Why can Microsoft simply support the new standards?
Because it's not that simple. You have to remember, they have a whole business model built around keeping a large customer base which they've been building for almost 20 years happy. There are companies out there that have built their entire infrastructure on MS products, namely IE, and for MS to "simply support the new standards" means breaking (lots) of old functionality. That translates into actual dollar amounts when it comes time to fix all the old web applications out there that rely on the borked functionality that $_IE_VERSION <= 7 provided. In other words, this is going to cost a lot of companies a lot of money. To make it even worse for MS once IE supports the standards it means that lots of corporate sites will render correctly in a variety of browsers, giving people even less reason to use IE. This is a lose/lose situation for MS.
Why can't MS fix them once and for all and be done with it?
The response you've given makes perfect sense from a consumer point of view. "WTF mate, how hard can it be!?" exclaims the user who doesn't have to pay for or worry about implementing the changes. Now, having said that I have zero pity for all those businesses who were duped into vendor lock-in and are going to be in a world of pain if they don't get their sites up to spec, and I have zero pity for MS. They have well and truly made their own bed and they can certainly sleep in it.
If they screwed up in the past, they should admit so and make up for their screwup.
They are. That's why IE is going to support the standards by default. I'm not sure what you're looking for here, although I suspect a good many people want a blood sacrifice and sworn oaths to never put web developers in this position again.
My point is that's why we're bashing Microsoft, not because we take perverse pleasure in saying rotten things about them.
Oh come on, of course we take perverse pleasure in saying rotten things about them;-)
I hate to break it to you chief but according to the laws which we as a society have established they are indeed adults. Not that I disagree with your sentiment, but since it's the law we're concerned about here (and I'm sure they are certainly concerned about it as well) then it's the law which will define their status as adults.
This was my first reaction as well. I guess I don't get the comparison of Miyamoto to Disney, I mean one guy made feature length animation films and the other made video games for crying out loud! If anyone deserves a comparison to Disney it's Miyazaki for his ability to visually tell a story.
Once you get over the novelty of the cultural difference most anime tends to be even less creative than your average sitcom.
I agree with this to an extent. There are definitely patterns that show up frequently in anime. Shy young man that ends up with a harem of hotties hanging all over him. One guy with "an unbreakable will" saves everyone against all odds. The current trend of "Shinigami" type anime. The patterns are easy to spot after you've seen them a few times, and they can get tiresome after a while. You can tell that anime producers definitely have their version of the golden equation for entertainment.
That being said, when you compare anime to American animation there really is a huge difference in creativity. There are a variety of genres, character archetypes, settings and themes that simply don't exist in American animation. Seriously, how many romantic comedies, horror shows, or cyber-thrillers have you seen in American animation? How many times has a villain in American animation turned out to be someone you could sympathize with? I think (and this is just speculation on my part as I've never been there) this is because animation there is viewed as a legitimate medium for storytelling. It seems as though American animation is restricted to children's shows (Disney, Warner Bros, Hanna Barbara) and fart jokes (I'm looking at you Cartoon Network!), with obvious exceptions (The Simpsons, Family Guy, and any of the DC cartoons all come to mind). It's difficult to see American animation producing anything as creative as what is currently being shown in Japan because of this "Oh it's animated so it must be for kids" mentality that so many people have here.
EXCEPT for the fact that they didn't bother to check for running processes first. Completely unaware of the fact that I was about to be laid off, I had kicked of an elaborate SQL script on the live server just before my boss called me into his office. They killed my account with this script still running-- oops. A friend of mine who was still at the company said that the resulting zombie crashed the main Oracle server, requiring a reboot, three days after I left.
Out of curiosity why was the process running under your account to begin with? I would think it would be good practice to have any kind of critical processes running on an account which is not connected to any particular individual for just such cases as yours.
Of course, I can't say too much regarding good practices at my workplace. I was looking through part of our code library and found an email routine (which is used in about 90% of our web applications) with a hard-coded user/password which belongs to an account the owner of which has been gone from the company for almost three years now. I can just imagine what would've happened if they had shut his account down immediately upon his departure.
Legislation is difficult to change once passed. Competing interests (or lack of interests) and simple inertia mean that whatever gets written into law stays there for a while.
