You're asking for everything in the world and asking for it cheap, and that's just not going to happen. Non-smart TVs yes have less hardware, but because they're made in much smaller quantities, they demand a premium.
That said, look at the Vizio E-Series. the only "Smarts" it has is app controls and a built-in ChromeCast. The E-series comes with a regular remote with volume and input options (don't know about sleep, never bothered with sleeping a TV manually). 4k 60Hz refresh, HDR-capable. That's probably as close as you're going to get to what you want in 2017.
The one thing I'd like to see changed is autocorrect behavior. Seriously, who thought hitting "space" after an autocorrect word comes up would correct it, but tapping the corrected word would dismiss it? Really?
I admit, I haven't tried it on an Android device (the nook being my only one), but on iOS it's annoying as hell.
This article has one key line that just makes me want to scream.
This is NOT 25 times faster than current standard cablemodems. It may be 25 times faster than Comcast currently OFFERS, but that is a significant difference.
One of the reasons uncapping modems worked as well as it did is because DOCSIS 1.1 and 2.0 are both capable of 45Mbit/sec downstream. There are current services (Disclaimer: I work for Cablevision, where one of these is offered) that are offering 30Mbit/sec download speeds - and getting them. (I personally have topped out at 29Mbit/sec.) There are other technologies than DOCSIS out there that are currently implemented which are easily capable of 100Mbit/sec.
There's absolutely nothing to get excited about with this. If anything, I admit to being puzzled as to why they weren't managing 180Mbit/sec on a modem with 4 bonded channels - 20Mbit/sec is a bit much to be writing off to overhead.
DOCSIS 3.0 is a solid step forward, but this is not the next greatest thing. There are comparative technologies available right now that would require minimal upgrades, if any. And the guy at Time Warner's right, what can't you do with 30Mbit/sec that you can with 100Mbps?
Obviously, you fail to comprehend Stockholm Syndrome. First they rule through physical threat, then offer treats and do their best to seem nice and friendly. Eventually the victim becomes so confused they they start believing the one constant in their world - the kidnapper - is the only anchor they can cling to and take anything said as stone truth.
This doesn't even begin to cover the threat of force - "Try getting in touch with your parents or running away from me, and I'll kill you and them."
1. Kyoto wasn't signed because it's a bad deal. It requires us to cut our emissions to levels that will significantly harm our economy, while letting much, MUCH larger pollution-producers - like China, who did sign - off the hook because they're a "developing nation". Yeah, you know the nation that's been around in one form or another as a civilized society for the past five thousand years? That China. We have enough problems with China squeezing out our own manufacturers without signing to a treaty that gives them carte blanche to put them out of business.
2. What does a Bio-diesel sports-car have to do with Iraq? I mean, seriously. Two completely separate issues. Iraq was about daily violation of a cease-fire, WMD programs that the entire planet was convinced were in operation, and funding for terrorism. The other is about kids building a car with one hell of a performance envelope and a mileage that makes hybrids look bad, with Bio-fuel thrown in for the capper.
3. I'll grant you the auto makers and the oil companies in cahoots, but where in holy howling hell does weapons manufacturers come in?! Complete, utter, ignorant Euro leftie bias, is what that is.
4. How can you POSSIBLY purport to understand us when you live in such a small place? I moved last June to be close to where I work. My definition of close is "less than an hour away". I live about 20 miles from work, and that's COMMON in the US. I have friends who work with me who live 40-50 miles away; they transferred to the positions they hold now because they were tired of a two-hour drive. Hell, you can fit most European countries into the US Northeast and they'd rattle around. Bicycles are not a reliable means of transport here; locations are too far from each other to use reliably. Anywhere where everything you need is close to your own home, there's better methods of travel due to the weather.
So please, take yourself and your bigoted, uninformed, propagandist drivel and go somewhere that people want to hear about it.
Re:Drugs is a misused word in the english language
on
Games Are Not Drugs
·
· Score: 1
English is an infinitely flexible language, and I think you overlook something here.
In modern usage, what has happened is that narcotics and hallucinogenics such as Opium, Pot, Cocaine, LSD, etc. are commonly referred to as drugs, with an implicit chemically addictive component. Anything taken as a prescription or for medical purposes is called what it is - a medication, often short-handed as "meds".
Common usage is far more flexible and faster to react than any dictionary out there. You can't call a change in how a word is fundamentally used by a nation of nearly 300 million people "misused" because that, by itself, fundamentally changes how the word should be used, especially if it's a gradual change like this one has been.
Yep, and this is why the US has been pushing for Iran to agree to a deal where the Russians (since they won't work with us) actually process the fuel for their reactors, the IAEA does bi-weekly random inspections on half of their nuclear facilities (again, at random), research labs, and anywhere else a centrifuge might be found, and their power output and waste output are carefully monitored and matched up.
We WANT them to have nuke power. It means cheaper gas at the pump and cheaper heating oil in our homes. What we don't want is any slightest chance they could be running a Breeder reactor or enriching ores for warheads.
