Posts by Steve Knox 1972 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jul 2011
"These folks" being? The Australian libertarians, the Wikileaks party, Bitcoin users, the AEC? Exactly whom are you attempting to defame here?
Or perhaps by "these folks" you mean people who go out of their way to remain anonymous whilst simultaneously attempting to sway others' opinions? If that's what you mean, I think I'm beginning to see your point...
have been pretty consistent in my memory - @ $0.10 per brick, more expensive for specialist sets (Technics, movie tie-in stuff), less expensive for generic buckets.
Not having seen the X-Wing set, I'd guess it includes somewhere between 1600 to 1900 pieces, given the marketing tie-in. Now to go look it up...
One man's muck is another man's brass.
I agree. That's why I'm picky about my reviews, and prefer games that I can try before buying.
I've had a couple of high-rated games that I've played a couple of times and then never touched again. FIFA on the NDS for one.
So the review part of my suggestion didn't work. Did you consider renting, or seeing if a friend had it? Failing that, you could have fallen back on my third precept: avoid crap publishers. EA is the king of that domain, in my book. They've had one or two titles which have been slightly tempting in the past decade, but their business practices (DRM, in-game advertising, crappy support, etc.) have dissuaded me from buying those titles, and I have yet to be disappointed.
And what do you think of the game publishers themselves, willingly foisting shit upon the public? And then not even letting them GIVE it away?
That was my point. AC was complaining about publishers selling overhyped crap, but then saying it was acceptable as long as he could dump it on someone else. Surely a better solution is one where the crap games don't get inflicted on anyone -- say by ensuring methods of trying before buying..
Every new game will almost certainly require activation. Therefore always-on will be a implicit requirement irrelevant of whatever M$ says today!.
That's completely wrong. Activation does not require a persistent connection; it requires a one-time connection. Connect; activate; disconnect; play. Anything more is by definition not activation but ongoing monitoring.
A 2nd hand market is essential as lot of games are hyped. How many are mere cut-scenes, contain mostly QTR interaction, or have non-linear on a rail gameplay that's vastly different from the trailer? That's not a problem when you can trade them in.
So you're saying that if you pay over the odds for a crap game, that's currently alright because you can get some money back by foisting it of on some other unsuspecting sap? Do unto others 'cause others have done unto you, eh?
I avoid the problem of buying overhyped crap games by a) waiting for a trustworthy review, b) trying out games before buying them whenever possible (shareware, rentals, friends), and c) avoiding publishers who are known to be crap.
No second hand market needed.
Clearly only one person here is telling the truth: Assange or a Guardian reporter.
BET NOW!
You have incorrectly assumed that one of the two is telling the truth. It is entirely possible for two directly contradictory statements to both be false. It is even more likely that the two original statements are not directly contradictory, but only apparently so, due to the confounding effects of imprecise original language and intervening quotations.
Let's try this again.
This is not a new thing; it's a rumor about a new thing -- a rumor about a new hardware component which isn't even the point of contention for people who don't wish to try Windows Phone 8.
So why would this make someone try Windows Phone 8 NOW?
But that looks wider than 1.6cm in diameter.
What's your frame of reference? There's nothing in that picture that I can see to identify how "zoomed-in" it is, so any measurement based solely on the image is likely to be wildly inaccurate.
Now, my brain tells me that hole looks bigger as well, but as I think about it I realize I'm making assumptions about the size of the particles and formations I see in the image. This is the same error that leads people to swear they see UFOs travel at hypersonic speeds and make instant right angle turns -- almost invariably the video evidence shows there's not enough reference information to determine size, distance, speed, and direction of travel with any accuracy whatsoever.
Actually, having used both SSD and HDD in both power-user and regular user scenarios, I can tell you this much:
For the average user, the performance difference between SSD and HDD is close to nil: slightly faster startup, almost unnoticeable program load improvement.
The average user would get much more benefit at a lower cost by increasing the RAM to have more caching.
And since when is a 500%-900% price difference not much?
SSDs are still very much a power-user proposition. Even in the enterprise space, the price differencei is still enough to relegate SSDs to caching and high-demand scenarios.
