Kind of off-topic, but one late night I was up watching boring TV and saw some awful hour-long show soleley trying to argue that the founding fathers of the US were Christian. I couldn't turn it off because it seemed so bizzare to me that someone would talk for an hour over something so pointless. I get the same vibe from your post. Why does it matter if someone is a Christian or not? I don't understand the logic of even bringing something up like this, since I see zero causation between his religion and his actions. Please enlighten me.
I couldn't have put it better. Pace Cars do not belong on public roads, respect your neighbor and their right to speed (for whatever reason it may be). The reason people tailgate is to talk with their car, since honking is no longer PC and makes people even more irate than tailgating. If you're being tailgated, someone is asking you to move the fuck out of the way, probably because you didn't notice you should have moved sooner. Unfortunately there isn't a better technical means like car-to-car communication.
Pay attention and don't slow down traffic. Sometimes people tailgate because YOU are the one being the asshole by imposing your speed limit on the left lane.
Take every reference in that post to the Middle East and replace it with Europe and think back to the first half of 1900. The exact same thing was going on then (albeit for different reasons), except the US was an isolationist nation. The reason the US does the things it does now is because of what happened in the past, trying to subdue smaller problems before they become big problems. Unfortunately its had some unintended consequences. These consequences do not in any way validate the return to isolationism.
This is exactly what I was thinking. Playing the devil's advocate, I'd be concerned if I worked for TI I'd be concerned about these kinds of situations. They make a killing off of the requirement in schools to use their calculators. When I worked for Staples during back to school season, we'd get a line to the back of the store for 3 days surrounding school starts and over 50% of the line was looking for a TI 83+, so we'd sell hundreds of them a day.
I remember large programs 8-9 years ago in high school that had lists of problems with inputs for variables, etc. I doubt it'd be hard to make a program that brings up a screen like the TI83/89 empty program menu, since this is all teachers check for before SATs and the like.
As much as I love customizability, if you were in their shoes, would you risk it?
A transcript of a Q&A with the lead dev in the MMORPG.com forums states that the PC game will be different from the XBOX version and the PC game will be designed for the PC first and foremost (no shitty ports), as well as that both versions will not communicate (smart move). I strongly suspect that the game will be designed for the PC first since the MMO market is much larger on the PC.
That said, I've played an MMOFPS, Darkfall, which did just fine, for an indie game. It was a bit more hardcore (full loot on death, full FFA PvP) than TSW will be but TSW is using a lot of the same concepts like the skill system and aiming.
I'm looking forward to it. Waiting for another good MMO that isn't watered down WoW trash is painful.
Haha at AvP, that game still goes down as one of the scariest games I played whe I was younger. I played the jaguar version...I still remember going up to floor 1 as a marine and walking out into the middle of the hallway and then looking right and seeing about 50 aliens charging me. The ambient noise is partly what made it so scary...it was pretty much quiet except for alien and predator screams. Proper sound can make or break a game.
My thoughts are that the incompatibility is intentional. There is a large camp of users that don't know about the glass ceiling a controller gives vs. a mouse in FPSes, or think mouse+kb is unfair against controllers (which it kinda is). Its like racing a Ferrari against a Camry.
Introducing KB + Mouse to Halo and COD4 would create extremely large tears in the console community comparable to allowing steroids in sports. It would also introduce the sheep to a stronger control scheme and may move them off the platform to a PC. This is a lose-lose for console manufacturers.
There is still a large debate over an unofficial mouse for the XBox 360, it creates very large flame wars. I'm sure you can find some angry youtube comments about it. On a side note, I've always felt that it was very smart of them to keep separate consoles multiplayer experiences apart because of the mouse. I can't imagine the epic QQ that would follow if 360's played against PC in CoD4.
Correct that it isn't like Tower Defense. TDs are about mazing and clustering non-agressive units trying to pass your defense, not destroy it. The custom map you are looking for is "Survival" maps.
