Comment Re:try BitCoin next time (Score 1) 97
If you read the article, they are complaining that CA's system does not affect out-of-state emissions.
Duh.
If you read the article, they are complaining that CA's system does not affect out-of-state emissions.
Duh.
NCsoft has a history of turning games off just when I get to enjoy them. Not going back there
Been there, done that, ran a corp.
I have a life now. I still want to play, but I don't want a game to essentially take over my life. It was hard enough to quit once, I'm not going back.
Ok, that's the kind of good parenting I can dig.
Care to explain why that "dose of reality" serves any meaningful purpose? Should they play some zombie shooter next where they have to sustain their character on cat food and muddy water, is he going to feed them that in case they don't know that it's not really something they'd want to do in REAL LIFE?
Kids are not as stupid as some adults think they are. They know damn well that just 'cause it's fun in a video game doesn't mean it's fun in RL. That's why they effin' do it in a VIDEO GAME! When was the last time you heard a 10 year old say "Gee, where could I now steal a car to run over a hooker?" I mean, unless he was playing GTA.
Isn't it odd that kids are very obviously far better able to tell fiction from reality? Who was it that had the bright idea of "hey, let's go take a vacation in a war zone!"
The kids?
Or their dad?
It's good to see this discussion becoming mainstream. Back in 2009, Alan Cox wrote in the Atlantic, "One sometimes wonders, in this era of Market religion, where the skeptics and freethinkers have gone". There's been an assumption in recent decades, since the USSR went down, that capitalism is the only possible system of economic organization. That's starting, cautiously, to be questioned.
In the Great Depression of the 1930s, all sorts of "isms" were proposed. Communism, socialism, technocracy, and others now forgotten had substantial followings. WWII ended those discussions, and the postwar boom made them irrelevant. Now, few people even know that alternatives to capitalism are possible.
The "strong safety net" countries (the Scandinavian countries, some EU countries, and Japan) have done reasonably well. The production side is mostly capitalist, but taxes are higher and the consumption side is partly socialist. This works if international competition is limited to stop the "race to the bottom" in wages. The current Doha round in the WTO is stalled because many countries now want more protectionism.
It's there though. To be fair, NASA does have a fair amount of in house engineering although a hell of a lot less than in the glory days. But the big projects have always been through contractors.
NASA was more like the general contractor on a construction site - an architect designed things, structural engineers designed things, construction crews built it - but somebody had to organize it. And, with the Saturn V / Apollo stack, they had to organize the most complex device ever created. Took some work, it did. Especially when you consider the level of automation available then. Most engineers still used slide rules when Apollo 11 took off.
The 'basics' to Mars have hardly been proven. Actually, what SpaceX is doing is bootstrapping up on 'simple' things - getting something to LEO. That's been proven to work. Then going to Mars (perhaps). But you have to start doing relatively straightforward stuff before you can do the esoteric - at least in meatspace engineering.
But, as you say, NASA's job was pushing at frontiers. That's actually what NASA was doing in Mercury - Gemini - Apollo. Then the military with their 'we-want-it-don't-much-care-how' attitude that brought you the Shuttle Kludge pushed in and pretty much trashed the Shuttle (and, ironically reincarnated it as the XB-37). Then it started costing real money and Congress got their fingers in it. The results were predictable.
NASA is in a bit of a bind. They still do a lot of basic research and even applied research (mostly in aeronautics vs. space) but the marquee projects have taken huge hits and management has been beat up at multiple levels. Remember, the big thing with the Apollo program wasn't so much the tech. It was getting all of those bits of tech rolled up into a project that could launch the most complex device ever created and get parts of it back. We've completely lost that management structure. It can be argued that modern engineering and computer science makes that investment in human management unneeded - that's what Musk is really trying to prove - that a small company can put all of the bits and pieces together to do something it took NASA tens of thousands of people to do.
I'm a bit doubtful but I wish him all of the luck - at least he's doing something.
Why would this cure anyone of FPS BS? What correlation is there between FPS and real war? Who plays an FPS because they wanted to go to war, but didn't like travel?
I don't mind shooting up some virtual people, I want to be as far away from real war as I possibly can be. You can like, die there. And I hear that's not the worst possible outcome by far. Down here in Texas the number of people with missing limbs and purple heart license plates is staggering, especially considering what wars we're in aren't really that large scale.
Kids are going to grow up and say "Yeah, Dad is kind of a stick in the mud. We wanted to CoD:BLOps on a new XBox, and he took us to the West Bank and showed us decapitated people. We just went over to friend's houses to play games after that."
... under UK Copyright law there is no "fair use" exception
That is correct. There are some specific exceptions, commonly referred to as "fair dealing" over here, and there have been some recent developments that will expand the scope of the exceptions, but there is no generic limitation on copyright determined by a set of qualitative tests like the Fair Use rules in the US. However, if we're talking about someone's own footage of the goals, the more important issue might be what the contract was when they bought their admission ticket.
If the conditions of entry clearly say no recording is allowed and that if any recordings are made anyway then all rights are assigned to the organisers, then my expectation is that the uploaders won't have a leg to stand on here. It would be very surprising in this day and age if such terms weren't routinely included, and I fully expect that this is how any debate about legality will wind up being resolved.
On the other hand, if there's nothing prohibiting the use of recording devices and nothing claiming any rights over recordings made by spectators, it might be tough to argue successfully in court along the lines that someone's personal recording was a copy or derivative work of some official recording that the organisers sell to TV networks. It's not an unprecedented idea: publishing photos of major public landmarks like the Hollywood sign or Eiffel Tower can be legally hazardous, particularly if commercial use is involved. However, those restrictions tend to result from some carefully contrived/created edge cases in the legal position for specific places, and it's hard to see how anything similar applies to a football match.
(IANAL so obviously you shouldn't trust anything you just read if it actually matters to you.)
We squeeze it out with inflation.
Online education has a lot of promise in various areas, but don't always assume it's the best tool
Rift is pretty cool. I just don't know anyone who plays it. Else I'd probably install it and take it for a spin again. It was a really awesome game, I like the idea of ad-hoc grouping around rifts, it just seems that in mid-levels it becomes near impossible to get anything going.
With a few others playing, I'd maybe give it (yet) another try.
NC killed off Tabula Rasa, which I still miss, to push their WoW clone Aion. They're not going to get a single cent of my money.
No amount of careful planning will ever replace dumb luck.