I think the last remark should be modded up.
How can someone complain about the lack of demos on consoles when Console game rentals have existed for at least 6 years? Demos on computer games have been around for a long time, but were very uncommon until shareware doom/heretic showed that you can make money on a game despite having a playable version of it. Within 3 years, most games had a demo version out there.
Why would you agree if you rarely buy new games & play older games like Zork & Mario Brothers 2?
The entertainment value is nonsense. If Atari put their 5200 or 2600 on sale again, or Jaguar, it wouldnt sell very well. The old nintendo or super nintendo or sega systems may have a lot of entertainment value to some people, but you'd be hard pressed to convince nintendo or sega to sell these consoles again.
If it's got value, why is the company not realizing any of it? Why not release the software for money? Yes, that costs money, but if they don't release it, they make no money off this product.
There's 1 thing I do not understand about the generation of spam.
I've got accounts on several places, and it makes sense that if my email address were made public somehow (ie usenet, forums like this, etc.) then spmmers can easily retrieve my address & send mail. (hense the Yahooo instead of proper yahoo in my email).
Here's the part I dont get. I open an account on hotmail, or AOL... especially AOL, and the emails come pouring in. Porn, Herbal Viagra, all sorts of crap I didn't ask for. And I didn't broadcast the addresses to anyone. So how did they find me? I don't get it.
I believe you're correct, regarding the use of stolen cc's and the like, but can't these people then get thrown in jail? Last time I checked, credit card fraud was illegal, and shouldn't we be seeing a bigger effort made to stopping that sort of thing?
Now look at English. As more and more people speak it, they brutualize Standard English. The English spoken in Malaysia is nothing like the English spoken in Vermont. It's not english, it's malaysianglish.
People argue "Oh, but they just have bad accents." WRONG.
RIGHT. They have an accent that people not from that area are unaccostomed to and do not understand. Even your next sentence admits as much:
They are speaking English using the pronunciation rules of Javanese (langauge of Malaysia). Further, words and phrases completely unknown in English are used.
Look no further than the US. Take that South Dakotan and place him in the South Side of Chichago.
Take a Nu Yawkah, put in someone from Lang EyeLand, get a Chowdahhead from Bahstan, get a Texan, a Canadian, an Australian, a Brit and someone from Nowrth Carolahnah all together in a room, and while there will be a bunch of "huh"'s here and there, they'd all be able to understand much of what's being said. And CERTAINLY they would understand what was WRITTEN in english.
Well, a few problems come to mind. My mom, due to economics and discrimination, did not go to school beyond the second grade. She does not read English, but she reads Spanish. Should she be denied the right to vote just because she cannot read the ballot that is printed in English?
She should be educated in a manner so she can understand english. There are people who are illiterate; does having a ballot they can't read any more discriminatory against them?
I would be willing to have a reasonable discussion about having an official language, but if you look at the various demagogues that espouse "English Only" or "English First" you will see that they are just barely to the left of neo-Nazi skinheads, albeit with better clothes and haircuts...
As opposed to the demogogues who decry anyone supporting English as a national language as automatically being a Nazi or a racist? Just 2 posts ago, you equated the following with Naziism:
We simply cannot learn that many languages to accomodate so many foreign cultures, but the immigrants can afford to learn one language if they choose to live here!
(your exact comment was "Hmmm.... I've heard those words somewhere before... Rush? Pat? Adolph?")
If they're so concerned about the purity of the language, their focus shouldn't be on the use of non-spanish words on the net or as tech jargon, but instead focus on teaching students proper spanish in the schools, and focus on broadcasting spanish speakers who speak the language properly instead of the muddled, mungled "spanglish" or whatever variation of spanish that they are objecting to. I don't believe for a minute that the lack of spanish words/terms to describe CGI, HTML, URLs, etc. is going to make spanish vanish. But if students aren't learning the language properly, that would/will.
Why? Is the average American so much dumber than the average European? Or many Canadians and Latin Americans?
When I went to Canada (Quebec City) there was no shortage of people who spoke French only. There were those who were Bilingual- if you work in restaurants where English & French spearkers frequent, that'd be very helpful I'm sure. But I don't believe the western provinces and much of Ontario is very bi or multi-lingual.
As far as US vs Latin America, I don't for a second believe that there are fewer bilinguals in the US than in South America.
Or me?:-> I think the reason more Americans don't learn other languages is sheer intellectual laziness...
Or a lack of need to. In Europe, in areas where there's little interaction with people who don't speak the local language, I'm sure the locals don't know anything but the provincial tongue. It's no different anywhere around the world I'm sure.
