I think it's sad we live in a world where one guy getting a refund for something he didn't want to pay for in the first place is such big news. Ideally this should be so common that no one cares.
Last Christmas I gave a homebrew PC to my sister our of extra stuff I had laying around and a couple things I had to buy new to make a complete system. We got XP for it all legit and everything, but a few months later the motherboard in it, that had been laying around my place for a while, gave out and I put a new one in, not exactly the same as the old one. We had to go through the whole call up Microsoft and explain ourselves to re-enable the XP install.
I was afraid this would be counted as the second license situation for Vista. Would I not be able to continue running it on what is essentially the "same" computer which had simply had a broken component replaced? Buying a new Vista license for every other motherboard replacement in "the same" computer would be flat out unacceptable. I'm not even talking about upgrading for the putpose of getting new or better features, I'm just talking about making a dead computer go again. Sure, swapping a motherboard, especially for not the exact same model, might be in that blurry part where you can't quite tell what side of the line your on, but would still totally suck when the cost to get my broken system running again more than doubles from just the hardware price because my motherboard is old and not available anymore for a more "exact" replacement, such as if I got it just as they were going end-of-life and it died a year or two later.
If asked whether there should be national elections, the response I get is "Why? We're already getting the brightest to work in the Government.
Or they could point out that we Americans voted for Gore but Bush became president, so why bother.
The rest of the parent post was very interesting, but realize that people would only know or care if the government was doing a poor job of what we believe it is doing. If the people are good little prons, then the government is doing quite well at what we believe it is doing.
What do we believe anyway, and where does that come from? If all these Chinese people are content or apathetic to our attempts to help them, maybe they don't think it's broken. If they're happy with China the way it is, what's the point of telling them how terrible their lives are? Heck, for all I know, I'm the one being duped by America's Minstry of Truth, not the Chinese. Everythign I "know" about life and policies in China I hear from the media, Slashdot included. I've never been there or talked to anyone from there. How can I definitively know that the news, Slashdot, cnn.com, etc. that I have access to aren't all a giant conspiracy to try and convince me that I have this great life? How can I definitively know that China isn't even better without actually going there and seeing for myself?
Most Americans "know" what they know of the world from school (history, geography, etc) and from the news. What if we're the ones being censored, carefully educated, and all that? Like Bush's weapons of mass descrutcion in Iraq. There was all kinds of satellite pictures of trucks they told us were missiles and stuff, but eventually the lie became too big to keep it running...
I for one hope the US and its Ministry of Truth keeps control. I'd hate to see obsolete information or the lies of the enemies propogated throughout the news sites I frequent./sarcasm
MacWorld reports that MySpace is going to start implementing audio fingerprinting to prevent copyrighted material from appearing on their site.
Weird Al had recently posted for free download a couple of his songs from his new album. Ironic that one of those free downloads was his song "Don't Download This Song". But those are HIS songs, and I assume that by posting them he had made sure with his producers and whatnot that they agreed to it as well. Will MySpace now prevent Weird Al from posting his own songs of his and his producers' own free will, because they also happened to be available for purchase on CD at your local music store? Will there be a way for people to legitimately post their own copyrighted works, or are legit artists now going to have to find a different site to post their own works that they wish to post?
An idea, but I shouldn't HAVE TO. Sometimes I'm in the kitchen which is right next to my left front speaker, no door to close, and I should not have to carry the remote with me in case of commercials while I'm up. Or if I'm workign on the house (I'm installing projector mount and wiring now) and am on a ladder or across the room or something, I should not have to keep my remote in hand while I'm fighting with an akward screw up inside the ceiling at a weird angle fromt eh access panel hole. Or if I'm paying more attention to email or web pages or WOW on my laptop than the TV and don't grab the remote in time... Or if I'm flipping through the channels and hit an extremely loud commercial on my way through.
This is not a perfect solution to the problem. The TV people not intentionally trying to cause pain to my eardrums in the first place is a better and far more reliable solution.
well they gonna block the commercial anyway, so there is no point in buying a timeslot on Techtv since nobody is gonna watch it", will this not make tv stations go bankrupt?
Ironic choice for which network to use in your example...
Another thing they might try is to look at average loudness. It seems like commercials are pumped up a bit from regular shows.
