Re:If You Want a Serious Answer... Don't Get Cute
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Rob Pike Responds
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· Score: 1
maybe he's neither pro- nor anti- IP patents and dismissed it as a loaded question. why should he be required to answer an obviously loaded question? you're obviously extremely anti-IP patents. do you know what'll happen in 10 years? no. it's possible they'll all be pointless. the nuclear arms race of the 70's-80's ended up with what? nothing. the soviet union eventually collapsed. sure it was big and scary, but in the end, nothing came of it.
so now you have big and scary corporations sucking up patents on frivilous things fighting each other over it. and what happens in the end? we'll find out i guess.
as for saying that their "invention" might be stupid or obvious, it's perfectly within the boundaries set by the law to patent something that doesn't already exist or hasn't been thought up. so while the amazon 1-click patent might seem stupid or obvious, if it's so obvious, why hasn't anyone else used the idea?
and honestly... do you hold google in that high a regard that you can say he's afraid to say he's anti-IP patents because of his employers and that makes his employers evil? come on now. google is a big corporation, they just went public, they have to keep their shareholders in mind now. do i think they'll develop stuff and leave it unpatented? they'd be stupid to do that. but given the nature of many of his other responses, i'd be willing to say he's neither pro- nor anti- IP patents.
you can undo that... it's a downloaded program file... hijackthis can get rid of that. of course, with the new windowsupdate, it only does that once and even if you don't check it off, it never comes back again.
no, the current third party candidates do not have the support ross perot had when he ran. why should we waste time on candidates who have absolutely no chance at winning? ross perot had a chance, a small one, but still a chance. the current third party candidates are too extreme, they have no chance at winning as they are virtually unknown. i never heard of either of them until i saw it on slashdot (ok, i heard of cobb when i heard nader was running independent of the green party).
a forum for guitarists should have information on everything about guitars... a forum for luthiers would have something about making/repairing guitars... they would have everything from stuff for newbies to stuff for the advanced users.
it's this elitist attitude on slashdot that makes slashdot suck. why should we not welcome newbies? should we just leave them? oh, but microsoft sucks, let the newbies read the fucking manual and learn linux on their own and have it never work, they get frustrated and they go back to microsoft. that's exactly what microsoft wants, but you're too thickheaded to realize that.
instead of being so elitist, we should welcome newbies. i, for one, am no expert on many of the things discussed on slashdot. i'm sure you don't think they should have information on evolution or other biological advances, do you? slashdot is for computer geeks. i bet i know a whole lot more about evolution than you (having a degree in evolutionary biology), but you probably know more about computers than i do. i happen to like the newbie books, but i can also do more with a computer than almost any newbie, however, i cannot program or code. i'm not a programmer, i'll admit to that. regardless.... we should welcome these people. if you don't like it, read a new technical book and write your own damn review and stop whining.
i like everything except the "allow anyone to connect to this router and access the internet" and the "ask me again in 5 days" because if those options are present... they'd be selected every time.
there should be something in there talking about scary hackers coming in and reading all your email and deleting your files or something like that.
the biggest problem i had with my AP is that when i had to enter the "password" i had to enter it as hex code. sure it could be a word, but ever 2 digits were separated, making it a bitch to enter. they need to make these things more user-friendly since wireless is far more common now... and it's a real nuisance in a college when it's serving out dhcp addresses to an entire dorm preventing a lot of people from properly accessing the network.
that actually completely agrees with what i said. i said nothing about the band getting paid a lot more for being on a major label. all i said was that they got money fronted. they got merchandise sales fronted, they got album sales fronted, they got all this money fronted that they weren't before. this gave them money at the beginning to upgrade all their equipment and stuff. in the end, it gives them less cash to take home, but up front it looks great.
of course, i also feel that the problem a lot of these bands are getting shafted is because they're just not good enough. look at bands like phish or the grateful dead. they made it through the whole recording industry and made a ton of money for themselves. sure they weren't big sellers of albums, but their concerts always sold out for years. phish just broke up after just over 20 years of playing together. they've been selling out every show probably for about 10 of those years. and that's touring almost non-stop. that can't be said for the majority of bands out there. they're music just isn't good enough, that's the problem.