Many high schools do mandate some sort of foreign language instruction-typically Spanish, but if you don't use it, you lose it.
Absentee Ballots do get counted. You will see modifications made to the popular vote totals, but you certainly won't see the sort of scrutiny of California, New York, Texas or Illinois as you saw in Florida because in those states, the margins were not close.
I'd like to add to this... if you enjoyed Florida, imagine Bush demanding recounts all over the country, in an attempt to find another 200,000 votes to catch up to Gore. Nader could demand recounts to scrounge up the additional votes to get 5% for his party for matching funds. And I don't think that'd be a good thing, to have Florida at a national level.
Gore didn't get 50% +1 of the vote; he got a plurality.
As far as trusting the people, I don't think it's unreasonable to not trust people who are eating "chads" or otherwise handling the ballots, looking for dents, dimples, pregnant, aborted, swinging, hanging or buffeted chads.
A browser that doesn't crash every time I use it for longer than 20 minutes?
I know that MSIE is supposed to have "taken over" my system, and whenever an IE browser crashes, it takes down the whole system, while Netscape doesn't do this. My experience is the opposite however. Your milelage may vary.
In the 80s, home computers were not as popular as they are today. It wasn't until the 90s that computers appeared in 50% of homes today. During the 80s, computers were difficult to use (compared to today) and largely incompatible with one another; Commodore owners could not share floppies with PC or Apple or Atari users. Microsoft created a product (Dos) that was largely used in business, and eventually people caught on that bringing work home would be a selling point to having a computer in the home- an extension of the "kids should have the same computer at home as they have in school" idea which drove sales of Apple computers.
Actually I've found Netscape 6 to crash virtually every session I use it. And when it crashes on me in win98, I will be forced to reboot within a few minutes if I expect to open up any applications due to instability in my session. My experience with IE crashing is that while there are times when it will crash and bring down the whole system with it, that occurs far less frequently than Netscape 6 has done.
In fact, in the 2 days I've had netscape 6, I was forced to reinstall it once, and have had to reboot my computer ~12 times in the past 48 hours due to Netscape related crashes. MSIE, I've found, has crashed maybe 6 times in the past week (and another 15 times regular 'explorer' has crashed, or hung, or otherwise became unstable.)
That's pretty stupid. Not all military wives are registered to vote in the same state as their husbands; my supervisor registered in California while her husband (navy Corspman) would've registered in Florida, and done the absentee thing. (He didn't vote, so I encouraged her to needle him endlessly, especially given how close the florida vote is, and his dislike of Gore/Clinton. That's another story though)
Regarding the "suspicious" votes by these elderly people who may or may not have screwed up... unless they retained the tabs from their ballots, there's no way to determine what ballot was cast by what old, young, middle aged, hispanic, black or white person in that county. You sure as hell don't put your name on the ballot, how the hell can they prove that someone voted for Buchanan instead of Gore?
And if they want to revote, they need to revote the entire state. And if we're going to revote Florida, why not revote everywhere?
Maybe by voting for Nader, those 70,000 or so voters will send a message to Gore et all not to sell them out. Otherwise, supporting or voting for a 3rd party candidate becomes a meaningless act.
Yes, and I'm so sure that they polled all 3 million voters (plus the absentee voters) from the state of California. And they NEVER get the predictions wrong...
Actually, I'm a research scientist and I really like my job.
The reason why I've gone MS is that I don't have time to do any CS admin stuff or learn some cryptic command line interface. I need tools for writing articles, processing data and creating figures as well as creating seminar/conference presentations.
Ok... I don't understand the need for Word/Excel to work seamlessly together. At my job I use excel or word usually to look at reports, or publish a report. If we dropped Word and went to Ami Pro or word perfect or text files, it wouldn't affect me much at all, and I don't utilize anything in either s/w package that would require "seamlessness".
I'd wager most people would fit in the same boat; the only things stopping people from switching apps are "look & feel", the lack of a real need to do so, and being used to a specific set of keystrokes to perform a task. And 1/2 of the time, instead of using Word, I use wordpad.
So do I. Thing is, by the time I got a cable modem, @home (cox@home here) seems to have disabled or otherwise eliminated by port blocking (i think) many of the services that you would use to link your computer with others- ie accessing my printer, etc.
The down side was to make it more difficult for me to share printers within my home LAN, but more savvy LAN-geeks suggested that I use netbui instead of trying TCPIP only.
Eventually I'll do a router with bsd, but i dont have the spare hardware at this time.
Working >40 hours is overtime, for good reason.
Occassional overtime may be necessary, and working 45 hour weeks routinely doesn't strike me as being very unreasonable. Once you reach the 50 hours or more threshold, then you're talking about the company being patently unfair, unless they're compensating (with paid time off that would be seperate from any 'earned time off'.)
