Aargh. I misspoke as well. I should have said "Apple's 30" display was the first wide-selling monitor that I know of that used a dual-link dvi connection."
Dual-link DVI is a single cable, true, but I have seen monitors in the past that used two single-link hookups. Apple's 30" display was the first wide-selling monitor that I know of that used a dual-dvi connection.
It also really didn't help that various video card manufacturers didn't know the difference between dual-link DVI and dual-DVI (I had to return one nvidia card from MSI once because the phrase "dual-link dvi" was printed on the box, and I was told by a representative that it was dual-link dvi, even though the card had two single-link DVI ports).
You might be. I predict that very soon you will see shirts printed with that number as a protest for criminalizing it. Some forward-thinking entrepreneurs may already have these out...
Blow it out your ass. Just because someone is in charge, in this case a teacher in charge of the classroom, doesn't mean that the school is fascist.
Maybe not in itself, but I would say schools are some of the most fascist organizations in our society. The rigid 'authority for authority's sake' environment was far harsher in my school than in any business I've been to in the years since graduating, and I don't believe it prepared us for how society would function 'in the real world.' That's just something we ended up picking up on our own.
Pipping finds the Palantir in a freaking stream?? WTF was that? Certainly much less exciting than steaking it from Gandalf as he slept.
Did we watch the same movie? Here's how it went:
*) In the book, Pippin picks up the Palantir from the waters of Isengard after Wormtongue throws it at Gandalf (or Saruman, it's hinted that he couldn't decide which wizard to chuck it at). In the movie, Saruman drops it when he is shot. In both cases it's picked up by Pippin after it falls into the water and is quickly confiscated by Gandalf.
*) In the book, Pippin steals the palantir while Gandalf is sleeping and puts a stone in its place. In the movie, Pippin steals the palantir and puts a round jug in its place.
You could make a strong case for why a few changes in the movie were unnecessary, but the palantir example isn't one of them.
Imagine if embedded video were handled the way embedded images are, where the user agent developer could add features, remove annoyances, hand it off to the OS' data type, whatever. Oh, and imagine if user agent developers could fix security holes, instead of having to wait for Adobe. Flash must die, and multimedia standards for web-embedded content would be a great bag of nails for the accursed coffin.
Wait, giving the user the control over playback and possibly even storage? Letting the user define his own interface doesn't sound like something the media companies would be interested in supporting. I mean.. what if the user could easily skip embedded commercials when the video specifies an unskippable section? What if the user wanted to play a video that is region-locked? Maybe the user even might be able to get away with skipping those FBI warnings? These are "travesties" that the average user might want, but media companies have worked very hard to ban in the DVD world.
sorry, but looks to me that you dont even preach it !
and allow me to say it again... with "preachers" like u, FOSS does not need enemies.
Not everyone who believes in FOSS advocates specific FOSS projects in every circumstance. If I thought MPEG was far better than Theora, then I wouldn't argue for Theora, regardless of its FOSS status. "FOSS always, right or wrong" helps FOSS projects stagnate.
But Sony is a multinational corporation that is no longer strictly a Japanese enterprise. Sony USA is an American division of Sony, based in the United States, and which sometimes clashes with it's Japanese parent. In this day and age, with corporations this large and spread out, I don't know that you could classify such an entity as belonging to any one country anymore.
Mod parent up! My earliest memory from Grade 1 was being given my Dick & Jane type reader, which I (having an older sister and a librarian mother, I learned to read at 4) read through in about 2 minutes. (IIRC, the book contained less than 60 words.) When the teacher asked me about the boy on the first page, I eagerly ratted out the contents of the entire book. To my surprise, I wasn't praised for my ability; I was hauled out of my chair in front of the class, and was spanked. It didn't take me long to realize that public schools aren't at all interested in you achieving your potential, and very much interested in ensuring you don't rock the boat in any way, shape, or form.
Sad thing is, this is exactly the sort of thing I encountered in my Montessori school. They were very much about having the children provide their own direction (as long as the advanced kids weren't "too" advanced) which resulted in each child having huge gaps in his or her education.
However, in Canada, there is no federal Dept. of Education that looks after public schools. This is purely a provincial (US friends, read "state") responsibility, and even there, while the province usually sets overall standards, individual regional school boards are given the actual responsibility to set up their own implementations. To track how well they were doing, about a decade ago, the right-wing gov't of Mike Harris set up standardized tests (quite rightly, IMHO) for students in grades 3 and 6 in reading and math, so that parents could see how their school in particular, and their board in general, were doing compared to other schools and boards. The results have been quite remarkable; not only has there been a general improvement in scores over the last ten years, parental involvement has escalated. When a school shows up in the bottom 10%, the principal is sure to be besieged by angry calls asking "what's being done?".