The reason we're worried about Iran is not because they're trying to develop nukes. Of course they're trying to. The reason we're worried about it is because, unlike Stalin and Mao, the Mullahs actually ARE crazy enough to nuke Israel (or us, if they could get a delivery method) in spite of the fact that we could turn the entire Fars plateau into one giant glowing glassed-over plain in about 20 minutes.
You make the mistake of assuming that because political zealots with no history of suicidal tendencies were held in check by the threat of Mutually Assured Destruction that religious zealots, who don't see death as an ending and HAVE shown suicidal tendencies, would be held in check by the same mechanism. I assure you, they would not be.
My wife pays a monthly fee to play World of Warcraft. She logs in once a week to do something on it beyond Auction House stuff. Her total playtime, including in the auction house, is right around 4 hours a week, maybe 5.
Half my guild logs in on a saturday, plays for 5-10 hours straight, then logs off for another two or three weeks.
Why the heck would they do this? Social environment for one. Casual gamers are ex-hardcore gamers who grew up and ran out of time to be hardcore. They want to keep their hand in for the non-existent lottery drawing they're going to win so they can go back to playing without a loss of too much skill. For another, it's cheaper than going out once every two months and dropping down $50-70 for the next game when they've played their single-player hack-n-slash out. A lot less. It's the main reason why people I know who don't like FPSes but did like gaming came over to WoW: It was pretty as hell, and they needed to stop buying a new PC game every 3-5 weeks.
If you think the casual gamer won't pay $15 a month to play, you don't know the casual gamer market anywhere near enough to be making pronouncements that get modded up as "Insightful".
All the content providers have to do is charge a "Bandwidth Recovery Fee" to any provider who charges them a "Bandwidth Usage Fee".
For example, BellSouth and Verizon (the two biggies on this one so far) start charging Google for the "right" to provide content to their customers. In return, Google begins charging BellSouth and Verizon for the "right" for their users to access Google's service over Google's upstream bandwidth.
The end result is that Google breaks even (because they can charge a small amount per customer for a massive total income) or pulls ahead on the deal, and Verizon either stays at the same spot they're in now, or they start losing money - either through losing access to one of the premier search engines on the internet, causing customers to start leaving in droves, or because they pass the "Bandwidth Recovery Fee" onto their consumers, causing everyone's bills to inflate noticeably, also causing customers to leave in droves for cheaper access to the same content.
And while the above article mentions cable and telephone network providers, I've yet to hear Comcast, Cox, Charter, or Time-Warner start making noises in this direction. Mayhap the telcos need to look into cheaper ways to bring all the dark fiber out there online?
Hot Girl-on-Girl porn in a high fantasy setting: Lord of the G-Strings.
Now that that's out of the way...
There is nothing, at all, wrong with a GLBT-friendly guild. The problem was not CREATING the guild, it was RECRUITING as such in the general population. Doing so is simply likely to piss too many people off and/or ruin their game time because they don't like it.
Change society all you want. Just don't start in a game that's intended for ALL players to be able to enjoy themselves. It doesn't need to be brought up in General chat. The vast, overwhelming majority of GLBT players are going to gather in specific areas outside of game anyhow, so why not recruit there? That's far superior in both terms of the majority's game enjoyment and likelihood of reaching the intended audience. That sounds like a win to me, for both sides of the discussion. Which leads me to the inescapable conclusion that the GLBT Community has once again found a target for hate and maligning.
What you should be amazed at is that Wiki does more poorly than Brittanica.
If an article has not substantially changed in facts or representation in a few decades, a new version of Brittanica is likely to use the same article, with a cursory once-over to ensure that there's no major errors still - and that I would bet would be more in the way of spelling and grammar rather than factual.
Wiki, on the other hand, performs worse, and the articles are only four and a half years old at most.
Copy errors in a document alone will, over time, introduce more errors than Brittanica is showing I would think, especially over a period of 235 years. The same cannot be said of Wiki.
That being said though, had you told me five or six years ago that an open-contribution online encyclopedia could consist wholly of anything other than spam and garbage, I would've laughed myself silly at you. I'm amazed that Wiki performed as well as it did, but I'm almost more amazed at Brittanica's ability to keep the errors very low amongst almost two and a half centuries of compiled information.
I'd tend to agree, though there are a few things that irk me.
For one, I'm running into a real cash crimp with crafting and trying to level up my character. I hit Level 12 and suddenly my abilities cost 8 Silver a piece. This could use a little tweaking, one way or the other.
Two, movement is horrendously slow, especially compared to other games. You adjust to it, but it's aggravating. (Keep in mind, I come from a background of four years of AC1, where outrunning the wind is possible.)
Three, WoW loses a point, irrespective of everything else above, which might actually add up to half a point compared to the rest of the game, for Blizzard's totally inexcusable regional restriction rules. There is no reason to implement them, and it shows that someone upstairs STILL has this fixation with Battle.net and a lack of true understanding about MMORPGs. Ping Lag is not the killer in an MMO like it would be in other games; it's mostly a minor annoyance for anything less than around 1k or so pingtimes. This effectively trashes their primary reasoning. Further, the suggestion to military and foreign service personnel that they purchase a subscription in the region they're stationed within if they'll be stationed there for an extended period of time demonstrates a severe lack of understanding about what drives an MMO player to play. And finally, the fact that they provide these incredible tools for Guild management and identity and then artificially break up guilds because they think Euro players shouldn't want to play on American servers is just bunk.
