We got 'snopes' email spammed basically, just the subject is a little different than usual, haha. Sounds like every self-righteous email my grandfather spams to anyone who will listen.
I am pretty sure the 'huge part of the country' going to the store once a week that the AC was alluding to were not Senators.
(That said, I live in the suburbs and go to the store once a week, a mile away, but I assumed he meant where it was a 20+ minute drive to the nearest store.)
By 'huge part of the country' I assume you mean by area, not population. And he said 'car' not 'truck' or 'van', which serves a different purpose (carrying things as opposed to carrying people). Now you may only have a van or truck for financial and convenience reasons, but when someone defines their market, and you then say 'but there are other markets' as your counterpoint...it isn't really germaine.
Code completion is your friend. You should only need to type two or three letters to get to most of your long named variables anyway. And using long variable names absolutely makes thing more readable, especially in a local sense.
When your debugger or log spits out:
"variable 'hn' was undefined" versus "'host_name' was undefined", you might actually be able to fix it without opening up code, because it was just a configuration error.
But even more generally, not having to grok to the beginning of a method or fully understand a class's internals to know what 3 lines of code are doing, helps the mere mortals out there like me, especially when traverse object inheritance several layers deep.
And mathematicians do a lot of writing on paper where it actually does make more sense to use abbreviated variables, at lease more so than in modern computer engineering.
Just because you buy something that was made in a foreign country doesn't mean that anywhere near the majority of that money goes to the foreign country. Retail salaries, rental/construction of stores, sales taxes, truck/rail transportation, etc. all contribute to the US economy.
I don't disagree that 'buying American' isn't better, but it isn't catastrophic either. Pushing gift cards for services is pretty bad IMO as well, since a large percentage of gift cards are never used. You would almost be better off donating the money to charity in their name in many cases.
But yes, there is a lot of useless crap out there too. Buying a loved one the 'gift' of a Thomas Kincaid 'painting' for instance. Made in the USA.
A better mantra would be 'Buy useful things that increase productivity', whether it that increase be in entertainment value, work productivity, kitchen productivity, or whatever.
Thought I had read that Climate Change was now run by the global climate change deniers. Makes sense that they would publish an article that is easy to denounce, even if it does support 'global warming'.
I have never been a fan of 'global warming' as a phrase since it is easy to make statements like 'last fall was the coolest since X' as an anecdotal evidence that it isn't real. The point is that there is more energy in the environment, which tends to increase the variability of the climate, bigger storms, hotter summers, colder winters, over multi-year scales.
It takes about an hour of actual effort from paperback to the proofing stage (ie. reading the thing on your PDA to clean up the couple of dozen errors).
2 min 1) Use a paper cutter to cut the book up 2 min 2) Send it thru a duplex auto feed scanner (got mine for $300 on ebay...before that I used a single side ADF that took a little more effort (like 5 more minutes). 1 min 3) Assign a reading block to exclude the page numbers and page header and load it for all pages. 3 min 4) Quickly scan thru all pages to make sure the reading blocks look good (can do it in like 1-2 minutes for 300 page book rapidly paging down). Otherwise adjust. 0 min 5) Start the OCR process and wait til it is done. 30 min 6) Scan thru all of the pages looking for obvious OCR problems and the highlighted 'unsure' words. 5 min 7) Go thru and look for hyphenated words that need to have them removed. 1 min 8) Export to Word/HTML/Whatever you feel comfortable with. 15 min 9) Recreate the ToC, and run some specialized spellchecking (only looks for words that aren't used repeatedly to deal with proper nouns or uncommon subject matter), and run script to join page breaks.
Start reading and highlight any formatting errors for later correction.
I'm not saying it isn't tedious, but it isn't 'really tedious' with the proper tools. An hour spent before you spend 6-10 hours reading.
This is the crux of the issue for me at least: I shouldn't need to become a topic expert to incorporate functionality into my code. Code is like a mash-up or whatever term you want to use for a lot of people, where you take libraries and functionality and string them together quickly and easily to create something new and possibly interesting.
I just want to make something fun and share it, not write my own regular expression parser or RTF2HTML converter.