Here in the states, the teachers (or at least the large teachers' unions) are very adamantly opposed to such a thing. What has depressed me is that in my state (California) the big unions are strongly opposed to any type of accountability. No standardized testing. No evaluation of teachers or school districts by any standard measurements. In the last major election, you should have heard the howling of outrage over the suggestion of the proposal of the governor's that merit pay be introduced. Paying someone based off of how well they teach and how good of a job they do? Fancy that! It's how every other sector of the economy operates, and you'll find it a notion based on the pay scale of every non-education job, but such an idea was anathema for teachers. And then they complain about how so much of the talent leaves the public schools and heads for the private sector instead. I have despaired that the state of education here will improve, as there is so much negativity in a war that is waged between the private sector and the government workers, the latter who feel the methods and ideals of the former are just plain evil and ought to be opposed at all costs.
Pity we don't have a Supreme Court with a backbone.
The Supreme Court can't really rule against it. Congress is within its constitutional rights to set the length of copyright as long as that length is not infinity.
What we would need is a constitutional amendment to limit Congress's copyright power, but even supporters of that idea don't want to bring that up -- given the stranglehold that the major owners of copywritten content have over communication outlets in this country, it's likely what we'd see in an amendment would have the pendulum swinging in the "worse" direction instead of the better one.
You could say that we need to elect congresspeople who have more respect for consumer rights in the copyright battle and that would be true. However, people vote for candidates based on their positions on a wide range of issues, and for most voters, copyright concerns rank very far down on the list. It really is pretty unimportant when compared to, say, health care, Iraq, terrorism, schools, and so forth. Which is why I'd favor a constitutional change, since you'd be voting on an issue than on a person who has a wide range of stances on various issues that you need to consider.
I don't buy the bullshit that nobody knew about it or they "rushed the stage". It's four or five guys in giant red chicken suits. How do you not see them from 800 feet away?!
It's the VGAs. Five guys in chicken suits isn't that unusual. You said yourself you assumed they were part of an entourage!
What do Radio Shack even sell these days? If you asked me, I couldn't tell you.
Hey, even Radio Shack's CEO can't figure out how they stay in business. Favorite quotes: "You wouldn't think that people still buy enough strobe lights and extension cords to support an entire nationwide chain, but I guess they must, or I wouldn't have this desk to sit behind all day."
"I know one thing," Day continued. "If Sony and JVC start including gold-tipped cable cords with their products, we're screwed."
You can contact the direct mail association and get on their opt-out list.
Unless they decide to ignore you and continue sending mail (which they generally do). I tried getting on their opt-out list. They even required me to pay a fee to do so. Did the volume of mail I receive go down at all? Not one bit.
Do I do this? No. I have a compost heap in the flowerbed under my mailbox, with crap from the indianapolis star and advco. My real mail goes to my post office box.
Oh, if only it was so easy for me! But every direct mail piece of junk I get contains some non-compostable, non-recyclable piece of plastic that I have to cut out or just throw away.
My favorite Fry's story: About a year ago I bought a mid-range Soundblaster card. It was a pretty good model, supported digital out and a few other things I wanted to do with it. I failed to notice the "previously returned" sticker on it. When I got home I opened up the package and... there was a much smaller card. It wasn't even a Creative brand card. I don't know if someone had pulled a fast one on Fry's and said the card didn't work, keeping the card and slipping in a different one in its place, but I ended up with the totally wrong card, getting a cheapo generic brand with few features. Brought it back to Fry's, got an exchange for a new, unopened box, and hoped that the other card wasn't just getting repackaged and reshelved.
I think it's because most customers do not demand excellent service. It's something they want when things go wrong, but the rise of Wall-Mart shows what most customers really want -- everything in one place, and above all, low prices. They go where prices are lowest, and if the service is bad, well.. that's part of the "cost" of low prices, right?
To make matters worse, about a year or so ago they remodeled to add a Home Theatre area. Oh yeah, like I want to go to a store with "Comp" in its name to look for consumer electronics.
Yeah, they did that because the crazy CompUSA owner decided to buy the Good Guys, what I considered to be a pretty good A/V-home theater chain, and merge them in together for no reason. So you had this token Good Guys section in your CompUSA store. Great. And now both CompUSA and the Good Guys are gone!
This is only true if the people chosen for the Neilson ratings as well as the people who honestly participate in them are a totally random sampling of the TV watching population.
Listen to the radio much lately? Or watch TV? Go to the movies? Most of what's being produced as a result of this "economic incentive" you speak of is total absolute crap.
Then why do you want to watch it? I dislike our copyright laws, but many people on my side are also under the delusion that somehow the quality of popular art will somehow improve if there was no copyright.