All told, I'd give it a 8.5-9/10. And I left Asheron's Call 1 for this game, something I truly thought no game out there would ever be able to do.
MMO Players: If you're undecided, think back to the magic of when you first started playing your original MMO. I've beta'd four or five MMOs in the last four years, as well as playing AC1. WoW captured the magic, for me, and imbued it into their world. Give it a try; at worst, you're out another $50 and had at least as much gameplay available to you as you would have had spending it on an FPS.
I have. They're phenominally easy to use, and basically force you to set 128-bit WEP as the default. The newer ones suggest you use 256-bit WPA, which works hunky-dory with Apple's WPA implementation. I have a MN-700 base station a short distance from me right now and it absolutely screams.
What planet are you on, dude? I've got an MN-500 sitting three feet from me. You know what it's doing? Accepting wireless connections in the clear from anyone in range. And no, it's not because I'm a selfless soul. In fact, all it's doing is sitting around playing WAP and switch for a few systems behind a LEAF Box simply because it doesn't have the friggin' HORSEPOWER to handle standard loose UDP methods in a NAT scheme. Asheron's Call - a game Microsoft PUBLISHED and currently controls the billing for - cannot be played on two systems behind it. I would assume the same goes for EQ or most other online games that use multiple port-triggered UDP connections.
Not to mention that WEP is OFF by default, it doesn't force you to use it at ALL, and in fact they make it WAY more difficult to turn on (especially at 128-bit) than it actually needs to be - enough so that most normal people wouldn't even bother with it.
Frankly, I love Microsoft's input devices (be they voice, mouse, keyboard, Joystick, or oddities like the Strategic Commander, regardless of whoever makes them), but their networking equipment is far beyond subpar.
Sounds like you... well, whatever the opposite of lucked out is.
Last position I was in, the network engineering manager was ex-navy, his "assistant" (the only other guy in the network engineering department - really small company) was ex-Air Force, the department head for the support department was ex-Navy, two of the five support techs were ex-Military, two of the three Sales Engineers/Implementation group were ex-military, etc. When they bought another company, two of the three techs and the security engineer were ex-military (1 Navy, 2 Army). The other three individuals they kept on were just highly competent.
Of those, only one was a clown like you suggest, and he was nowhere near that bad. In fact, between them, those guys easily carried more than their share of the company.
Sounds to me like you just got a few bad apples. Maybe you were hiring out of the wrong branch?
I would guess that it was supposed to be a Democrat only server, in which it makes sense that a ranking democrat would have hired that admin. The article isn't very clear about what the server was supposed to be used for.
Read the parent you replied to again. It's a Senate Judiciary Committee server. All members of the Senate Judiciary committee - and one would assume their staffs as well - have access to the server.
Therefore nice little jobs like this shouldn't be handed out by Senate Majority Leaders, and instead should be hired as non-partisan positions by the GAO or some other organization.
The password protection was not implemented. The Democrats failed to password-protect their own documents. And the access to the server was completely, 100% legitimate, because it was a Judiciary Committee server, NOT a server owned by the DNC.
No, the tech didn't "neglect" to put a password on the document. He neglected to implement a password protection scheme altogether. And is it stealing if I'm browsing around on the computer YOU gave me access to and make a copy of your private journals or letters to your sweetheart?
BOTH PARTIES had access to this server. If you're too dumb to store sensitive memos on a server that's legitimately accessible by your opponents, and fail to put your OWN password protection on the files, then crying because someone else was reading them is a bit moronic, IMO.
Fact: The files were stored on a server shared by all members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, regardless of party affiliation.
Fact: During the takeover of the Senate in 2001, a tech was stupid when setting up the sharing system, and files on this server were not password protected by location and/or type as they were supposed to be.
I don't know about you, Brain, but I'd take legitimate access on a server that is supposed to be password-protected for stuff you're not supposed to have access to as implicit right to access anything on there that doesn't have a password prompt to get at or open it.
Whether it's an ethics violation to do so or not, I don't know. That's for someone well-equipped to evaluate the situation to decide. But I wouldn't assume that the Republicans "have no ethics", and I'd also SERIOUSLY question the ethics of holding up a judicial nominee's hearings based on a request from a lobby group that results in a favorable lawsuit finding, never mind some of the other crap floating around out there.
So while you're assuming that the Republicans have no ethics, try and remember that the Dems don't seem to have any either.
...because that sounds absolutely nothing at all like any symptoms of Attention Deficit Disorder, most ESPECIALLY Hyperactive type.
Have you taken her to see a psychiatrist who can run the full battery of tests to determine where the issue lies?
Myself, and almost every kid I've ever met with ADD variants is exceptionally bright, creative, often extremely hard to keep under control, and ocasionally mischievous. Someone who can keep herself busy by chatting with herself, and won't get dressed without permission in the morning sounds a lot more like high-form autism than traditional ADD/ADHD. Ritalin will work for high-form autism as well, and that type of autism will rarely impact an individual's life the way normal autism would, but it is definitely a challenge.