I had a particular instance last year, where I was working on an Ebook reader application in C# for a WinMo phone. One of the things I wanted to do was have the app be able to open and read MS Reader format files (ones created without DRM), because there are a lot out there and it would be handy to have. ConvertLit is the only pratical solution for doing this currently. It is GPL. I was able to get it to work on WinMo, but I had to keep it as a separate EXE on the device and explode the LIT file to a temp folder, rather than do it in memory.
I absolutely plan on having my source be open. However, some other libraries I might want to use like an RTF2HTML conversion library in C# might be proprietary or not be compatible and there aren't really any other options in C# other than to go take some C rtf2html code and spend way more time and effort than I want to making that work just so I can be compatible with the GPL.
GPL does ensure that your code is free, but it may prevent a lot of source that would otherwise have been created and free from being released as well, because of its strictness. And yet, in the GPL ConvertLIT at least it uses Public Domain code for some CAB file manipulation.
Do you mean that the videos can't be embedded separately in an html document and manipulated that way?
Otherwise, I'm pretty sure you could do most, if not all, of this in Flash too. And most of the things you mentioned already exist in flash as well as far as filters, color manipulations, etc.
I'm not saying you are wrong, I just don't see what specifically about the link you gave can't be done in flash/flex?
Certainly, multiple videos, drag, resize, rotate, and independent volume control per video, right click context menu (though this is admitedly hacky), take a screenshot of the whole shebang and encode it in the browser into png/jpg/bmp and upload it to a server: all supported.
I've been using Flex more and more where possible, simply because it lets me focus on what I care about, the value that my code brings to things, NOT trying to make sure it works in X different browsers that each need to be tweaked, etc.
When using Adobe (or MS for the color of a flash, Silverlight), I have one vendor, with one vision, one set of design tools, one set of help files, where most of the examples I find on the web I can use immediately and get back to work.
With HTML5, I have: HTML Committee (w3c, etc.) Javascript committee CSS Committee 1 of many javascript libraries, like Prototype, JQuery, etc.
Then you have: Microsoft (IE) Mozilla (FF) Safari Google Opera, etc.
each with their own implementations of the 3 committees work, that are partial and flaky and require the above mentioned javascript frameworks to even begin to be useful since they incorporate some of those browser work arounds. But then everytime you look for an example on the web, you find something that uses the framework you aren't using, so you have to keep looking or rewrite code you really have no interest in as part of your business.
Until there is a unified framework that is actually Write Once, Run and look the same Anywhere as Flex (or Silverlight), there will be a place for them. MXML (and possibly XAML) are simply a huge relief to work with after dealing with the morass of HTML/JS/CSS dev.
I absolutely agree that the mobile market is a BIG issue that needs to be dealt with, with Flex-Flash/Silverlight though.
This is the 'prior art' post for my switched drive idea. The main issues I have with all of the 'raid' and 8 bay systems I see is that a) the drives are always on, sucking power, b) while raid is certainly safer, it is much more expensive currently than it is worth. Ideally you want to keep you costs below $1 per movie for storage, which the 1.5TB drives approach assuming an average of 7GB per movie. The 8 bay drives seem to cost at minimum $500 which is a lot of overhead.
I would rather see a simple box with slots for say 24 drives. These drives would then be wired to a switched sata controller ala a KVM. By switched I mean that pressing a physical radio style button, that drive would become the active drive, would power up and mount automatically. Ideally the system would allow 2 drives to be powered at the same time for ease of transferring between drives. Also ideally it would be possible to switch from one drive to another by signal from the computer in addition to the physical buttons.
If Apple was serious about making it a standard, then they wouldn't have trademarked 'FireWire' and made everyone else call it i1394 and Sony's iLink or whatever. And I know You Ess Bee isn't exactly catchy, it is catchier than i1394.
As someone who uses Flex extensively as a developer, I can say that it is just plain faster/easier to get a site up and running with an interesting design using Flash or Flex. In particular, I work on campaign based sites, that have a limited life span, unrealistic dates for launch, etc. And I work on sites that do things that Javascript can't do or doesn't do well: multi-file upload, bitmap manipulation (turn an image from color to b&w, distort it, use layers and blend modes to create interesting user interactions), fonts, webcam/microphone recording, write once with no tweaks required browser by browser. Plus with the super-tight integration of photoshop with Flash and soon with Flex, you can turn around a design in a day or two, whereas with Javascript/HTML/CSS/DOM/framework/SVG/etc. I might spend a day on a single page of functionality.