Some Guy Who Doesn't Want To Take Out A 2nd Mortgage To Go See A FSCKING Movie
The work is FUCK, as in "fucker," "fucking," and "fuck-o-rama." Calling it fsck just looks stupid, even to nerds who get the reference. Everyone knows what you mean, changing the u to an s doesn't magically make it not profanity.
Yes, it's definitely a good soundtrack. For some reason I hear a lot of the musical queues from that game in South Park episodes now, of all places.
If you liked HOMM 2's soundtrack, then I heartily recommend another Redbook game from the same era: Fantasy General (from the designers who made the popular Panzer General).
I would have to totally agree on your assessments, especially with the underrated FF VIII. The game itself got annoying and isn't regarded as fondly as many other FFs, so I think its soundtrack (which I felt was a big improvement over FF VII's) gets too easily forgotten.
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Aargh. I misspoke as well. I should have said "Apple's 30" display was the first wide-selling monitor that I know of that used a dual-link dvi connection."
It also really didn't help that various video card manufacturers didn't know the difference between dual-link DVI and dual-DVI (I had to return one nvidia card from MSI once because the phrase "dual-link dvi" was printed on the box, and I was told by a representative that it was dual-link dvi, even though the card had two single-link DVI ports).
You might be. I predict that very soon you will see shirts printed with that number as a protest for criminalizing it. Some forward-thinking entrepreneurs may already have these out...
The moderation system was not put into place for people to vote their opinions.
That I don't know about, but I can actually see it happening, yes, even in Middle Earth. Somewhat of a tradition in New Zealand.
Maybe not in itself, but I would say schools are some of the most fascist organizations in our society. The rigid 'authority for authority's sake' environment was far harsher in my school than in any business I've been to in the years since graduating, and I don't believe it prepared us for how society would function 'in the real world.' That's just something we ended up picking up on our own.
Wait, I thought the Wii was the fashion console of the moment.
I honestly don't see the problem here.
Pipping finds the Palantir in a freaking stream?? WTF was that? Certainly much less exciting than steaking it from Gandalf as he slept.
Did we watch the same movie? Here's how it went:
*) In the book, Pippin picks up the Palantir from the waters of Isengard after Wormtongue throws it at Gandalf (or Saruman, it's hinted that he couldn't decide which wizard to chuck it at). In the movie, Saruman drops it when he is shot. In both cases it's picked up by Pippin after it falls into the water and is quickly confiscated by Gandalf.
*) In the book, Pippin steals the palantir while Gandalf is sleeping and puts a stone in its place. In the movie, Pippin steals the palantir and puts a round jug in its place.
You could make a strong case for why a few changes in the movie were unnecessary, but the palantir example isn't one of them.
Wait, giving the user the control over playback and possibly even storage? Letting the user define his own interface doesn't sound like something the media companies would be interested in supporting. I mean.. what if the user could easily skip embedded commercials when the video specifies an unskippable section? What if the user wanted to play a video that is region-locked? Maybe the user even might be able to get away with skipping those FBI warnings? These are "travesties" that the average user might want, but media companies have worked very hard to ban in the DVD world.
Not everyone who believes in FOSS advocates specific FOSS projects in every circumstance. If I thought MPEG was far better than Theora, then I wouldn't argue for Theora, regardless of its FOSS status. "FOSS always, right or wrong" helps FOSS projects stagnate.
But Sony is a multinational corporation that is no longer strictly a Japanese enterprise. Sony USA is an American division of Sony, based in the United States, and which sometimes clashes with it's Japanese parent. In this day and age, with corporations this large and spread out, I don't know that you could classify such an entity as belonging to any one country anymore.
Sad thing is, this is exactly the sort of thing I encountered in my Montessori school. They were very much about having the children provide their own direction (as long as the advanced kids weren't "too" advanced) which resulted in each child having huge gaps in his or her education.
However, in Canada, there is no federal Dept. of Education that looks after public schools. This is purely a provincial (US friends, read "state") responsibility, and even there, while the province usually sets overall standards, individual regional school boards are given the actual responsibility to set up their own implementations. To track how well they were doing, about a decade ago, the right-wing gov't of Mike Harris set up standardized tests (quite rightly, IMHO) for students in grades 3 and 6 in reading and math, so that parents could see how their school in particular, and their board in general, were doing compared to other schools and boards. The results have been quite remarkable; not only has there been a general improvement in scores over the last ten years, parental involvement has escalated. When a school shows up in the bottom 10%, the principal is sure to be besieged by angry calls asking "what's being done?".
