I've been suspicious of the motivations behind this list from the outset. A couple times a year I get forwarded spam by well-meaning family members, who had received spam e-mails saying that if they didn't sign up for the No Call List by a certain, right-around-the-corner date, their cellphone would begin ringing off the hook with telemarketers. I've had one unsolicited telemarketing call since I've had my cel account, and I've had it for several years. I don't obey spam, particularly when I have nothing to gain from it and the whole thing just seems... fishy in the extreme. I want no part of this damn list - even on a good day you can't trust the US Government, and these are not good days.
If there's any way to get video playback working on the Dell/Ubunutu 1420n without awful flickering and tearing, I haven't found it yet. I don't give a damn about 3D bling if I can't even watch a video properly. I don't mind poking around in config files, but there doesn't seem to be any poking around that'll fix this.
My shiny new Core 2 Duo laptop shouldn't get its ass handed to it in the video playback department by my old Compaq P3-733, and yet it unquestionably does. That's very, very annoying, even more annoying than the default touchpad settings that you can't change without editing xorg.conf. Sure there's 3 gui utilities to choose from to configure the touchpad - they all require you to edit xorg.conf as well. But at least there's something you can do about the touchpad. Video playback, not so much.
Well there's always Amarok running in X11 on Macintosh... works (almost) flawlessly for me.
I used to be a staunch supporter and long time user of iTunes, but version 7's preference-ignoring crash-happy ass sent me away determined to get Amarok loaded on my Mac. Maybe they've fixed those countless bugs in iTunes 7.whatever by now - my God, one would hope so. I don't plan on finding out, because Amarok is far superior. It works with me to do things my way, it doesn't force me to do things its way as iTunes does.
At the moment there's no Google Pack for Mac. That link just takes you to their Mac software page where you can get Google Earth, SketchUp, and the rest of their Mac stuff. No super-secret Aqua version of StarOffice in sight.
Well, the War On Terror is the biggest pile of steaming FUD I've ever seen. Microsoft is uniquely qualified to call them out on it, because after all, game recognize game.
Regal (now encompassing UA and Edwards theater chains as well) is an exceptionally poorly run company, even by today's dismal corporate standards. I have friends who work or worked there. Customer-unfriendly policies are the order of the day. They really, truly don't care about whether or not the moviegoer has an enjoyable moviegoing experience or not... or else they'd do everything very differently. Mostly, the ticket buyer is not the customer, they're the product, delivered to the advertisers who blanket every available surface in the building with their crap. Lots of you are probably too young to remember the excitement of going to the movies, waiting anxiously for the curtains to open and the background music to fade, or when one of the cool things about going to the movies was the lack of commercials. Getting bombarded non-stop with nerve-wracking advertising until the very second the trailers begin (I make an exception for trailers - the only advertising I actually WANT to be subjected to at the movies) just kills the mood. The lack of respect customers show for the moviegoing experience seems to roughly correlate to the lack of respect the movie theatres show their ticket-buyers. I don't say customers, because NBC/Universal and Coca-Cola or Pepsi, M&M/Mars, Frito-Lay, etc are the customers. The moviegoers are the product, and are treated as such. In short, fuck Regal. Offtopic? Sort of, I guess. But if you look at this as a case of bad product (customer with video camera = Mad Cow Disease-infected livestock) being removed from the production line, it might just apply somehow.
I doubt Sun would come out with a system named Blue Steel. IBM, on the other hand, may be looking for something to call whatever they come up with to surpass this.
I assume you mean Wapner. Wopnar is the evil robotic syndicated TV judge from the future. He is without mercy, and his appearance in our time is a horrifying warning to us all.
As recounted in Stephen Farber's book THE MOVIE RATINGS GAME, an account of the film critic's stint with the ratings board as an intern, MIDNIGHT COWBOY was going to be given an R rating by the MPAA, but United Artists self-applied an X at the behest of their CEO, who was working with advice given to him by psychiatrist Aaron Stern*. The "X" was the only rating that was not copyrighted by the MPAA and could be self-applied**, and that ended with the copyrighted NC-17 rating and Universal Pictures' HENRY AND JUNE.
*Stern later became a full-fledged ratings board consultant with some really wacky ideas... no "significant challenges to social mores" in unrestricted films and other such creepy shit. **The MPAA did not want to own a copyright on the "X" rating so as to avoid the appearance of endorsing blatantly pornographic films that would inevitably be given that rating.