This isn't an 'I love Flash, you should always use it' post. This is an 'in the real world, many sites have limited timeframes both in deployment as well as in development' post, and Flex/Flash brings a lot to the table. Specifically, they bring the 'centralized authority of Adobe' controlling all aspects of the stack, as opposed to having a committee doing Javascript, a committee doing HTML5, a committee doing CSS 3, a comittee doing SVG, each browser having it's own DOM implementation, each site using a different flavor of jQuery, Django, Prototype, , on and on.
Using Flex/Flash in many cases is quite simply the most efficient, expedient thing to do, and as a programmer I am all about efficiency and expediency. There are trade offs, and there are concerns to be raised about the central authority, but at the end of the day, once you work on a Flex app because you have to for some reason as mentioned above, when you realize Javascript simply CAN'T do what you want it to do (hardware accelerated bitmap manipulation say or webcam) then you start down the path of 'why do I need two environments when I can use just the one?' It is seductive and productive.
a) Run 24/7 on my computer, even when Chrome or whatever other google software exists is not running b) NOT UNINSTALL WHEN I UNINSTALL CHROME. WTF? I have no other software from google on my machine, yet there is no way to uninstall this without resorting to deleting some files hidden in your \Users\\AppData\Local\Google\ folder (a hidden folder by default), and disabling it manually in Services and Tasks?
Don't get me wrong: Apple also just pulled this same extreme Asshattery with their 'MobileMe' install on Vista just for trying to put iTunes on it. And Bonjour? Bon fucking voyage. With the MobileMe thing on Vista, you would have to search the web to find out that it is actually 'Apple Mobile Device Services' in the Uninstall list. And it doesn't even work when you click 'Uninstall'. You specifically have to go into 'Change' and then click the 'Remove' button.
"If you can't see healthy dissent in a country to some extent--something is terribly wrong."
I don't want to disagree with this statement, but it does remind me of the 'media issues' we are having in the U.S. From the Fox News propaganda machine, to the 'elite media' doing their best to increase their ratings and readership without much thought of journalistic integrity: Healthy dissent can be hard to find, in a certain sense.
The whole Sarah Palin's daughter thing, Anne Nicole Smith's death orgy, Rush Limbaugh's histrionics...extremist, reactionary views and commentary are the norm. No one shows any respect or restraint, as the incentives are for the opposite. And the 'two' 'sides' make so much noise about their own issues that other issues that concern a large portion of the citizens go unaddressed and unreported.
So there is a clarification on the rules that are misquoted in the linked article: The gymnast must turn 16 at any time during the year of the Olympics. Therefore someone born on 12/31/1992 is legal to participate.
Beyond that: While I agree rules should be followed, in general, I tried to find my outrage at the age issue and really came up short. Isn't the Olympics about 'the best in the world' versus 'the best in the world'? It isn't as if other gymnasts would have been able to suddenly do anything differently: they couldn't have somehow taken advantage of the rules if the age limit had been lifted...they still would have been the same age themselves. The only disparity I see is if the US Women's team had some 14yo phenom that wasn't allowed to compete because they followed the rules. Otherwise, I don't see how it short-changes the athletes that are there. Certainly, complaining you got beat by someone who is younger than you sounds pretty petty.
I understand that perhaps the rule is in place for the safety of the participants, in that those under 15-16 may have more fearlessness...it's not like they aren't already doing some pretty crazy stuff in gymnastics at 12-13 anyway, so I don't see how safety couldn't be waived in the interest of seeing the best competitors in the world compete.
There is some outrage at the scoring/judging bias that seems to be so prevalent, but I just can't get too worked up over the age issue.