Exactly! How can we expect progress when there are still statutes on the books such as this:
"The chief constable shall receive one pig every month and two comely lasses of virtue true."
Personally I would've just bought the janitor off with a couple of sodas and ditched the formal wear. If it was as deserted as you say then who would've been the wiser?
As for the save after every field entry, did SuperValu specialize in hiring sadists for their holiday candy operations?
This is a no-brainer around here (literally.) First, there are no tech companies in Ohio, so tech jobs are quite scarce.
What in the world and what part of Ohio are you talking about? I'm a software engineer in Columbus, OH and I'm posting this on my lunch break. There are plenty of tech jobs out there, you just have to know where to look. A few right off the top of my head:
Admittedly a lot of these aren't what you classify as "tech companies," but they still hire developers like crazy. I think the market is what you make of it, and a lot of getting a job is simply not giving up on the hunt.
As for a B.S. being B.S... I call BS. Most places around here won't give you the time of day unless you have a B.S. Certifications don't mean a thing (unless you have experience to back them up), and an Associate's means the hiring manager will at least glance at it for a fleeting few seconds before deciding to toss it back in the pile.
Is it possible they've fixed it already? I just sent a youtube link from one of my accounts to another, and it went through just fine. I was also able to receive a youtube link from my other account. Furthermore, TinyURL seems to work just fine as well, so even if youtube is being blocked it's not as if there aren't work arounds for it. I'm guessing some MS engineer borked their servers accidentally.
Sun thought that Java was going to be the Next Big Thing
And rightly so considering the last 13 or so years of development in the industry.
Java lost a lot of ground in the back-end space to Python, Ruby, and others
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that this remark is probably only true regarding FOSS projects. Looking at this statement from a commercial development point of view is another ballgame entirely.
Lets be honest, the industry as it currently stands runs on Java and.NET. This is not to say that OSS and the languages mentioned above are not gaining ground quickly, but I think its important to keep a historical perspective regarding the status of Java. Java really was/is the Next Big Thing, and it will almost certainly become the next COBOL in terms of the amount of code which will need to be maintained decades from now.
Ok, I realize that you're probably just trolling at this point, but what the hell.
Well, there's a lot one can say here, but it's important to remember that movies are (gasp) entertainment.
So basically what you're saying is that reading isn't entertainment?
I'm afraid the enlightened cosmopolitan movie watcher thing is rather laughable at times. It's a disease most prevalent in community college students and high school kids trying to shore up their self-esteem. The fact that a Blockbuster employee would stand behind a desk in one of those polyester polo shirts and be appalled at the plebeian tastes of patrons also hurts my head..or my funny bone, not sure which.
I don't really know where to start. First of all, believe it or not, yes there are people who actually care about the quality of the movies they're watching, and who are open to watching more than the latest gorefest. Secondly, as for you remark about my job at Blockbuster, it was just that, a job. Nothing about it defined me, just as nothing about my current job (as a software engineer) defines me. The fact that you decided to make it a point in your post says more about you than it does about me (especially so considering that you decided to post anonymously).
As someone who is genuinely multilingual and a trained linguist, I must also point out that for many of the world's languages, no, you wouldn't catch any significant nuances by hearing the original and reading the subtitles. European languages are easy; do you really think you'd be able to pick up subtle nuances in Turkish or Farsi that a good voice actor couldn't reproduce with proper direction. Are you even aware of how few universals there are with respect to suprasegmental features?
You're multilingual, good for you. I still call BS however. I speak/read/write Spanish and Japanese (though admittedly not fluently in either one), and I can say from personal experience that there is definitely a loss of nuance when dubbing is used. You're either very new to picking up languages, or you aren't nearly as good at them as you obviously think you are.
As for effectively reproducing these nuanced with properly directed voice actors, I agree that it's certainly possible, but it's also extremely rare. More often the studio is only interested in getting the filmed dubbed and out the door because foreign markets are typically after sales and the owners don't want to spend money on voice acting.
I can't help but think that the very act of watching foreign films demonstrates some openness to other cultures already. You think those vulgar masses fail to appreciate that a film is foreign because it's dubbed?
