They just announced selling their PC business, along with WebOS hardware, to focus on high margin business.
It doesn't matter that they could earn billions every year, it matters that they can tell investors they have high margins. There is absolutely no way they would accept 10%, before distibution costs and advertising is taken out.
Apple builds dedicated manufacturing to guarantee availability, and ensure the company won't set up an extra line to make replicas to sell locally, and other tricks to make sure they have a price advantage and market lock. Then turn around and sell it at good profit margins to a loyal and growing fan base.
You can't get the magic price point without going in with a good plan, and based on reports in the money mags, the plan was "jump on the pad bandwagon." That's worse than no plan at all.
The larger / more popular MSDN downloads are nearly always in ISO format. So you are expected to download, burn, and install from CD every time. Much faster to use a virtual drive, though I usually just extract the ISO using 7-zip (or other tools before 7-zip was around). Of course, the solution is always use a virtual machine, but that's not always practical.
Cool Story time. My first successful crack was fixing the MSVC 6 installer so it would run off of the hard drive instead of a CD. Change a JNE to a NOP and it works. Thank goodness they don't do that - that's the last time I remember not being able to run it directly after extracting it.
Funny thing is, I usually back up the ISO in case it gets removed from MSDN, like Windows 95 and 98 did. So I RAR it up and use QuickPar for data integrity. Then burn it to a disc. I admit it's quirky.
When I search for things to delete, I can't trust that the file list won't change under me. I delete files 1 by 1.
In outlook, searches complete with the focus being put on the first result. I have deleted more emails than I've found as a result.
Searches don't even work. I've posted before about not being able to find things. Dir/b/s is my favorite thing in the world.because Vista's search is *not*.
I use Vista at work, and cannot wait till I get off of it. Meanwhile, if I can't find a better file manager, I'm writing one. It sucks, on eggs. 7 I haven't had a lot of experience with. I have it at home, but usually work on the work notebook rather than turning on the home PC. And I can watch TV if I'm using the notebook.
-Search does not return the expected results -Search updates itself in the middle of an operation -Explorer changes focus. Try hitting 'Tab' a few times and see how may flashes you get. The more, the worse the programmer is. -Explorer is like punching yourself in the nuts, if you have nuts. Otherwise, it is like ripping out your uterus. If you have neither, understand that it is unpleasant.
In short, go fuck yourself, Windows, and your stupid file manager. If there is nothing better, I will write it. If there is, I will improve it.
I *will* be better than you. Because you suck, and I don't.
You are thinking like a nerd, not a computer user. I did not know this information, so I was one of those 90% people until today. And you would be surprised how many people are using FireFox but could not possibly do this. Yes, even with step by step instructions.
"I refuse to believe that 90% of car owners cannot change their own oil." That statement makes as much sense as yours. Maybe they could, but they won't, and don't think they should.
Lots of people wiped their parents/friends/neighbors computers because of their inability to understand anything at all, getting viruses and popups and toolbars and whatnot. And they put Firefox on, and said "there, use that, that's the internet." Those people will click any update box, any OK button just to "make the damned thing go away." They will not update a text file inside a zip, or if they try they will not do it correctly.
"Just associate.zip files with WinZip" you say. I wish we had known when we set people up to use Firefox that this was coming, or we might have.
I gave up on search, I use "dir/b/s *term*" every single time. It's a lot faster, and you don't lose out on the GUI because it doesn't do things like sort anyway (not on large file searches), and it likes to start over just when you found your file.
Redirect the output to a file and open it with something better than notepad, and you got your search working again.
Consider this article one bit of information for authors and buyers to consider when making a purchase.
The article may very well be identifying the first of many examples to come. It could very well be a bad conclusion, but at this point Amazon does have the power to take over e-publishing. Whether they do, or can in the near future, depends a lot on what people do and what publishers do and what authors do.
The biggest difference is C++ typically uses a different compiler on a different system. I started playing with Java when I took a week off from work, and I was surprised that I didn't have compiler errors, missing libraries, and all the usual problems.