the point still remains that the RIAA does front the money, but in exchange for basically stealing money that the artist deserves from royalties and stuff. i never said that they paid the bands well, i just said they fronted money, which they do, and that sounds good to people who know nothing about finances.
if discs were really as outdated as you claim, they wouldn't be actively sought out. the majority of people in the US have some sort of broadband internet connection. we can all get itunes or whatever otehr music store there is and just buy our music that way and that would put the majority of people getting digital media rather than CD's. this is how i look at it. maybe i should've stated this before. i listen to a lot of bands that allow free taping and trading of their concerts. we do most of our trading via the internet using.flac or.shn files. we then take those files, decompress them, and burn them to an audio cd. what's the point of doing the extra work when i can buy an audio cd of an album that i actually haev to pay for.
the difference between appreciation of high quality music and the "music game" as you like to call it is obvious, i agree. i don't see a need for the industry. the problem is that the largest market for music will not switch to solely buying their music online and does not listen to it on all portable devices or their computer. you also haev to remember that there are a lot of older people who listen to a lot of music and buy a lot of music, people who are unwilling to adapt. and as people get older, they'll tend to seek out better sounding music to play on more expensive equipment than their PC or their mp3 player. they're willing to pay more for music. the CD is not outdated, plain and simple. i will admit to the CD being way overpriced, but it should cost more than buying the individual tracks online to be burned to CD. this is only because it costs the consumer more money for the media and time and maybe even ink/paper to print the artwork. the industry is a business, they're not there for the music. and being mainly from the largest capitalist country in the world, it's no surprise that they're gonna charge as much as they can for CD's. but it's not an outdated distribution method. as someone already said, not everyone in the US can get broadband. some people can't even get cable TV. while the majority of the population can, a fair amount cannot. does the industry just give a big F you to those who can't and eliminate CD's? no. that's worse than suing customers (which is what this thread is really about). suing them for illegally distributing copyrighted material for free is not as bad as saying "sorry, you can't buy music anymore because you're town/county/state/whatever is unable to get with the times and provide broadband internet services to you."
and while i'm at it... there's plenty of bandwidth on most DSL connections here in the US to download music, the downstream speeds are fine, it's upstream that's limited, and that's only necessary when sharing music, like you say. it can take a while to upload a bunch of.shn files, while it's quick to download them from a high speed server. but when it comes to copyrighted music, we shouldn't be sharing it anyways, plain and simple. that's just a moot point there that you have more bandwidth than us.
until i can get small file sizes for lossless compression (shn or flac) and have those file types able to be played in all sorts of devices (from car cd players to mp3 players, the cd is what i want. the cd also adds more art to the music than just the music. what's the point of albums like "tommy" if you're not listening to the whole thing the way they intended it to be? the other problem i have is it's hard to listen to two songs with a nice segue connecting them. the bands i listen to do this at concerts and if i were to put the mp3's of the show on a device like an ipod, there'd be a gap, an unwanted gap. it ruins the flow. i'm all about the music and the sound quality. i don't want to be listening to mp3's or ogg files.
i never listen to music on my comptuer, it's either in my stereo or in my car for the best sound possible. mp3's are just plain crap. so until devices that suit my needs become mainstream enough to be affordable, i'll stick to buying cd's as they're the best solution to my problem. i don't need music anymore portable than carrying a few cd's with me in my car and putting a disc into my stereo. if they want to provide me with a way to download an album in flac or shn format that i can then burn to an audio disc, i'll accept that, but until then, cd's are it.
indies aren't as accessible (ie: not played on the radio)... indies don't necessarily produce catchy music... a lot of indie music kind of sucks.
for me, it's the music, not the label. if the band i like is on a major label, i'll buy the album anyways. of course the bands i like have managed to go on doing their own thing without worrying about pleasing the RIAA (phish and they might be giants are good examples of this).
another thing that people don't seem to realize is that while it's easy to say "go record and distribute your records yourself," it's just not that easy. the grateful dead tried to and did for a few years and then signed with arista. it can be very costly and greatly increases the overhead costs of being a band. also, not all bands starting out have the money up front to pay for studio time and pressing the discs and shipping them out and advertising. that's what the RIAA is for. it's just not that simple.