Sorry, but I disagree again. You wouldn't believe the number of people who pick up any random movie that has a cover that caught their eye only to find out after the fact that it was a foreign film. I'm not saying that this covers every case, but it still happens and probably more often than you think it does.
I don't understand the need to have everything dubbed. Several years back I used to work at Blockbuster, and whenever a foreign film came out I would consistently have customers complaining to me that the film wasn't in English, and how dare they be expected to have *gasp* read subtitles. Honestly, it's not that hard to read the text and watch the action at the same time!
Dubbing usually strips out any kind of emotional emphasis (or mutilates it at the very least), and you lose nuances in the language that would otherwise be apparent. I remember watching Pan's Labyrinth (El laberinto del fauno) and thinking how horribly it could've been butchered if it were dubbed in English. The director (Guillermo del Toro) specifically chose the actor for Pan because of his voice, so in essence watching it dubbed means you really are missing out on "the art."
Finally, I can't help but think that demanding that films be dubbed shows a lack of openess to other cultures. Not everything has to be in (Insert native language here). There is a wide world out there, and I think it would do everyone good to expand their horizons beyond their own backyard.
of reading entire novels online. I mean, lets be honest here, American Gods isn't exactly a slim book, that's a lot of text to scroll through, using a reader or not.
I know there are a lot of people out there that seem to prefer the format, but for me part of the enjoyment of reading is getting away from everything else, including the computer.
IANAL, but I'm fairly certain they would need to reveal their identities in order to do that, which would really the defeat the whole purpose. Besides, think of the hassle it would cause for them to have to come up with a new name with the same degree of awesome!
"We've [internally] tested several systems, and we're going to see if there's a way to identify pirated content on the network. That asks the question of what to do if we develop such as technology. The actual deployment raises a lot of questions, [such as the impact on] customer rights and government policy. We wouldn't proceed without answers to those questions."
Yes, because they were so concerned with privacy when they let the government monitor communications across their network without court authorization. The position they're coming from is that they see that Comcast may be in hot water with the way they've handled their network, and they also see the possibility of the hammer coming down on them if the telcos aren't granted immunity for allowing the government free access to all of their network traffic.
No one's running out there and all of a sudden identifying such traffic. We're not going to do that. We are partnering to identify.
What kind of doublespeak PR crap is this? Either you are trying to identify content, or you're not.
if they made innocuous little changes here and there, such as changing the words "do not support file-sharing" to "fully support file-sharing." It probably would've the RIAA much longer to realize they've been had, and I'm sure they would've gotten some interesting calls and e-mails:-D
I never said it was wrong, I just wasn't familiar with the term is all. I've always referred to them as "ground," "neutral," and "hot" myself. *shrugs* Learn something new every day.
They may be fine most of the time, but you still have the risk of possible infection or abrasion. They can avoid those problems entirely by using glasses or another form of media which doesn't directly touch your eyes. Don't get me wrong, this is a cool idea, but I'm not particularly hot about the idea of contact lenses (I don't wear/need glasses btw.), much less contact lenses that will hold an electrical charge.
I think this will be moot in the semi-near future anyway. With the work they're doing with direct neural interfaces, they may be able to display a HUD by "simply" stimulating the visual cortex in a certain way.
Notice how I'm not cool with contact lenses touching my eyes, yet I'm somehow excited about the possibility of hooking a computer directly into my own brain? God I'm such a nerd.
There is no problem using QoS, as long as their QoS strategy matches their marketing campaign. Thus far, most ISPs in the US advertise unlimited access at such a level of speed. If they advertise a certain level of quality then they should have the capacity to provide what they're promising. In other words, if they offered adequate capacity, they wouldn't need to worry about P2P traffic "hogging" the pipe, which by the way is just a biased way of saying "using the bandwidth they pay for." Limiting the user shouldn't even come into it when they're too damned cheap to upgrade their network. It's unfortunate for the cable companies that their entire business model is based off of deliberately advertising more than they can actually provide, but don't expect any sympathy from me as a consumer.
I suppose that if they change their QoS strategy and implement hard caps they'll have to change their marketing campaign too, but I can't see customers being happy about it unless it means a drastic reduction in pricing for those people who only use the internet to check their mail and get their horoscopes.