When I download a C++ project, I usually cringe and fire up a browser so I can resolve the ensuing pile of error messages just to get the code built. With this project, I just downloaded the code, used the JDK I already had, installed ant, and it worked the first time. That has only happened 3 times with C++ over the past 15 years for me. I agree one example is not a good study, but you can't argue that even the most widely used C++ compilers will accept just about every project out there.
My point is, if the code is cross platform, you don't have to fight the compiler. Yes, Java does have its own quirks about having libraries available and such, but if you have to modify the code to get it working something is seriously wrong.
It's a good suggestion, and it works well. I have tried Science (AAAS), Scientific American, and The Scientist. One of them didn't work, I don't remember which. It showed "Some content on this page could not be displayed" at the bottom of a blank page.
Papers themselves should be fine. PDF reading in general is pretty good as long as it's not the one scientific journal I couldn't read.
I play guitar, and use it to display Lilypond typeset output, and it looks wonderful. I can't even say it's a photoshop, because I can't see the pixels. And as parent post said, turn it sideways and it auto-zooms to fill.
Kindle DX is a beautiful thing, and I hope thy fix the few bits the PDF reader can't do. Formulae and such are fine, seems to be piles of images layered that gives the problem.
Put some junk on a notebook and bring it with you, and ask the salespeople at the various places near you if they would mind if you transferred some things to the thing and see what it looks like.
You won't be happy with a nook color unless you really want color, e-Ink is energy conscious - I've charged it twice in two months. Don't shut it off, just leave the last page you read open. Chart or index or reference or whatever, it stays there until you replace it, no burn-in.
I hate to sound like a shill, I'm just really happy. $379 or whatever well spent, and it will get cheaper.
I suck and get killed all the time, so I quit trying. Also, I'm more interested in discovering different ways to kill someone, and other neat facets of the game.
That is very easy with computer AI, but with a person you have fairly consistent damge (at least for each class of opponent). No cool stuff like shooting a tower and have oil barrels fall on the bad guy in a flaming death from above epic world destruction moment. Unless it's me, paying attention to something else and not noticing the shot you just took. You can take me out that way most days, easily, and then you realize I'm just as bad, if not worse, than an AI opponent.
When you play against people in deathmatch style things get kinda repetitive. Someone's shooting at you, try to duck, and then try to kill them. Ooh, different weapons, different respawn spots. Like playing the same sport with different equipment. This ball is more dense, this bat is better, differetn people today, but it's still baseball. You seem to like that, I don't. I'd like to play a round of golf, then learn how a bat behaves differently from a golf club, then figure out uses for a tennis racket. Experimentation on the world, not on people.
Half-life 2 is my kind of game. Plenty of people to shoot at, but you have to be reasonable about where you waste your ammo. Good choices lead to conservation, bad choices leave you nothnig but a crowbar. Also, some exploring while there aren't too many bad guys can get you surprises. I like the exploration idea, as long as it's not me finding every crevice of the game because I need some magic thing I can't find.
I got the Orange Box just for Portal, and started playing HL when Portal was over. BioShock is perfect, you can explore if you want or just follow the arrow and shoot everything. I think of each different enemy class as a different person, developing new tricks.
Team playing could be fun, but it's usually team against other team. I would enjoy the hell out of a multiplayer game where every human worked together for the same goal against AI opponents or traps or whatever. But you wouldn't.
I guess we're just different. Look, we should just stop seeing each other, okay?
I'm convinced it's disk access. The awesome bar and cache take up a lot of disk access to work, and especially on systems like Vista I/O can cripple a computer.
Combined with poor memory management, you have an in-memory cache that's actually paged to disk, a SQLlite database updated every time you access any URL (which is plenty of times even with scripts disabled), and the actual file cache which seems to be disregarded since the back button seems to at least ask the server for a HEAD request.
The simplest example is when you have an image on a page, right-click and save, and the download window pops up. Then it says "Downloading...." Either the image is not cached, or it's paged out, or disk access is slow, or some other horrendously crappy resource management problem is exposed. It just does not work the way it should.
Sounds like evidence tampering to me, or at least it could if I were on the other side of the table. As a juror, that sounds like you edited the results somehow, or at least someone could make the argument.