Nerd reproduction occasionally happens, I'm second generation myself, raised on Star Trek, computer technology, and cartoons by my geeky computer programmer father. I'm not even particularly young (mid-30s), so there's some third and probably fourth gen nerds reading this post right now. Nerd sex - rare, but not undocumented.
Only a few networks even have commentators that even discuss both sides of an issue. Those that do not discuss both sides tend to be very much on the far left - no where near center, let alone the right. (Yes, that's ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, CNN, NY Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and pretty much all other major news outlets in the US. Fox News is the only one I'm aware of that even discusses both sides.)
Thanks, I needed a good laugh. Let nobody tell you that American news coverage has anything other than a strong conservative bias; they're either an idiot or they're bullshitting you. The American left is so weak that it doesn't even really exist for practical purposes. A few genuine left-wingers are allowed to remain in the Democratic party. Dennis Kucinich, there's a case to be made there for his "leftist" status. But the Democratic party is way fucking far to the right of Kucinich, and the "liberal" media doesn't take him even slightly seriously (funny how that works, you'd think the "liberal" media would be giving us all the Kucinich we could handle, since they're all "liberal" and shit. But no, we get the useless likes of Hillary Clinton rammed down our throats. When Socialists start turning up on CNN who aren't from Vermont, and aren't there for the bloodthirsty wingers to kick around, then I'll say we have a functional left. Until then, pshaw on that. The main political debate in this country is between center-right (or as they say on TV, "liberal") and far-right. Anyone who says differently doesn't even know what "far left" really means.
Why would re-encoding even be required? In the absence of DRM, couldn't you just pass the AAC stream unchanged into a new MP4 container with no personally identifying information or even just delete that information from the existing MP4 file?
Shuttleworth needs to bust through the ceiling and decend to the stage suspended from a cable about halfway through the Gates/Jobs "summit", throwing Ubuntu CDs into the crowd with his full astronaut gear on. That would be entertaining, if nothing else.
You know who ought to be making educational games for kids? Smart kids. Adults are reliably clueless about what kids like and don't like. (Get off my lawn.) So, some kids make up a game and sell it. It's educational. They're clearly having a blast doing it, at least as far as I can tell. It's a 21st Century lemonade stand gone thermonuclear, and I salute them. Wish that was MY childhood.
But then I thought about my mom and dad's old Laserjet 4L. That damn printer is an unkillable beast, that's real, real economical with the toner and the output remains flawless. That thing came from the Windows 3.1 box we had, a 486/66. I can be a fan of something that was reasonably priced and built to last.
And of course, the calculators are the stuff of legend in certain circles.
"If you do not like this country so much, or do not trust it then move to IRAN or somewhere that you will be more comfortable...... until you can show me proof that it was an "inside" job just shut the fuck up..."
Ah, that golden oldie "America: Love It Or Leave It!" It always comes back to the classics for people who aren't comfortable with people who question their government. In Revolutionary times you'd have made a fine British loyalist, but I doubt the people who were the real American patriots would have much to do with you. Certainly they'd have been disgusted with your notion of the government somehow being worthy of our blind trust.
Did it ever occur to you that the reason that people are so upset by the notion that 9/11 was perpetrated by our own government is BECAUSE they love America, and they don't particularly want to move somewhere else?
If you really loved your country, how would you feel about a group within the government who'd either allow or actually assist in the execution of thousands of your fellow Americans, to grease the wheels for an ideological agenda of highly questionable origins? I'm not saying that's what happened, but that is a common thread in alternative explanations of the events of 9/11, and if that actually happened, I'd hope that it would piss you off. The people of America > the Government. The only people who think that "love your country" and "love your government" are the same thing are either fascists, or the sheep that blindly follow them. Either way, they're no real friends of America.
Call them crazy, call them delusional, but when you make blanket statements calling into question the patriotism of 9/11 skeptics, you show that you have no idea about why this is such a fucking incredible country. Maybe it's the people who'd silence anyone who questions the government who'd be better off in a totalitarian state, and not the people who love America enough to ask the hard questions, the ones with answers that we may not like.
Boy, the Fort Bend Chinese-American Voters League sure seems to be a bunch of pussies. The proper response would have been...