If you can deal with some setup headaches, the HDHomerun (www.silicondust.com) is a good network device that takes both OTA HD channels and unencrypted QAM cable, digital and music channels. 2 Tuners so you can go one of each OTA/QAM or whatever. It streams the unpacked MPEG2 across the network using UDP to any computer. Works with Windows/Vista Media Center, Myth and others. The main issue during setup is dealing with channel mapping so that you get proper guide data. I don't know about the whole UHF/VHF thing someone else mentioned as I just deal with QAM.
That would pretty much turn the AH into a Buy Now on Ebay, as all prices would essentially be fixed at 10x the vendor price. This would lead to an underground AH that did not remove money from the game in the AH 'vig'/cut. 1000x the number of tells in chat and trade channels of people selling things, etc.
Potions and turnins and things have zero value or 1 copper in many cases and would destroy those markets or require vendors to pay a lot more for those items.
It would be much harder to get 6000 gold together to buy a mount without being able to have fun on the AH or to be able to borrow it from your guild members, and pay it back.
Not letting people mine/herb things that are grey to them would prevent someone from say learning how to be a miner AND a blacksmith without having to buy a ton of materials. Or, no more swift pots if your 375 herbalism can't pick the herbs.
THough you could always just drop the profession and relearn it to get around that...
Even with DRM, it is still possible, in the same way that you can still take a video of your DRM'd HDMI TV.
Specifically, at the very grossest level, you can point a webcam from another computer at your monitor, and have a device that transmits USB key board/mouse information to the other computer in response to what your webcam sees, like http://www.barcodeman.com/altek/mule/ . This is only one step removed from the most passive screen shot techniques.
Blixx makes it easier in that you can write addons that literally transmit data out of your application using color encoding and/or OCR for telling things like direction and location, as well as player status like 'poisoned', 'You must face target to attack' etc.
Slashdot Mirror
We got 'snopes' email spammed basically, just the subject is a little different than usual, haha. Sounds like every self-righteous email my grandfather spams to anyone who will listen.
I think in the context of electric cars, it is generally more specific, but my assumption could be wrong.
I am pretty sure the 'huge part of the country' going to the store once a week that the AC was alluding to were not Senators.
(That said, I live in the suburbs and go to the store once a week, a mile away, but I assumed he meant where it was a 20+ minute drive to the nearest store.)
By 'huge part of the country' I assume you mean by area, not population. And he said 'car' not 'truck' or 'van', which serves a different purpose (carrying things as opposed to carrying people). Now you may only have a van or truck for financial and convenience reasons, but when someone defines their market, and you then say 'but there are other markets' as your counterpoint...it isn't really germaine.
Code completion is your friend. You should only need to type two or three letters to get to most of your long named variables anyway. And using long variable names absolutely makes thing more readable, especially in a local sense.
When your debugger or log spits out:
"variable 'hn' was undefined" versus "'host_name' was undefined", you might actually be able to fix it without opening up code, because it was just a configuration error.
But even more generally, not having to grok to the beginning of a method or fully understand a class's internals to know what 3 lines of code are doing, helps the mere mortals out there like me, especially when traverse object inheritance several layers deep.
And mathematicians do a lot of writing on paper where it actually does make more sense to use abbreviated variables, at lease more so than in modern computer engineering.
Just because you buy something that was made in a foreign country doesn't mean that anywhere near the majority of that money goes to the foreign country. Retail salaries, rental/construction of stores, sales taxes, truck/rail transportation, etc. all contribute to the US economy.
I don't disagree that 'buying American' isn't better, but it isn't catastrophic either. Pushing gift cards for services is pretty bad IMO as well, since a large percentage of gift cards are never used. You would almost be better off donating the money to charity in their name in many cases.
But yes, there is a lot of useless crap out there too. Buying a loved one the 'gift' of a Thomas Kincaid 'painting' for instance. Made in the USA.
A better mantra would be 'Buy useful things that increase productivity', whether it that increase be in entertainment value, work productivity, kitchen productivity, or whatever.
Thought I had read that Climate Change was now run by the global climate change deniers. Makes sense that they would publish an article that is easy to denounce, even if it does support 'global warming'.