I'll also echo one of the other posters: Get a doctor's opinion on the subject. Preferably several doctors' opinions.
Perhaps you ought to try alternatives to chemical therapy regimens before you discount them.
I was diagnosed with Attention Deficit in the 4th Grade, and after that diagnosis, my teachers worked with me to accomodate the issue. I went from barely passing to very nearly acing my classes, without a change in class difficulty.
Unfortunately for me, the information was lost in a move from one state to another, or never forwarded. I've been on chemical therapy in the past, and frankly, I got more comments about how the medication seemed to be working well after a week or two off of it than I did when I was on it. (This doesn't even BEGIN to mention the fact that someone with a tendency to absentmindedness is particularly unsuited to a regimen that requires they remember to take a drug to remember incidentals.)
I have to agree with the previous poster. Anything that affects the better part of 20% of the world's population isn't properly classified as a disorder. Medicating us is not the answer. Working with us to make sure we adapt to the society that the other 80% have created is where we should be going. As it is, far too many kids get medicated these days because their parents don't want to take the time to raise them properly, and the prevalence of Ritalin for "hyperactivity" is one of the main causes of this.
If parents and educators looked at this as a "Leadership Challenge", as the military would call it, and not a disease or flaw, then more people would be well-adjusted individuals without a need for prescription medications.
The idea of letting the world's last great Communist power - China, despite their recent reforms - land someone on the moon where they can toss a few rocks back down the gravity well is a REMARKABLY bad idea.
So the only solution is to beat them to it. They've announced their plans, time for us to beat them at the game.
[H]e's the president whose main goal seems to be to make sure tax funds make it into the hands of the giant corporations...
Your point? Or are you one of those who is actually oblivious to the fact that every tax on a corporation gets passed on to the consumers, with perhaps a smidge more added in to make a larger profit? Go ahead! Tax the large companies. Hit 'em hard, 50% of their profit! Watch the price of goods skyrocket to unimaginable levels! It'll be FUN!
Tax cuts for individuals who receive stock dividends, primarily benefitting the wealthy. Most poor and middle-class people who get dividends do so within a tax-deferred vehicle like an IRA or 401(k).
Hrm. Odd that. I do believe that this was an economic stimulus package that was designed to get people who invest into businesses in large chunks to invest even more money. Amazingly, it seems to have worked!
Must be a fluke.
Defense contractors will make a bundle replacing all the munitions and other supplies used in Iraq, during the fighting and after. Yes, Saddam is a terrible person, responsible for the deaths of at least 300,000 Iraqis, but should the US taxpayers have spent $160B (or more) to depose him?
Yes. Creating a stable democracy in the center of the Middle East will immediately begin to have an impact on the radical fundamentalists surrounding that democracy. As a matter of fact, Saudi Arabia has already begun reforms in that direction.
You DO know that most terrorists tend to be well-educated individuals who see no hope of advancing beyond their current status - which is often miserable - and have been taught to believe that this is the result of external forces, such as Israel and the United States, right? And that if they had the ability to rise as high as anyone else can, they'd be much less likely to be using aircraft to alter New York's skyline, right?
Insurance companies and drug companies both get major benefits from the prescription drug bill.
Yep. And for the first time, senior citizens without an exorbitant amount of income and/or pension-provided insurance are eligible for prescription drug benefits. Sounds like a win-win deal for me. Or are you one of those types who can't see how private citizens AND major corporations can win on the same deal?
Proposed guest-worker program has got to put downward pressure on the cost of labor.
Riiiight... All those illegal immigrants getting access to a method by which they can leave the country and return - which guarantees they'll sign up in droves - and then by the very nature of the program, suddenly earning minimum wage rather than $20/day and a nice sandwich for lunch is going to apply DOWNWARD pressure on the cost of labor? Not seeing your reasoning. In fact, I'm not sure you HAVE any reasoning.
Campaign proposals (not acted on yet) to privatize Social Security. Estimates are that as much as 20% of the money would end up in the hands of large brokerage houses as fees and expenses.
Any estimates on how much profit Social Security would then be turning? Because that's the key, you see. If Social Security can't turn a profit, no private company is going to touch it. Ergo, since it's possible and even likely, is 20% in fees to brokerage houses even a dent in the profit it will be turning? Companies don't actively try to rape everything in sight for the immediate cash; they're in business to make a profit and to CONTINUE making profit.
You, sir, need to check your preconceptions at the door and start ANALYZING what you're spewing. Preferably with a better grasp of free-market principles and a healthy dose of reality.
...and intelligent geeks file for unemployment, then use that to go out, buy more books, and learn more stuff, all the while taking a short and relaxing "vacation".
Implying that filing for unemployment is only for those people who aren't legitimately interested in their field is obnoxious, insulting, and incorrect. What Unemployment allows you to do is find a DECENT job while boning up on your skills.
Slashdot Mirror
You're asking for everything in the world and asking for it cheap, and that's just not going to happen. Non-smart TVs yes have less hardware, but because they're made in much smaller quantities, they demand a premium.