A bit? Some channels I get are terrible to the point of causing actual pain during the commercials, but the shows are so low I have to crank the volume way up to hear what people are saying. And I don't have hearing loss. SciFi is particularly bad with that. There's a couple other commercials that are unacceptably loud on any channel, even when others are better balanced with the show's volume.
I'd love to see something done to balance things out. Some industry standard for average volume that would allow me to set things where I like them without having to strain to hear certain things and scream in pain at other things all at the same setting. I will not buy from vendors of products that cause me pain while wathing TV. This includes some carpet/flooring company and I wish I knew who the other one was, something about babies with check engine lights and deafening loud beeps on their heads. I hope they never put thsoe two ads on the SciFi channel as my head might explode.
I prefer KDE to Gnome, so tried isntalling kubuntu recently, the 6.06 release. That installer kept hanging before completing, which seemed a common thing in the forums. Has this been improved? Will I actually be able to install it this time?
The industry is pushing me more and more toward organic foods. It's more expensive, yes, but at least I know I'm not going to have a reaction to hormones and stuff that doesn't have to be in there. I don' think that cloned food is all that scary, as it's coming from DNA we'd have eaten before the cell samples were taken for the cloners. I am more concerned about genetic engineering than cloning, as with engineered DNA, we haven't been eating that for thousands of years and thus it has more potential for "side-effects" to happen than cloned stuff from a natural cow source.
If cloned and genetically engineered stuff is approved for public consumption, at least have the courtesy to require labelling so we can decide for ourselves. If the public is OK with such things, then they'll be successful in the market. If the public does not want such things, they should be allowed to choose, and that decision should not be hindered because they don't know what is or is not cloned or engineered or whatever. If the public doesn't want it, then the market for it should not florish due to devious obfuscation tactics, it should be the consumer's choice for a product to succeed, not the vendor's.
Just remember to deduct your expenses toward creating your virtual wealth. Buying the retail box or download, the monthly service fees, upgrade fees when new content is released, etc. should all be legit deductions to such a tax.So should some percentage of your electric bill to power the computer. Maybe part of that nice new desk, chair, and all that too. If they want a tax, they better recognize the business expenses we're ging to to create that income, virtual or not, and if they leave the deductions part out of this weird tax law they better be ready for a virtual revolution.
I wonder when Monopoly will stat coming with a per-game tax too...
We design semiconductor chips at work. It'd be great to have enough room for a shell window or 5, the main CAD window, the design browser window, the verification window, the layer colors window, etc. rather than having to constantly cycle through a huge stack of them. Sure, we've got different virtual screens, but you still have to cycle through them too.
Unfortunately, as our large CRTs age and die, they've more recently been replaced with LCD screens, nice, but they're smaller than the old CRTs...:/
Since darkness (the absence of light) can't be defined as a product, no VAT.
Surely a politician can find a way... They just hadn't thought of it until you gave them the idea. Now they're going to tax both the presence of light as well as the absence of it.
While your parents were busy telling you to turn off the light when you left the room, mine were busy telling me to turn off the dark-suckers for the same reason...
How long until they hire Mr. Burns to built them a sun blocking device? Then they could charge a fee to allow the sun through, and finally be able to get the tax income from all those photons people have been mooching for free all these eons...
Because not two months ago, he wanted to shut down the ISS missions because they were estimated to cost $200M.
The ISS is not a weapon, which makes it a waste of money. Even if Bush had some way to force it out of orbit, it'd probably burn up before it hit anything he'd want to wreck with it.
aimed at extracting sensitive information from targets such as the Commerce Department's technology export office.
Why is sensitive governmental data even connected to the public internet? Surely the government can afford it's own private network that doesn't even have connections to the general public internet. They couldn't hack into something that's not there... Sure, the government started the internet, that doesn't mean they have to continue using the same one we do, does it?
What about Grandma?
on
A GUI For Books
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· Score: 4, Insightful
This page on the vendor's site has videos of a 7-year-old using a TouchBook.
OK, but little kids pick up on things pretty well. Like grandma asking little Timmy to open her child-proof medecine bottle for her.
Show me a video of my grandma using this thing and I'll be impressed.
the tactile joy of owning a physical object that represents your attachment to a band is infinitely more enjoyable than entering a credit card number into iTunes.
Then enter your credit card into the slot at the local CD superstore, or Amazon or something, and get a physical object. My CD player is more portable than most record players, and I've never seen a record player for a car.