Here in the states, the teachers (or at least the large teachers' unions) are very adamantly opposed to such a thing. What has depressed me is that in my state (California) the big unions are strongly opposed to any type of accountability. No standardized testing. No evaluation of teachers or school districts by any standard measurements. In the last major election, you should have heard the howling of outrage over the suggestion of the proposal of the governor's that merit pay be introduced. Paying someone based off of how well they teach and how good of a job they do? Fancy that! It's how every other sector of the economy operates, and you'll find it a notion based on the pay scale of every non-education job, but such an idea was anathema for teachers. And then they complain about how so much of the talent leaves the public schools and heads for the private sector instead. I have despaired that the state of education here will improve, as there is so much negativity in a war that is waged between the private sector and the government workers, the latter who feel the methods and ideals of the former are just plain evil and ought to be opposed at all costs.
The Supreme Court can't really rule against it. Congress is within its constitutional rights to set the length of copyright as long as that length is not infinity.
What we would need is a constitutional amendment to limit Congress's copyright power, but even supporters of that idea don't want to bring that up -- given the stranglehold that the major owners of copywritten content have over communication outlets in this country, it's likely what we'd see in an amendment would have the pendulum swinging in the "worse" direction instead of the better one.
You could say that we need to elect congresspeople who have more respect for consumer rights in the copyright battle and that would be true. However, people vote for candidates based on their positions on a wide range of issues, and for most voters, copyright concerns rank very far down on the list. It really is pretty unimportant when compared to, say, health care, Iraq, terrorism, schools, and so forth. Which is why I'd favor a constitutional change, since you'd be voting on an issue than on a person who has a wide range of stances on various issues that you need to consider.
It's the VGAs. Five guys in chicken suits isn't that unusual. You said yourself you assumed they were part of an entourage!
Hey, even Radio Shack's CEO can't figure out how they stay in business. Favorite quotes: "You wouldn't think that people still buy enough strobe lights and extension cords to support an entire nationwide chain, but I guess they must, or I wouldn't have this desk to sit behind all day."
"I know one thing," Day continued. "If Sony and JVC start including gold-tipped cable cords with their products, we're screwed."
Unless they decide to ignore you and continue sending mail (which they generally do). I tried getting on their opt-out list. They even required me to pay a fee to do so. Did the volume of mail I receive go down at all? Not one bit.
Do I do this? No. I have a compost heap in the flowerbed under my mailbox, with crap from the indianapolis star and advco. My real mail goes to my post office box.
Oh, if only it was so easy for me! But every direct mail piece of junk I get contains some non-compostable, non-recyclable piece of plastic that I have to cut out or just throw away.
Actually, until the last few paragraphs, that wasn't too bad. Short and too the point, mostly devoid of meaningless buzzwords.
My favorite Fry's story: About a year ago I bought a mid-range Soundblaster card. It was a pretty good model, supported digital out and a few other things I wanted to do with it. I failed to notice the "previously returned" sticker on it. When I got home I opened up the package and... there was a much smaller card. It wasn't even a Creative brand card. I don't know if someone had pulled a fast one on Fry's and said the card didn't work, keeping the card and slipping in a different one in its place, but I ended up with the totally wrong card, getting a cheapo generic brand with few features. Brought it back to Fry's, got an exchange for a new, unopened box, and hoped that the other card wasn't just getting repackaged and reshelved.
I think it's because most customers do not demand excellent service. It's something they want when things go wrong, but the rise of Wall-Mart shows what most customers really want -- everything in one place, and above all, low prices. They go where prices are lowest, and if the service is bad, well.. that's part of the "cost" of low prices, right?
Yeah, they did that because the crazy CompUSA owner decided to buy the Good Guys, what I considered to be a pretty good A/V-home theater chain, and merge them in together for no reason. So you had this token Good Guys section in your CompUSA store. Great. And now both CompUSA and the Good Guys are gone!
Only +4? For shame! I wish I could mod this post up to a thousand for wonderfully enlightening link. Kudos.
This is only true if the people chosen for the Neilson ratings as well as the people who honestly participate in them are a totally random sampling of the TV watching population.
Then why do you want to watch it? I dislike our copyright laws, but many people on my side are also under the delusion that somehow the quality of popular art will somehow improve if there was no copyright.
Some Guy Who Doesn't Want To Take Out A 2nd Mortgage To Go See A FSCKING Movie
The work is FUCK, as in "fucker," "fucking," and "fuck-o-rama." Calling it fsck just looks stupid, even to nerds who get the reference. Everyone knows what you mean, changing the u to an s doesn't magically make it not profanity.
Yes, it's definitely a good soundtrack. For some reason I hear a lot of the musical queues from that game in South Park episodes now, of all places.
If you liked HOMM 2's soundtrack, then I heartily recommend another Redbook game from the same era: Fantasy General (from the designers who made the popular Panzer General).
I would have to totally agree on your assessments, especially with the underrated FF VIII. The game itself got annoying and isn't regarded as fondly as many other FFs, so I think its soundtrack (which I felt was a big improvement over FF VII's) gets too easily forgotten.