I would suggest that any editing or tampering or modification would be potentially damaging to your cause. Yes, the anonymous video-only leak might sway public sentiment.
Recording government of any kind in a public place, in any manner, should be just as legal as government of any kind recording private citizens in the same context. That's quite simple, and quite obvious.
But to get anything actually done, someone needs to be able to stand up and say that yes, that is the unmodified video that my camera recorded, while I watched the very same thing. In that case, the video cannot be ruled inadmissible due to it being potentially edited or photoshopped or michael bayed. You have a real live person, and no amount of anonymizing will hide you when someone has the right to confront their accuser.
Recording audio is not the crime, cops beating people is the crime. Do you civil disobedience duty, ask for donations to your legal fund, and appeal the law until either it goes away, or you at least get enough visibility that groups can pressure police departments into publically stating that they will not pursue charges like this. "Good luck with that" you say sarcastially. But thanks, because someone is going to need it.
Or to look at it another way, right now it is a very effective tool to intimidate people into not recording things. They won't want to lose that tool. It's going to be an ugly fight. You can get the law overturned by the judiciary, rewritten by the legislature, or announced unenforceable by the executive branches. But the push has to come from civilians. Having to hide behind anonymity in order to avoid prosecution is not a free country, especially when the law is so obviously flawed.
Doesn't matter, there's piles of lunatics lumping themselves in with you, who cannot answer relatively simple questions with any clarity. They don't know what they're upset about specifically, and jump on the bandwagon of things that sound good.
Be offended all you want, or realize that you have some people riding your coat-tails (or maybe you are riding theirs) that you probably do not want to be associated with. Be offended, or recognize the situation upfront, or choose another name.
BTW, I don't see how "Taxed Enough Already" has anything to do with rule of law and constitutionality. The original tea party in Boston wasn't over tax rates, it was taxation without representation. And tax rates are relatively low compared to other countries and points in history of our own country. So maybe a name change is in order. May I suggest "Founding Fathers" or something similar?
To the average user, it has eye candy and flashy cool stuff. And it's not bloated and slow like Vista. It's what they should have released 2 years after XP, to compete with Apple. And what they should have put on phones within the next 2 years.
I have HDMI out to a 42 inch HDTV, and use 7 with WMP for DVDs and MP3s and such. It's refreshing, although annoying since I'm used to XP, and have to use Vista for work. If I could stay on 7 only, I'd be happy enough.
Keep in mind, I curse Vista daily, and I'm saying 7 is pleasant. It's better, it does what I want, and does it well.
XP was a kludge, SP1 and 2 were major stability fixes. SP3 was essentially a new OS, with anit-piracy features that freeloaders don't want, as well as better security that was a kludge on top of a kludge. They put it in a blender and shat out Vista, and put everything they learned together to make Windows 7. I say this despite the *years* of productivity I've lost due to reboots, crashes, hangs, corrupt files, and so on since Windows 3.1 / NT 4. It's better.
In addition to the other ways in which you failed, here is how marginal tax rates work - aka progressive tax, aka tax brackets. If they filed as people instead of as companies, it would be about $50k taxes on $280k.
They didn't even make it into the 35% bracket, which starts at over $300k.
I have the opposite problem. If a website doesn't work with NoScript enabled, I deem it broken and never return. I don't have AdBlock, they can show me ads, but not like what you're describing.
I saw an article when I clicked.
Here's the idea. It's my computer, my processor, and if a website wants me to run something they need to ask permission first.
I know the DRM is about PC games, but I just got an XBOX 360 not too long ago.
I have bought several games, and plan on buying more. I prefer cheap new games than used, but when it's an Ubisoft title, I make sure to get it used. I don't know if I'm helping or not.
Firefox is not a good example. Or alternatively it's the best counter-example. The source tree I looked at, in the 2.x series, had so many instances of duplication and cruft I couldn't tell what would actually run once compiled. And then most of it is written on top of XUL, so if you're a C++ expert you'll have a learning curve to understand even how to read it, how to search.
I gave up bug-hunting because it's so terrible, and I'm close to completely not using it as a result. It may be better now, but I was embarrassed for open source at the time.