I have never been a fan of 'global warming' as a phrase since it is easy to make statements like 'last fall was the coolest since X' as an anecdotal evidence that it isn't real. The point is that there is more energy in the environment, which tends to increase the variability of the climate, bigger storms, hotter summers, colder winters, over multi-year scales.
You are such a fag... and by fag I mean a cigarette.
Languages and meaning are fluid.
My problem with SxS is that the winsxs is taking up 12GB on my 80GB SSD with no easy way to move it.
It takes about an hour of actual effort from paperback to the proofing stage (ie. reading the thing on your PDA to clean up the couple of dozen errors).
2 min 1) Use a paper cutter to cut the book up
2 min 2) Send it thru a duplex auto feed scanner (got mine for $300 on ebay...before that I used a single side ADF that took a little more effort (like 5 more minutes).
1 min 3) Assign a reading block to exclude the page numbers and page header and load it for all pages.
3 min 4) Quickly scan thru all pages to make sure the reading blocks look good (can do it in like 1-2 minutes for 300 page book rapidly paging down). Otherwise adjust.
0 min 5) Start the OCR process and wait til it is done.
30 min 6) Scan thru all of the pages looking for obvious OCR problems and the highlighted 'unsure' words.
5 min 7) Go thru and look for hyphenated words that need to have them removed.
1 min 8) Export to Word/HTML/Whatever you feel comfortable with.
15 min 9) Recreate the ToC, and run some specialized spellchecking (only looks for words that aren't used repeatedly to deal with proper nouns or uncommon subject matter), and run script to join page breaks.
Start reading and highlight any formatting errors for later correction.
I'm not saying it isn't tedious, but it isn't 'really tedious' with the proper tools. An hour spent before you spend 6-10 hours reading.
Except of course you could ask Google to withdraw your book at any time according to the settlement.
If you wanted to keep your book PRIVATE then you shouldn't have made it PUBLIC by PUBLIshing it.
Copyright is not intended prevent works from being published, it is intended to PROMOTE works being published.
This is the crux of the issue for me at least: I shouldn't need to become a topic expert to incorporate functionality into my code. Code is like a mash-up or whatever term you want to use for a lot of people, where you take libraries and functionality and string them together quickly and easily to create something new and possibly interesting.
I just want to make something fun and share it, not write my own regular expression parser or RTF2HTML converter.
I had a particular instance last year, where I was working on an Ebook reader application in C# for a WinMo phone. One of the things I wanted to do was have the app be able to open and read MS Reader format files (ones created without DRM), because there are a lot out there and it would be handy to have. ConvertLit is the only pratical solution for doing this currently. It is GPL. I was able to get it to work on WinMo, but I had to keep it as a separate EXE on the device and explode the LIT file to a temp folder, rather than do it in memory.
I absolutely plan on having my source be open. However, some other libraries I might want to use like an RTF2HTML conversion library in C# might be proprietary or not be compatible and there aren't really any other options in C# other than to go take some C rtf2html code and spend way more time and effort than I want to making that work just so I can be compatible with the GPL.
GPL does ensure that your code is free, but it may prevent a lot of source that would otherwise have been created and free from being released as well, because of its strictness. And yet, in the GPL ConvertLIT at least it uses Public Domain code for some CAB file manipulation.
Do you mean that the videos can't be embedded separately in an html document and manipulated that way?
Otherwise, I'm pretty sure you could do most, if not all, of this in Flash too. And most of the things you mentioned already exist in flash as well as far as filters, color manipulations, etc.
I'm not saying you are wrong, I just don't see what specifically about the link you gave can't be done in flash/flex?
Certainly, multiple videos, drag, resize, rotate, and independent volume control per video, right click context menu (though this is admitedly hacky), take a screenshot of the whole shebang and encode it in the browser into png/jpg/bmp and upload it to a server: all supported.
I've been using Flex more and more where possible, simply because it lets me focus on what I care about, the value that my code brings to things, NOT trying to make sure it works in X different browsers that each need to be tweaked, etc.
When using Adobe (or MS for the color of a flash, Silverlight), I have one vendor, with one vision, one set of design tools, one set of help files, where most of the examples I find on the web I can use immediately and get back to work.
With HTML5, I have:
HTML Committee (w3c, etc.)
