I generally agree with everything you said except "the truth is that all areas in America assign high/strict penalties to people who get caught drinking and driving"... When I was in court (not drunk driving related) a few weeks ago there was a video played for all those who where there for that. The tape stated that the first offense within a 7 year period was a $500 fine. The second was a $1000 fine. The third was up to $5000, jail, and either a license suspension or an interlock device. This was for people who got lucky and did not kill anybody, those who do get felonies and include prison time for manslaughter and up to $10000 fine. The later is strict enforcement, the former I do not think is. Even so it's really up to the judge, whom from what I have seen will hand a lesser punishment to get a quick guilty plea and get them out of the court. I know a guy who got to his fifth DUI before getting his license taken away... thats just crazy!
If you drive drunk you should probably do some time, maybe six months tops with work release or something. Its really not that hard to call a cab or have a friend drive you home... the bar I go to will even pay the cab fees for the first 5 miles.
"Fraud Alert: The Slashdot story seems to be without support elsewhere. It may be a paid Slashvertisement. "
Here are just a few: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121452148199808879.html http://www.eastvalleytribune.com/story/120243 http://www.myjournalcourier.com/articles/apparently_18892___article.html/nancy_called.html http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/archives/2008/07/congress_banning_social_media/ http://www.rockymountainnews.com/news/2008/jul/06/fairness-or-censorship/ http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=27338 http://www.newsroomamerica.com/politics/story.php?id=422649
Exactly! I do not feel that I was wronged in any way. I do not feel I should be in receipt of any payment. Therefor I refuse to collect my $5. I feel I am making a statement by not collecting. Does anyone know of a way I can make that more well defined? I don't want to collect, but there is potential that my outstanding payment gets chalked up in a group of people that they assume don't know about the payment. I know about it, I just don't want it because I don't agree with it... how does one make that known to the court?
We use the ocean water just to cool the reactor... Its perfectly safe without any material getting into the ocean. I can't say I would agree with dumping the actual waste product _into_ the water. A better idea would be to bury it. France puts their waste into a man made pool in a secure building where it wont possibly contaminate the water supply.
In California we have this beach in San Onofre where the ocean water is used to cool the reactors. I've swam in this water, countless millions of others have, without one single link to cancer or any other problems. In fact I prefer this beach to others... the water is quite warm!
"Maybe someone should tell MADD that they would probably have better luck getting their message out if they didn't take positions that are somewhere between sophomoric and insane."
You mean to tell me that menopausal women can take positions that are not sophomoric and insane?
Now they have a place to go (ISS) but they are canceling the shuttle with no spacecraft to replace it. I wouldn't be this bitter at least they had something replacing it.
Um... take a look at the Orion spacecraft. This will be the replacement for the shuttle program. The shuttle program was started to help build and travel to the ISS. Now with the ISS out of the way NASA will realign for missions to the moon and mars, including plans for this moon base you seem to want. In fact test are underway in Antarctica for prototypes of habitats for the moon base. Orion (along with some very neat robotics) is what's planned to get us there. We will have a five year gap between the end of life for the shuttle program and first launch of the Orion. By 2020 NASA plans to return to the moon. You can see some details on wikipedia, along with about a dozen shows on discovery channel about this new spacecraft.
As an aside, I believe you're right on one point. Eventually NASA will no longer have such a strong role in space. For that matter I believe your scope is off as neither the ESA or the Russian Federal Space Program can hang around much longer at their current support levels and efficiency. I'd be shocked though if China ever does anything more than put up some more advanced spy sats. Private enterprise will eventually fill the gaps with more efficiency and innovation we just don't see out of these federal programs. While the federal programs will be stripped down and merged into the military of their respective governments.
Good points, but even beyond the 4-5 year support period I know I can still pop in a game I bought and it'll still work. I have an Atari, Genesis and a Dreamcast that still work! If they had not been stolen my NES, SNES and N64 would likely still be working today as well. Try picking up a 20 year old PC game and running it under even Windows XP, good luck! You make a good point I had not even thought about until now, with the PC not only do you have to worry about upgrades but also backwards compatibility to keep using what you've already paid for. My Father hung on to Windows98 up until six months ago just because some of his games would not work.
For gaming, consoles are about as "Just Works" (no Xbox jokes, thanks) as you get. For people who lack computer expertise, but like playing games, how can PCs beat that for the time being?
It "Just Works" is not just people who lack computer experience. There is a growing group of us that are technical and have abandoned the PC as a gaming platform. For me it came down to two major issues. 1) I could not stand buying hardware every six months just for video games. A top of the line video card here, and some RAM there, for what? So I can play some new fancy game? At some point it just stopped making sense. I don't need an uber powerful computer to do my day to day work related tasks. All I need is a browser, email and a dozen or so terminal windows. For the little time I do spend playing games it's just not worth it. 2) *Mostly* Windows only. I hate it. It started becoming a blocker to doing day to day work. After years of blue screens, random data loss, faulty drivers, the horrible transition to Windows98 I gave up and have never looked back. Games should be fun! Fixing / updating / upgrading a computer is not fun when I just spent all day doing that at work. Yeah, I use the "just works" excuse, but not for lack of experience.