These days, before I start using something, I actually read a bit of the code. If it looks readable, I'll use it. If not, I'm not making the investment.
Do you have a handy test available? I imagine a simple set of say 4 pages, which has 2 WAV or FLAC files, and you have to listen and decide which is the original and which is the encoded/decoded one. After 4 you have 75% accuracy. So an initial self test should be easy to set up, you just need to randomize the filenames and whether the uncompressed one is on the right or left.
I've always had problems with MP3, mostly the bass drum in pop rock (usually a drum machine, not a real drum set). It sounds thin and occasionally "cooked" for those of you who remember uncook.exe. But I haven't done a good a/b test in a while, and that was probably a terrible 128k encoder.
I'm curious about AAC, but not curious enough to try to set up my own test.
3D represents depth by tricking your eyes, but it does give you depth. The real world does it without tricks.
The real world is the real world. If you want to represent the real world somehow, the holodeck of Star Trek: The Next Generation is the only truly realistic representation I've seen. It has the added ability to actually feel and hold the objects, which is way more involved than a holographic projector would have. But visually, you have an empty room, and then it's filled with real looking objects.
You are choosing to define 3D as having the ability to change focus, which is not what 3D is trying to be, and it never will be. And yes that's why it confuses a small percentage of people's senses. It's a 3D projection onto a 2D space, but it presents a different view to each eye.
So why do you choose a definition of "true 3D" which requires more than just having 3 dimensions? Why not define 3D as "What you would see if you focus on the same thing the director wanted the focus on"?
Put another way, if you insist that 3D has to allow for refocus, we'll have everything from 1900 to holograms under the same 3D label. The current trend towards 3D in TVs, gaming, movies, and now phones, all represent 3 dimensions, but will not have re-focusing capability any time soon, since de-facto standards are already in place.
Why can't we agree on this:
3D is when height, width, and depth are represented
3D is not realistic and makes some people uncomfortable
3D needs to evolve into something more, which will not be called 3D
Yes it's 3D, it has 3 dimensions. It's not virtual reality, and doesn't claim to be. You can't wander around it and see it from the back. What you can do is infer the depth based on the stereoscopic effect, just like you can infer height and width based on surrounding objects.
You can't see the back of things, you can't re-focus on something that the camera didn't focus on. Yes it's gimmicky and limited. But there are 3 dimensions, and if you want to count time (as in watching a movie) it has 4.
I think you just regurgitated from an article here posted a while back without really thinking about what you've said, but if you managed to come up with the exact same deivel independently, I have to applaud your stubbornness.
"But the real world has 4 dimensions, and it doesn't have those limits, how can you call it 3D if it's limited?" The real world is the real world. When we can simulate that, it will be called holography or something more interesting than 3D. The real world has smells, no one complains about those missing in 3D. The real world has things like neighbors making noise, interrupting phone calls - I think we would be happier with a limited simulation, even when we get to that point.
Most producers and consumers don't care because the music is intended to be consumed on portable devices. Car radios, iPods, phones... Listen to a well done classical recording in a typical car, or on an MP3 player, and you'll be adjusting the volume up and down all day just to hear it.
With compression, you don't have those louds and soft bits. At home on your nice stereo, it sounds terrible. But on the portable devices, they sound. Terrible or not, you can hear it. That's the whole point, and why no one cares.
Also why the standard will not catch on unless it differentiates audiophile settings vs. portable settings. Personally, I'd love to have automatic range compression in a car audio system to even out the highs and lows a bit. But I'd like the option to turn it off when i want it off. No producer will let this be up to a computer, so we're stuck the way it is, for now.
They hack anything and everything, and essentially just demonstrate that poor security is everywhere. Whether that's what they want to prove or not, that's the point they end up making.
Don't trust anyone with your data until they are proven secure, and then always wonder if they made an update that breaks their security.
People trust the cloud, but don't think about what it actually means. Someone else has your data, and you trust them to keep it private, and not use or sell bits and pieces here and there when it suits them.
Slashdot Mirror
I... I don't see what you did there.
They just announced selling their PC business, along with WebOS hardware, to focus on high margin business.