Or 3.) They could actually increase their capacity by investing in their infrastructure. They're going to have to do this sooner or later, and it may as well be sooner.
I can't see how bandwidth caps would be a good idea for the cable companies, especially when there are competitorsout there that don't need to worry about capping their customer's usage. I also want to know how this would play out if other cable companies followed suit, considering that they're promising much faster speeds. I would think that at 160Mbps you could hit your cap pretty quickly (depending of course on what the cap is set at, and your actual usage).
I'm a Time Warner customer, and as far as I'm concerned I'm paying for unlimited usage, and unlimited usage is what I should be getting.
Following the link you provided, it appears to be an opt-in. You have to install the Google Toolbar and give them permission to record your web history, as well as being logged in.
When you're 30 or so, there isn't much reason to make the license much tougher than it is now. But the younger you are, the harder it should be. How about mandatory defensive driving? Just an idea.
I think that if we were to make it more difficult to get a driver's license the younger someone is that it would create a barrier to being a contributing member of society. I live in Columbus, OH, and it's nearly impossible to get around without a vehicle. There is a bus system, but it doesn't run nearly regularly enough, or stop at enough locations to make it as efficient and effective as it should be. As for mandatory defensive driving, most driving tests already cover it as far as I know.
The marriage thing is another issue of mine. I see so many problems related to that, I think we should do something. I can't mandate you have to date for X years or something like that. But I think many people get married without realizing some of the problems that even a tiny bit of marriage counseling would bring up (like how big a deal your separate religions are, or how your step kid isn't going to mind you and you need to accept that) that I think this kind of stuff is important. The divorce part is because I see many people as being divorced because they don't know what else to do, or that it will get better if they keep struggling. These are here as a way of getting people to think about this decision much more than they might right now. The faith based part? I think that if someone is in their faith even a bit, then that will be more effective than secular counseling. You don't have to go faith based, I think it's just a good idea.
I agree that marriage counseling would probably help a lot of people, I just don't think that mandating it is the right way to go. I guess I'm also not the best person to voice an opinion on the matter, my wife and I dated for seven years before we finally got married, so we had plenty of time to get to know each other and to talk over the big issues.
There isn't a point of forcing them to continue to attend classes when they might spend all their time not doing work and causing problems for teachers and other students who are interested in learning. If the kid is that committed, let's give them another option. Maybe they'll try it, see how tough life is with a blue collar job, and decide maybe they should go back on the track to college to get a better job. Maybe they'll like it. Maybe they'll just be a problem there too. I want to do something to help people like this, this was my best idea.
I definitely agree that if the typical high school experience isn't working that they should have some options available to them. In my local school district (which I didn't go to) they have a couple of different tracks, including college prep and tech school. As for the kids that don't do anything but make trouble, well, there's always military school. A little discipline never hurt anyone.
Slashdot Mirror
I wouldn't call that a bad thing, I would call that job security.
Why can Microsoft simply support the new standards?
Because it's not that simple. You have to remember, they have a whole business model built around keeping a large customer base which they've been building for almost 20 years happy. There are companies out there that have built their entire infrastructure on MS products, namely IE, and for MS to "simply support the new standards" means breaking (lots) of old functionality. That translates into actual dollar amounts when it comes time to fix all the old web applications out there that rely on the borked functionality that $_IE_VERSION <= 7 provided. In other words, this is going to cost a lot of companies a lot of money. To make it even worse for MS once IE supports the standards it means that lots of corporate sites will render correctly in a variety of browsers, giving people even less reason to use IE. This is a lose/lose situation for MS.
Why can't MS fix them once and for all and be done with it?
The response you've given makes perfect sense from a consumer point of view. "WTF mate, how hard can it be!?" exclaims the user who doesn't have to pay for or worry about implementing the changes. Now, having said that I have zero pity for all those businesses who were duped into vendor lock-in and are going to be in a world of pain if they don't get their sites up to spec, and I have zero pity for MS. They have well and truly made their own bed and they can certainly sleep in it.
If they screwed up in the past, they should admit so and make up for their screwup.
They are. That's why IE is going to support the standards by default. I'm not sure what you're looking for here, although I suspect a good many people want a blood sacrifice and sworn oaths to never put web developers in this position again.