When I hit submit I realized someone has to have had a good experience with iTMS, unfortunately it was not me. I was simply told I should have backed up and that they where sorry my pc notebook had taken a dump. As someone else in this thread pointed out, it's the few tight wad support people that make the bad PR moves for the rest of the company. Sure it's a policy of theirs but I imagine policies like this are more designed to stop the would be abusers. Maybe I was thought to be one, or maybe the guy was just a hard ass about it. I certainly believe Apple is a pretty good company in general, as your mother saw, and she repaid that goodness in dollars. As a result, I on the other hand decided to sign up for Yahoo's music service and wrote off the whole downloading local copies of music all together. In the end though it made the most sense for me and who knows maybe I'd have ended up switching anyway. Loosing my music collection with no option to get it back made that decision that much easier however. I'm glad to hear they bent the rules for your mother, it's nice to know there are still some decent people working out there in IT helpdesk land.
I've never run across an online marketplace that doesn't include some provision for restoring purchased content that the buyer can prove he purchased
Let me introduce you to iTunes Music Store. An otherwise great service with no way to redownload previous purchases, if say for example your macbook crashes.
Nah, I'd have not checked the "No karma bonus" for higher visibility if I where looking to "karma whore". I'm no expert on Hinduism, but thanks for the additional info...
This also happened at my school, roughly around the same time. No doubt our prints are in the system by now... at least if not from that, mine are there from the now *required* biometric scan to get a California drivers license. I gave serious consideration to giving up my drivers license instead of renewing it with this scan.
Lego starwars is a great example of a good kid friendly game. It teaches some simple problem solving and is very fun, in fact I played it a lot until I completed 100% of it. My 4 year old (boy) loves it and plays it all the time.
Short answer, yes. When you press the record button as you normally do to record normal content, such as TV shows or home videos, you get an error on the dvd recorder itself letting you know that it's copy protected and can not be copied to DVD. I had not heard of this, so naturally the first thing we tried doing was putting tape over the "write block" hole on the VHS tape. This however gave the same results. I did a little browsing and found something about this macrovision company that produces copy protection. Apparently this copy protection is written to the VHS tape itself and through an "old boys club" back door deal most of the hardware manufactures for VHS and DVD recorders look for, and honor, this copy protection. There are ways around this however, which include hooking up a piece of hardware between the player and recorder, but as another poster notes the copies can still have lines and other discoloration in them due to these copy restrictions.
it is almost more efficient to do it through a computer
Good point. If this where for me, had I even owned any VHS, this would be the route I'd take. My parents are in their 50's however, and not very technically included. My dad may use the computer to play a flight sim and my mom for email... beyond this their technical skills are very limited. Naturally I went for a solution that would be more clear cut for them, something like say the VHS recorder they have been familiar with for the past few decades.
I bought my parents a DVD recorder for Christmas only to find out later they could not copy their legally purchased VHS collection to DVD due to some macrovision crap. So now after having burned a few old home videos this recorder will probably sit on the self collecting dust. What's the point of having a DVD recorder if you can't record content you legally own? Word travels fast and at least a other dozen older folks I know now won't be getting a DVD recorder. The hardware vendors really screw themselves with this lock in ware.
Just a quick SEO suggestion for your site, search engines tend to favor content with real paths over variables. Using mod rewrite to change URLs like this:
Will get you higher page rank for these pages with almost no effort. Additionally, always link to the former, rather than the later in other pages. In this way each page will get ranked properly, rather than "index.php" taking all the credit.
Sure it does, individual sections could use the "dispute" feature on wiki software like the way wikipedia.org uses it. Individuals could comment directly on questions that arise. This could help organize grass roots efforts to push for specific changes.
Really, I was shocked that the Xbox needed a cable running to my living room for net access. Climbing around by attic running 50ft of network cable is not my idea of a "next gen" experience. I realize that you can buy all sorts of things to overcome this, but please can we put a $5 wifi chip into so called "next gen" consoles from now on?
Slashdot Mirror
I generally agree with everything you said except "the truth is that all areas in America assign high/strict penalties to people who get caught drinking and driving"... When I was in court (not drunk driving related) a few weeks ago there was a video played for all those who where there for that. The tape stated that the first offense within a 7 year period was a $500 fine. The second was a $1000 fine. The third was up to $5000, jail, and either a license suspension or an interlock device. This was for people who got lucky and did not kill anybody, those who do get felonies and include prison time for manslaughter and up to $10000 fine. The later is strict enforcement, the former I do not think is. Even so it's really up to the judge, whom from what I have seen will hand a lesser punishment to get a quick guilty plea and get them out of the court. I know a guy who got to his fifth DUI before getting his license taken away... thats just crazy!
