Ditto ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN. When you hear someone like Katie Couric say something like, "Colon exams should be free," she is presenting an opinion as fact. All of these TV outlets do it.
"Concentrate more on promoting (adding points) rather than on demoting (subtracting points). The real goal here is to find the juicy good stuff and let others read it. Do not promote personal agendas. Do not let your opinions factor in. Try to be impartial about this.
"Simply disagreeing with a comment is not a valid reason to mark it down. Likewise, agreeing with a comment is not a valid reason to mark it up. The goal here is to share ideas. To sift through the haystack and find needles. And to keep the children who like to spam Slashdot in check."
Beck, O'reilly and Hannity have said multiple times that they are biased conservatives or libertarians.
That you did not know that indicates you know nothing about FOX because you apparently don't watch it. How do you judge something as "junk" if you don't watch it? Hmmm. Must be magic.
Limbaugh's bad info: "Net neutrality means google will equally display Republican and Democrat pages. Like a Fairness Doctrine for the net."
This is why I stopped listening to Limbaugh. He spreads false information. Like when he said a hybrid can only go 80 miles/hour maximum. He's almost as bad as Rachel Maddow.
Net neutrality is NOT about creating a fairness doctrine for the net - it's about ensuring Comcast, Verizon, and other local monopolies don't block access to sites they don't like (such as limbaugh.com)
>>>While there are definite benefits to the XP system, it's a very large departure from the stable and useful 2000 system.
Time to upgrade. While the new "7" system will not run on 128K RAM like XP could, it should fit comfortably inside a 256K computer and still let you run Internet Explorer or Firefox or Opera. Even my ancient AMD Athlon (P3-equivalent) laptop can run it.
Gaming was different on those ancient Atari and Commodore computers. You had to read through a 200-page manual to first learn how to hook up everything, and then type in the commands to start the game.
Okay I exaggerate a little, but the fact is that the primitiveness of those computers is what led me to investigate how they worked, and on the path towards a technology degree. Otherwise I'd probably have ended-up a business major like my Macintosh-owning friend. (The Original Mac hid everything behind a GUI and discouraged exploration. No CLI.)
And yet we do exactly that when we imprison people. The criminal commited a WRONG of stealing or killing, and we commit a *second* wrong of depriving that person of his liberty. So YES two wrongs DO often make a right.
>>>Which is why I suggested originally that perhaps it was a conversation better had with someone in technical support or with a lawyer - with the intent of coercing the company into fixing the actual problem. >>>
Don't you think that's already been tried? A woman sat on the floor of Congress and testified that her car accelerated to 90 miles an hour, she could not get it to stop (even when shifting to neutral), and when she called Toyota she wasted several hours & received no resolution. Toyota denied the problem existed for YEARS.
I have better things to do than waste my time when I already KNOW the result from Microsoft's Xbox lawyers/staff will be "no".
AND kids who have parents that participate also fare better.
Study after study has shown that parental interaction is the key to learning. Sit a kid in front of PBS all day, watching educational shows, and they will still not learn as much as when they learn directly from mom-and-dad (or when mom/dad are watching PBS too).
Bottom Line: You can't just sit a kid in front of some object, neglect them, and expect results. They need direction and somebody to bounce questions off of. I'd like to see this same study performed for Games vs. TV. Or games vs. fiction books. I bet there's little or no difference.
I don't understand people who say "This voice acting is terrible". Sure if I play something like Mario Sunshine, which has atrocious voicing, then I'll notice but for the most part I don't. It's just vocalized reading of the words on the screen.
Of course I also don't understand people who say "Babylon 5 has lousy acting" or "Japanese anime sounds better in Japanese". To me B5 acting is no worse or better than Star Trek stiltedness. And my copy of Love Hina (old but a classic) is just as funny whether I watch in Japanese or English.
Maybe I'm just not as picky or sensitive to voice nuances.
I also don't consider it stealing when *THEY SCREWED ME FIRST* with a defective product which they KNOW is defective but refuse to fix. That's why I silently Cheered when Toyota's President got drug in front of Congress. He deserved to be raked across the coals for:
- selling engines that died prematurely at 20-30,000 miles and then refusing to honor the replacement warranty - selling cars that drove by themselves and killed passengers, while insisted it wasn't their fault - selling Priuses with faulty batteries that died prematurely and cost adopter $4000 to replace, even while said battery was under warranty
They way Toyota has acted since 2000 reminds me of Ford during the 1970s (remember the exploding Pintos?). If a corporation Screws you, I consider it acceptable to screw them right back.