what you should be asking is why more bands aren't going to indie labels who will pay for all that overhead in exchange for a small percentage of the income rather than in exchange for their souls (their souls being the rights to the music and freedom to do with it what they choose even if the artist disagrees).
most drugs are neurochemical, taht's how they work. they may affect different chemicals at different sites in different ways, but that's generally what most do.
and if there's a neurochemical dependence, couldn't that be basically the same thing as a physical one? i have a feeling that what my parent was referring to when talking about physical vs. psychological dependency will be what you're about to explain as neurochemical dependency. i think it'll be the same as his physical (since he didn't say a thing about neurochemical dependency).
so, yes, please go into the details, at least for the difference between physical and neurochemical.
i have a couple issues with your description... first, yes, there are drugs that only have a psychological dependency (and even that's debatable). marijuana is the most obvious of these, as well as most psychedelics (psilocybin especially). alcohol does not fit in this category as serious alcoholics are physically addicted to it. i am also 75% sure that ecstasy is physically addictive as well, as i know people who have been addicted to it. also, there's a much higher percentage of people who are susceptible to dependence than just 10% of the population. maybe it's 10% for the psychological dependence, but if it's physically addictive, it will affect much more than 10%.
while i agree that most drugs should be legalized, they should also be heavily regulated. ecstasy, as a prime example, can be extremely varied by dose. a single dose could cause nothing or be extremely hazardous to your health. if it's not regulated, then people will be selling what could be nearly letal doses.
what we do to our bodies should be our decision, not the government's. the problem that remains, however, is sobriety testing, which is important. just as we shouldn't drive drunk, we shouldn't drive high or tripping either. however, thc can remain in your fatty tissue for weeks and your hair for months. how do they test you? then there's the whole crack baby thing. if it's legal, what's to stop a pregnant mother from doing it? the doctors can only suggest against drinking and smoking while pregnant, they can't legally force you to not drink or smoke since those activities are perfectly legal. a pregnant woman who does drugs can really mess up the child more easily than one who just drinks or smokes. all these things need to be thought through.
i'm all for legalizing drugs, but it can't be all at one, i think it needs to be a gradual thing. start with the least problematic (which would be marijuana as it's completely harmless aside from the tar content, you don't see people getting high and starting fights) and move up to the others (coke, ecstasy, maybe even heroin). but non-violent criminals should not be going to jail.
drugs are pretty damn expensive on the street, moreso than you can get alcohol or cigarettes for. if the government regulated them, they'd be sold at a lower cost to the consumer, but still taxed. the whole reason that the drugs are so costly is because of the "war on drugs" and because they aren't readily mass produced like alcohol and cigarettes. once they are legal, companies will get into the business (true philly blunts maybe?) and reduce the cost of production, reducing the cost to consumers. there'll still be black market, tax free stuff like there is for cigarettes and booze, but it won't be as big an issue, and more for the underaged users.
and you are correct on using tax revenue to support clinics and treatment programs. i really don't undersatnd why nicotine gum or the patch are more expensive than cigarettes. they should cost as much or less. it's the damn pharmaceuticals taht produce them that drive up the cost, not the government.
so i stole $5 from the person who dropped the $5 bill in the parking lot. no one was to be seen, it was the middle of the night. i hardly think you're right here. don't pick up a penny if you see it on the street, that's theft, leave it there, the owner might come back for it. that empty mcdonald's cup you see on the side of the road, i left it there, you pick it up and i'm making sure you suffer the worst punishment the law allows.
the only time it's wrong to use something you find is when it's a credit card, because then you're stealing someone's money/credit, literally. you can keep the card and not break the law, but to use it would be theft.
so you're wrong on all counts. the only thing left is ethics and do we really give a shit about those?
i didn't see anywhere on the site that said he was the taxi driver, just that he found the card in the taxi. how many taxi drivers do you know that are smart enough to create a blog, making the images smaller for display, and witty enough to go and make up a story on it? come on now...
as for the medallions... they are hard to get and expensive in NYC.
while that may still make a difference, it's still lossy. OGG is also quite lossy. the parent/grandparent's point was that the more popular format is becoming a crappy sounding format. why aren't they looking into making it sound great and be portable at the same time? do something more with flac since it is open source, make those filesizes smaller.