"Are you all out of your minds? You threw a good student out of school for making a map? You confiscated a hammer as a potential weapon? How many of you have hammers in your homes? Are they locked up in a gun safe, or are they somewhere where children could easily access them? How many of your kids play the same exact game or one like it, and have access to hammers? You say there were other students playing the map. Were they thrown out of school too? If they weren't, why not? Were they Asian? After all, this has nothing to do with racism, right? Couldn't they have been his accomplices-in-training in your hypothetical hammer-powered killing spree? We are neither blind nor stupid. This principal must resign, and (insert student's name here) must be re-admitted to school, both effective immediately, or legal action will follow, also immediately. The Fort Bend Chinese-American Voters League will not stand for this for a moment."
Someone made a mistake, and it sure as hell wasn't the student. Between the ignorance and probable xenophobia of the school, the parents consenting to an warrantless search (if there was a search warrant, then why'd they mention that the parents consented - they would certainly have had no choice when faced with a warrant), and the cowardice of the aforementioned Chinese-American voter's league, the kid seems to be the only person here who's not a complete and total fuck-up. Were I his classmate, I sure as shit would boycott any graduation he was not a part of. The whole thing's absolutely disgraceful from top to bottom. I truly feel sorry for the guy, but this being Texas, he's probably just breathing a sigh of relief that he wasn't tossed into the electric chair, or the gas chamber, or whatever the hell it is you people use for your court sanctioned, government approved homicides there.
First home computer my father actually bought was a Sinclair ZX81 (preassembled, not kit form), the 1K model, not the later Timex/Sinclair 2K model. I wish I knew whatever happened to that thing, we were the only American family I knew who had one. I remember drooling over pictures of the Spectrum... color! sound! I oughta download an emulator...
...but I've been waiting for the no-name Chinese players to turn up before I even gave either HD format the slightest consideration. Unfortunately, now I'm waiting for the cheap Blu-Ray/HD-DVD hybrid players to show up. Whichever one of those can be hacked the most thoroughly to do the most cool shit (and turn off the most annoying DRM "features") will be the one I end up taking home.
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I've been suspicious of the motivations behind this list from the outset. A couple times a year I get forwarded spam by well-meaning family members, who had received spam e-mails saying that if they didn't sign up for the No Call List by a certain, right-around-the-corner date, their cellphone would begin ringing off the hook with telemarketers. I've had one unsolicited telemarketing call since I've had my cel account, and I've had it for several years. I don't obey spam, particularly when I have nothing to gain from it and the whole thing just seems... fishy in the extreme. I want no part of this damn list - even on a good day you can't trust the US Government, and these are not good days.
If there's any way to get video playback working on the Dell/Ubunutu 1420n without awful flickering and tearing, I haven't found it yet. I don't give a damn about 3D bling if I can't even watch a video properly. I don't mind poking around in config files, but there doesn't seem to be any poking around that'll fix this.
My shiny new Core 2 Duo laptop shouldn't get its ass handed to it in the video playback department by my old Compaq P3-733, and yet it unquestionably does. That's very, very annoying, even more annoying than the default touchpad settings that you can't change without editing xorg.conf. Sure there's 3 gui utilities to choose from to configure the touchpad - they all require you to edit xorg.conf as well. But at least there's something you can do about the touchpad. Video playback, not so much.
Well there's always Amarok running in X11 on Macintosh... works (almost) flawlessly for me.
I used to be a staunch supporter and long time user of iTunes, but version 7's preference-ignoring crash-happy ass sent me away determined to get Amarok loaded on my Mac. Maybe they've fixed those countless bugs in iTunes 7.whatever by now - my God, one would hope so. I don't plan on finding out, because Amarok is far superior. It works with me to do things my way, it doesn't force me to do things its way as iTunes does.
http://oldcomputers.net/trs100.html
At the moment there's no Google Pack for Mac. That link just takes you to their Mac software page where you can get Google Earth, SketchUp, and the rest of their Mac stuff. No super-secret Aqua version of StarOffice in sight.
Well, the War On Terror is the biggest pile of steaming FUD I've ever seen. Microsoft is uniquely qualified to call them out on it, because after all, game recognize game.