It doesn't matter that they could earn billions every year, it matters that they can tell investors they have high margins. There is absolutely no way they would accept 10%, before distibution costs and advertising is taken out.
Apple builds dedicated manufacturing to guarantee availability, and ensure the company won't set up an extra line to make replicas to sell locally, and other tricks to make sure they have a price advantage and market lock. Then turn around and sell it at good profit margins to a loyal and growing fan base.
You can't get the magic price point without going in with a good plan, and based on reports in the money mags, the plan was "jump on the pad bandwagon." That's worse than no plan at all.
The larger / more popular MSDN downloads are nearly always in ISO format. So you are expected to download, burn, and install from CD every time. Much faster to use a virtual drive, though I usually just extract the ISO using 7-zip (or other tools before 7-zip was around). Of course, the solution is always use a virtual machine, but that's not always practical.
Cool Story time. My first successful crack was fixing the MSVC 6 installer so it would run off of the hard drive instead of a CD. Change a JNE to a NOP and it works. Thank goodness they don't do that - that's the last time I remember not being able to run it directly after extracting it.
Funny thing is, I usually back up the ISO in case it gets removed from MSDN, like Windows 95 and 98 did. So I RAR it up and use QuickPar for data integrity. Then burn it to a disc. I admit it's quirky.
When I search for things to delete, I can't trust that the file list won't change under me. I delete files 1 by 1.
In outlook, searches complete with the focus being put on the first result. I have deleted more emails than I've found as a result.
Searches don't even work. I've posted before about not being able to find things. Dir /b /s is my favorite thing in the world.because Vista's search is *not*.
I use Vista at work, and cannot wait till I get off of it. Meanwhile, if I can't find a better file manager, I'm writing one. It sucks, on eggs. 7 I haven't had a lot of experience with. I have it at home, but usually work on the work notebook rather than turning on the home PC. And I can watch TV if I'm using the notebook.
-Search does not return the expected results
-Search updates itself in the middle of an operation
-Explorer changes focus. Try hitting 'Tab' a few times and see how may flashes you get. The more, the worse the programmer is.
-Explorer is like punching yourself in the nuts, if you have nuts. Otherwise, it is like ripping out your uterus. If you have neither, understand that it is unpleasant.
In short, go fuck yourself, Windows, and your stupid file manager. If there is nothing better, I will write it. If there is, I will improve it.
I *will* be better than you. Because you suck, and I don't.
You are thinking like a nerd, not a computer user. I did not know this information, so I was one of those 90% people until today. And you would be surprised how many people are using FireFox but could not possibly do this. Yes, even with step by step instructions.
"I refuse to believe that 90% of car owners cannot change their own oil." That statement makes as much sense as yours. Maybe they could, but they won't, and don't think they should.
Lots of people wiped their parents/friends/neighbors computers because of their inability to understand anything at all, getting viruses and popups and toolbars and whatnot. And they put Firefox on, and said "there, use that, that's the internet." Those people will click any update box, any OK button just to "make the damned thing go away." They will not update a text file inside a zip, or if they try they will not do it correctly.
"Just associate .zip files with WinZip" you say. I wish we had known when we set people up to use Firefox that this was coming, or we might have.
I gave up on search, I use "dir /b /s *term*" every single time. It's a lot faster, and you don't lose out on the GUI because it doesn't do things like sort anyway (not on large file searches), and it likes to start over just when you found your file.
Redirect the output to a file and open it with something better than notepad, and you got your search working again.
Consider this article one bit of information for authors and buyers to consider when making a purchase.
The article may very well be identifying the first of many examples to come. It could very well be a bad conclusion, but at this point Amazon does have the power to take over e-publishing. Whether they do, or can in the near future, depends a lot on what people do and what publishers do and what authors do.
The biggest difference is C++ typically uses a different compiler on a different system. I started playing with Java when I took a week off from work, and I was surprised that I didn't have compiler errors, missing libraries, and all the usual problems.