I agree... this death of gnutella is silly considering it's beta software and hasn't even reached version 1.0 yet for crying out loud.
I've had problems using gnutella, so I don't. I find it to be a waste of my time, and I suspect that most people trying it for the 1st time will be inclined to do the same, until Napster and it's alternatives (scour, mx, etc) go away... IF they go away.
Eventually Gnutella or its clone apps will improve in quality to where the program becomes useful for newbies and presumably this broken code will be fixed by then.
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I think the last remark should be modded up. How can someone complain about the lack of demos on consoles when Console game rentals have existed for at least 6 years? Demos on computer games have been around for a long time, but were very uncommon until shareware doom/heretic showed that you can make money on a game despite having a playable version of it. Within 3 years, most games had a demo version out there.
Why would you agree if you rarely buy new games & play older games like Zork & Mario Brothers 2? The entertainment value is nonsense. If Atari put their 5200 or 2600 on sale again, or Jaguar, it wouldnt sell very well. The old nintendo or super nintendo or sega systems may have a lot of entertainment value to some people, but you'd be hard pressed to convince nintendo or sega to sell these consoles again.
If it's got value, why is the company not realizing any of it? Why not release the software for money? Yes, that costs money, but if they don't release it, they make no money off this product.
There's 1 thing I do not understand about the generation of spam. I've got accounts on several places, and it makes sense that if my email address were made public somehow (ie usenet, forums like this, etc.) then spmmers can easily retrieve my address & send mail. (hense the Yahooo instead of proper yahoo in my email). Here's the part I dont get. I open an account on hotmail, or AOL... especially AOL, and the emails come pouring in. Porn, Herbal Viagra, all sorts of crap I didn't ask for. And I didn't broadcast the addresses to anyone. So how did they find me? I don't get it.
I believe you're correct, regarding the use of stolen cc's and the like, but can't these people then get thrown in jail? Last time I checked, credit card fraud was illegal, and shouldn't we be seeing a bigger effort made to stopping that sort of thing?
Now look at English. As more and more people speak it, they brutualize Standard English. The English spoken in Malaysia is nothing like the English spoken in Vermont. It's not english, it's malaysianglish.
People argue "Oh, but they just have bad accents." WRONG. RIGHT. They have an accent that people not from that area are unaccostomed to and do not understand. Even your next sentence admits as much:
They are speaking English using the pronunciation rules of Javanese (langauge of Malaysia). Further, words and phrases completely unknown in English are used.
Look no further than the US. Take that South Dakotan and place him in the South Side of Chichago. Take a Nu Yawkah, put in someone from Lang EyeLand, get a Chowdahhead from Bahstan, get a Texan, a Canadian, an Australian, a Brit and someone from Nowrth Carolahnah all together in a room, and while there will be a bunch of "huh"'s here and there, they'd all be able to understand much of what's being said. And CERTAINLY they would understand what was WRITTEN in english.
Well, a few problems come to mind. My mom, due to economics and discrimination, did not go to school beyond the second grade. She does not read English, but she reads Spanish. Should she be denied the right to vote just because she cannot read the ballot that is printed in English?
She should be educated in a manner so she can understand english. There are people who are illiterate; does having a ballot they can't read any more discriminatory against them?
I would be willing to have a reasonable discussion about having an official language, but if you look at the various demagogues that espouse "English Only" or "English First" you will see that they are just barely to the left of neo-Nazi skinheads, albeit with better clothes and haircuts...
As opposed to the demogogues who decry anyone supporting English as a national language as automatically being a Nazi or a racist? Just 2 posts ago, you equated the following with Naziism:
We simply cannot learn that many languages to accomodate so many foreign cultures, but the immigrants can afford to learn one language if they choose to live here!
(your exact comment was "Hmmm.... I've heard those words somewhere before... Rush? Pat? Adolph?")
Why? Is the average American so much dumber than the average European? Or many Canadians and Latin Americans?
When I went to Canada (Quebec City) there was no shortage of people who spoke French only. There were those who were Bilingual- if you work in restaurants where English & French spearkers frequent, that'd be very helpful I'm sure. But I don't believe the western provinces and much of Ontario is very bi or multi-lingual.
As far as US vs Latin America, I don't for a second believe that there are fewer bilinguals in the US than in South America.
Or me? :-> I think the reason more Americans don't learn other languages is sheer intellectual laziness...
Or a lack of need to. In Europe, in areas where there's little interaction with people who don't speak the local language, I'm sure the locals don't know anything but the provincial tongue. It's no different anywhere around the world I'm sure.