Right now, end-user HDD sellers have more to fear from the death of the PC than from the rise of the SSD.
The retail chain refunded the disputed payments - even those that went unnoticed until the customer's bank statement turned up weeks later - while pointing out that its NFC system was well tested prior to deployment.
No, it wasn't well tested. It may have been tested a lot but if the tests failed to predict these now-known real-world issues, then it certainly was not tested well.
Hodge said the point was not illegality, but immorality.
translates roughly as "I know you're not doing anything not done by any other international company, and I know years of legal tax advice are on your side, but you're a big company whose name is very well-known, and there's this election coming up*, and I/my party need to be seen as a 'crusader'..."
* (There's always an election coming up.)
This thing discovers planets so far away we will never be able to get there
This is simply untrue. Even with current technology, we could reach those planets if we had the will.
This thing discovers planets that might be habitable.
More precisely, this "thing" looks for planets (period) and tries to measure them in as many ways as possible. More on this in a bit.
By the time the human race gets the technology to go there we will have been destroyed by a zombie virus/death virus/bird flu/nuclear Armageddon/the sun going super nova/old age etc etc etc etc.
At this point you are clearly presuming that the sole benefit to consider is migration. However, that is simply not the case.
Before 1988, our entire dataset for the study of planetary formation, interaction, ecosystems, etc. consisted of somewhere between 8 and 100 entities (depending on exactly what you count) all of which had little in common apart from the system to which they belonged. As far as studying earth-like planets, we had exactly one data point.
We had no idea if the rules and models we had developed for all sorts of planetary properties were simply conveniently correlative to our own situation or consistently accurate on a more universal scale.
Now, Kepler has not given us the resolution necessary to test all of that, but it has exceeded its design goals in advancing us along that path. We have learned a great deal about what is special about our planet and what is more common than we had thought.
Pointless exercise.
Yes, I am afraid that my attempt to explain to you why learning about our existence can in itself be a very fruitful exercise will fall on deaf ears, given your attitude, but if we don't try, the only guarantee is failure.
Why is it funny? If you've ever had to support typical users you'll have said it a bajillion times.
I was going to post a short quip ridiculing you for posting this question, but I've done that type of thing a bajillion times.Instead, I'm going to assume you're not a troll, and just completely uninformed on the topic on the humor of the banal.
The entire point of the joke is that support has said it a bajillion times, and than users have heard it a bajillion times. So everyone, upon hearing it, can immediately relate to the situation. Meanwhile, Chris's excellent delivery of the line manages to convey that:
This sets up a situation which is so obviously stereotypical as to be comical. That is the humor of the banal in a nutshell.
Bajillion!
"We make adjustments as we go. But it's very clear to us that in today's war of ecosystems, we've made a very clear decision to focus on Windows Phone with our Lumia product line," he said. "And it is with that that we will compete with competitors like Samsung and Android."
Interesting language there: he's not claiming that he's doing the right thing, only that he's committed to doing what he's doing. Although you could argue that he leaves the door slightly open by limiting Windows Phone to "our Lumia product line", it's very telling that he considers "Samsing and Android" to be competitors.
"Like hundreds of millions of people, I am a true believer – someone who can’t get enough of the story [of how George Lucas managed to amass a huge fortune marketing crap kids toys from b-grade movies], the culture [that encourages parents to buy everything their children ask for and adults to collect and never use kids' toys], and the ethos [of suing the pants off of anyone who tries to use something remotely resembling one's IP] of Star Wars," EA Labels president Frank Gibeau gushed.
When it comes to long life devices, who gives a toss about recyclable?
Long life is quite an assumption here. Even assuming that the device will function for over 5 years, will the technology in it be relevant by then?
What matters is that every part can be replaced easily and cheaply...
This does nothing to help the environment. Imagine for a moment that such a modular phone does exist. Say the screen breaks, so you replace that. Now instead of just having a phone to recycle, you have a phone and a broken screen to recycle. Even if you want to keep using the phone for some time, the recyclability of the broken parts is an issue.