They first appeared in SC custom where you'd have a normal base and waves would come at set intervals with increasing difficulty with the attack-move command - meaning they'd blow your stuff up. I was saddened when it didn't become popular since I enjoyed them very much. For those that recall, this was mimicked in the last wacraft 3 scenario level.
How old is the youngest IPhone user you've seen? For me its 15. No elementary school kid needs to be running around with a $100/mo bill and an expensive phone. By 12, most kids already know these words. Who is this censorship for?
All this is beside the point that this kind of stuff should not be censored in a dictionary anyway. The sheer idiocy of this fiasco amazes me.
The problem is the users DONT know what they are getting into, only people like us do, and the the devs follow the users because they have to follow the green. Joe sixpack has no idea about this stuff. These articles are attempting to reach out to major news outlets, and its working. Just today I saw a snippet about Apple blocking Google Voice on CNN.
Apple's draconian lockdown policy has limited their market saturation before, and its starting to again.
Keyboards really aren't the reason that the PC configuration is so much better, its the mouse. A joystick is vastly inferior to a mouse because a joystick has a max turn speed based on your sensitivity that is much lower than anything you can do with a mouse. There's a reason that games like COD4, which are multi-platform, have separate game servers for Xbox and PC. PC players just starting the game can quite regularly decimate veteran xbox players because of the control scheme. The controller creates a playing field with a much lower skill ceiling than the mouse. Joysticks were good back in the day for fighting games where up was simply a single command, but not anymore.
Even in RTSes, most have figured out by now you can map the commands for each unit/building which have the same UI location to the same location on the keyboard adn people will get used to it. This can easily translate to the controller since most have 20 or so keys now. Losing the reaction time of the mouse is much more important.
I think motion controlers will benefit the console industry once refined because its like a mouse without a mousepad. This will give them access to a mouse-like device without a flat surface needed.
WHY does slashdot not save my formatting?!!!
I live in Charlotte, NC where there are a good amount of suberbia bike lanes and wide roads, but I still see problems with the system. The way the US does bike lanes doesn't work as well as having a dedicated mini-road like I saw in Europe. I visited Helsinki last summer and the bike lanes are amazing. Every road I saw had a separate asphalt road approximately 5-6 feet wide for pedestrians and bikes...including downtown. I felt comfortable riding my cousin's bike there to get places.
In the US, there's this expectation that if you're riding a bike, you're riding a bike in rediculous looking spandex biking gear as a company billboard and doing it as a sport on a fast bike. You are shunned for doing it just to get somewhere close in your normal clothes on a normal bike...as a matter of fact, its downright dangerous to ride like that on the roads. It is not seen as a means of travel, it is seen as a recreation, which is where some of the driver agitation comes from. This also reinforces the isolated suberbia situation that appears in so many neighborhoods: You're locked into a small world until you get a car. This only breeds further discontent for bikes and praise for cars.
I realize the cost of these separate lanes, but I think they are incredible and was one of the most impressive things I noticed about Finland (that and the mass transit). To be fair, sprawling southern cities in the US do not make bikes practical. However, they COULD be practical for short distance travel to the nearby strip mall if something like this was in place.
Loaded containers onboard a container vessel are sealed and inaccessible, making use of these in that situation impossible. This would have to be used during customs searches on imports, making it pointless since it doesn't remove the need for scanners or dogs. This would only allow customs agents to sit down instead of searching through the stuff manually like they do now.
This thing seems pretty pointless to me. From what I could gather from the article, this needs to be inside the container for it to work. The optimal place to use this kind of implementation would be onboard the vessel during transit, but loaded containers are sealed and cannot be opened without breaking the seal.
The place this would end up being implemented would be at customs facilities where they open & inspect containers either flagged for suspicion or randomly flagged. Containers enter a shipping terminal sealed and leave sealed in most cases. Therefore, this would not effect any of the drug dogs or x-ray machines currently used, which is what the article suggests. All it would do is make custom's job a little easier b/c they wouldn't have to manually dig through a 40ft container...but the cost of these devices would most likely outweigh the benefits.