If you drive drunk you should probably do some time, maybe six months tops with work release or something. Its really not that hard to call a cab or have a friend drive you home... the bar I go to will even pay the cab fees for the first 5 miles.
"Fraud Alert: The Slashdot story seems to be without support elsewhere. It may be a paid Slashvertisement. "
Here are just a few:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121452148199808879.html
http://www.eastvalleytribune.com/story/120243
http://www.myjournalcourier.com/articles/apparently_18892___article.html/nancy_called.html
http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/archives/2008/07/congress_banning_social_media/
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/news/2008/jul/06/fairness-or-censorship/
http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=27338
http://www.newsroomamerica.com/politics/story.php?id=422649
"The best thing you can do is DO NOTHING AT ALL."
Exactly! I do not feel that I was wronged in any way. I do not feel I should be in receipt of any payment. Therefor I refuse to collect my $5. I feel I am making a statement by not collecting. Does anyone know of a way I can make that more well defined? I don't want to collect, but there is potential that my outstanding payment gets chalked up in a group of people that they assume don't know about the payment. I know about it, I just don't want it because I don't agree with it... how does one make that known to the court?
We use the ocean water just to cool the reactor... Its perfectly safe without any material getting into the ocean. I can't say I would agree with dumping the actual waste product _into_ the water. A better idea would be to bury it. France puts their waste into a man made pool in a secure building where it wont possibly contaminate the water supply.
Two words for them "San Onofre".
In California we have this beach in San Onofre where the ocean water is used to cool the reactors. I've swam in this water, countless millions of others have, without one single link to cancer or any other problems. In fact I prefer this beach to others... the water is quite warm!
"Maybe someone should tell MADD that they would probably have better luck getting their message out if they didn't take positions that are somewhere between sophomoric and insane."
You mean to tell me that menopausal women can take positions that are not sophomoric and insane?
Now they have a place to go (ISS) but they are canceling the shuttle with no spacecraft to replace it. I wouldn't be this bitter at least they had something replacing it.
Um... take a look at the Orion spacecraft. This will be the replacement for the shuttle program. The shuttle program was started to help build and travel to the ISS. Now with the ISS out of the way NASA will realign for missions to the moon and mars, including plans for this moon base you seem to want. In fact test are underway in Antarctica for prototypes of habitats for the moon base. Orion (along with some very neat robotics) is what's planned to get us there. We will have a five year gap between the end of life for the shuttle program and first launch of the Orion. By 2020 NASA plans to return to the moon. You can see some details on wikipedia, along with about a dozen shows on discovery channel about this new spacecraft.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion_(spacecraft)
As an aside, I believe you're right on one point. Eventually NASA will no longer have such a strong role in space. For that matter I believe your scope is off as neither the ESA or the Russian Federal Space Program can hang around much longer at their current support levels and efficiency. I'd be shocked though if China ever does anything more than put up some more advanced spy sats. Private enterprise will eventually fill the gaps with more efficiency and innovation we just don't see out of these federal programs. While the federal programs will be stripped down and merged into the military of their respective governments.
Good points, but even beyond the 4-5 year support period I know I can still pop in a game I bought and it'll still work. I have an Atari, Genesis and a Dreamcast that still work! If they had not been stolen my NES, SNES and N64 would likely still be working today as well. Try picking up a 20 year old PC game and running it under even Windows XP, good luck! You make a good point I had not even thought about until now, with the PC not only do you have to worry about upgrades but also backwards compatibility to keep using what you've already paid for. My Father hung on to Windows98 up until six months ago just because some of his games would not work.
For gaming, consoles are about as "Just Works" (no Xbox jokes, thanks) as you get. For people who lack computer expertise, but like playing games, how can PCs beat that for the time being?
It "Just Works" is not just people who lack computer experience. There is a growing group of us that are technical and have abandoned the PC as a gaming platform. For me it came down to two major issues. 1) I could not stand buying hardware every six months just for video games. A top of the line video card here, and some RAM there, for what? So I can play some new fancy game? At some point it just stopped making sense. I don't need an uber powerful computer to do my day to day work related tasks. All I need is a browser, email and a dozen or so terminal windows. For the little time I do spend playing games it's just not worth it. 2) *Mostly* Windows only. I hate it. It started becoming a blocker to doing day to day work. After years of blue screens, random data loss, faulty drivers, the horrible transition to Windows98 I gave up and have never looked back. Games should be fun! Fixing / updating / upgrading a computer is not fun when I just spent all day doing that at work. Yeah, I use the "just works" excuse, but not for lack of experience.