I don't consider it theft when I'm dealing with (1) a scam artist that knowingly sells defective product (2) a dishonest corporation that sells defective products like the X360 with ~33% failure rate, or (c) a corporation like Bank of America that stole 1500 billion in bailout funds from our wallets. I don't consider taking money from Known Thieves to be stealing, just as I didn't cry when Saddam Hussein was hung dead.
As for the serial number issue, I was not aware of that since I never bought a new Xbox. In that case I'd probably deal with an online retailer like amazon rather than Microsoft - they don't scan the numbers. Worst case I use Step 5 (dispute the return with the credit card). Proof of return == refund.
A search turns up numbers ranging from 15% (TGdaily) to 30% (retailers' reports) to 54% (user surveys). I suspect the Retailer stat is the most accurate. If 1/3rd of Xbox 360's are failing that is FAR, far worse than the failure rate that existed with the original PS2 (and that was pretty bad). LINK - http://www.bing.com/search?q=xbox+360+failure+rate
The lowest is the Nintendo Wii console at only 3%.
>>>And guess who was president when it was repealed. I mean, not that these little trivialities really make a difference.
You're right. They don't. It doesn't matter to me who passed the 55mph speed limit, because that was not the point of my post. But since your brought-up politics:
- Rep or Dem, they both have demonstrated themselves intent upon increasing government, and decreasing individual liberty, while completely ignoring the People's Constitution as if it did not exist. The fact you engage in such R v. D nonsense indicates you are still stuck in the sports mentality, rather than thinking logically & rationally about government.:-)
Only because the PS3 was outrageously priced, and that stupid decision cost Sony the #1 place it held for ten years (they are now #3).
I bet your gaming PC did not cost less than, say, the Nintendo Wii or Xbox360. Or the previous generation Gamecube, Xbox, and PS2. They were all reasonably priced at $250-399 at release, and no gaming PC could be bought at that low a price.
>>>I was just pointing out that a good deal of the problems could have been reduced, or even eliminated with a little bit of a orientation to the new desktop.
Not correct. I didn't just toss an Ubuntu Linux Laptop and Windows 7 Desktop on my brother's table and say, "There." I spent about an hour on each of them, explaining how to use the menus and gain access to the internet.
But my brother has a notoriously bad memory so forgets a lot of what I told him. With WIN7 he was able to navigate it because it's basically the same as his old Vista and XP machines. But with Linux he got lost - hence a lot of questions and problems.
>>>With a little training, and the undoubtedly years' worth of exposure, running any distro of Linux can be as easy and idiot-proof as any other OS.
I would agree with you if the Mac OS did not exist. But having used Macs since the days of the Quadras (68040s), it always amazes me how you can sit somebody in front of a Mac, and an hour later they are navigating it with ease, even though they've never used it before. (I suspect this is why Macs are popular with non-technical types like artists, publishers, communications majors.)
Why Linux can not be as easy as Mac OS is a mystery to me. But no, instead you have to open a CLI to get stuff done, and that's the opposite of easy for newbies.
I concur. Ever since Windows 95 copied the Mac OS (including the trashcan and shutdown procedure), it essentially became as easy to use as a Mac. In fact when I first tried Win95 I immediately thought, "This is just like my Quadra."
Windows ultimately gained the stability of the Classic Mac with the Windows NT 4 (business) and Windows XP (consumer) releases. It's still not as stable as OS X 10.6, but for newbies there's no real difference as far as ease-of-use.
"To consider the justices as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions is a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy."
"Our justices are as honest as other men and not more so. They have with others the same passions for party, for power, and the privilege of their corps. Their maxim is boni judicis est ampliare jurisdictionem [good justice is broad jurisdiction], and their power the more dangerous as they are in office for life and not responsible, as the other functionaries are, to the elective control. The Constitution has erected no such single tribunal, knowing that to whatever hands confided, with the corruptions of time and party, its members would become despots." Thomas Jefferson to William C. Jarvis, 1820. ME 15:277
In other words - no the opinion of 9 unelected men does NOT supersede the Law. The Constitution rises above the U.S. government, and the justices are part of that government, therefore while their opinion may have been followed in 1944, as of today the Constitutional Law still reigns supreme over the justices. We are a Republic, not an Oligarchy of 9 old men.
Also Remember: White/colored Segregation was upheld by the Supreme Court in through most of the 1800s and 1900s. They were wrong then too.
Not all kids were aware they were being spied upon until the story broke. I saw an interview on FOX News* just yesterday where a mom said, "My daughter is worried. She said, 'Mom I have that laptop open all the time. Even when I'm changing. What is they saw me in my underwear or naked?' She is scared of what her teachers might have seen."