Many high schools do mandate some sort of foreign language instruction-typically Spanish, but if you don't use it, you lose it.
Absentee Ballots do get counted. You will see modifications made to the popular vote totals, but you certainly won't see the sort of scrutiny of California, New York, Texas or Illinois as you saw in Florida because in those states, the margins were not close.
I'd like to add to this... if you enjoyed Florida, imagine Bush demanding recounts all over the country, in an attempt to find another 200,000 votes to catch up to Gore. Nader could demand recounts to scrounge up the additional votes to get 5% for his party for matching funds. And I don't think that'd be a good thing, to have Florida at a national level.
Gore didn't get 50% +1 of the vote; he got a plurality.
As far as trusting the people, I don't think it's unreasonable to not trust people who are eating "chads" or otherwise handling the ballots, looking for dents, dimples, pregnant, aborted, swinging, hanging or buffeted chads.
I know that MSIE is supposed to have "taken over" my system, and whenever an IE browser crashes, it takes down the whole system, while Netscape doesn't do this. My experience is the opposite however. Your milelage may vary.
In the 80s, home computers were not as popular as they are today. It wasn't until the 90s that computers appeared in 50% of homes today. During the 80s, computers were difficult to use (compared to today) and largely incompatible with one another; Commodore owners could not share floppies with PC or Apple or Atari users. Microsoft created a product (Dos) that was largely used in business, and eventually people caught on that bringing work home would be a selling point to having a computer in the home- an extension of the "kids should have the same computer at home as they have in school" idea which drove sales of Apple computers.
In fact, in the 2 days I've had netscape 6, I was forced to reinstall it once, and have had to reboot my computer ~12 times in the past 48 hours due to Netscape related crashes. MSIE, I've found, has crashed maybe 6 times in the past week (and another 15 times regular 'explorer' has crashed, or hung, or otherwise became unstable.)
That's pretty stupid. Not all military wives are registered to vote in the same state as their husbands; my supervisor registered in California while her husband (navy Corspman) would've registered in Florida, and done the absentee thing. (He didn't vote, so I encouraged her to needle him endlessly, especially given how close the florida vote is, and his dislike of Gore/Clinton. That's another story though)
Or Bush votes went to Buchanan....
Not a revote, but a recount. Big difference.
And if they want to revote, they need to revote the entire state. And if we're going to revote Florida, why not revote everywhere?
Maybe by voting for Nader, those 70,000 or so voters will send a message to Gore et all not to sell them out. Otherwise, supporting or voting for a 3rd party candidate becomes a meaningless act.
Yes, and I'm so sure that they polled all 3 million voters (plus the absentee voters) from the state of California. And they NEVER get the predictions wrong...
Actually, I'm a research scientist and I really like my job.
The reason why I've gone MS is that I don't have time to do any CS admin stuff or learn some cryptic command line interface. I need tools for writing articles, processing data and creating figures as well as creating seminar/conference presentations.
Ok... I don't understand the need for Word/Excel to work seamlessly together. At my job I use excel or word usually to look at reports, or publish a report. If we dropped Word and went to Ami Pro or word perfect or text files, it wouldn't affect me much at all, and I don't utilize anything in either s/w package that would require "seamlessness".
I'd wager most people would fit in the same boat; the only things stopping people from switching apps are "look & feel", the lack of a real need to do so, and being used to a specific set of keystrokes to perform a task. And 1/2 of the time, instead of using Word, I use wordpad.
The down side was to make it more difficult for me to share printers within my home LAN, but more savvy LAN-geeks suggested that I use netbui instead of trying TCPIP only.
Eventually I'll do a router with bsd, but i dont have the spare hardware at this time.
Working >40 hours is overtime, for good reason. Occassional overtime may be necessary, and working 45 hour weeks routinely doesn't strike me as being very unreasonable. Once you reach the 50 hours or more threshold, then you're talking about the company being patently unfair, unless they're compensating (with paid time off that would be seperate from any 'earned time off'.)
You shouldn't be afraid of big government, you should be afraid of big corporations. They're running the government, anyway.
Be prudent and fear both. Don't assume that Corporations are to be feared while Gov't is not. Don't assume the converse is also true.
As far as taking back control of the country, I think Browne is a better choice than Nader
I've had problems using gnutella, so I don't. I find it to be a waste of my time, and I suspect that most people trying it for the 1st time will be inclined to do the same, until Napster and it's alternatives (scour, mx, etc) go away... IF they go away.
Eventually Gnutella or its clone apps will improve in quality to where the program becomes useful for newbies and presumably this broken code will be fixed by then.