Mandating a container ferret in all containers would work if they were mass produced, given out freely, and very inexpensive, but that wouldn't work either. Since the container is sealed at the origin, tampering could be done to the device to prevent it from working properly.
Last but not least, I recall most ceilings of shipping containers being corrugated steel, not flat. Some have plywood linings. Can this thing handle that? Also, open top containers wouldn't be able to use these. Stuff some contraband at the bottom and fill it with tires and voila.
BTW, WHY is slashdot removing my formatting and making a wall of text? Argh!
There's a game out claiming to be UO 2.0, its called Darkfall. It was just released 2-3 months ago by an indie company called Aventurine. From what I understand, some of the developers were old UO and AC vets aiming to recreate the niche. It has little to no marketing so its flown under the radar, and has a subscriber base probably under 100k right now. It combines the skill system of UO and AC with the guild warfare and land ownership aspects of SB. As a matter of fact, you can read up a lot about it on MMORPG.com, the same site that this story is from.
Its not just about fixed scheduling, its about weight and economies of scale. Sails are no longer viable with the size of the ships transporting cargo. The smallest ship I've dealth with holds 300 20ft containers with an avg weight of ~30,000 lbs. Some can be loaded with over 200 million pounds of cargo. I don't even think we have the materials developed to make sails for those physically possible.
The only practical application of sails for cargo ships is augmenting the engine, which we've seen before here on slashdot (too lazy to find the link).
Beleive it or not, overseas shipping containers are typically smaller than domestic shipping containers. Why? Cell guides on ships make it more efficient to use as few sizes as possible as to never have empty slots on the ships due to size issues. Also, the prongs on the tophandlers & cranes are positioned at set points, and making the containers longer requires costly structural improvements that outweigh the benefits. Most trucks you see on roads are 53' where ships typically carry 20's and 40's, with a few 45's. Keep in mind this may be different in areas near the coasts or denser countries (I'm in the US).
Also, overseas shipping containers are much much heavier than domestic ones because they have to be picked up from the top & withstand constant movement and stacking, where domestics are on a truck 99% of the time and are designed to never be lifted. As info, all of the grocry store & wall-mart containers you see with the big pretty advertisements on the side never go overseas, they are loaded at distribution centers near the coast that receive the shipping containers. The steel-ribbed ugly containers are the ones that go overseas.
Yes, there are inneficiencies to standardized shipping, but it removes more inefficiencies than it creates. Thats how the costs go down.
A logical and often-stated reason for the tax breaks for hetero couples and children is that they are contributing to the future of the species. One of the arguments against same-sex civil unions is that they do not contribute to the future of the species/nation because they can't produce children. There's a lot of if's and but's to this line, like adoption, but its a hotly debated issue that doesn't really have any sound evidence for or against it on either side that doesn't cancel out.
Since the beginning of civilization, groups of people have adopted practices that benefit the group rather than the individual in the long term in the form of law or religion. Since it is presently undeterminable if rewarding same-sex marriage is beneifical to the species, the natural reaction is to resist that change.
FYI, regarding "subsidizing" families as a single, I'm a single guy and I feel that in the long term, I am the burden on society because I am a net loss, not the families.
I can't find the press release so I can't be sure, but I recall it involving evasive maneuvers and use of the emegency fire equipment over the side of the vessel.
I work for a large shipping company. Piracy has been in the news lately because they are going after larger and larger ships in deeper waters. The most recent headliner was a supertanker carrying $100 million in crude oil getting hijacked, the largest vessel in history to ever be hijacked. One of our company's vessels fended off an attempted hijacking a few weeks ago as well. Regardless of cargo, vessels of this size often cost nearly 6 figures a day just to own, let alone operating costs. The costs of these hijackings are astronomical, that is why they are in the news. It is not OPEC propaganda.