No student, not even one, should have to feel like that.
* * Please don't reject my story just because it came from FOX.;-)
>>>It seems it was just some setup where if a student reported a laptop missing the school which owned those laptops could remotely access it to try to figure out where it was and who was using it. >>>
Yes but then the school started using the laptops to monitor students behavior. That's how they were caught. The Vice Principal called a student into an office, showed the student a video of his bedroom with the student apparently "misbehaving", and told the student he will be held in detention. Pretty soon other students were being punished for activities they did at home, in their private bedrooms, and with the Principal or VP using video evidence to back them up.
And so what may have started as a stolen laptop case turned into a 1984-esque behavioral control attempt by the Government school.
>>>I wouldn't want to be supporting this sort of legalistic chicanery.
If it was any other company, I'd agree, but Nintendo went through a rough 10 years with the N64 (2nd place) and Gamecube (again 2nd place). They really can't afford to be losing any money to illegal copies of their software.
Plus it's not as if Nintendo makes crap. Nintendo and their 2nd-party partners have consistently made the best games of the last 15 years (Mario64, Zelda, Fzero, Banjo Kazooie, Metroid, Animal Crossing, etc). They are worth every dollar you spend buying them. I steal a lot of stuff, but not Nintendo. Nintendo artists/programmers deserve to be compensated.
Oh jeez. Would you like a tissue to wipe-away your tears?
Life is not fair, and the challenge is to learn how to navigate the obstacles. As the previous poster said, if the device doesn't have the option to "boot another OS" then don't buy that device. Buy something else. Or invent your OWN device that is open/modifiable, and sell it..... America is still the best place to start a new business.
BTW the law predates me as well. The control over inventions by their inventors was codified in 1789 in the U.S. You still can change that law, via constitutional amendment (strike out the clause).
Slashdot Mirror
FOX presents opinions as facts
Ditto ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN. When you hear someone like Katie Couric say something like, "Colon exams should be free," she is presenting an opinion as fact. All of these TV outlets do it.
SLASHDOT FAQ:
"Concentrate more on promoting (adding points) rather than on demoting (subtracting points). The real goal here is to find the juicy good stuff and let others read it. Do not promote personal agendas. Do not let your opinions factor in. Try to be impartial about this.
"Simply disagreeing with a comment is not a valid reason to mark it down. Likewise, agreeing with a comment is not a valid reason to mark it up. The goal here is to share ideas. To sift through the haystack and find needles. And to keep the children who like to spam Slashdot in check."
Beck, O'reilly and Hannity have said multiple times that they are biased conservatives or libertarians.
That you did not know that indicates you know nothing about FOX because you apparently don't watch it. How do you judge something as "junk" if you don't watch it? Hmmm. Must be magic.
P.S.
Limbaugh's bad info: "Net neutrality means google will equally display Republican and Democrat pages. Like a Fairness Doctrine for the net."
This is why I stopped listening to Limbaugh. He spreads false information. Like when he said a hybrid can only go 80 miles/hour maximum. He's almost as bad as Rachel Maddow.
Net neutrality is NOT about creating a fairness doctrine for the net - it's about ensuring Comcast, Verizon, and other local monopolies don't block access to sites they don't like (such as limbaugh.com)
>>>While there are definite benefits to the XP system, it's a very large departure from the stable and useful 2000 system.
Time to upgrade. While the new "7" system will not run on 128K RAM like XP could, it should fit comfortably inside a 256K computer and still let you run Internet Explorer or Firefox or Opera. Even my ancient AMD Athlon (P3-equivalent) laptop can run it.
Gaming was different on those ancient Atari and Commodore computers. You had to read through a 200-page manual to first learn how to hook up everything, and then type in the commands to start the game.
Okay I exaggerate a little, but the fact is that the primitiveness of those computers is what led me to investigate how they worked, and on the path towards a technology degree. Otherwise I'd probably have ended-up a business major like my Macintosh-owning friend. (The Original Mac hid everything behind a GUI and discouraged exploration. No CLI.)
>>>two wrongs don't make a right applies here.
And yet we do exactly that when we imprison people. The criminal commited a WRONG of stealing or killing, and we commit a *second* wrong of depriving that person of his liberty. So YES two wrongs DO often make a right.
And we call it "revenge" or "justice".
>>>Which is why I suggested originally that perhaps it was a conversation better had with someone in technical support or with a lawyer - with the intent of coercing the company into fixing the actual problem.
