Before you start calling me names, Mr. Coward, maybe you should consider what that money went to. My guess is, primarily research and development.
So the City of Seattle was doing this as a charitable donation to research and development of public restroom technology by a German company?
Now unfortunately, it turns out that these units weren't as cheap to maintain as they were supposed to be. Well, that's tough, but unless you're the kind of jackass who believes that backwards rationalization is a valid line of argumentation, you couldn't know that until it had been tried out.
I wonder what evidence they had up front that those maintenance projections were realistic, or what assumptions were made about things like police monitoring and such. I haven't seen anything about it that in any of the articles.
We have toilets from the same manufacturer over here (Berlin, DE) and they don't attract much drug abuse or prostitution, because if you spend too much time in there the door simply opens. I'm not kidding, it happened to a friend of mine who for some reason unknown to me decided to roll a joint in there. Since he told me I've stopped using them for their intended purpose.
I just read an article about these self-cleaning toilets a few weeks ago. I think it was about New York getting some, or considering getting some, in order to ease their problems with lack of public restrooms. The article said that if you stay in there for more than 15 minutes, the door would just open automatically. That was considered to be a deterrent to people using them for "alternative purposes."
They might be the interaction, but either way they become a switch that places everybody into "jedi" or "not jedi". And there's nothing spiritual about that.
While I originally hated the whole midichlorian thing (I think I groaned out loud in the theater during that scene... people were looking at me...), I think I've been trying to mentally fix it in my head so that it doesn't screw things up so badly. All I can really come up with is that being force-sensitive or not has always been something that the person has no control over. Luke and Leia had a parent who was very strong with it, so they are too. Training helps you to learn to control it better, but doesn't change your potential.
The books that come after Jedi obviously don't speak of midichlorians because Lucas hadn't injected that yet, but they do have Jedi seeking out young people who have force potential so that they can be trained before they get tempted by the dark side. This seems in line with the idea that only a few have the potential. Midichlorians may be the mechanism, but there must still be some underlying reason why the midichlorians are present in some and not in others. Presumably it has something to do with the person themselves. Otherwise people would be getting midichlorian injections to get force powers.
So, the spirituality aspect can still exist alongside the midichlorian explanation. It would have been better off without it, but that's Lucas for you. He's always gotta get in there and insert his own special brand of suckage into the story. Someone should have tossed his ass down a reactor pit ages ago.
And maybe that's why the last few movies were so abominable. He went from a straight up "good guys are better than bad guys" allegory to "only the Sith deal in absolutes"; he took away our simple heroic fairy tale, and gave us... nuance, intrigue, and gray areas.
No, I think the problem was still just horrible writing, casting and directing rather than an inherent problem with the story. The stories could have been better, but they weren't the real problem. Get rid of Jar-Jar, cast someone that can actually act to play Anakin, and cut some of the dumbest slapstick stuff out and maybe add in some (even slightly) more intelligent humor, and the movies would have been a lot better. Han's sarcasm and banter with Leia and Chewie worked. Jar-Jar is just really really dumb.
The audience for the prequels could easily deal with the little bit of "gray-ness". It's not like it really made it too hard to tell good from bad. It was the extra crap that served no purpose except to highlight the crappy dialog and casting that really messed things up.
The more control Lucas has over the story and filming, the worse the film ends up. Go see Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and then read one of the leaked copies of Indiana Jones and the City of the Gods on the Internet. The latter is a professionally written screenplay by someone who loves the characters, the former is Lucas's "corrected" version. We need to stop having high expectations of the man.
I don't think most of us have had high expectations of him since RotJ. We'd mostly just like to see him stay the hell away from Star Wars, especially when it comes to writing, directing, casting, etc. The books that followed RotJ were much better than any of the movies. Get some decent authors to work with the material and they show us what can be done with it. They put Lucas to shame.
From here : At a Senate hearing in June, Larry Cunningham, a New York prosecutor who is now a law professor, defended laptop searches--but not necessarily seizures--as perfectly permissible. Preventing customs agents from searching laptops "would open a vulnerability in our border by providing criminals and terrorists with a means to smuggle child pornography or other dangerous and illegal computer files into the country," Cunningham said.
What I want to know is who exactly "smuggles" child pornography around on a laptop. They may have it on their laptop, but they're not "smuggling" it into the country. They more than likely downloaded it from someplace that's already accessible to anyone in the country anyway.
You may be able to prosecute them for it, but it's not going to save any children. Anyone that wants it will just hide it better, and you'll end up arresting people that have a suspect image or three in their browser cache that they've probably never even seen. This is just more bullshit fear-mongering to further strip us of our liberties.