My point is that's why we're bashing Microsoft, not because we take perverse pleasure in saying rotten things about them.
Oh come on, of course we take perverse pleasure in saying rotten things about them ;-)
I hate to break it to you chief but according to the laws which we as a society have established they are indeed adults. Not that I disagree with your sentiment, but since it's the law we're concerned about here (and I'm sure they are certainly concerned about it as well) then it's the law which will define their status as adults.
This was my first reaction as well. I guess I don't get the comparison of Miyamoto to Disney, I mean one guy made feature length animation films and the other made video games for crying out loud! If anyone deserves a comparison to Disney it's Miyazaki for his ability to visually tell a story.
Once you get over the novelty of the cultural difference most anime tends to be even less creative than your average sitcom.
I agree with this to an extent. There are definitely patterns that show up frequently in anime. Shy young man that ends up with a harem of hotties hanging all over him. One guy with "an unbreakable will" saves everyone against all odds. The current trend of "Shinigami" type anime. The patterns are easy to spot after you've seen them a few times, and they can get tiresome after a while. You can tell that anime producers definitely have their version of the golden equation for entertainment.
That being said, when you compare anime to American animation there really is a huge difference in creativity. There are a variety of genres, character archetypes, settings and themes that simply don't exist in American animation. Seriously, how many romantic comedies, horror shows, or cyber-thrillers have you seen in American animation? How many times has a villain in American animation turned out to be someone you could sympathize with? I think (and this is just speculation on my part as I've never been there) this is because animation there is viewed as a legitimate medium for storytelling. It seems as though American animation is restricted to children's shows (Disney, Warner Bros, Hanna Barbara) and fart jokes (I'm looking at you Cartoon Network!), with obvious exceptions (The Simpsons, Family Guy, and any of the DC cartoons all come to mind). It's difficult to see American animation producing anything as creative as what is currently being shown in Japan because of this "Oh it's animated so it must be for kids" mentality that so many people have here.
EXCEPT for the fact that they didn't bother to check for running processes first. Completely unaware of the fact that I was about to be laid off, I had kicked of an elaborate SQL script on the live server just before my boss called me into his office. They killed my account with this script still running-- oops. A friend of mine who was still at the company said that the resulting zombie crashed the main Oracle server, requiring a reboot, three days after I left.
Out of curiosity why was the process running under your account to begin with? I would think it would be good practice to have any kind of critical processes running on an account which is not connected to any particular individual for just such cases as yours.
Of course, I can't say too much regarding good practices at my workplace. I was looking through part of our code library and found an email routine (which is used in about 90% of our web applications) with a hard-coded user/password which belongs to an account the owner of which has been gone from the company for almost three years now. I can just imagine what would've happened if they had shut his account down immediately upon his departure.
Legislation is difficult to change once passed. Competing interests (or lack of interests) and simple inertia mean that whatever gets written into law stays there for a while.
Exactly! How can we expect progress when there are still statutes on the books such as this:
Personally I would've just bought the janitor off with a couple of sodas and ditched the formal wear. If it was as deserted as you say then who would've been the wiser?
As for the save after every field entry, did SuperValu specialize in hiring sadists for their holiday candy operations?
This is a no-brainer around here (literally.) First, there are no tech companies in Ohio, so tech jobs are quite scarce.
What in the world and what part of Ohio are you talking about? I'm a software engineer in Columbus, OH and I'm posting this on my lunch break. There are plenty of tech jobs out there, you just have to know where to look. A few right off the top of my head:
Admittedly a lot of these aren't what you classify as "tech companies," but they still hire developers like crazy. I think the market is what you make of it, and a lot of getting a job is simply not giving up on the hunt.
As for a B.S. being B.S... I call BS. Most places around here won't give you the time of day unless you have a B.S. Certifications don't mean a thing (unless you have experience to back them up), and an Associate's means the hiring manager will at least glance at it for a fleeting few seconds before deciding to toss it back in the pile.
Is it possible they've fixed it already? I just sent a youtube link from one of my accounts to another, and it went through just fine. I was also able to receive a youtube link from my other account. Furthermore, TinyURL seems to work just fine as well, so even if youtube is being blocked it's not as if there aren't work arounds for it. I'm guessing some MS engineer borked their servers accidentally.