That said, look at the Vizio E-Series. the only "Smarts" it has is app controls and a built-in ChromeCast. The E-series comes with a regular remote with volume and input options (don't know about sleep, never bothered with sleeping a TV manually). 4k 60Hz refresh, HDR-capable. That's probably as close as you're going to get to what you want in 2017.
The one thing I'd like to see changed is autocorrect behavior. Seriously, who thought hitting "space" after an autocorrect word comes up would correct it, but tapping the corrected word would dismiss it? Really?
I admit, I haven't tried it on an Android device (the nook being my only one), but on iOS it's annoying as hell.
This article has one key line that just makes me want to scream.
This is NOT 25 times faster than current standard cablemodems. It may be 25 times faster than Comcast currently OFFERS, but that is a significant difference.
One of the reasons uncapping modems worked as well as it did is because DOCSIS 1.1 and 2.0 are both capable of 45Mbit/sec downstream. There are current services (Disclaimer: I work for Cablevision, where one of these is offered) that are offering 30Mbit/sec download speeds - and getting them. (I personally have topped out at 29Mbit/sec.) There are other technologies than DOCSIS out there that are currently implemented which are easily capable of 100Mbit/sec.
There's absolutely nothing to get excited about with this. If anything, I admit to being puzzled as to why they weren't managing 180Mbit/sec on a modem with 4 bonded channels - 20Mbit/sec is a bit much to be writing off to overhead.
DOCSIS 3.0 is a solid step forward, but this is not the next greatest thing. There are comparative technologies available right now that would require minimal upgrades, if any. And the guy at Time Warner's right, what can't you do with 30Mbit/sec that you can with 100Mbps?
Obviously, you fail to comprehend Stockholm Syndrome. First they rule through physical threat, then offer treats and do their best to seem nice and friendly. Eventually the victim becomes so confused they they start believing the one constant in their world - the kidnapper - is the only anchor they can cling to and take anything said as stone truth.
This doesn't even begin to cover the threat of force - "Try getting in touch with your parents or running away from me, and I'll kill you and them."
Learn2psychology.
How do idiots like you get modded up?
1. Kyoto wasn't signed because it's a bad deal. It requires us to cut our emissions to levels that will significantly harm our economy, while letting much, MUCH larger pollution-producers - like China, who did sign - off the hook because they're a "developing nation". Yeah, you know the nation that's been around in one form or another as a civilized society for the past five thousand years? That China. We have enough problems with China squeezing out our own manufacturers without signing to a treaty that gives them carte blanche to put them out of business.
2. What does a Bio-diesel sports-car have to do with Iraq? I mean, seriously. Two completely separate issues. Iraq was about daily violation of a cease-fire, WMD programs that the entire planet was convinced were in operation, and funding for terrorism. The other is about kids building a car with one hell of a performance envelope and a mileage that makes hybrids look bad, with Bio-fuel thrown in for the capper.
3. I'll grant you the auto makers and the oil companies in cahoots, but where in holy howling hell does weapons manufacturers come in?! Complete, utter, ignorant Euro leftie bias, is what that is.
4. How can you POSSIBLY purport to understand us when you live in such a small place? I moved last June to be close to where I work. My definition of close is "less than an hour away". I live about 20 miles from work, and that's COMMON in the US. I have friends who work with me who live 40-50 miles away; they transferred to the positions they hold now because they were tired of a two-hour drive. Hell, you can fit most European countries into the US Northeast and they'd rattle around. Bicycles are not a reliable means of transport here; locations are too far from each other to use reliably. Anywhere where everything you need is close to your own home, there's better methods of travel due to the weather.
So please, take yourself and your bigoted, uninformed, propagandist drivel and go somewhere that people want to hear about it.
English is an infinitely flexible language, and I think you overlook something here.
In modern usage, what has happened is that narcotics and hallucinogenics such as Opium, Pot, Cocaine, LSD, etc. are commonly referred to as drugs, with an implicit chemically addictive component. Anything taken as a prescription or for medical purposes is called what it is - a medication, often short-handed as "meds".
Common usage is far more flexible and faster to react than any dictionary out there. You can't call a change in how a word is fundamentally used by a nation of nearly 300 million people "misused" because that, by itself, fundamentally changes how the word should be used, especially if it's a gradual change like this one has been.
Yep, and this is why the US has been pushing for Iran to agree to a deal where the Russians (since they won't work with us) actually process the fuel for their reactors, the IAEA does bi-weekly random inspections on half of their nuclear facilities (again, at random), research labs, and anywhere else a centrifuge might be found, and their power output and waste output are carefully monitored and matched up.
We WANT them to have nuke power. It means cheaper gas at the pump and cheaper heating oil in our homes. What we don't want is any slightest chance they could be running a Breeder reactor or enriching ores for warheads.
The reason we're worried about Iran is not because they're trying to develop nukes. Of course they're trying to. The reason we're worried about it is because, unlike Stalin and Mao, the Mullahs actually ARE crazy enough to nuke Israel (or us, if they could get a delivery method) in spite of the fact that we could turn the entire Fars plateau into one giant glowing glassed-over plain in about 20 minutes.