Regal (now encompassing UA and Edwards theater chains as well) is an exceptionally poorly run company, even by today's dismal corporate standards. I have friends who work or worked there. Customer-unfriendly policies are the order of the day. They really, truly don't care about whether or not the moviegoer has an enjoyable moviegoing experience or not... or else they'd do everything very differently. Mostly, the ticket buyer is not the customer, they're the product, delivered to the advertisers who blanket every available surface in the building with their crap. Lots of you are probably too young to remember the excitement of going to the movies, waiting anxiously for the curtains to open and the background music to fade, or when one of the cool things about going to the movies was the lack of commercials. Getting bombarded non-stop with nerve-wracking advertising until the very second the trailers begin (I make an exception for trailers - the only advertising I actually WANT to be subjected to at the movies) just kills the mood. The lack of respect customers show for the moviegoing experience seems to roughly correlate to the lack of respect the movie theatres show their ticket-buyers. I don't say customers, because NBC/Universal and Coca-Cola or Pepsi, M&M/Mars, Frito-Lay, etc are the customers. The moviegoers are the product, and are treated as such. In short, fuck Regal. Offtopic? Sort of, I guess. But if you look at this as a case of bad product (customer with video camera = Mad Cow Disease-infected livestock) being removed from the production line, it might just apply somehow.
When Paris Hilton decides to get an iPhone, according to the prophecies the world will quietly implode.
I doubt Sun would come out with a system named Blue Steel. IBM, on the other hand, may be looking for something to call whatever they come up with to surpass this.
I assume you mean Wapner. Wopnar is the evil robotic syndicated TV judge from the future. He is without mercy, and his appearance in our time is a horrifying warning to us all.
n/t
As long as there's a war on drugs, cash isn't going anywhere.
The MPAA never gave MIDNIGHT COWBOY an "X".
As recounted in Stephen Farber's book THE MOVIE RATINGS GAME, an account of the film critic's stint with the ratings board as an intern, MIDNIGHT COWBOY was going to be given an R rating by the MPAA, but United Artists self-applied an X at the behest of their CEO, who was working with advice given to him by psychiatrist Aaron Stern*. The "X" was the only rating that was not copyrighted by the MPAA and could be self-applied**, and that ended with the copyrighted NC-17 rating and Universal Pictures' HENRY AND JUNE.
*Stern later became a full-fledged ratings board consultant with some really wacky ideas... no "significant challenges to social mores" in unrestricted films and other such creepy shit.
**The MPAA did not want to own a copyright on the "X" rating so as to avoid the appearance of endorsing blatantly pornographic films that would inevitably be given that rating.
Nerd reproduction occasionally happens, I'm second generation myself, raised on Star Trek, computer technology, and cartoons by my geeky computer programmer father. I'm not even particularly young (mid-30s), so there's some third and probably fourth gen nerds reading this post right now. Nerd sex - rare, but not undocumented.
Thanks, I needed a good laugh. Let nobody tell you that American news coverage has anything other than a strong conservative bias; they're either an idiot or they're bullshitting you. The American left is so weak that it doesn't even really exist for practical purposes. A few genuine left-wingers are allowed to remain in the Democratic party. Dennis Kucinich, there's a case to be made there for his "leftist" status. But the Democratic party is way fucking far to the right of Kucinich, and the "liberal" media doesn't take him even slightly seriously (funny how that works, you'd think the "liberal" media would be giving us all the Kucinich we could handle, since they're all "liberal" and shit. But no, we get the useless likes of Hillary Clinton rammed down our throats. When Socialists start turning up on CNN who aren't from Vermont, and aren't there for the bloodthirsty wingers to kick around, then I'll say we have a functional left. Until then, pshaw on that. The main political debate in this country is between center-right (or as they say on TV, "liberal") and far-right. Anyone who says differently doesn't even know what "far left" really means.
Why would re-encoding even be required? In the absence of DRM, couldn't you just pass the AAC stream unchanged into a new MP4 container with no personally identifying information or even just delete that information from the existing MP4 file?
Shuttleworth needs to bust through the ceiling and decend to the stage suspended from a cable about halfway through the Gates/Jobs "summit", throwing Ubuntu CDs into the crowd with his full astronaut gear on. That would be entertaining, if nothing else.
You know who ought to be making educational games for kids? Smart kids. Adults are reliably clueless about what kids like and don't like. (Get off my lawn.) So, some kids make up a game and sell it. It's educational. They're clearly having a blast doing it, at least as far as I can tell. It's a 21st Century lemonade stand gone thermonuclear, and I salute them. Wish that was MY childhood.