Javascript committee
CSS Committee
1 of many javascript libraries, like Prototype, JQuery, etc.
Then you have:
Microsoft (IE)
Mozilla (FF)
Safari
Google
Opera, etc.
each with their own implementations of the 3 committees work, that are partial and flaky and require the above mentioned javascript frameworks to even begin to be useful since they incorporate some of those browser work arounds. But then everytime you look for an example on the web, you find something that uses the framework you aren't using, so you have to keep looking or rewrite code you really have no interest in as part of your business.
Until there is a unified framework that is actually Write Once, Run and look the same Anywhere as Flex (or Silverlight), there will be a place for them. MXML (and possibly XAML) are simply a huge relief to work with after dealing with the morass of HTML/JS/CSS dev.
I absolutely agree that the mobile market is a BIG issue that needs to be dealt with, with Flex-Flash/Silverlight though.
This is the 'prior art' post for my switched drive idea. The main issues I have with all of the 'raid' and 8 bay systems I see is that a) the drives are always on, sucking power, b) while raid is certainly safer, it is much more expensive currently than it is worth. Ideally you want to keep you costs below $1 per movie for storage, which the 1.5TB drives approach assuming an average of 7GB per movie. The 8 bay drives seem to cost at minimum $500 which is a lot of overhead.
I would rather see a simple box with slots for say 24 drives. These drives would then be wired to a switched sata controller ala a KVM. By switched I mean that pressing a physical radio style button, that drive would become the active drive, would power up and mount automatically. Ideally the system would allow 2 drives to be powered at the same time for ease of transferring between drives. Also ideally it would be possible to switch from one drive to another by signal from the computer in addition to the physical buttons.
If Apple was serious about making it a standard, then they wouldn't have trademarked 'FireWire' and made everyone else call it i1394 and Sony's iLink or whatever. And I know You Ess Bee isn't exactly catchy, it is catchier than i1394.
As someone who uses Flex extensively as a developer, I can say that it is just plain faster/easier to get a site up and running with an interesting design using Flash or Flex. In particular, I work on campaign based sites, that have a limited life span, unrealistic dates for launch, etc. And I work on sites that do things that Javascript can't do or doesn't do well: multi-file upload, bitmap manipulation (turn an image from color to b&w, distort it, use layers and blend modes to create interesting user interactions), fonts, webcam/microphone recording, write once with no tweaks required browser by browser. Plus with the super-tight integration of photoshop with Flash and soon with Flex, you can turn around a design in a day or two, whereas with Javascript/HTML/CSS/DOM/framework/SVG/etc. I might spend a day on a single page of functionality.
This isn't an 'I love Flash, you should always use it' post. This is an 'in the real world, many sites have limited timeframes both in deployment as well as in development' post, and Flex/Flash brings a lot to the table. Specifically, they bring the 'centralized authority of Adobe' controlling all aspects of the stack, as opposed to having a committee doing Javascript, a committee doing HTML5, a committee doing CSS 3, a comittee doing SVG, each browser having it's own DOM implementation, each site using a different flavor of jQuery, Django, Prototype, , on and on.
Using Flex/Flash in many cases is quite simply the most efficient, expedient thing to do, and as a programmer I am all about efficiency and expediency. There are trade offs, and there are concerns to be raised about the central authority, but at the end of the day, once you work on a Flex app because you have to for some reason as mentioned above, when you realize Javascript simply CAN'T do what you want it to do (hardware accelerated bitmap manipulation say or webcam) then you start down the path of 'why do I need two environments when I can use just the one?' It is seductive and productive.
Which of course still doesn't get around the fact that software patents suck either way.
There is no good reason for 'GoogleUpdate.exe' to
a) Run 24/7 on my computer, even when Chrome or whatever other google software exists is not running
b) NOT UNINSTALL WHEN I UNINSTALL CHROME. WTF? I have no other software from google on my machine, yet there is no way to uninstall this without resorting to deleting some files hidden in your \Users\\AppData\Local\Google\ folder (a hidden folder by default), and disabling it manually in Services and Tasks?