You make the mistake of assuming that because political zealots with no history of suicidal tendencies were held in check by the threat of Mutually Assured Destruction that religious zealots, who don't see death as an ending and HAVE shown suicidal tendencies, would be held in check by the same mechanism. I assure you, they would not be.
Part time gamers will never pay a monthly fee.
You sir, are an idiot.
My wife pays a monthly fee to play World of Warcraft. She logs in once a week to do something on it beyond Auction House stuff. Her total playtime, including in the auction house, is right around 4 hours a week, maybe 5.
Half my guild logs in on a saturday, plays for 5-10 hours straight, then logs off for another two or three weeks.
Why the heck would they do this? Social environment for one. Casual gamers are ex-hardcore gamers who grew up and ran out of time to be hardcore. They want to keep their hand in for the non-existent lottery drawing they're going to win so they can go back to playing without a loss of too much skill. For another, it's cheaper than going out once every two months and dropping down $50-70 for the next game when they've played their single-player hack-n-slash out. A lot less. It's the main reason why people I know who don't like FPSes but did like gaming came over to WoW: It was pretty as hell, and they needed to stop buying a new PC game every 3-5 weeks.
If you think the casual gamer won't pay $15 a month to play, you don't know the casual gamer market anywhere near enough to be making pronouncements that get modded up as "Insightful".
All the content providers have to do is charge a "Bandwidth Recovery Fee" to any provider who charges them a "Bandwidth Usage Fee".
For example, BellSouth and Verizon (the two biggies on this one so far) start charging Google for the "right" to provide content to their customers. In return, Google begins charging BellSouth and Verizon for the "right" for their users to access Google's service over Google's upstream bandwidth.
The end result is that Google breaks even (because they can charge a small amount per customer for a massive total income) or pulls ahead on the deal, and Verizon either stays at the same spot they're in now, or they start losing money - either through losing access to one of the premier search engines on the internet, causing customers to start leaving in droves, or because they pass the "Bandwidth Recovery Fee" onto their consumers, causing everyone's bills to inflate noticeably, also causing customers to leave in droves for cheaper access to the same content.
And while the above article mentions cable and telephone network providers, I've yet to hear Comcast, Cox, Charter, or Time-Warner start making noises in this direction. Mayhap the telcos need to look into cheaper ways to bring all the dark fiber out there online?
Hot Girl-on-Girl porn in a high fantasy setting: Lord of the G-Strings.
Now that that's out of the way...
There is nothing, at all, wrong with a GLBT-friendly guild. The problem was not CREATING the guild, it was RECRUITING as such in the general population. Doing so is simply likely to piss too many people off and/or ruin their game time because they don't like it.
Change society all you want. Just don't start in a game that's intended for ALL players to be able to enjoy themselves. It doesn't need to be brought up in General chat. The vast, overwhelming majority of GLBT players are going to gather in specific areas outside of game anyhow, so why not recruit there? That's far superior in both terms of the majority's game enjoyment and likelihood of reaching the intended audience. That sounds like a win to me, for both sides of the discussion. Which leads me to the inescapable conclusion that the GLBT Community has once again found a target for hate and maligning.
What you should be amazed at is that Wiki does more poorly than Brittanica.
If an article has not substantially changed in facts or representation in a few decades, a new version of Brittanica is likely to use the same article, with a cursory once-over to ensure that there's no major errors still - and that I would bet would be more in the way of spelling and grammar rather than factual.
Wiki, on the other hand, performs worse, and the articles are only four and a half years old at most.
Copy errors in a document alone will, over time, introduce more errors than Brittanica is showing I would think, especially over a period of 235 years. The same cannot be said of Wiki.
That being said though, had you told me five or six years ago that an open-contribution online encyclopedia could consist wholly of anything other than spam and garbage, I would've laughed myself silly at you. I'm amazed that Wiki performed as well as it did, but I'm almost more amazed at Brittanica's ability to keep the errors very low amongst almost two and a half centuries of compiled information.
Yep. And Cablevision is 10Mbit/sec down, 1Mbit/sec up, as well. And I've heard they're even testing a higher tier.
Not to mention, if you're talking commercially available, DS3s are 44Mbit/sec...
I'd tend to agree, though there are a few things that irk me.
For one, I'm running into a real cash crimp with crafting and trying to level up my character. I hit Level 12 and suddenly my abilities cost 8 Silver a piece. This could use a little tweaking, one way or the other.
Two, movement is horrendously slow, especially compared to other games. You adjust to it, but it's aggravating. (Keep in mind, I come from a background of four years of AC1, where outrunning the wind is possible.)
Three, WoW loses a point, irrespective of everything else above, which might actually add up to half a point compared to the rest of the game, for Blizzard's totally inexcusable regional restriction rules. There is no reason to implement them, and it shows that someone upstairs STILL has this fixation with Battle.net and a lack of true understanding about MMORPGs. Ping Lag is not the killer in an MMO like it would be in other games; it's mostly a minor annoyance for anything less than around 1k or so pingtimes. This effectively trashes their primary reasoning. Further, the suggestion to military and foreign service personnel that they purchase a subscription in the region they're stationed within if they'll be stationed there for an extended period of time demonstrates a severe lack of understanding about what drives an MMO player to play. And finally, the fact that they provide these incredible tools for Guild management and identity and then artificially break up guilds because they think Euro players shouldn't want to play on American servers is just bunk.