I get surveys, but infrequently, and they honedtly don't try to sell me anything. One is a nearby radio station asking what I listen to. Most of the unwanted calls I get are non-profits begging for money, and the occasional mortgage offer. The non-profits at least have the excuse that they are exempt from the list, but they still annoy me, as I'm not going to donate to every single beggar that calls, especially when they give me a hard time about being too greedy to give away $10. One solicitor for some veterans group actualy called me a dumbass because I didn't buy a T-shirt from him. But the mortgage people have no excuse at all. At least it's not as often as it used to be. I'll never do business with my original mortgage agent again as I still 5 years and a couple refinances later get junk mail referenging my original loan through them, and assume they sold me to the phone solicitors too.
But overal I get significantly less phone spam than I did before the list.
Will the particular people participating in suhc a test be aware of it, or will they suddenly find themselves in a great deal of discomfort without knowing why? Will people with pacemakers suddenly drop dead?
I'm sure they'll be looking for volunteers to have to meet certain medical requirements to be approved (or so I hope is the process), but it just seems like a weird idea for a governemnt/military to turn its weapons on its own people.
I'll agree that Firefly is awesome and all, but who hasn't already seen every episode?
Irrelevant. I've seen all the Dark Angel episodes, own the DVDs (first season only, second season really sucked) but still watched their marathon for this one this past Monday. I watched the Scifi Monday 4x episodes of Stargate for a few years, but it didn't take that long to go through them all, and I've now seen some episodes lots of times each. Just because people have ealready seen it doesn't mean they won't watch it again. Heck, last Friday's Stargate marathon showed the 1960's time-travel episode I never saw before, and I still only saw the last few minutes of it. Maybe not everyone has seen every single Firefly episode either? I saw most of them, but I don't think I saw all of them, and it seems there was one or two that never even aired in USA. Or should I shut up and finally watch the Firefly DVD set I got for christmas last year?
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I think it's sad we live in a world where one guy getting a refund for something he didn't want to pay for in the first place is such big news. Ideally this should be so common that no one cares.
Last Christmas I gave a homebrew PC to my sister our of extra stuff I had laying around and a couple things I had to buy new to make a complete system. We got XP for it all legit and everything, but a few months later the motherboard in it, that had been laying around my place for a while, gave out and I put a new one in, not exactly the same as the old one. We had to go through the whole call up Microsoft and explain ourselves to re-enable the XP install.
I was afraid this would be counted as the second license situation for Vista. Would I not be able to continue running it on what is essentially the "same" computer which had simply had a broken component replaced? Buying a new Vista license for every other motherboard replacement in "the same" computer would be flat out unacceptable. I'm not even talking about upgrading for the putpose of getting new or better features, I'm just talking about making a dead computer go again. Sure, swapping a motherboard, especially for not the exact same model, might be in that blurry part where you can't quite tell what side of the line your on, but would still totally suck when the cost to get my broken system running again more than doubles from just the hardware price because my motherboard is old and not available anymore for a more "exact" replacement, such as if I got it just as they were going end-of-life and it died a year or two later.
If asked whether there should be national elections, the response I get is "Why? We're already getting the brightest to work in the Government.
Or they could point out that we Americans voted for Gore but Bush became president, so why bother.
The rest of the parent post was very interesting, but realize that people would only know or care if the government was doing a poor job of what we believe it is doing. If the people are good little prons, then the government is doing quite well at what we believe it is doing.
What do we believe anyway, and where does that come from? If all these Chinese people are content or apathetic to our attempts to help them, maybe they don't think it's broken. If they're happy with China the way it is, what's the point of telling them how terrible their lives are? Heck, for all I know, I'm the one being duped by America's Minstry of Truth, not the Chinese. Everythign I "know" about life and policies in China I hear from the media, Slashdot included. I've never been there or talked to anyone from there. How can I definitively know that the news, Slashdot, cnn.com, etc. that I have access to aren't all a giant conspiracy to try and convince me that I have this great life? How can I definitively know that China isn't even better without actually going there and seeing for myself?
Most Americans "know" what they know of the world from school (history, geography, etc) and from the news. What if we're the ones being censored, carefully educated, and all that? Like Bush's weapons of mass descrutcion in Iraq. There was all kinds of satellite pictures of trucks they told us were missiles and stuff, but eventually the lie became too big to keep it running...