They had a documentary on either Discovery or National Geographic recently about the brain, and it talked about How those problems could be caused by an extreme male brain (known as the "S" brain or Systems brain). They also stated that in the US, most men have "S" brains where most women have "E" brains, and they stated a large majority of people with autism are males. I think it is genetically linked as well as culturally linked, because even apes, which have no cultural influence, will choose toys the same way human infants do. Female apes will choose dolls, where male apes will choose trucks. I think this has to do with what our brains are geared for, and what we are interested in. At the core of it, men and women are not equal because for hundreds of thousands of years our ancestors performed specific roles in the family unit. I don't find anything wrong with embracing these differences as long as people realize that there are deviations and they should not be discriminated against.
I think this study simply highlights the problem I have with the school system. The system has been re-geared toward everyone meeting the minimum. I bet if they extended this on to college they would have much different results, since college students are allowed to choose their interests. Every math and science course I took in college was male dominated. My engineernig classes were 95% male, and over 50% left handed.
People are different, and there is nothing wrong with it.
About 4 months ago, Time Warner (Road Runner) started to throttle my connection between 12 and 6 AM, and by throttle I mean completely cut it off. I'd call and they would say they are upgrading the network between 12 and 6 AM, and 2 days later it would stop. It would then resume after I made a substantial download and I'd have to call again. When they had a service rep come out to my house, he said it was "node recertification" and that they were checking and upgrading all the nodes in the area to a higher standard. Conveniently, the "increase your Road Runner power" commercials for their $55 service started to come out 4 months ago. Does anyone else have any "I smell the bullshit" stories about Time Warner relating to the past four months?
There is a reason for DRM, even if it inherently flawed in design: to keep the average Joe buying your stuff. If they stop fighting completely, you'll end up with a flopped industry. The bigger the investment they put into DRM, the more returns they get from sales, because not everyone is computer literate. The more technical they make their schemes, the more people they get buying their product instead of stealing it. Gross value goes up, even if net stays the same. Lawsuits and copyright protection are designed to scare the AVERAGE consumer away from illegal activity and narrow the possible copyright infringement targets down to a manageable size, so they can treat it exactly like cops treat druggies: go for the dealers.
Copyright protection in some form or another will never die out, because if it does, a larger percentage of the population will steal the product and it will cease being a manageable problem for them.
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Kind of off-topic, but one late night I was up watching boring TV and saw some awful hour-long show soleley trying to argue that the founding fathers of the US were Christian. I couldn't turn it off because it seemed so bizzare to me that someone would talk for an hour over something so pointless. I get the same vibe from your post. Why does it matter if someone is a Christian or not? I don't understand the logic of even bringing something up like this, since I see zero causation between his religion and his actions. Please enlighten me.
I couldn't have put it better. Pace Cars do not belong on public roads, respect your neighbor and their right to speed (for whatever reason it may be). The reason people tailgate is to talk with their car, since honking is no longer PC and makes people even more irate than tailgating. If you're being tailgated, someone is asking you to move the fuck out of the way, probably because you didn't notice you should have moved sooner. Unfortunately there isn't a better technical means like car-to-car communication. Pay attention and don't slow down traffic. Sometimes people tailgate because YOU are the one being the asshole by imposing your speed limit on the left lane.
Take every reference in that post to the Middle East and replace it with Europe and think back to the first half of 1900. The exact same thing was going on then (albeit for different reasons), except the US was an isolationist nation. The reason the US does the things it does now is because of what happened in the past, trying to subdue smaller problems before they become big problems. Unfortunately its had some unintended consequences. These consequences do not in any way validate the return to isolationism.
This is exactly what I was thinking. Playing the devil's advocate, I'd be concerned if I worked for TI I'd be concerned about these kinds of situations. They make a killing off of the requirement in schools to use their calculators. When I worked for Staples during back to school season, we'd get a line to the back of the store for 3 days surrounding school starts and over 50% of the line was looking for a TI 83+, so we'd sell hundreds of them a day. I remember large programs 8-9 years ago in high school that had lists of problems with inputs for variables, etc. I doubt it'd be hard to make a program that brings up a screen like the TI83/89 empty program menu, since this is all teachers check for before SATs and the like. As much as I love customizability, if you were in their shoes, would you risk it?