When I download a C++ project, I usually cringe and fire up a browser so I can resolve the ensuing pile of error messages just to get the code built. With this project, I just downloaded the code, used the JDK I already had, installed ant, and it worked the first time. That has only happened 3 times with C++ over the past 15 years for me. I agree one example is not a good study, but you can't argue that even the most widely used C++ compilers will accept just about every project out there.
My point is, if the code is cross platform, you don't have to fight the compiler. Yes, Java does have its own quirks about having libraries available and such, but if you have to modify the code to get it working something is seriously wrong.
And after Hurd left, the CEO from SAP took over. SAP, which sells vaporware and then you buy consulting to make it do exactly what you don't want.
It's a good suggestion, and it works well. I have tried Science (AAAS), Scientific American, and The Scientist. One of them didn't work, I don't remember which. It showed "Some content on this page could not be displayed" at the bottom of a blank page.
Papers themselves should be fine. PDF reading in general is pretty good as long as it's not the one scientific journal I couldn't read.
I play guitar, and use it to display Lilypond typeset output, and it looks wonderful. I can't even say it's a photoshop, because I can't see the pixels. And as parent post said, turn it sideways and it auto-zooms to fill.
Kindle DX is a beautiful thing, and I hope thy fix the few bits the PDF reader can't do. Formulae and such are fine, seems to be piles of images layered that gives the problem.
Put some junk on a notebook and bring it with you, and ask the salespeople at the various places near you if they would mind if you transferred some things to the thing and see what it looks like.
You won't be happy with a nook color unless you really want color, e-Ink is energy conscious - I've charged it twice in two months. Don't shut it off, just leave the last page you read open. Chart or index or reference or whatever, it stays there until you replace it, no burn-in.
I hate to sound like a shill, I'm just really happy. $379 or whatever well spent, and it will get cheaper.
Please, don't tell me if it hasn't.
I suck and get killed all the time, so I quit trying. Also, I'm more interested in discovering different ways to kill someone, and other neat facets of the game.
That is very easy with computer AI, but with a person you have fairly consistent damge (at least for each class of opponent). No cool stuff like shooting a tower and have oil barrels fall on the bad guy in a flaming death from above epic world destruction moment. Unless it's me, paying attention to something else and not noticing the shot you just took. You can take me out that way most days, easily, and then you realize I'm just as bad, if not worse, than an AI opponent.
When you play against people in deathmatch style things get kinda repetitive. Someone's shooting at you, try to duck, and then try to kill them. Ooh, different weapons, different respawn spots. Like playing the same sport with different equipment. This ball is more dense, this bat is better, differetn people today, but it's still baseball. You seem to like that, I don't. I'd like to play a round of golf, then learn how a bat behaves differently from a golf club, then figure out uses for a tennis racket. Experimentation on the world, not on people.
Half-life 2 is my kind of game. Plenty of people to shoot at, but you have to be reasonable about where you waste your ammo. Good choices lead to conservation, bad choices leave you nothnig but a crowbar. Also, some exploring while there aren't too many bad guys can get you surprises. I like the exploration idea, as long as it's not me finding every crevice of the game because I need some magic thing I can't find.
I got the Orange Box just for Portal, and started playing HL when Portal was over. BioShock is perfect, you can explore if you want or just follow the arrow and shoot everything. I think of each different enemy class as a different person, developing new tricks.
Team playing could be fun, but it's usually team against other team. I would enjoy the hell out of a multiplayer game where every human worked together for the same goal against AI opponents or traps or whatever. But you wouldn't.
I guess we're just different. Look, we should just stop seeing each other, okay?
I'm convinced it's disk access. The awesome bar and cache take up a lot of disk access to work, and especially on systems like Vista I/O can cripple a computer.
Combined with poor memory management, you have an in-memory cache that's actually paged to disk, a SQLlite database updated every time you access any URL (which is plenty of times even with scripts disabled), and the actual file cache which seems to be disregarded since the back button seems to at least ask the server for a HEAD request.
The simplest example is when you have an image on a page, right-click and save, and the download window pops up. Then it says "Downloading...." Either the image is not cached, or it's paged out, or disk access is slow, or some other horrendously crappy resource management problem is exposed. It just does not work the way it should.