Even if the 'making available' argument doesn't stand under current law, you can expect attempted copyright infringement to be made illegal when congress gets back from vacation.
Yep. Some of the new legislation they're trying to push through makes the DMCA look like the "Free Kittens and Ice Cream For Everyone Act". As long as our Congress is up for sale and people aren't paying attention to copyright legislation, we're going to keep getting screwed time after time. I hardly ever see anything about copyright legislation in the mainstream media, except when they're talking about how the mean nasty pirates are going to have the poor recording and movie industry execs sending their kids to school wearing last year's fashions. NPR does some decent interviews from time to time, but that's about it.
I know that Valve's games (or at least, the older Half-Life period ones) came with parental controls to lock out blood. I think that more should follow this strategy. Or, just have a paintball mode like Goldeneye.
Blood tends to be a consequence of violence. Locking out blood seems pretty pointless in a violent game. A paintball mode might work for some games, but it would seem pretty out of place in others. Sometimes parents have to tell their kids no. When they're ready to handle games with more adult content, then let them play them. Trying to nerf games that involve lots of violence doesn't seem like a good idea, nor should game developers try to please everyone with every game. Some games just aren't for kids. So don't let them play those.
I'm not saying the Republicans are angels by any stretch when it comes to campaign shenanigans - but then they aren't the ones trying to claim the moral high ground, generally.
Who are you kidding? Both sides ALWAYS try to claim the moral high ground. If they can't, then they try to knock the other side off the high ground. Neither side is any cleaner than the other. People just tend to pick a side and then turn a blind eye to that side's dirty dealing while demonizing the other side. I think that makes them feel that there is at least a good side out there. Otherwise they'd have to face the truth: powerful people don't get that way by following the rules. They get that way by bending and breaking the rules any way they can get away with, and covering their tracks as best they can. Then they have plausible deniability and the people on "their side" will defend them and demonize the other guy.
The long term goal I think is that the hardware itself becomes an operating system simply supporting an virtually infinite number of hypervisors.
I haven't really worked with these virtualization technologies, so maybe I'm missing something, but wouldn't there only be one hypervisor running on the hardware or within a host operating system? That hypervisor could support many virtual machines. Am I misunderstanding it?
This basically guarantees that your muscles will be toned but will not bulk up
dude, I challenge you to try and build more muscle than you "want" without using steroids. If you're like me and 99% of the people I have trained with, no matter how much weight you can lift/press/squat etc, it is almost impossible to end up looking even close to a modern bodybuilder without using copious quantities of human growth hormone.
No kidding. Seemed pretty strange to me that he seems to think that you can just kind of accidentally get huge or something. I've been doing a lot more weight training over the last several months, and it's quite obvious that there's no chance of me "bulking up". I've definitely added some size and definition, but nothing that even begins to approach body-builder size. I don't think anyone here needs to worry about it at all.
Never want to see RIAA again? Then don't steal the dream - don't steal the music. Buy your "tunes" at a reputable record store instead of just stealing them off the Internet.
The RIAA and other entertainment lobbyists have been stealing from the public on a massive scale for decades. Beyond the repeated price-fixing convictions (which they never seem to get punished for), they've been taking works that should have become public domain and extending the duration of their monopoly rights over them, even retroactively so that the public never gets any return on the copyright bargain in their lifetime. You could wrap all those industry execs in bacon and drag them through an alligator moat and nobody would shed a tear.
I would venture to speculate that in a country where man-on-the-street interviews reveal that most of Obama's supporters can't name one single thing he's accomplished that caused them to support him
I'm thinking "ran as a Democrat" would be the most obvious answer.
Get serious. In every fucking discussion regarding the RIAA, someone plays spin doctor and tries to twist the intent of copyright law as some evile corepirate nazi tool to rake in the dough. In this discussion, it was your turn. Just be happy with the fact that you were successfully able to whore yourself out for 5 shiny new karma points by doing so.
I would have suggested that if you read/. more, you would have been familiar with this argument, but I saw no need to point out what you just demonstrated.
I practically quoted the Constitution as to the intent of copyright law. How is that twisting it? The fact that the public has to keep giving longer and longer terms and more draconian restrictions on copyrighted works, for no apparent benefit, is the problem. Come back when you can dispute that.
I loved Portal and I'd like to see more games like it. The key is a comprehensible and consistent set of rules. I don't mind trying to figure out a puzzle as long as it makes sense.
What I hate are those "puzzle" games that have you clicking on every goddamn thing on the screen and using every item on every other item to try to figure out what some designer decided should work based on some arbitrary reason or whim. Of course when you try some similar solution in another level, it won't work. That shit is just annoying. Give me more games like Portal!