A transcript of a Q&A with the lead dev in the MMORPG.com forums states that the PC game will be different from the XBOX version and the PC game will be designed for the PC first and foremost (no shitty ports), as well as that both versions will not communicate (smart move). I strongly suspect that the game will be designed for the PC first since the MMO market is much larger on the PC. That said, I've played an MMOFPS, Darkfall, which did just fine, for an indie game. It was a bit more hardcore (full loot on death, full FFA PvP) than TSW will be but TSW is using a lot of the same concepts like the skill system and aiming. I'm looking forward to it. Waiting for another good MMO that isn't watered down WoW trash is painful.
Haha at AvP, that game still goes down as one of the scariest games I played whe I was younger. I played the jaguar version...I still remember going up to floor 1 as a marine and walking out into the middle of the hallway and then looking right and seeing about 50 aliens charging me. The ambient noise is partly what made it so scary...it was pretty much quiet except for alien and predator screams. Proper sound can make or break a game.
My thoughts are that the incompatibility is intentional. There is a large camp of users that don't know about the glass ceiling a controller gives vs. a mouse in FPSes, or think mouse+kb is unfair against controllers (which it kinda is). Its like racing a Ferrari against a Camry.
Introducing KB + Mouse to Halo and COD4 would create extremely large tears in the console community comparable to allowing steroids in sports. It would also introduce the sheep to a stronger control scheme and may move them off the platform to a PC. This is a lose-lose for console manufacturers.
There is still a large debate over an unofficial mouse for the XBox 360, it creates very large flame wars. I'm sure you can find some angry youtube comments about it. On a side note, I've always felt that it was very smart of them to keep separate consoles multiplayer experiences apart because of the mouse. I can't imagine the epic QQ that would follow if 360's played against PC in CoD4.
Correct that it isn't like Tower Defense. TDs are about mazing and clustering non-agressive units trying to pass your defense, not destroy it. The custom map you are looking for is "Survival" maps.
They first appeared in SC custom where you'd have a normal base and waves would come at set intervals with increasing difficulty with the attack-move command - meaning they'd blow your stuff up. I was saddened when it didn't become popular since I enjoyed them very much. For those that recall, this was mimicked in the last wacraft 3 scenario level.
How old is the youngest IPhone user you've seen? For me its 15. No elementary school kid needs to be running around with a $100/mo bill and an expensive phone. By 12, most kids already know these words. Who is this censorship for?
All this is beside the point that this kind of stuff should not be censored in a dictionary anyway. The sheer idiocy of this fiasco amazes me.
The problem is the users DONT know what they are getting into, only people like us do, and the the devs follow the users because they have to follow the green. Joe sixpack has no idea about this stuff. These articles are attempting to reach out to major news outlets, and its working. Just today I saw a snippet about Apple blocking Google Voice on CNN. Apple's draconian lockdown policy has limited their market saturation before, and its starting to again.
Well, at least you didn't just have salmon for lunch. I did
Keyboards really aren't the reason that the PC configuration is so much better, its the mouse. A joystick is vastly inferior to a mouse because a joystick has a max turn speed based on your sensitivity that is much lower than anything you can do with a mouse. There's a reason that games like COD4, which are multi-platform, have separate game servers for Xbox and PC. PC players just starting the game can quite regularly decimate veteran xbox players because of the control scheme. The controller creates a playing field with a much lower skill ceiling than the mouse. Joysticks were good back in the day for fighting games where up was simply a single command, but not anymore. Even in RTSes, most have figured out by now you can map the commands for each unit/building which have the same UI location to the same location on the keyboard adn people will get used to it. This can easily translate to the controller since most have 20 or so keys now. Losing the reaction time of the mouse is much more important. I think motion controlers will benefit the console industry once refined because its like a mouse without a mousepad. This will give them access to a mouse-like device without a flat surface needed. WHY does slashdot not save my formatting?!!!