Sun thought that Java was going to be the Next Big Thing
And rightly so considering the last 13 or so years of development in the industry.
Java lost a lot of ground in the back-end space to Python, Ruby, and others
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that this remark is probably only true regarding FOSS projects. Looking at this statement from a commercial development point of view is another ballgame entirely.
Job search hits from Dice.com
Lets be honest, the industry as it currently stands runs on Java and .NET. This is not to say that OSS and the languages mentioned above are not gaining ground quickly, but I think its important to keep a historical perspective regarding the status of Java. Java really was/is the Next Big Thing, and it will almost certainly become the next COBOL in terms of the amount of code which will need to be maintained decades from now.
Ok, I realize that you're probably just trolling at this point, but what the hell.
Well, there's a lot one can say here, but it's important to remember that movies are (gasp) entertainment.
So basically what you're saying is that reading isn't entertainment?
I'm afraid the enlightened cosmopolitan movie watcher thing is rather laughable at times. It's a disease most prevalent in community college students and high school kids trying to shore up their self-esteem. The fact that a Blockbuster employee would stand behind a desk in one of those polyester polo shirts and be appalled at the plebeian tastes of patrons also hurts my head..or my funny bone, not sure which.
I don't really know where to start. First of all, believe it or not, yes there are people who actually care about the quality of the movies they're watching, and who are open to watching more than the latest gorefest. Secondly, as for you remark about my job at Blockbuster, it was just that, a job. Nothing about it defined me, just as nothing about my current job (as a software engineer) defines me. The fact that you decided to make it a point in your post says more about you than it does about me (especially so considering that you decided to post anonymously).
As someone who is genuinely multilingual and a trained linguist, I must also point out that for many of the world's languages, no, you wouldn't catch any significant nuances by hearing the original and reading the subtitles. European languages are easy; do you really think you'd be able to pick up subtle nuances in Turkish or Farsi that a good voice actor couldn't reproduce with proper direction. Are you even aware of how few universals there are with respect to suprasegmental features?
You're multilingual, good for you. I still call BS however. I speak/read/write Spanish and Japanese (though admittedly not fluently in either one), and I can say from personal experience that there is definitely a loss of nuance when dubbing is used. You're either very new to picking up languages, or you aren't nearly as good at them as you obviously think you are.
As for effectively reproducing these nuanced with properly directed voice actors, I agree that it's certainly possible, but it's also extremely rare. More often the studio is only interested in getting the filmed dubbed and out the door because foreign markets are typically after sales and the owners don't want to spend money on voice acting.
I can't help but think that the very act of watching foreign films demonstrates some openness to other cultures already. You think those vulgar masses fail to appreciate that a film is foreign because it's dubbed?
Sorry, but I disagree again. You wouldn't believe the number of people who pick up any random movie that has a cover that caught their eye only to find out after the fact that it was a foreign film. I'm not saying that this covers every case, but it still happens and probably more often than you think it does.
I don't understand the need to have everything dubbed. Several years back I used to work at Blockbuster, and whenever a foreign film came out I would consistently have customers complaining to me that the film wasn't in English, and how dare they be expected to have *gasp* read subtitles. Honestly, it's not that hard to read the text and watch the action at the same time!
Dubbing usually strips out any kind of emotional emphasis (or mutilates it at the very least), and you lose nuances in the language that would otherwise be apparent. I remember watching Pan's Labyrinth (El laberinto del fauno) and thinking how horribly it could've been butchered if it were dubbed in English. The director (Guillermo del Toro) specifically chose the actor for Pan because of his voice, so in essence watching it dubbed means you really are missing out on "the art."
Finally, I can't help but think that demanding that films be dubbed shows a lack of openess to other cultures. Not everything has to be in (Insert native language here). There is a wide world out there, and I think it would do everyone good to expand their horizons beyond their own backyard.
of reading entire novels online. I mean, lets be honest here, American Gods isn't exactly a slim book, that's a lot of text to scroll through, using a reader or not.
I know there are a lot of people out there that seem to prefer the format, but for me part of the enjoyment of reading is getting away from everything else, including the computer.