Yeah, unfortunately this is a discussion about copyright, a legal fiction created for economic stimulous, and not about tangible goods which can be stolen.
Should read: "a legal fiction created for cultural and scientific stimulus, and altered over the last few decades to provided an unending stream of income to the entertainment industry for work that somebody did decades ago, all at the expense of the public."
Using Tom Cruise as an example is a poor one. Of course the super celebrities get in without any hurdles. The people that are harder to keep track on is the people "behind the scenes". A lot of sound techies, video techies and crew are invited as well.
It's too much to ask for them to show an ID to be checked against the list?
I think that's the same reasoning people use to defend stealing movies and music. Apparently, everything is garbage nowadays. Music, games, movies, television, everything sucks ass. Is there anything in existence that you do like?
It's not that people steal what they don't like. It's the idea of "try before you buy" that motivates a lot of people to download a copy first. It's not that everything is crap really. It's that you can't trust the publishers or reviewers out there, cause they're in a symbiotic relationship with the goal of selling as much as possible. Things like this ban of user-created gameplay footage just makes things worse. The tendency of many console gamers to buy whatever happens to be on the cover of a magazine this month contributes as well.
The default look of IE is pretty much unrecognizable. It's also pretty unusuable. It's very my like the mew msoffice in this respect.
Unrecognizable, yes. Unusable, no. It does make you pretty much start over with learning where everything is, but the interface is actually very accessible and easy once you get the hang of it. I've only been using it for about 6 weeks now, but I've started to like it better. It's a dramatic departure, but it feels like a better direction than the old toolbar/menu system. Haven't used IE in Vista though, so I can't comment on that. If I ran Vista, I'd just install FF3 anyway.
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Before you start calling me names, Mr. Coward, maybe you should consider what that money went to. My guess is, primarily research and development.
So the City of Seattle was doing this as a charitable donation to research and development of public restroom technology by a German company?
Now unfortunately, it turns out that these units weren't as cheap to maintain as they were supposed to be. Well, that's tough, but unless you're the kind of jackass who believes that backwards rationalization is a valid line of argumentation, you couldn't know that until it had been tried out.
I wonder what evidence they had up front that those maintenance projections were realistic, or what assumptions were made about things like police monitoring and such. I haven't seen anything about it that in any of the articles.
We have toilets from the same manufacturer over here (Berlin, DE) and they don't attract much drug abuse or prostitution, because if you spend too much time in there the door simply opens.
I'm not kidding, it happened to a friend of mine who for some reason unknown to me decided to roll a joint in there. Since he told me I've stopped using them for their intended purpose.
I just read an article about these self-cleaning toilets a few weeks ago. I think it was about New York getting some, or considering getting some, in order to ease their problems with lack of public restrooms. The article said that if you stay in there for more than 15 minutes, the door would just open automatically. That was considered to be a deterrent to people using them for "alternative purposes."
They might be the interaction, but either way they become a switch that places everybody into "jedi" or "not jedi". And there's nothing spiritual about that.
While I originally hated the whole midichlorian thing (I think I groaned out loud in the theater during that scene... people were looking at me...), I think I've been trying to mentally fix it in my head so that it doesn't screw things up so badly. All I can really come up with is that being force-sensitive or not has always been something that the person has no control over. Luke and Leia had a parent who was very strong with it, so they are too. Training helps you to learn to control it better, but doesn't change your potential.
The books that come after Jedi obviously don't speak of midichlorians because Lucas hadn't injected that yet, but they do have Jedi seeking out young people who have force potential so that they can be trained before they get tempted by the dark side. This seems in line with the idea that only a few have the potential. Midichlorians may be the mechanism, but there must still be some underlying reason why the midichlorians are present in some and not in others. Presumably it has something to do with the person themselves. Otherwise people would be getting midichlorian injections to get force powers.
So, the spirituality aspect can still exist alongside the midichlorian explanation. It would have been better off without it, but that's Lucas for you. He's always gotta get in there and insert his own special brand of suckage into the story. Someone should have tossed his ass down a reactor pit ages ago.
I bought them. They were bonus discs to the DVD releases of the refitted and beshitted originals.
Are they still available?
And maybe that's why the last few movies were so abominable. He went from a straight up "good guys are better than bad guys" allegory to "only the Sith deal in absolutes"; he took away our simple heroic fairy tale, and gave us... nuance, intrigue, and gray areas.