I live in Charlotte, NC where there are a good amount of suberbia bike lanes and wide roads, but I still see problems with the system. The way the US does bike lanes doesn't work as well as having a dedicated mini-road like I saw in Europe. I visited Helsinki last summer and the bike lanes are amazing. Every road I saw had a separate asphalt road approximately 5-6 feet wide for pedestrians and bikes...including downtown. I felt comfortable riding my cousin's bike there to get places. In the US, there's this expectation that if you're riding a bike, you're riding a bike in rediculous looking spandex biking gear as a company billboard and doing it as a sport on a fast bike. You are shunned for doing it just to get somewhere close in your normal clothes on a normal bike...as a matter of fact, its downright dangerous to ride like that on the roads. It is not seen as a means of travel, it is seen as a recreation, which is where some of the driver agitation comes from. This also reinforces the isolated suberbia situation that appears in so many neighborhoods: You're locked into a small world until you get a car. This only breeds further discontent for bikes and praise for cars. I realize the cost of these separate lanes, but I think they are incredible and was one of the most impressive things I noticed about Finland (that and the mass transit). To be fair, sprawling southern cities in the US do not make bikes practical. However, they COULD be practical for short distance travel to the nearby strip mall if something like this was in place.
Loaded containers onboard a container vessel are sealed and inaccessible, making use of these in that situation impossible. This would have to be used during customs searches on imports, making it pointless since it doesn't remove the need for scanners or dogs. This would only allow customs agents to sit down instead of searching through the stuff manually like they do now.
This thing seems pretty pointless to me. From what I could gather from the article, this needs to be inside the container for it to work. The optimal place to use this kind of implementation would be onboard the vessel during transit, but loaded containers are sealed and cannot be opened without breaking the seal. The place this would end up being implemented would be at customs facilities where they open & inspect containers either flagged for suspicion or randomly flagged. Containers enter a shipping terminal sealed and leave sealed in most cases. Therefore, this would not effect any of the drug dogs or x-ray machines currently used, which is what the article suggests. All it would do is make custom's job a little easier b/c they wouldn't have to manually dig through a 40ft container...but the cost of these devices would most likely outweigh the benefits. Mandating a container ferret in all containers would work if they were mass produced, given out freely, and very inexpensive, but that wouldn't work either. Since the container is sealed at the origin, tampering could be done to the device to prevent it from working properly. Last but not least, I recall most ceilings of shipping containers being corrugated steel, not flat. Some have plywood linings. Can this thing handle that? Also, open top containers wouldn't be able to use these. Stuff some contraband at the bottom and fill it with tires and voila. BTW, WHY is slashdot removing my formatting and making a wall of text? Argh!
There's a game out claiming to be UO 2.0, its called Darkfall. It was just released 2-3 months ago by an indie company called Aventurine. From what I understand, some of the developers were old UO and AC vets aiming to recreate the niche. It has little to no marketing so its flown under the radar, and has a subscriber base probably under 100k right now. It combines the skill system of UO and AC with the guild warfare and land ownership aspects of SB. As a matter of fact, you can read up a lot about it on MMORPG.com, the same site that this story is from.
Most fun I've had with an MMO since the 90's.
Its not just about fixed scheduling, its about weight and economies of scale. Sails are no longer viable with the size of the ships transporting cargo. The smallest ship I've dealth with holds 300 20ft containers with an avg weight of ~30,000 lbs. Some can be loaded with over 200 million pounds of cargo. I don't even think we have the materials developed to make sails for those physically possible.
The only practical application of sails for cargo ships is augmenting the engine, which we've seen before here on slashdot (too lazy to find the link).
Beleive it or not, overseas shipping containers are typically smaller than domestic shipping containers. Why? Cell guides on ships make it more efficient to use as few sizes as possible as to never have empty slots on the ships due to size issues. Also, the prongs on the tophandlers & cranes are positioned at set points, and making the containers longer requires costly structural improvements that outweigh the benefits. Most trucks you see on roads are 53' where ships typically carry 20's and 40's, with a few 45's. Keep in mind this may be different in areas near the coasts or denser countries (I'm in the US).