Sounds like evidence tampering to me, or at least it could if I were on the other side of the table. As a juror, that sounds like you edited the results somehow, or at least someone could make the argument.
I would suggest that any editing or tampering or modification would be potentially damaging to your cause. Yes, the anonymous video-only leak might sway public sentiment.
Recording government of any kind in a public place, in any manner, should be just as legal as government of any kind recording private citizens in the same context. That's quite simple, and quite obvious.
But to get anything actually done, someone needs to be able to stand up and say that yes, that is the unmodified video that my camera recorded, while I watched the very same thing. In that case, the video cannot be ruled inadmissible due to it being potentially edited or photoshopped or michael bayed. You have a real live person, and no amount of anonymizing will hide you when someone has the right to confront their accuser.
Recording audio is not the crime, cops beating people is the crime. Do you civil disobedience duty, ask for donations to your legal fund, and appeal the law until either it goes away, or you at least get enough visibility that groups can pressure police departments into publically stating that they will not pursue charges like this. "Good luck with that" you say sarcastially. But thanks, because someone is going to need it.
Or to look at it another way, right now it is a very effective tool to intimidate people into not recording things. They won't want to lose that tool. It's going to be an ugly fight. You can get the law overturned by the judiciary, rewritten by the legislature, or announced unenforceable by the executive branches. But the push has to come from civilians. Having to hide behind anonymity in order to avoid prosecution is not a free country, especially when the law is so obviously flawed.
Doesn't matter, there's piles of lunatics lumping themselves in with you, who cannot answer relatively simple questions with any clarity. They don't know what they're upset about specifically, and jump on the bandwagon of things that sound good.
Be offended all you want, or realize that you have some people riding your coat-tails (or maybe you are riding theirs) that you probably do not want to be associated with. Be offended, or recognize the situation upfront, or choose another name.
BTW, I don't see how "Taxed Enough Already" has anything to do with rule of law and constitutionality. The original tea party in Boston wasn't over tax rates, it was taxation without representation. And tax rates are relatively low compared to other countries and points in history of our own country. So maybe a name change is in order. May I suggest "Founding Fathers" or something similar?
To the average user, it has eye candy and flashy cool stuff. And it's not bloated and slow like Vista. It's what they should have released 2 years after XP, to compete with Apple. And what they should have put on phones within the next 2 years.
I have HDMI out to a 42 inch HDTV, and use 7 with WMP for DVDs and MP3s and such. It's refreshing, although annoying since I'm used to XP, and have to use Vista for work. If I could stay on 7 only, I'd be happy enough.
Keep in mind, I curse Vista daily, and I'm saying 7 is pleasant. It's better, it does what I want, and does it well.
XP was a kludge, SP1 and 2 were major stability fixes. SP3 was essentially a new OS, with anit-piracy features that freeloaders don't want, as well as better security that was a kludge on top of a kludge. They put it in a blender and shat out Vista, and put everything they learned together to make Windows 7. I say this despite the *years* of productivity I've lost due to reboots, crashes, hangs, corrupt files, and so on since Windows 3.1 / NT 4. It's better.
In addition to the other ways in which you failed, here is how marginal tax rates work - aka progressive tax, aka tax brackets. If they filed as people instead of as companies, it would be about $50k taxes on $280k.
They didn't even make it into the 35% bracket, which starts at over $300k.
http://www.bargaineering.com/articles/federal-income-irs-tax-brackets.html
I have the opposite problem. If a website doesn't work with NoScript enabled, I deem it broken and never return. I don't have AdBlock, they can show me ads, but not like what you're describing.
I saw an article when I clicked.
Here's the idea. It's my computer, my processor, and if a website wants me to run something they need to ask permission first.
I know the DRM is about PC games, but I just got an XBOX 360 not too long ago.
I have bought several games, and plan on buying more. I prefer cheap new games than used, but when it's an Ubisoft title, I make sure to get it used. I don't know if I'm helping or not.
http://www.ubi.com/us/games/search.aspx?pltag=xbox360
Firefox is not a good example. Or alternatively it's the best counter-example. The source tree I looked at, in the 2.x series, had so many instances of duplication and cruft I couldn't tell what would actually run once compiled. And then most of it is written on top of XUL, so if you're a C++ expert you'll have a learning curve to understand even how to read it, how to search.