No, I think the problem was still just horrible writing, casting and directing rather than an inherent problem with the story. The stories could have been better, but they weren't the real problem. Get rid of Jar-Jar, cast someone that can actually act to play Anakin, and cut some of the dumbest slapstick stuff out and maybe add in some (even slightly) more intelligent humor, and the movies would have been a lot better. Han's sarcasm and banter with Leia and Chewie worked. Jar-Jar is just really really dumb.
The audience for the prequels could easily deal with the little bit of "gray-ness". It's not like it really made it too hard to tell good from bad. It was the extra crap that served no purpose except to highlight the crappy dialog and casting that really messed things up.
The more control Lucas has over the story and filming, the worse the film ends up. Go see Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and then read one of the leaked copies of Indiana Jones and the City of the Gods on the Internet. The latter is a professionally written screenplay by someone who loves the characters, the former is Lucas's "corrected" version. We need to stop having high expectations of the man.
I don't think most of us have had high expectations of him since RotJ. We'd mostly just like to see him stay the hell away from Star Wars, especially when it comes to writing, directing, casting, etc. The books that followed RotJ were much better than any of the movies. Get some decent authors to work with the material and they show us what can be done with it. They put Lucas to shame.
From here : At a Senate hearing in June, Larry Cunningham, a New York prosecutor who is now a law professor, defended laptop searches--but not necessarily seizures--as perfectly permissible. Preventing customs agents from searching laptops "would open a vulnerability in our border by providing criminals and terrorists with a means to smuggle child pornography or other dangerous and illegal computer files into the country," Cunningham said.
What I want to know is who exactly "smuggles" child pornography around on a laptop. They may have it on their laptop, but they're not "smuggling" it into the country. They more than likely downloaded it from someplace that's already accessible to anyone in the country anyway.
You may be able to prosecute them for it, but it's not going to save any children. Anyone that wants it will just hide it better, and you'll end up arresting people that have a suspect image or three in their browser cache that they've probably never even seen. This is just more bullshit fear-mongering to further strip us of our liberties.
Even if the 'making available' argument doesn't stand under current law, you can expect attempted copyright infringement to be made illegal when congress gets back from vacation.
Yep. Some of the new legislation they're trying to push through makes the DMCA look like the "Free Kittens and Ice Cream For Everyone Act". As long as our Congress is up for sale and people aren't paying attention to copyright legislation, we're going to keep getting screwed time after time. I hardly ever see anything about copyright legislation in the mainstream media, except when they're talking about how the mean nasty pirates are going to have the poor recording and movie industry execs sending their kids to school wearing last year's fashions. NPR does some decent interviews from time to time, but that's about it.
I know that Valve's games (or at least, the older Half-Life period ones) came with parental controls to lock out blood. I think that more should follow this strategy.
Or, just have a paintball mode like Goldeneye.
Blood tends to be a consequence of violence. Locking out blood seems pretty pointless in a violent game. A paintball mode might work for some games, but it would seem pretty out of place in others. Sometimes parents have to tell their kids no. When they're ready to handle games with more adult content, then let them play them. Trying to nerf games that involve lots of violence doesn't seem like a good idea, nor should game developers try to please everyone with every game. Some games just aren't for kids. So don't let them play those.
I don't see why most games can't give users the tools to self filter. At that point, it's the parent's responsibility.
They do. The consoles have parental controls built in. Parents just don't seem to want to bother to use them.
Only when someone isn't smart enough to realize there are more than two candidates running. Like you for instance.
The question still stands. Which candidate, out of any that are running, has no dealings with any shady people in their past?
I'm not saying the Republicans are angels by any stretch when it comes to campaign shenanigans - but then they aren't the ones trying to claim the moral high ground, generally.
Who are you kidding? Both sides ALWAYS try to claim the moral high ground. If they can't, then they try to knock the other side off the high ground. Neither side is any cleaner than the other. People just tend to pick a side and then turn a blind eye to that side's dirty dealing while demonizing the other side. I think that makes them feel that there is at least a good side out there. Otherwise they'd have to face the truth: powerful people don't get that way by following the rules. They get that way by bending and breaking the rules any way they can get away with, and covering their tracks as best they can. Then they have plausible deniability and the people on "their side" will defend them and demonize the other guy.
The long term goal I think is that the hardware itself becomes an operating system simply supporting an virtually infinite number of hypervisors.
I haven't really worked with these virtualization technologies, so maybe I'm missing something, but wouldn't there only be one hypervisor running on the hardware or within a host operating system? That hypervisor could support many virtual machines. Am I misunderstanding it?
"Oh, shut up already. These jokes are getting old and redundant."
Ah, did someone called your baby UGLY?