"HP has fans?"
But then I thought about my mom and dad's old Laserjet 4L. That damn printer is an unkillable beast, that's real, real economical with the toner and the output remains flawless. That thing came from the Windows 3.1 box we had, a 486/66. I can be a fan of something that was reasonably priced and built to last.
And of course, the calculators are the stuff of legend in certain circles.
"If you do not like this country so much, or do not trust it then move to IRAN or somewhere that you will be more comfortable...... until you can show me proof that it was an "inside" job just shut the fuck up..."
Ah, that golden oldie "America: Love It Or Leave It!" It always comes back to the classics for people who aren't comfortable with people who question their government. In Revolutionary times you'd have made a fine British loyalist, but I doubt the people who were the real American patriots would have much to do with you. Certainly they'd have been disgusted with your notion of the government somehow being worthy of our blind trust.
Did it ever occur to you that the reason that people are so upset by the notion that 9/11 was perpetrated by our own government is BECAUSE they love America, and they don't particularly want to move somewhere else?
If you really loved your country, how would you feel about a group within the government who'd either allow or actually assist in the execution of thousands of your fellow Americans, to grease the wheels for an ideological agenda of highly questionable origins? I'm not saying that's what happened, but that is a common thread in alternative explanations of the events of 9/11, and if that actually happened, I'd hope that it would piss you off. The people of America > the Government. The only people who think that "love your country" and "love your government" are the same thing are either fascists, or the sheep that blindly follow them. Either way, they're no real friends of America.
Call them crazy, call them delusional, but when you make blanket statements calling into question the patriotism of 9/11 skeptics, you show that you have no idea about why this is such a fucking incredible country. Maybe it's the people who'd silence anyone who questions the government who'd be better off in a totalitarian state, and not the people who love America enough to ask the hard questions, the ones with answers that we may not like.
Actually, it turned out to be a great term paper. Texting while driving is still really stupid, though.
Boy, the Fort Bend Chinese-American Voters League sure seems to be a bunch of pussies. The proper response would have been...
"Are you all out of your minds? You threw a good student out of school for making a map? You confiscated a hammer as a potential weapon? How many of you have hammers in your homes? Are they locked up in a gun safe, or are they somewhere where children could easily access them? How many of your kids play the same exact game or one like it, and have access to hammers? You say there were other students playing the map. Were they thrown out of school too? If they weren't, why not? Were they Asian? After all, this has nothing to do with racism, right? Couldn't they have been his accomplices-in-training in your hypothetical hammer-powered killing spree? We are neither blind nor stupid. This principal must resign, and (insert student's name here) must be re-admitted to school, both effective immediately, or legal action will follow, also immediately. The Fort Bend Chinese-American Voters League will not stand for this for a moment."
Someone made a mistake, and it sure as hell wasn't the student. Between the ignorance and probable xenophobia of the school, the parents consenting to an warrantless search (if there was a search warrant, then why'd they mention that the parents consented - they would certainly have had no choice when faced with a warrant), and the cowardice of the aforementioned Chinese-American voter's league, the kid seems to be the only person here who's not a complete and total fuck-up. Were I his classmate, I sure as shit would boycott any graduation he was not a part of. The whole thing's absolutely disgraceful from top to bottom. I truly feel sorry for the guy, but this being Texas, he's probably just breathing a sigh of relief that he wasn't tossed into the electric chair, or the gas chamber, or whatever the hell it is you people use for your court sanctioned, government approved homicides there.
I got 13,256,278,887,989,457,651,018,865,901,401,704,640 problems and a bitch ain't one.
First home computer my father actually bought was a Sinclair ZX81 (preassembled, not kit form), the 1K model, not the later Timex/Sinclair 2K model. I wish I knew whatever happened to that thing, we were the only American family I knew who had one. I remember drooling over pictures of the Spectrum... color! sound! I oughta download an emulator...
...but I've been waiting for the no-name Chinese players to turn up before I even gave either HD format the slightest consideration. Unfortunately, now I'm waiting for the cheap Blu-Ray/HD-DVD hybrid players to show up. Whichever one of those can be hacked the most thoroughly to do the most cool shit (and turn off the most annoying DRM "features") will be the one I end up taking home.