All told, I'd give it a 8.5-9/10. And I left Asheron's Call 1 for this game, something I truly thought no game out there would ever be able to do.
MMO Players: If you're undecided, think back to the magic of when you first started playing your original MMO. I've beta'd four or five MMOs in the last four years, as well as playing AC1. WoW captured the magic, for me, and imbued it into their world. Give it a try; at worst, you're out another $50 and had at least as much gameplay available to you as you would have had spending it on an FPS.
I have. They're phenominally easy to use, and basically force you to set 128-bit WEP as the default. The newer ones suggest you use 256-bit WPA, which works hunky-dory with Apple's WPA implementation. I have a MN-700 base station a short distance from me right now and it absolutely screams.
What planet are you on, dude? I've got an MN-500 sitting three feet from me. You know what it's doing? Accepting wireless connections in the clear from anyone in range. And no, it's not because I'm a selfless soul. In fact, all it's doing is sitting around playing WAP and switch for a few systems behind a LEAF Box simply because it doesn't have the friggin' HORSEPOWER to handle standard loose UDP methods in a NAT scheme. Asheron's Call - a game Microsoft PUBLISHED and currently controls the billing for - cannot be played on two systems behind it. I would assume the same goes for EQ or most other online games that use multiple port-triggered UDP connections.
Not to mention that WEP is OFF by default, it doesn't force you to use it at ALL, and in fact they make it WAY more difficult to turn on (especially at 128-bit) than it actually needs to be - enough so that most normal people wouldn't even bother with it.
Frankly, I love Microsoft's input devices (be they voice, mouse, keyboard, Joystick, or oddities like the Strategic Commander, regardless of whoever makes them), but their networking equipment is far beyond subpar.
Sounds like you ... well, whatever the opposite of lucked out is.
Last position I was in, the network engineering manager was ex-navy, his "assistant" (the only other guy in the network engineering department - really small company) was ex-Air Force, the department head for the support department was ex-Navy, two of the five support techs were ex-Military, two of the three Sales Engineers/Implementation group were ex-military, etc. When they bought another company, two of the three techs and the security engineer were ex-military (1 Navy, 2 Army). The other three individuals they kept on were just highly competent.
Of those, only one was a clown like you suggest, and he was nowhere near that bad. In fact, between them, those guys easily carried more than their share of the company.
Sounds to me like you just got a few bad apples. Maybe you were hiring out of the wrong branch?
I would guess that it was supposed to be a Democrat only server, in which it makes sense that a ranking democrat would have hired that admin. The article isn't very clear about what the server was supposed to be used for.
Read the parent you replied to again. It's a Senate Judiciary Committee server. All members of the Senate Judiciary committee - and one would assume their staffs as well - have access to the server.
Therefore nice little jobs like this shouldn't be handed out by Senate Majority Leaders, and instead should be hired as non-partisan positions by the GAO or some other organization.
Partisan IT professionals is a really BAD idea.
Incorrect.
The password protection was not implemented. The Democrats failed to password-protect their own documents. And the access to the server was completely, 100% legitimate, because it was a Judiciary Committee server, NOT a server owned by the DNC.
RTFA please.
No, the tech didn't "neglect" to put a password on the document. He neglected to implement a password protection scheme altogether. And is it stealing if I'm browsing around on the computer YOU gave me access to and make a copy of your private journals or letters to your sweetheart?
BOTH PARTIES had access to this server. If you're too dumb to store sensitive memos on a server that's legitimately accessible by your opponents, and fail to put your OWN password protection on the files, then crying because someone else was reading them is a bit moronic, IMO.
Fact: The files were stored on a server shared by all members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, regardless of party affiliation.
Fact: During the takeover of the Senate in 2001, a tech was stupid when setting up the sharing system, and files on this server were not password protected by location and/or type as they were supposed to be.
I don't know about you, Brain, but I'd take legitimate access on a server that is supposed to be password-protected for stuff you're not supposed to have access to as implicit right to access anything on there that doesn't have a password prompt to get at or open it.
Whether it's an ethics violation to do so or not, I don't know. That's for someone well-equipped to evaluate the situation to decide. But I wouldn't assume that the Republicans "have no ethics", and I'd also SERIOUSLY question the ethics of holding up a judicial nominee's hearings based on a request from a lobby group that results in a favorable lawsuit finding, never mind some of the other crap floating around out there.
So while you're assuming that the Republicans have no ethics, try and remember that the Dems don't seem to have any either.
...because that sounds absolutely nothing at all like any symptoms of Attention Deficit Disorder, most ESPECIALLY Hyperactive type.
Have you taken her to see a psychiatrist who can run the full battery of tests to determine where the issue lies?
Myself, and almost every kid I've ever met with ADD variants is exceptionally bright, creative, often extremely hard to keep under control, and ocasionally mischievous. Someone who can keep herself busy by chatting with herself, and won't get dressed without permission in the morning sounds a lot more like high-form autism than traditional ADD/ADHD. Ritalin will work for high-form autism as well, and that type of autism will rarely impact an individual's life the way normal autism would, but it is definitely a challenge.