>>>
Don't you think that's already been tried? A woman sat on the floor of Congress and testified that her car accelerated to 90 miles an hour, she could not get it to stop (even when shifting to neutral), and when she called Toyota she wasted several hours & received no resolution. Toyota denied the problem existed for YEARS.
I have better things to do than waste my time when I already KNOW the result from Microsoft's Xbox lawyers/staff will be "no".
AND kids who have parents that participate also fare better.
Study after study has shown that parental interaction is the key to learning. Sit a kid in front of PBS all day, watching educational shows, and they will still not learn as much as when they learn directly from mom-and-dad (or when mom/dad are watching PBS too).
Bottom Line: You can't just sit a kid in front of some object, neglect them, and expect results. They need direction and somebody to bounce questions off of. I'd like to see this same study performed for Games vs. TV. Or games vs. fiction books. I bet there's little or no difference.
I don't understand people who say "This voice acting is terrible". Sure if I play something like Mario Sunshine, which has atrocious voicing, then I'll notice but for the most part I don't. It's just vocalized reading of the words on the screen.
Of course I also don't understand people who say "Babylon 5 has lousy acting" or "Japanese anime sounds better in Japanese". To me B5 acting is no worse or better than Star Trek stiltedness. And my copy of Love Hina (old but a classic) is just as funny whether I watch in Japanese or English.
Maybe I'm just not as picky or sensitive to voice nuances.
P.S.
I also don't consider it stealing when *THEY SCREWED ME FIRST* with a defective product which they KNOW is defective but refuse to fix. That's why I silently Cheered when Toyota's President got drug in front of Congress. He deserved to be raked across the coals for:
- selling engines that died prematurely at 20-30,000 miles and then refusing to honor the replacement warranty
- selling cars that drove by themselves and killed passengers, while insisted it wasn't their fault
- selling Priuses with faulty batteries that died prematurely and cost adopter $4000 to replace, even while said battery was under warranty
They way Toyota has acted since 2000 reminds me of Ford during the 1970s (remember the exploding Pintos?). If a corporation Screws you, I consider it acceptable to screw them right back.
>>>As you say, this is theft.
I don't consider it theft when I'm dealing with (1) a scam artist that knowingly sells defective product (2) a dishonest corporation that sells defective products like the X360 with ~33% failure rate, or (c) a corporation like Bank of America that stole 1500 billion in bailout funds from our wallets. I don't consider taking money from Known Thieves to be stealing, just as I didn't cry when Saddam Hussein was hung dead.
As for the serial number issue, I was not aware of that since I never bought a new Xbox.
In that case I'd probably deal with an online retailer like amazon rather than Microsoft
- they don't scan the numbers.
Worst case I use Step 5 (dispute the return with the credit card). Proof of return == refund.
A search turns up numbers ranging from 15% (TGdaily) to 30% (retailers' reports) to 54% (user surveys). I suspect the Retailer stat is the most accurate. If 1/3rd of Xbox 360's are failing that is FAR, far worse than the failure rate that existed with the original PS2 (and that was pretty bad). LINK - http://www.bing.com/search?q=xbox+360+failure+rate
The lowest is the Nintendo Wii console at only 3%.
>>>And guess who was president when it was repealed. I mean, not that these little trivialities really make a difference.
You're right. They don't. It doesn't matter to me who passed the 55mph speed limit, because that was not the point of my post. But since your brought-up politics:
- Rep or Dem, they both have demonstrated themselves intent upon increasing government, and decreasing individual liberty, while completely ignoring the People's Constitution as if it did not exist. The fact you engage in such R v. D nonsense indicates you are still stuck in the sports mentality, rather than thinking logically & rationally about government. :-)
>>>My gaming PC cost less than my PS3.
Only because the PS3 was outrageously priced, and that stupid decision cost Sony the #1 place it held for ten years (they are now #3).
I bet your gaming PC did not cost less than, say, the Nintendo Wii or Xbox360. Or the previous generation Gamecube, Xbox, and PS2. They were all reasonably priced at $250-399 at release, and no gaming PC could be bought at that low a price.
And you know it.
An employer is not required to let you into his premises. It's his place, and you must meet HIS requirements, else your job offer will be retracted.
If you don't like it, become a farmer or other self-employed person, so you can remain completely-and-totally private. (Also rather poor.)
>>>I was just pointing out that a good deal of the problems could have been reduced, or even eliminated with a little bit of a orientation to the new desktop.
Not correct. I didn't just toss an Ubuntu Linux Laptop and Windows 7 Desktop on my brother's table and say, "There." I spent about an hour on each of them, explaining how to use the menus and gain access to the internet.