I think someone called his baby buggy.
This basically guarantees that your muscles will be toned but will not bulk up
dude, I challenge you to try and build more muscle than you "want" without using steroids. If you're like me and 99% of the people I have trained with, no matter how much weight you can lift/press/squat etc, it is almost impossible to end up looking even close to a modern bodybuilder without using copious quantities of human growth hormone.
No kidding. Seemed pretty strange to me that he seems to think that you can just kind of accidentally get huge or something. I've been doing a lot more weight training over the last several months, and it's quite obvious that there's no chance of me "bulking up". I've definitely added some size and definition, but nothing that even begins to approach body-builder size. I don't think anyone here needs to worry about it at all.
Never want to see RIAA again? Then don't steal the dream - don't steal the music. Buy your "tunes" at a reputable record store instead of just stealing them off the Internet.
The RIAA and other entertainment lobbyists have been stealing from the public on a massive scale for decades. Beyond the repeated price-fixing convictions (which they never seem to get punished for), they've been taking works that should have become public domain and extending the duration of their monopoly rights over them, even retroactively so that the public never gets any return on the copyright bargain in their lifetime. You could wrap all those industry execs in bacon and drag them through an alligator moat and nobody would shed a tear.
I would venture to speculate that in a country where man-on-the-street interviews reveal that most of Obama's supporters can't name one single thing he's accomplished that caused them to support him
I'm thinking "ran as a Democrat" would be the most obvious answer.
Get serious. In every fucking discussion regarding the RIAA, someone plays spin doctor and tries to twist the intent of copyright law as some evile corepirate nazi tool to rake in the dough. In this discussion, it was your turn. Just be happy with the fact that you were successfully able to whore yourself out for 5 shiny new karma points by doing so.
I would have suggested that if you read /. more, you would have been familiar with this argument, but I saw no need to point out what you just demonstrated.
I practically quoted the Constitution as to the intent of copyright law. How is that twisting it? The fact that the public has to keep giving longer and longer terms and more draconian restrictions on copyrighted works, for no apparent benefit, is the problem. Come back when you can dispute that.
Wow!! Way to propagandize it!! Too bad you're a few decades late for the war - Hitler would've been impressed by your skills.
Oh, wait, nevermind - you didn't come up with that argument. You're just regurgitating someone else's.
What are you babbling about, and how exactly is my post incorrect or attributable to someone else?
I loved Portal and I'd like to see more games like it. The key is a comprehensible and consistent set of rules. I don't mind trying to figure out a puzzle as long as it makes sense.
What I hate are those "puzzle" games that have you clicking on every goddamn thing on the screen and using every item on every other item to try to figure out what some designer decided should work based on some arbitrary reason or whim. Of course when you try some similar solution in another level, it won't work. That shit is just annoying. Give me more games like Portal!
Yeah, unfortunately this is a discussion about copyright, a legal fiction created for economic stimulous, and not about tangible goods which can be stolen.
Should read: "a legal fiction created for cultural and scientific stimulus, and altered over the last few decades to provided an unending stream of income to the entertainment industry for work that somebody did decades ago, all at the expense of the public."
Using Tom Cruise as an example is a poor one. Of course the super celebrities get in without any hurdles. The people that are harder to keep track on is the people "behind the scenes". A lot of sound techies, video techies and crew are invited as well.
It's too much to ask for them to show an ID to be checked against the list?
I think that's the same reasoning people use to defend stealing movies and music. Apparently, everything is garbage nowadays. Music, games, movies, television, everything sucks ass. Is there anything in existence that you do like?
It's not that people steal what they don't like. It's the idea of "try before you buy" that motivates a lot of people to download a copy first. It's not that everything is crap really. It's that you can't trust the publishers or reviewers out there, cause they're in a symbiotic relationship with the goal of selling as much as possible. Things like this ban of user-created gameplay footage just makes things worse. The tendency of many console gamers to buy whatever happens to be on the cover of a magazine this month contributes as well.
Doh. Just realized that I didn't make it clear at the start of that post that I was talking about MS Office, not IE.
The default look of IE is pretty much unrecognizable. It's also pretty unusuable.
It's very my like the mew msoffice in this respect.
Unrecognizable, yes. Unusable, no. It does make you pretty much start over with learning where everything is, but the interface is actually very accessible and easy once you get the hang of it. I've only been using it for about 6 weeks now, but I've started to like it better. It's a dramatic departure, but it feels like a better direction than the old toolbar/menu system. Haven't used IE in Vista though, so I can't comment on that. If I ran Vista, I'd just install FF3 anyway.