IANAL, but I'm fairly certain they would need to reveal their identities in order to do that, which would really the defeat the whole purpose. Besides, think of the hassle it would cause for them to have to come up with a new name with the same degree of awesome!
Yes, because they were so concerned with privacy when they let the government monitor communications across their network without court authorization. The position they're coming from is that they see that Comcast may be in hot water with the way they've handled their network, and they also see the possibility of the hammer coming down on them if the telcos aren't granted immunity for allowing the government free access to all of their network traffic.
What kind of doublespeak PR crap is this? Either you are trying to identify content, or you're not.
if they made innocuous little changes here and there, such as changing the words "do not support file-sharing" to "fully support file-sharing." It probably would've the RIAA much longer to realize they've been had, and I'm sure they would've gotten some interesting calls and e-mails :-D
I never said it was wrong, I just wasn't familiar with the term is all. I've always referred to them as "ground," "neutral," and "hot" myself. *shrugs* Learn something new every day.
I'm guessing they probably mean grounded. I've never heard of that term, maybe I'm out of the new slang loop?
They may be fine most of the time, but you still have the risk of possible infection or abrasion. They can avoid those problems entirely by using glasses or another form of media which doesn't directly touch your eyes. Don't get me wrong, this is a cool idea, but I'm not particularly hot about the idea of contact lenses (I don't wear/need glasses btw.), much less contact lenses that will hold an electrical charge.
I think this will be moot in the semi-near future anyway. With the work they're doing with direct neural interfaces, they may be able to display a HUD by "simply" stimulating the visual cortex in a certain way.
Notice how I'm not cool with contact lenses touching my eyes, yet I'm somehow excited about the possibility of hooking a computer directly into my own brain? God I'm such a nerd.
There is no problem using QoS, as long as their QoS strategy matches their marketing campaign. Thus far, most ISPs in the US advertise unlimited access at such a level of speed. If they advertise a certain level of quality then they should have the capacity to provide what they're promising. In other words, if they offered adequate capacity, they wouldn't need to worry about P2P traffic "hogging" the pipe, which by the way is just a biased way of saying "using the bandwidth they pay for." Limiting the user shouldn't even come into it when they're too damned cheap to upgrade their network. It's unfortunate for the cable companies that their entire business model is based off of deliberately advertising more than they can actually provide, but don't expect any sympathy from me as a consumer.
I suppose that if they change their QoS strategy and implement hard caps they'll have to change their marketing campaign too, but I can't see customers being happy about it unless it means a drastic reduction in pricing for those people who only use the internet to check their mail and get their horoscopes.
Or 3.) They could actually increase their capacity by investing in their infrastructure. They're going to have to do this sooner or later, and it may as well be sooner.
I can't see how bandwidth caps would be a good idea for the cable companies, especially when there are competitors out there that don't need to worry about capping their customer's usage. I also want to know how this would play out if other cable companies followed suit, considering that they're promising much faster speeds. I would think that at 160Mbps you could hit your cap pretty quickly (depending of course on what the cap is set at, and your actual usage).
I'm a Time Warner customer, and as far as I'm concerned I'm paying for unlimited usage, and unlimited usage is what I should be getting.
Following the link you provided, it appears to be an opt-in. You have to install the Google Toolbar and give them permission to record your web history, as well as being logged in.
I think that if we were to make it more difficult to get a driver's license the younger someone is that it would create a barrier to being a contributing member of society. I live in Columbus, OH, and it's nearly impossible to get around without a vehicle. There is a bus system, but it doesn't run nearly regularly enough, or stop at enough locations to make it as efficient and effective as it should be. As for mandatory defensive driving, most driving tests already cover it as far as I know.
I agree that marriage counseling would probably help a lot of people, I just don't think that mandating it is the right way to go. I guess I'm also not the best person to voice an opinion on the matter, my wife and I dated for seven years before we finally got married, so we had plenty of time to get to know each other and to talk over the big issues.
I definitely agree that if the typical high school experience isn't working that they should have some options available to them. In my local school district (which I didn't go to) they have a couple of different tracks, including college prep and tech school. As for the kids that don't do anything but make trouble, well, there's always military school. A little discipline never hurt anyone.