I for one hope the US and its Ministry of Truth keeps control. I'd hate to see obsolete information or the lies of the enemies propogated throughout the news sites I frequent. /sarcasm
MacWorld reports that MySpace is going to start implementing audio fingerprinting to prevent copyrighted material from appearing on their site.
Weird Al had recently posted for free download a couple of his songs from his new album. Ironic that one of those free downloads was his song "Don't Download This Song". But those are HIS songs, and I assume that by posting them he had made sure with his producers and whatnot that they agreed to it as well. Will MySpace now prevent Weird Al from posting his own songs of his and his producers' own free will, because they also happened to be available for purchase on CD at your local music store? Will there be a way for people to legitimately post their own copyrighted works, or are legit artists now going to have to find a different site to post their own works that they wish to post?
Use the Mute button, Luke!
An idea, but I shouldn't HAVE TO. Sometimes I'm in the kitchen which is right next to my left front speaker, no door to close, and I should not have to carry the remote with me in case of commercials while I'm up. Or if I'm workign on the house (I'm installing projector mount and wiring now) and am on a ladder or across the room or something, I should not have to keep my remote in hand while I'm fighting with an akward screw up inside the ceiling at a weird angle fromt eh access panel hole. Or if I'm paying more attention to email or web pages or WOW on my laptop than the TV and don't grab the remote in time... Or if I'm flipping through the channels and hit an extremely loud commercial on my way through.
This is not a perfect solution to the problem. The TV people not intentionally trying to cause pain to my eardrums in the first place is a better and far more reliable solution.
well they gonna block the commercial anyway, so there is no point in buying a timeslot on Techtv since nobody is gonna watch it", will this not make tv stations go bankrupt?
Ironic choice for which network to use in your example...
Another thing they might try is to look at average loudness. It seems like commercials are pumped up a bit from regular shows.
A bit? Some channels I get are terrible to the point of causing actual pain during the commercials, but the shows are so low I have to crank the volume way up to hear what people are saying. And I don't have hearing loss. SciFi is particularly bad with that. There's a couple other commercials that are unacceptably loud on any channel, even when others are better balanced with the show's volume.
I'd love to see something done to balance things out. Some industry standard for average volume that would allow me to set things where I like them without having to strain to hear certain things and scream in pain at other things all at the same setting. I will not buy from vendors of products that cause me pain while wathing TV. This includes some carpet/flooring company and I wish I knew who the other one was, something about babies with check engine lights and deafening loud beeps on their heads. I hope they never put thsoe two ads on the SciFi channel as my head might explode.
The display is very easy to see even in full sunlight but uses much less energy than an LCD, Wilcox says.
What if it's dark out? Is there a backlight for use at night, or is it just not seeable then?
How durable is eink? Article says no glass or plastic cover is needed, will this thing resist wear and tear that might try and ruin it?
I prefer KDE to Gnome, so tried isntalling kubuntu recently, the 6.06 release. That installer kept hanging before completing, which seemed a common thing in the forums. Has this been improved? Will I actually be able to install it this time?
The industry is pushing me more and more toward organic foods. It's more expensive, yes, but at least I know I'm not going to have a reaction to hormones and stuff that doesn't have to be in there. I don' think that cloned food is all that scary, as it's coming from DNA we'd have eaten before the cell samples were taken for the cloners. I am more concerned about genetic engineering than cloning, as with engineered DNA, we haven't been eating that for thousands of years and thus it has more potential for "side-effects" to happen than cloned stuff from a natural cow source.
If cloned and genetically engineered stuff is approved for public consumption, at least have the courtesy to require labelling so we can decide for ourselves. If the public is OK with such things, then they'll be successful in the market. If the public does not want such things, they should be allowed to choose, and that decision should not be hindered because they don't know what is or is not cloned or engineered or whatever. If the public doesn't want it, then the market for it should not florish due to devious obfuscation tactics, it should be the consumer's choice for a product to succeed, not the vendor's.
Just remember to deduct your expenses toward creating your virtual wealth. Buying the retail box or download, the monthly service fees, upgrade fees when new content is released, etc. should all be legit deductions to such a tax.So should some percentage of your electric bill to power the computer. Maybe part of that nice new desk, chair, and all that too. If they want a tax, they better recognize the business expenses we're ging to to create that income, virtual or not, and if they leave the deductions part out of this weird tax law they better be ready for a virtual revolution.