i'm also one with a large collection of CD's (no, not 500, i'm somewhere around 260, unless you count all my recorded shows and then i'm probably well over 500). I will continue to buy CD's as i not only like the sound quality, but i also like the concept of the album. there's a reason when an album is released it's released the way it is (at least with some bands). those songs are suppoed to flow together. how good would abbey road or sgt pepper be if those songs weren't listened to in that order? my only issue is the cost of the CD. it's still a ripoff. while i disagree with the RIAA, i like my music, so i'm gonna be buying CD's no matter what.
but that's sort of true... they are generally camera copies. also screeners tend to be lower quality as well, so a copy of a screener would be lower quality than what you'd buy in a store. and camera copies are only as good as the camera and the dude holding it.
freshman can have cars, they just can't get parking permits, and therefore will be ticketed/towed if they park on campus. that becomes an on-campus behavior. fraternity membership is not specifically banned by colleges, but some colleges will not approve fraternities to be recognized by the college and receive funding to become a part of the college. those are both on-campus behaviors that you speak of. come back when you have something good to say.
i think there's more hot women doing bio and nursing... i had calculus in the nursing building when i was in school...;)
then i became a bio major... talk about a 4:1 ration of females:males, and nevermind the fact taht the school was already a majority of women (which seems to be the trend, unless you're at schools like MIT or CMU which focus more on engineering type stuff).
yes, i have actually used it. and i still don't think it sucks. oh wait... i know why it sucks... it's microsoft, that's why it sucks. seriously though... microsoft isn't all crap. i still love windows 2000, and i love my microsoft optical mouse (not some dumb looking shiny thing). it's more comfortable than any other mouse i've used.
in family guy, stewie mentions an email address of loismustdie@yahoo.com. it was an actual email address related to the show. started out with pretty amusing responses, got lamer as time went on. they used it to get people to write to fox to keep family guy on the air.
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maybe he's neither pro- nor anti- IP patents and dismissed it as a loaded question. why should he be required to answer an obviously loaded question? you're obviously extremely anti-IP patents. do you know what'll happen in 10 years? no. it's possible they'll all be pointless. the nuclear arms race of the 70's-80's ended up with what? nothing. the soviet union eventually collapsed. sure it was big and scary, but in the end, nothing came of it.
so now you have big and scary corporations sucking up patents on frivilous things fighting each other over it. and what happens in the end? we'll find out i guess.
as for saying that their "invention" might be stupid or obvious, it's perfectly within the boundaries set by the law to patent something that doesn't already exist or hasn't been thought up. so while the amazon 1-click patent might seem stupid or obvious, if it's so obvious, why hasn't anyone else used the idea?
and honestly... do you hold google in that high a regard that you can say he's afraid to say he's anti-IP patents because of his employers and that makes his employers evil? come on now. google is a big corporation, they just went public, they have to keep their shareholders in mind now. do i think they'll develop stuff and leave it unpatented? they'd be stupid to do that. but given the nature of many of his other responses, i'd be willing to say he's neither pro- nor anti- IP patents.
you can undo that... it's a downloaded program file... hijackthis can get rid of that. of course, with the new windowsupdate, it only does that once and even if you don't check it off, it never comes back again.
no, the current third party candidates do not have the support ross perot had when he ran. why should we waste time on candidates who have absolutely no chance at winning? ross perot had a chance, a small one, but still a chance. the current third party candidates are too extreme, they have no chance at winning as they are virtually unknown. i never heard of either of them until i saw it on slashdot (ok, i heard of cobb when i heard nader was running independent of the green party).
when did a nerd become someone who knew it all?
a forum for guitarists should have information on everything about guitars... a forum for luthiers would have something about making/repairing guitars... they would have everything from stuff for newbies to stuff for the advanced users.
it's this elitist attitude on slashdot that makes slashdot suck. why should we not welcome newbies? should we just leave them? oh, but microsoft sucks, let the newbies read the fucking manual and learn linux on their own and have it never work, they get frustrated and they go back to microsoft. that's exactly what microsoft wants, but you're too thickheaded to realize that.