Also, overseas shipping containers are much much heavier than domestic ones because they have to be picked up from the top & withstand constant movement and stacking, where domestics are on a truck 99% of the time and are designed to never be lifted. As info, all of the grocry store & wall-mart containers you see with the big pretty advertisements on the side never go overseas, they are loaded at distribution centers near the coast that receive the shipping containers. The steel-ribbed ugly containers are the ones that go overseas.
Yes, there are inneficiencies to standardized shipping, but it removes more inefficiencies than it creates. Thats how the costs go down.
A logical and often-stated reason for the tax breaks for hetero couples and children is that they are contributing to the future of the species. One of the arguments against same-sex civil unions is that they do not contribute to the future of the species/nation because they can't produce children. There's a lot of if's and but's to this line, like adoption, but its a hotly debated issue that doesn't really have any sound evidence for or against it on either side that doesn't cancel out. Since the beginning of civilization, groups of people have adopted practices that benefit the group rather than the individual in the long term in the form of law or religion. Since it is presently undeterminable if rewarding same-sex marriage is beneifical to the species, the natural reaction is to resist that change. FYI, regarding "subsidizing" families as a single, I'm a single guy and I feel that in the long term, I am the burden on society because I am a net loss, not the families.
I can't find the press release so I can't be sure, but I recall it involving evasive maneuvers and use of the emegency fire equipment over the side of the vessel.
I work for a large shipping company. Piracy has been in the news lately because they are going after larger and larger ships in deeper waters. The most recent headliner was a supertanker carrying $100 million in crude oil getting hijacked, the largest vessel in history to ever be hijacked. One of our company's vessels fended off an attempted hijacking a few weeks ago as well. Regardless of cargo, vessels of this size often cost nearly 6 figures a day just to own, let alone operating costs. The costs of these hijackings are astronomical, that is why they are in the news. It is not OPEC propaganda.
They had a documentary on either Discovery or National Geographic recently about the brain, and it talked about How those problems could be caused by an extreme male brain (known as the "S" brain or Systems brain). They also stated that in the US, most men have "S" brains where most women have "E" brains, and they stated a large majority of people with autism are males. I think it is genetically linked as well as culturally linked, because even apes, which have no cultural influence, will choose toys the same way human infants do. Female apes will choose dolls, where male apes will choose trucks. I think this has to do with what our brains are geared for, and what we are interested in. At the core of it, men and women are not equal because for hundreds of thousands of years our ancestors performed specific roles in the family unit. I don't find anything wrong with embracing these differences as long as people realize that there are deviations and they should not be discriminated against. I think this study simply highlights the problem I have with the school system. The system has been re-geared toward everyone meeting the minimum. I bet if they extended this on to college they would have much different results, since college students are allowed to choose their interests. Every math and science course I took in college was male dominated. My engineernig classes were 95% male, and over 50% left handed. People are different, and there is nothing wrong with it.
About 4 months ago, Time Warner (Road Runner) started to throttle my connection between 12 and 6 AM, and by throttle I mean completely cut it off. I'd call and they would say they are upgrading the network between 12 and 6 AM, and 2 days later it would stop. It would then resume after I made a substantial download and I'd have to call again. When they had a service rep come out to my house, he said it was "node recertification" and that they were checking and upgrading all the nodes in the area to a higher standard. Conveniently, the "increase your Road Runner power" commercials for their $55 service started to come out 4 months ago. Does anyone else have any "I smell the bullshit" stories about Time Warner relating to the past four months?
There is a reason for DRM, even if it inherently flawed in design: to keep the average Joe buying your stuff. If they stop fighting completely, you'll end up with a flopped industry. The bigger the investment they put into DRM, the more returns they get from sales, because not everyone is computer literate. The more technical they make their schemes, the more people they get buying their product instead of stealing it. Gross value goes up, even if net stays the same. Lawsuits and copyright protection are designed to scare the AVERAGE consumer away from illegal activity and narrow the possible copyright infringement targets down to a manageable size, so they can treat it exactly like cops treat druggies: go for the dealers. Copyright protection in some form or another will never die out, because if it does, a larger percentage of the population will steal the product and it will cease being a manageable problem for them.