... and that replacement parts will be available as long as the owners want to go on using the phone.
Here's the crux of the issue. Every mobile phone I've had to date has been replaced while it's still functional. Three of them were replaced not because I wanted to replace them, but because my network would no longer support them. Two of them were replaced because my employer decided I needed a newer, more capable device.
As long as it's usable and useful recycling is an irrelevance.
No, as long as it's in use recycling is irrelevant. But so is throwing it in a landfill.
Long-life is great and all (however unlikely for a mobile phone) but everything comes to an end. And if we can design things which can be put to other use once their current use has ended, why wouldn't we?
More to the point, this paper is about generating a mathematical checksum function which maximizes the probability of recovering from multiple failures while minimizing the space needed to store the checksum.
Beyond that, it's matrix algebra, which I knew for about two weeks in college, and even then gave me headaches.
There is no possible way to implement DRM in open source software.
This is a common fallacy. DRM can be implemented in open source software. However, the nature of open source means that any such DRM system can be cracked much more easily than a similarly strong proprietary DRM system. That doesn't prevent said implementation, however; it only deters it.
Hence, EME will either prevent OSS browsers from competing on the Web...
Really? Because DRM already exists in such sites as Amazon, NetFlix, LoveFilm, the BBC, Hulu, Vudu, et al. And yet the most popular browsers are primarily open-source.
Nothing in the EME spec prevents open source implementations of EME. The only potentially proprietary part of the spec is the Content Decryption Modules. Those can be either open- or closed- source.
..or will force them using a non-free plugin for EME content.
Which they already must do (and do do) for any DRM content.
EME is not going to change the code of the web overnight, or even over decades. Even the specification itself notes how complicated setting up proprietary DRM is.
What EME does do is allow a basic encryption management system to be implemented in a standard way, and which can be implemented in open source. This allows content producers to better protect their content without resorting to proprietary components, and reduces the footprint of the proprietary component used by those who wish stronger protection.
Those who want super-strong DRM will never use open source for their content delivery for the very reason you state. So closing off proprietary components completely is no more an option than eliminating free components.
EME represents a practical compromise between two childish fundamentalist dogmas. That's why y'all are bitching about it so much.
Furthermore, the FSF contends, because DRM schemes for the web are invariably implemented via proprietary browser plugins – such as the Silverlight plugin currently employed by Netflix – ratifying EME would pressure more users to accept non-free software in order to play media.
The entire point of EME is to minimize use of those proprietary plugins.
Currently, DRM schemes for the web are invariably implemented via proprietary plugins because there are no open systems for it.
With EME, some content providers may use the non-proprietary components for content rights management. Without it or something like it, none will.
No, "gaming the system" is decidedly not abusing the system. It lies exactly on the line between using and abusing the system.
"Gaming the system" refers to using a system's rules as written to generate an individual advantage that was apparently not the rulemakers' intent. In other words, it's following the letter of the law rather than the spirit.
In this case, the spirit of the free trial is that Netflix lets you use their system for a period of time and you perform an honest evaluation with the possibility of opting to pay for future use of the system. The strict rules of the trial, however, do not require you to actually consider continuing the contract for pay.
From the slashdot post:
When plotting genetic complexity against time, the researchers found that genetic complexity increases exponentially, just as with Moore's law, but with a doubling rate of about once every 376 million years. Extrapolating backwards, the researchers estimate that life began about 4 billion years after the universe formed and evolved the first bacteria just before the Earth was formed.
Setting aside the Moore's law reference, the most obvious flaw is exemplified by the phrase "extrapolating backwards." It asserts the assumption that underlies the entire original piece: that the rate of genetic change is constant and has remained constant. This is not consistent with observations on how environmental changes can affect (and even effect) evolution.
Anyone in the industry knows that's a smokescreen to cover bad news.
Agreed -- it's only made more obvious by the next line:
...which meant it was unable to capitalise on the interest generated by Windows 8 ...
It'd have been more accurately written as:
...which meant it was unable to counter the collective sigh of non-interest generated by Windows 8 ...
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