instead of being so elitist, we should welcome newbies. i, for one, am no expert on many of the things discussed on slashdot. i'm sure you don't think they should have information on evolution or other biological advances, do you? slashdot is for computer geeks. i bet i know a whole lot more about evolution than you (having a degree in evolutionary biology), but you probably know more about computers than i do. i happen to like the newbie books, but i can also do more with a computer than almost any newbie, however, i cannot program or code. i'm not a programmer, i'll admit to that. regardless.... we should welcome these people. if you don't like it, read a new technical book and write your own damn review and stop whining.
i like everything except the "allow anyone to connect to this router and access the internet" and the "ask me again in 5 days" because if those options are present... they'd be selected every time.
there should be something in there talking about scary hackers coming in and reading all your email and deleting your files or something like that.
the biggest problem i had with my AP is that when i had to enter the "password" i had to enter it as hex code. sure it could be a word, but ever 2 digits were separated, making it a bitch to enter. they need to make these things more user-friendly since wireless is far more common now... and it's a real nuisance in a college when it's serving out dhcp addresses to an entire dorm preventing a lot of people from properly accessing the network.
bass ale is british... as is newcastle... what's wrong with these 2 beers? they're both ales... i agree, lagers suck, but ales are great.
that actually completely agrees with what i said. i said nothing about the band getting paid a lot more for being on a major label. all i said was that they got money fronted. they got merchandise sales fronted, they got album sales fronted, they got all this money fronted that they weren't before. this gave them money at the beginning to upgrade all their equipment and stuff. in the end, it gives them less cash to take home, but up front it looks great.
of course, i also feel that the problem a lot of these bands are getting shafted is because they're just not good enough. look at bands like phish or the grateful dead. they made it through the whole recording industry and made a ton of money for themselves. sure they weren't big sellers of albums, but their concerts always sold out for years. phish just broke up after just over 20 years of playing together. they've been selling out every show probably for about 10 of those years. and that's touring almost non-stop. that can't be said for the majority of bands out there. they're music just isn't good enough, that's the problem.
the point still remains that the RIAA does front the money, but in exchange for basically stealing money that the artist deserves from royalties and stuff. i never said that they paid the bands well, i just said they fronted money, which they do, and that sounds good to people who know nothing about finances.
if discs were really as outdated as you claim, they wouldn't be actively sought out. the majority of people in the US have some sort of broadband internet connection. we can all get itunes or whatever otehr music store there is and just buy our music that way and that would put the majority of people getting digital media rather than CD's. this is how i look at it. maybe i should've stated this before. i listen to a lot of bands that allow free taping and trading of their concerts. we do most of our trading via the internet using .flac or .shn files. we then take those files, decompress them, and burn them to an audio cd. what's the point of doing the extra work when i can buy an audio cd of an album that i actually haev to pay for.
.shn files, while it's quick to download them from a high speed server. but when it comes to copyrighted music, we shouldn't be sharing it anyways, plain and simple. that's just a moot point there that you have more bandwidth than us.
the difference between appreciation of high quality music and the "music game" as you like to call it is obvious, i agree. i don't see a need for the industry. the problem is that the largest market for music will not switch to solely buying their music online and does not listen to it on all portable devices or their computer. you also haev to remember that there are a lot of older people who listen to a lot of music and buy a lot of music, people who are unwilling to adapt. and as people get older, they'll tend to seek out better sounding music to play on more expensive equipment than their PC or their mp3 player. they're willing to pay more for music. the CD is not outdated, plain and simple. i will admit to the CD being way overpriced, but it should cost more than buying the individual tracks online to be burned to CD. this is only because it costs the consumer more money for the media and time and maybe even ink/paper to print the artwork. the industry is a business, they're not there for the music. and being mainly from the largest capitalist country in the world, it's no surprise that they're gonna charge as much as they can for CD's. but it's not an outdated distribution method. as someone already said, not everyone in the US can get broadband. some people can't even get cable TV. while the majority of the population can, a fair amount cannot. does the industry just give a big F you to those who can't and eliminate CD's? no. that's worse than suing customers (which is what this thread is really about). suing them for illegally distributing copyrighted material for free is not as bad as saying "sorry, you can't buy music anymore because you're town/county/state/whatever is unable to get with the times and provide broadband internet services to you."