But my brother has a notoriously bad memory so forgets a lot of what I told him. With WIN7 he was able to navigate it because it's basically the same as his old Vista and XP machines. But with Linux he got lost - hence a lot of questions and problems.
>>>With a little training, and the undoubtedly years' worth of exposure, running any distro of Linux can be as easy and idiot-proof as any other OS.
I would agree with you if the Mac OS did not exist. But having used Macs since the days of the Quadras (68040s), it always amazes me how you can sit somebody in front of a Mac, and an hour later they are navigating it with ease, even though they've never used it before. (I suspect this is why Macs are popular with non-technical types like artists, publishers, communications majors.)
Why Linux can not be as easy as Mac OS is a mystery to me.
But no, instead you have to open a CLI to get stuff done,
and that's the opposite of easy for newbies.
I concur. Ever since Windows 95 copied the Mac OS (including the trashcan and shutdown procedure), it essentially became as easy to use as a Mac. In fact when I first tried Win95 I immediately thought, "This is just like my Quadra."
Windows ultimately gained the stability of the Classic Mac with the Windows NT 4 (business) and Windows XP (consumer) releases. It's still not as stable as OS X 10.6, but for newbies there's no real difference as far as ease-of-use.
"To consider the justices as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions is a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy."
"Our justices are as honest as other men and not more so. They have with others the same passions for party, for power, and the privilege of their corps. Their maxim is boni judicis est ampliare jurisdictionem [good justice is broad jurisdiction], and their power the more dangerous as they are in office for life and not responsible, as the other functionaries are, to the elective control. The Constitution has erected no such single tribunal, knowing that to whatever hands confided, with the corruptions of time and party, its members would become despots." Thomas Jefferson to William C. Jarvis, 1820. ME 15:277
In other words - no the opinion of 9 unelected men does NOT supersede the Law. The Constitution rises above the U.S. government, and the justices are part of that government, therefore while their opinion may have been followed in 1944, as of today the Constitutional Law still reigns supreme over the justices. We are a Republic, not an Oligarchy of 9 old men.
Also Remember: White/colored Segregation was upheld by the Supreme Court in through most of the 1800s and 1900s.
They were wrong then too.
Not all kids were aware they were being spied upon until the story broke. I saw an interview on FOX News* just yesterday where a mom said, "My daughter is worried. She said, 'Mom I have that laptop open all the time. Even when I'm changing. What is they saw me in my underwear or naked?' She is scared of what her teachers might have seen."
No student, not even one, should have to feel like that.
* ;-)
* Please don't reject my story just because it came from FOX.
I hope that by the time the U.S. Government (FBI) is done with this school, not one concrete block is standing atop another.
Every single person involved in this should be fired, and the school closed, to be replaced by a better school that is not corrupt.
>>>It seems it was just some setup where if a student reported a laptop missing the school which owned those laptops could remotely access it to try to figure out where it was and who was using it.
>>>
Yes but then the school started using the laptops to monitor students behavior. That's how they were caught. The Vice Principal called a student into an office, showed the student a video of his bedroom with the student apparently "misbehaving", and told the student he will be held in detention. Pretty soon other students were being punished for activities they did at home, in their private bedrooms, and with the Principal or VP using video evidence to back them up.
And so what may have started as a stolen laptop case turned into a 1984-esque behavioral control attempt by the Government school.
And now you know...... the REST of the story.
>>>I wouldn't want to be supporting this sort of legalistic chicanery.
If it was any other company, I'd agree, but Nintendo went through a rough 10 years with the N64 (2nd place) and Gamecube (again 2nd place). They really can't afford to be losing any money to illegal copies of their software.
Plus it's not as if Nintendo makes crap. Nintendo and their 2nd-party partners have consistently made the best games of the last 15 years (Mario64, Zelda, Fzero, Banjo Kazooie, Metroid, Animal Crossing, etc). They are worth every dollar you spend buying them. I steal a lot of stuff, but not Nintendo. Nintendo artists/programmers deserve to be compensated.
IMHO
Oh jeez. Would you like a tissue to wipe-away your tears?
Life is not fair, and the challenge is to learn how to navigate the obstacles. As the previous poster said, if the device doesn't have the option to "boot another OS" then don't buy that device. Buy something else. Or invent your OWN device that is open/modifiable, and sell it..... America is still the best place to start a new business.
BTW the law predates me as well. The control over inventions by their inventors was codified in 1789 in the U.S. You still can change that law, via constitutional amendment (strike out the clause).