"It's only 'easy' if your time has no value and you're competent to examine the source"
MY data is valuable, therefore I don't consider time spent evaluating the security of said as being waisted.
When I hit submit I realized someone has to have had a good experience with iTMS, unfortunately it was not me. I was simply told I should have backed up and that they where sorry my pc notebook had taken a dump. As someone else in this thread pointed out, it's the few tight wad support people that make the bad PR moves for the rest of the company. Sure it's a policy of theirs but I imagine policies like this are more designed to stop the would be abusers. Maybe I was thought to be one, or maybe the guy was just a hard ass about it. I certainly believe Apple is a pretty good company in general, as your mother saw, and she repaid that goodness in dollars. As a result, I on the other hand decided to sign up for Yahoo's music service and wrote off the whole downloading local copies of music all together. In the end though it made the most sense for me and who knows maybe I'd have ended up switching anyway. Loosing my music collection with no option to get it back made that decision that much easier however. I'm glad to hear they bent the rules for your mother, it's nice to know there are still some decent people working out there in IT helpdesk land.
I've never run across an online marketplace that doesn't include some provision for restoring purchased content that the buyer can prove he purchased
Let me introduce you to iTunes Music Store. An otherwise great service with no way to redownload previous purchases, if say for example your macbook crashes.
Nah, I'd have not checked the "No karma bonus" for higher visibility if I where looking to "karma whore". I'm no expert on Hinduism, but thanks for the additional info...
Those of the Hindu faith read the Sruti and the Smriti.
At least they took 15 minutes to respond.
This also happened at my school, roughly around the same time. No doubt our prints are in the system by now... at least if not from that, mine are there from the now *required* biometric scan to get a California drivers license. I gave serious consideration to giving up my drivers license instead of renewing it with this scan.
I think thats normal for boys, my son is the same way ;)
Lego starwars is a great example of a good kid friendly game. It teaches some simple problem solving and is very fun, in fact I played it a lot until I completed 100% of it. My 4 year old (boy) loves it and plays it all the time.
Is there a technical reason they can't do this?
Short answer, yes. When you press the record button as you normally do to record normal content, such as TV shows or home videos, you get an error on the dvd recorder itself letting you know that it's copy protected and can not be copied to DVD. I had not heard of this, so naturally the first thing we tried doing was putting tape over the "write block" hole on the VHS tape. This however gave the same results. I did a little browsing and found something about this macrovision company that produces copy protection. Apparently this copy protection is written to the VHS tape itself and through an "old boys club" back door deal most of the hardware manufactures for VHS and DVD recorders look for, and honor, this copy protection. There are ways around this however, which include hooking up a piece of hardware between the player and recorder, but as another poster notes the copies can still have lines and other discoloration in them due to these copy restrictions.
it is almost more efficient to do it through a computer
Good point. If this where for me, had I even owned any VHS, this would be the route I'd take. My parents are in their 50's however, and not very technically included. My dad may use the computer to play a flight sim and my mom for email... beyond this their technical skills are very limited. Naturally I went for a solution that would be more clear cut for them, something like say the VHS recorder they have been familiar with for the past few decades.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macrovision
I bought my parents a DVD recorder for Christmas only to find out later they could not copy their legally purchased VHS collection to DVD due to some macrovision crap. So now after having burned a few old home videos this recorder will probably sit on the self collecting dust. What's the point of having a DVD recorder if you can't record content you legally own? Word travels fast and at least a other dozen older folks I know now won't be getting a DVD recorder. The hardware vendors really screw themselves with this lock in ware.
Just a quick SEO suggestion for your site, search engines tend to favor content with real paths over variables. Using mod rewrite to change URLs like this:
http://www.itchingmyballs.com/wikiforpresident/Overview_of_the_2008_Budget
to:
http://www.itchingmyballs.com/wikiforpresident/index.php?title=Overview_of_the_2008_Budget
Will get you higher page rank for these pages with almost no effort. Additionally, always link to the former, rather than the later in other pages. In this way each page will get ranked properly, rather than "index.php" taking all the credit.
Sure it does, individual sections could use the "dispute" feature on wiki software like the way wikipedia.org uses it. Individuals could comment directly on questions that arise. This could help organize grass roots efforts to push for specific changes.
Here ya go...
for i in `cat somefile.txt`
do
wget http://www.nsi.com/whois/results.jsp?domain=$1
done
Really, I was shocked that the Xbox needed a cable running to my living room for net access. Climbing around by attic running 50ft of network cable is not my idea of a "next gen" experience. I realize that you can buy all sorts of things to overcome this, but please can we put a $5 wifi chip into so called "next gen" consoles from now on?
I'm totally with you on that one! When I read that I took pause and thought, man, that's a really good name!