I'll also echo one of the other posters: Get a doctor's opinion on the subject. Preferably several doctors' opinions.
Perhaps you ought to try alternatives to chemical therapy regimens before you discount them.
I was diagnosed with Attention Deficit in the 4th Grade, and after that diagnosis, my teachers worked with me to accomodate the issue. I went from barely passing to very nearly acing my classes, without a change in class difficulty.
Unfortunately for me, the information was lost in a move from one state to another, or never forwarded. I've been on chemical therapy in the past, and frankly, I got more comments about how the medication seemed to be working well after a week or two off of it than I did when I was on it. (This doesn't even BEGIN to mention the fact that someone with a tendency to absentmindedness is particularly unsuited to a regimen that requires they remember to take a drug to remember incidentals.)
I have to agree with the previous poster. Anything that affects the better part of 20% of the world's population isn't properly classified as a disorder. Medicating us is not the answer. Working with us to make sure we adapt to the society that the other 80% have created is where we should be going. As it is, far too many kids get medicated these days because their parents don't want to take the time to raise them properly, and the prevalence of Ritalin for "hyperactivity" is one of the main causes of this.
If parents and educators looked at this as a "Leadership Challenge", as the military would call it, and not a disease or flaw, then more people would be well-adjusted individuals without a need for prescription medications.
Bingo.
The idea of letting the world's last great Communist power - China, despite their recent reforms - land someone on the moon where they can toss a few rocks back down the gravity well is a REMARKABLY bad idea.
So the only solution is to beat them to it. They've announced their plans, time for us to beat them at the game.
Let's take this a point at a time, shall we?
[H]e's the president whose main goal seems to be to make sure tax funds make it into the hands of the giant corporations...
Your point? Or are you one of those who is actually oblivious to the fact that every tax on a corporation gets passed on to the consumers, with perhaps a smidge more added in to make a larger profit? Go ahead! Tax the large companies. Hit 'em hard, 50% of their profit! Watch the price of goods skyrocket to unimaginable levels! It'll be FUN!
Tax cuts for individuals who receive stock dividends, primarily benefitting the wealthy. Most poor and middle-class people who get dividends do so within a tax-deferred vehicle like an IRA or 401(k).
Hrm. Odd that. I do believe that this was an economic stimulus package that was designed to get people who invest into businesses in large chunks to invest even more money. Amazingly, it seems to have worked!
Must be a fluke.
Defense contractors will make a bundle replacing all the munitions and other supplies used in Iraq, during the fighting and after. Yes, Saddam is a terrible person, responsible for the deaths of at least 300,000 Iraqis, but should the US taxpayers have spent $160B (or more) to depose him?
Yes. Creating a stable democracy in the center of the Middle East will immediately begin to have an impact on the radical fundamentalists surrounding that democracy. As a matter of fact, Saudi Arabia has already begun reforms in that direction.
You DO know that most terrorists tend to be well-educated individuals who see no hope of advancing beyond their current status - which is often miserable - and have been taught to believe that this is the result of external forces, such as Israel and the United States, right? And that if they had the ability to rise as high as anyone else can, they'd be much less likely to be using aircraft to alter New York's skyline, right?
Insurance companies and drug companies both get major benefits from the prescription drug bill.
Yep. And for the first time, senior citizens without an exorbitant amount of income and/or pension-provided insurance are eligible for prescription drug benefits. Sounds like a win-win deal for me. Or are you one of those types who can't see how private citizens AND major corporations can win on the same deal?
Proposed guest-worker program has got to put downward pressure on the cost of labor.
Riiiight... All those illegal immigrants getting access to a method by which they can leave the country and return - which guarantees they'll sign up in droves - and then by the very nature of the program, suddenly earning minimum wage rather than $20/day and a nice sandwich for lunch is going to apply DOWNWARD pressure on the cost of labor? Not seeing your reasoning. In fact, I'm not sure you HAVE any reasoning.
Campaign proposals (not acted on yet) to privatize Social Security. Estimates are that as much as 20% of the money would end up in the hands of large brokerage houses as fees and expenses.
Any estimates on how much profit Social Security would then be turning? Because that's the key, you see. If Social Security can't turn a profit, no private company is going to touch it. Ergo, since it's possible and even likely, is 20% in fees to brokerage houses even a dent in the profit it will be turning? Companies don't actively try to rape everything in sight for the immediate cash; they're in business to make a profit and to CONTINUE making profit.
You, sir, need to check your preconceptions at the door and start ANALYZING what you're spewing. Preferably with a better grasp of free-market principles and a healthy dose of reality.
...and intelligent geeks file for unemployment, then use that to go out, buy more books, and learn more stuff, all the while taking a short and relaxing "vacation".
Implying that filing for unemployment is only for those people who aren't legitimately interested in their field is obnoxious, insulting, and incorrect. What Unemployment allows you to do is find a DECENT job while boning up on your skills.
Well, they're hiring for Security Analysts and Unix Admins. Go hit them up for a job - you never know, they might actually hire you.