Don't get me wrong: Apple also just pulled this same extreme Asshattery with their 'MobileMe' install on Vista just for trying to put iTunes on it. And Bonjour? Bon fucking voyage. With the MobileMe thing on Vista, you would have to search the web to find out that it is actually 'Apple Mobile Device Services' in the Uninstall list. And it doesn't even work when you click 'Uninstall'. You specifically have to go into 'Change' and then click the 'Remove' button.
"If you can't see healthy dissent in a country to some extent--something is terribly wrong."
I don't want to disagree with this statement, but it does remind me of the 'media issues' we are having in the U.S. From the Fox News propaganda machine, to the 'elite media' doing their best to increase their ratings and readership without much thought of journalistic integrity: Healthy dissent can be hard to find, in a certain sense.
The whole Sarah Palin's daughter thing, Anne Nicole Smith's death orgy, Rush Limbaugh's histrionics...extremist, reactionary views and commentary are the norm. No one shows any respect or restraint, as the incentives are for the opposite. And the 'two' 'sides' make so much noise about their own issues that other issues that concern a large portion of the citizens go unaddressed and unreported.
So there is a clarification on the rules that are misquoted in the linked article: The gymnast must turn 16 at any time during the year of the Olympics. Therefore someone born on 12/31/1992 is legal to participate.
Beyond that:
While I agree rules should be followed, in general, I tried to find my outrage at the age issue and really came up short. Isn't the Olympics about 'the best in the world' versus 'the best in the world'? It isn't as if other gymnasts would have been able to suddenly do anything differently: they couldn't have somehow taken advantage of the rules if the age limit had been lifted...they still would have been the same age themselves. The only disparity I see is if the US Women's team had some 14yo phenom that wasn't allowed to compete because they followed the rules. Otherwise, I don't see how it short-changes the athletes that are there. Certainly, complaining you got beat by someone who is younger than you sounds pretty petty.
I understand that perhaps the rule is in place for the safety of the participants, in that those under 15-16 may have more fearlessness...it's not like they aren't already doing some pretty crazy stuff in gymnastics at 12-13 anyway, so I don't see how safety couldn't be waived in the interest of seeing the best competitors in the world compete.
There is some outrage at the scoring/judging bias that seems to be so prevalent, but I just can't get too worked up over the age issue.
If you can deal with some setup headaches, the HDHomerun (www.silicondust.com) is a good network device that takes both OTA HD channels and unencrypted QAM cable, digital and music channels. 2 Tuners so you can go one of each OTA/QAM or whatever. It streams the unpacked MPEG2 across the network using UDP to any computer. Works with Windows/Vista Media Center, Myth and others. The main issue during setup is dealing with channel mapping so that you get proper guide data. I don't know about the whole UHF/VHF thing someone else mentioned as I just deal with QAM.
That would pretty much turn the AH into a Buy Now on Ebay, as all prices would essentially be fixed at 10x the vendor price. This would lead to an underground AH that did not remove money from the game in the AH 'vig'/cut. 1000x the number of tells in chat and trade channels of people selling things, etc.
Potions and turnins and things have zero value or 1 copper in many cases and would destroy those markets or require vendors to pay a lot more for those items.
It would be much harder to get 6000 gold together to buy a mount without being able to have fun on the AH or to be able to borrow it from your guild members, and pay it back.
Not letting people mine/herb things that are grey to them would prevent someone from say learning how to be a miner AND a blacksmith without having to buy a ton of materials. Or, no more swift pots if your 375 herbalism can't pick the herbs.
THough you could always just drop the profession and relearn it to get around that...
Even with DRM, it is still possible, in the same way that you can still take a video of your DRM'd HDMI TV.
Specifically, at the very grossest level, you can point a webcam from another computer at your monitor, and have a device that transmits USB key board/mouse information to the other computer in response to what your webcam sees, like http://www.barcodeman.com/altek/mule/ . This is only one step removed from the most passive screen shot techniques.
Blixx makes it easier in that you can write addons that literally transmit data out of your application using color encoding and/or OCR for telling things like direction and location, as well as player status like 'poisoned', 'You must face target to attack' etc.
Even in quotes? lol, was just making fun of the zealots versus anti-zealot zealots arguments