I gave up bug-hunting because it's so terrible, and I'm close to completely not using it as a result. It may be better now, but I was embarrassed for open source at the time.
These days, before I start using something, I actually read a bit of the code. If it looks readable, I'll use it. If not, I'm not making the investment.
Do you have a handy test available? I imagine a simple set of say 4 pages, which has 2 WAV or FLAC files, and you have to listen and decide which is the original and which is the encoded/decoded one. After 4 you have 75% accuracy. So an initial self test should be easy to set up, you just need to randomize the filenames and whether the uncompressed one is on the right or left.
I've always had problems with MP3, mostly the bass drum in pop rock (usually a drum machine, not a real drum set). It sounds thin and occasionally "cooked" for those of you who remember uncook.exe. But I haven't done a good a/b test in a while, and that was probably a terrible 128k encoder.
I'm curious about AAC, but not curious enough to try to set up my own test.
3D represents depth by tricking your eyes, but it does give you depth. The real world does it without tricks.
The real world is the real world. If you want to represent the real world somehow, the holodeck of Star Trek: The Next Generation is the only truly realistic representation I've seen. It has the added ability to actually feel and hold the objects, which is way more involved than a holographic projector would have. But visually, you have an empty room, and then it's filled with real looking objects.
You are choosing to define 3D as having the ability to change focus, which is not what 3D is trying to be, and it never will be. And yes that's why it confuses a small percentage of people's senses. It's a 3D projection onto a 2D space, but it presents a different view to each eye.
So why do you choose a definition of "true 3D" which requires more than just having 3 dimensions? Why not define 3D as "What you would see if you focus on the same thing the director wanted the focus on"?
Put another way, if you insist that 3D has to allow for refocus, we'll have everything from 1900 to holograms under the same 3D label. The current trend towards 3D in TVs, gaming, movies, and now phones, all represent 3 dimensions, but will not have re-focusing capability any time soon, since de-facto standards are already in place.
Why can't we agree on this:
Yes it's 3D, it has 3 dimensions. It's not virtual reality, and doesn't claim to be. You can't wander around it and see it from the back. What you can do is infer the depth based on the stereoscopic effect, just like you can infer height and width based on surrounding objects.
You can't see the back of things, you can't re-focus on something that the camera didn't focus on. Yes it's gimmicky and limited. But there are 3 dimensions, and if you want to count time (as in watching a movie) it has 4.
I think you just regurgitated from an article here posted a while back without really thinking about what you've said, but if you managed to come up with the exact same deivel independently, I have to applaud your stubbornness.
"But the real world has 4 dimensions, and it doesn't have those limits, how can you call it 3D if it's limited?" The real world is the real world. When we can simulate that, it will be called holography or something more interesting than 3D. The real world has smells, no one complains about those missing in 3D. The real world has things like neighbors making noise, interrupting phone calls - I think we would be happier with a limited simulation, even when we get to that point.
Most producers and consumers don't care because the music is intended to be consumed on portable devices. Car radios, iPods, phones... Listen to a well done classical recording in a typical car, or on an MP3 player, and you'll be adjusting the volume up and down all day just to hear it.
With compression, you don't have those louds and soft bits. At home on your nice stereo, it sounds terrible. But on the portable devices, they sound. Terrible or not, you can hear it. That's the whole point, and why no one cares.
Also why the standard will not catch on unless it differentiates audiophile settings vs. portable settings. Personally, I'd love to have automatic range compression in a car audio system to even out the highs and lows a bit. But I'd like the option to turn it off when i want it off. No producer will let this be up to a computer, so we're stuck the way it is, for now.
They hack anything and everything, and essentially just demonstrate that poor security is everywhere. Whether that's what they want to prove or not, that's the point they end up making.
Don't trust anyone with your data until they are proven secure, and then always wonder if they made an update that breaks their security.
People trust the cloud, but don't think about what it actually means. Someone else has your data, and you trust them to keep it private, and not use or sell bits and pieces here and there when it suits them.