and while i'm at it... there's plenty of bandwidth on most DSL connections here in the US to download music, the downstream speeds are fine, it's upstream that's limited, and that's only necessary when sharing music, like you say. it can take a while to upload a bunch of
until i can get small file sizes for lossless compression (shn or flac) and have those file types able to be played in all sorts of devices (from car cd players to mp3 players, the cd is what i want. the cd also adds more art to the music than just the music. what's the point of albums like "tommy" if you're not listening to the whole thing the way they intended it to be? the other problem i have is it's hard to listen to two songs with a nice segue connecting them. the bands i listen to do this at concerts and if i were to put the mp3's of the show on a device like an ipod, there'd be a gap, an unwanted gap. it ruins the flow. i'm all about the music and the sound quality. i don't want to be listening to mp3's or ogg files.
i never listen to music on my comptuer, it's either in my stereo or in my car for the best sound possible. mp3's are just plain crap. so until devices that suit my needs become mainstream enough to be affordable, i'll stick to buying cd's as they're the best solution to my problem. i don't need music anymore portable than carrying a few cd's with me in my car and putting a disc into my stereo. if they want to provide me with a way to download an album in flac or shn format that i can then burn to an audio disc, i'll accept that, but until then, cd's are it.
indies aren't as accessible (ie: not played on the radio)... indies don't necessarily produce catchy music... a lot of indie music kind of sucks.
for me, it's the music, not the label. if the band i like is on a major label, i'll buy the album anyways. of course the bands i like have managed to go on doing their own thing without worrying about pleasing the RIAA (phish and they might be giants are good examples of this).
another thing that people don't seem to realize is that while it's easy to say "go record and distribute your records yourself," it's just not that easy. the grateful dead tried to and did for a few years and then signed with arista. it can be very costly and greatly increases the overhead costs of being a band. also, not all bands starting out have the money up front to pay for studio time and pressing the discs and shipping them out and advertising. that's what the RIAA is for. it's just not that simple.
what you should be asking is why more bands aren't going to indie labels who will pay for all that overhead in exchange for a small percentage of the income rather than in exchange for their souls (their souls being the rights to the music and freedom to do with it what they choose even if the artist disagrees).
canada?
most drugs are neurochemical, taht's how they work. they may affect different chemicals at different sites in different ways, but that's generally what most do.
and if there's a neurochemical dependence, couldn't that be basically the same thing as a physical one? i have a feeling that what my parent was referring to when talking about physical vs. psychological dependency will be what you're about to explain as neurochemical dependency. i think it'll be the same as his physical (since he didn't say a thing about neurochemical dependency).
so, yes, please go into the details, at least for the difference between physical and neurochemical.
i have a couple issues with your description... first, yes, there are drugs that only have a psychological dependency (and even that's debatable). marijuana is the most obvious of these, as well as most psychedelics (psilocybin especially). alcohol does not fit in this category as serious alcoholics are physically addicted to it. i am also 75% sure that ecstasy is physically addictive as well, as i know people who have been addicted to it. also, there's a much higher percentage of people who are susceptible to dependence than just 10% of the population. maybe it's 10% for the psychological dependence, but if it's physically addictive, it will affect much more than 10%.
while i agree that most drugs should be legalized, they should also be heavily regulated. ecstasy, as a prime example, can be extremely varied by dose. a single dose could cause nothing or be extremely hazardous to your health. if it's not regulated, then people will be selling what could be nearly letal doses.
what we do to our bodies should be our decision, not the government's. the problem that remains, however, is sobriety testing, which is important. just as we shouldn't drive drunk, we shouldn't drive high or tripping either. however, thc can remain in your fatty tissue for weeks and your hair for months. how do they test you? then there's the whole crack baby thing. if it's legal, what's to stop a pregnant mother from doing it? the doctors can only suggest against drinking and smoking while pregnant, they can't legally force you to not drink or smoke since those activities are perfectly legal. a pregnant woman who does drugs can really mess up the child more easily than one who just drinks or smokes. all these things need to be thought through.
i'm all for legalizing drugs, but it can't be all at one, i think it needs to be a gradual thing. start with the least problematic (which would be marijuana as it's completely harmless aside from the tar content, you don't see people getting high and starting fights) and move up to the others (coke, ecstasy, maybe even heroin). but non-violent criminals should not be going to jail.