I wonder when Monopoly will stat coming with a per-game tax too...
We design semiconductor chips at work. It'd be great to have enough room for a shell window or 5, the main CAD window, the design browser window, the verification window, the layer colors window, etc. rather than having to constantly cycle through a huge stack of them. Sure, we've got different virtual screens, but you still have to cycle through them too.
:/
Unfortunately, as our large CRTs age and die, they've more recently been replaced with LCD screens, nice, but they're smaller than the old CRTs...
Since darkness (the absence of light) can't be defined as a product, no VAT.
Surely a politician can find a way... They just hadn't thought of it until you gave them the idea. Now they're going to tax both the presence of light as well as the absence of it.
While your parents were busy telling you to turn off the light when you left the room, mine were busy telling me to turn off the dark-suckers for the same reason...
How long until they hire Mr. Burns to built them a sun blocking device? Then they could charge a fee to allow the sun through, and finally be able to get the tax income from all those photons people have been mooching for free all these eons...
Because not two months ago, he wanted to shut down the ISS missions because they were estimated to cost $200M.
The ISS is not a weapon, which makes it a waste of money. Even if Bush had some way to force it out of orbit, it'd probably burn up before it hit anything he'd want to wreck with it.
aimed at extracting sensitive information from targets such as the Commerce Department's technology export office.
Why is sensitive governmental data even connected to the public internet? Surely the government can afford it's own private network that doesn't even have connections to the general public internet. They couldn't hack into something that's not there... Sure, the government started the internet, that doesn't mean they have to continue using the same one we do, does it?
This page on the vendor's site has videos of a 7-year-old using a TouchBook.
OK, but little kids pick up on things pretty well. Like grandma asking little Timmy to open her child-proof medecine bottle for her.
Show me a video of my grandma using this thing and I'll be impressed.
the tactile joy of owning a physical object that represents your attachment to a band is infinitely more enjoyable than entering a credit card number into iTunes.
Then enter your credit card into the slot at the local CD superstore, or Amazon or something, and get a physical object. My CD player is more portable than most record players, and I've never seen a record player for a car.
I get surveys, but infrequently, and they honedtly don't try to sell me anything. One is a nearby radio station asking what I listen to. Most of the unwanted calls I get are non-profits begging for money, and the occasional mortgage offer. The non-profits at least have the excuse that they are exempt from the list, but they still annoy me, as I'm not going to donate to every single beggar that calls, especially when they give me a hard time about being too greedy to give away $10. One solicitor for some veterans group actualy called me a dumbass because I didn't buy a T-shirt from him. But the mortgage people have no excuse at all. At least it's not as often as it used to be. I'll never do business with my original mortgage agent again as I still 5 years and a couple refinances later get junk mail referenging my original loan through them, and assume they sold me to the phone solicitors too.
But overal I get significantly less phone spam than I did before the list.
Why don't you test these weapons on yourself jackass?
Maybe he doesn't want to be the one who finds out you get cancer 4 years after being exposed to the thing?
Will the particular people participating in suhc a test be aware of it, or will they suddenly find themselves in a great deal of discomfort without knowing why? Will people with pacemakers suddenly drop dead?
I'm sure they'll be looking for volunteers to have to meet certain medical requirements to be approved (or so I hope is the process), but it just seems like a weird idea for a governemnt/military to turn its weapons on its own people.
If you're going to promise not to assert a patent, then what's the point of getting it in the first place?
I'll agree that Firefly is awesome and all, but who hasn't already seen every episode?
Irrelevant. I've seen all the Dark Angel episodes, own the DVDs (first season only, second season really sucked) but still watched their marathon for this one this past Monday. I watched the Scifi Monday 4x episodes of Stargate for a few years, but it didn't take that long to go through them all, and I've now seen some episodes lots of times each. Just because people have ealready seen it doesn't mean they won't watch it again. Heck, last Friday's Stargate marathon showed the 1960's time-travel episode I never saw before, and I still only saw the last few minutes of it. Maybe not everyone has seen every single Firefly episode either? I saw most of them, but I don't think I saw all of them, and it seems there was one or two that never even aired in USA. Or should I shut up and finally watch the Firefly DVD set I got for christmas last year?
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