drugs are pretty damn expensive on the street, moreso than you can get alcohol or cigarettes for. if the government regulated them, they'd be sold at a lower cost to the consumer, but still taxed. the whole reason that the drugs are so costly is because of the "war on drugs" and because they aren't readily mass produced like alcohol and cigarettes. once they are legal, companies will get into the business (true philly blunts maybe?) and reduce the cost of production, reducing the cost to consumers. there'll still be black market, tax free stuff like there is for cigarettes and booze, but it won't be as big an issue, and more for the underaged users.
and you are correct on using tax revenue to support clinics and treatment programs. i really don't undersatnd why nicotine gum or the patch are more expensive than cigarettes. they should cost as much or less. it's the damn pharmaceuticals taht produce them that drive up the cost, not the government.
so i stole $5 from the person who dropped the $5 bill in the parking lot. no one was to be seen, it was the middle of the night. i hardly think you're right here. don't pick up a penny if you see it on the street, that's theft, leave it there, the owner might come back for it. that empty mcdonald's cup you see on the side of the road, i left it there, you pick it up and i'm making sure you suffer the worst punishment the law allows.
the only time it's wrong to use something you find is when it's a credit card, because then you're stealing someone's money/credit, literally. you can keep the card and not break the law, but to use it would be theft.
so you're wrong on all counts. the only thing left is ethics and do we really give a shit about those?
i didn't see anywhere on the site that said he was the taxi driver, just that he found the card in the taxi. how many taxi drivers do you know that are smart enough to create a blog, making the images smaller for display, and witty enough to go and make up a story on it? come on now...
as for the medallions... they are hard to get and expensive in NYC.
while that may still make a difference, it's still lossy. OGG is also quite lossy. the parent/grandparent's point was that the more popular format is becoming a crappy sounding format. why aren't they looking into making it sound great and be portable at the same time? do something more with flac since it is open source, make those filesizes smaller.
i'm also one with a large collection of CD's (no, not 500, i'm somewhere around 260, unless you count all my recorded shows and then i'm probably well over 500). I will continue to buy CD's as i not only like the sound quality, but i also like the concept of the album. there's a reason when an album is released it's released the way it is (at least with some bands). those songs are suppoed to flow together. how good would abbey road or sgt pepper be if those songs weren't listened to in that order? my only issue is the cost of the CD. it's still a ripoff. while i disagree with the RIAA, i like my music, so i'm gonna be buying CD's no matter what.
but that's sort of true... they are generally camera copies. also screeners tend to be lower quality as well, so a copy of a screener would be lower quality than what you'd buy in a store. and camera copies are only as good as the camera and the dude holding it.
freshman can have cars, they just can't get parking permits, and therefore will be ticketed/towed if they park on campus. that becomes an on-campus behavior. fraternity membership is not specifically banned by colleges, but some colleges will not approve fraternities to be recognized by the college and receive funding to become a part of the college. those are both on-campus behaviors that you speak of. come back when you have something good to say.
i think there's more hot women doing bio and nursing... i had calculus in the nursing building when i was in school... ;)
then i became a bio major... talk about a 4:1 ration of females:males, and nevermind the fact taht the school was already a majority of women (which seems to be the trend, unless you're at schools like MIT or CMU which focus more on engineering type stuff).
yes, i have actually used it. and i still don't think it sucks. oh wait... i know why it sucks... it's microsoft, that's why it sucks. seriously though... microsoft isn't all crap. i still love windows 2000, and i love my microsoft optical mouse (not some dumb looking shiny thing). it's more comfortable than any other mouse i've used.
why does word suck? how does it suck? i use it everyday, i don't seem to have any issues with it, nevermind to say that it sucks.
.yad lla nees ev'I gniht tseinnuF .gnisuma etiuq saw tahT
i'm pretty sure the new episodes haven't been released yet. i think what you're seeing is just re-runs of the first 3 seasons.
in family guy, stewie mentions an email address of loismustdie@yahoo.com. it was an actual email address related to the show. started out with pretty amusing responses, got lamer as time went on. they used it to get people to write to fox to keep family guy on the air.