satire - noun
1. the use of irony, sarcasm, ridicule, or the like, in exposing, denouncing, or deriding vice, folly, etc.
2. a literary composition, in verse or prose, in which human folly and vice are held up to scorn, derision, or ridicule.
3. a literary genre comprising such compositions.
In what way would pretending to have a rare illness and then pretending to be cured be satire? There is a difference between "lies" and "satire."
I think that were the poster's theory correct definition #2 would clearly apply. Also the determination of whether a statement constitutes a lie or is otherwise a deception is completely irrelevant to the question of whether it qualifies as satire, or was meant in that vein.
Consider the fact that maybe you don't NEED guns for that? And should you ever DO need guns in an event like that, I'm sure there'd be no problem getting them.
I don't know of any country in the entire world with nearly as many guns as you, that are as afraid of yourselves that you are. Remember, Bush can't hold down 300 million americans alone. YOU have the power, you're just too lazy and afraid to admit it, rather relying on guns to do the talking and objecting.
Think about it. If 300 MILLION americans rose up against an abusive government, even without weapons, what the hell could they do about it?
Get your heads out of your gun-barrels and think about it. Really think about it.
ps.
I live in sweden. We have idiots. We have a government. We have idiots IN the goverment. Yet, not a single citizen here feels that guns should be a "right" so that we can defend ourselves against said goverment. And we're just a measly 9 million people over here:)
What would happen to them is the same thing that happened to the people who rose up against Hitler, Stalin, Saddam Hussein, and the Chinese government. They would be gunned down by the tools of the state and any survivors gathered for the torture chamber just to make sure the point was not lost on the rest of the populace, primarily because of the lack of means to oppose that level of force. When the Germans invaded your country resistance was only possible because guerilla fighters had weapons to use and advantage over terrain. Even then they were not expelled overnight.
There are other countries with more access to weapons than we have. I know it does not help my point, but the level of weaponry legally allowed in Iraq is shocking to most Americans. Actually, Iraq is instructive in one other way. The Shia were unable to oppose Saddam because gunships vs small arms = you are dead with your AK. The level of weaponry the common citizen has in the US is utterly impotent against the might of our military forces and machines were they ever turned against us. The only hope left is that the common soldier continues to hold true to those values that the German soldier threw away; they have sworn to defend the constitution with their life, and as long as they continue to do that they will never allow themselves to be blatantly misused.
"I find the judge's defense is sound: The judge basically identified that the level of violence in this game is already approved by society."
But that's the wrong test. There is, to my knowledge, no precedent for restraining publication of anything. Even instructions for creating a nuclear bomb in the 50's.
That's just not the case. It's sad, but there is in fact ample precedent for restricting works wholesale. Think _Ulyses_ or _Lady_Chatterly's_Lover_ or _Lolita_ or anything else on the "banned books list." The legal standard established by precedent is exactly what the judge was following here. A work can be judged obscene and therefore unworthy of first amendment protection if it holds no artistic value, appeals to the prurient interest, and meets the community's standard of obscenity. I don't agree with that but that is how the law has been interpreted for a very long time. The judge's argument here is that the community already accepts a level of violence greater than what is contained in the game as valid entertainment, and there is nothing else objectionable in the game. Therefore it fails to meet the legal standard for obscenity and must be allowed.
Personally I am an absolutist when it comes to the constitution. I think when it says "shall make no law" that's what it should mean. None of this funny business about "reasonable compromises for society" and all that. The Constitution is not reasonable and does not compromise. It is not to be held to the standard of culture that was the product of millenia of oppression and ignorance. It stands above all and should be regarded in that way. I don't think it's even useful to go too far into what the "Founding Fathers" would have allowed. They could not possibly have completely imagined what they had unleashed. They had an idea, but even they were not ready to apply it as we have by freeing slaves, allowing non-landowners/non-whites/women to vote, etc. But despite the fact the government felt the need to amend it to accomplish these things, the law was already there in the constitution and the declaration of independance. "Society" was just not ready to apply it properly just as it was not ready to accept a world without kings where free men chose their own destiny and "class" no longer mattered.
Every time we try to apply the needs of "our heritage" and "society" to these things we take a step backward. That's why the constitution should be interpreted literally and followed as the supreme law of the land. It doesn't say "you have freedom of speech as long as you do not offend the most prudish of minds." It does not say you have the "right to be secure in [your] papers, effects" etc except when the government feels the need to pry. It says no and it means it. "make no law." Do not touch this area of life.
There have always been people who want to move backwards and want to change things back the way they used to be, especially people who once held more sway than they do now. They will always have an excuse, some reasonable argument why you should allow them to have their way. And that is why we should always follow the constitution. We should say that no means no, period. To believe this is alreday the case is to suffer from grave naivite and serious error.
SERIOUSLY. Show me proof because I am 100% sure you are full of shit. No judge in their right mind would allow a free speech law to stand like that. If they did, it would be struck on appeal (and it WOULD be appealed).
This is not a question of freedom of speech. If the laws barred such games from being sold/produced/owned at all then it would violate the first amendment (among other things) and therefore would be struck down. Which has already happened. However, the question of whether such material is to be allowed in the hands of minors is a seperate issue. Historically courts have upheld laws restricting minors' access to certain materials (such as pornography) without the consent of their parents.
The poster is correct in stating that laws that require vendors to be responsible for checking the age of customers who buy certain games/videos/music cds has generally been upheld for the same reason that laws requiring stores to check ages for cigarettes/alcohol/firearms/pornography. The argument that it presents an undue burden on the retailer was not upheld, and the laws themselves do not directly challenge constitutional rights as currently interpreted by the courts since adults still have access to these things.
The wider question, where because of these burdens and economic factors retailers/moviehouses demand that media be censored to meet the standard of their market, as happens with movies needing a certain rating or the "Wal-Mart version" of a cd, sanitized so that it no longer has a "mature" rating, and its effect on the ability of content providers to create unhindered works of art and adults to access those works has not been addressed as far as I know. I'm not sure the courts are the right answer for that question, but it is a societal problem that must be faced as surely as the problem of unsupervised, unguided/misguided children and the damage they cause because their parents refuse to take responsibility and do their jobs.
I spoke too soon. It looks like the 100%cpu thing is still happening occasionally. There isn't much to go on; today when it happened I only had 5 firefox windows up, mostly with only one tab. None of the pages were dynamic, either. I expect to see that sometimes if there are flash pages or some other dynamic code, stuff that self-refreshes, etc. But if the page has already been rendered and is not being refreshed, there is no applet or flash plugin being run because of the page... what could firefox possibly be doing with all those cycles?
Yes it does, and it was not a link, but it did have a big green arrow pointing down at the bittorent and edonkey links. Thus the only working links on that site did not lead to a download for the software. Clicking on the green area did nothing.
I was able to make the green area do something later. When I had tried before hovering on the aforementioned green area did not produce the mouseover changes associated with links, and you could click all you wanted but it was not going anywhere. So I basically assumed, although I think I have run into this before because there was some deja vu here, that the image was just that, an image, with a big green arrow pointing to the normal links, which did behave as expected, pointing to ed2k or bittorrents. After looking again at the code for the page I suspect some kind of java strangeness was involved, and given that I was looking at the page in Windows the fact I recently rebooted to clear some other oddities must be weighed in.
But it does beg the question. Especially given how much the open source community decries fanciness such as flash (which I initially suspected as the culprit given the behaviour of this embedded object) at the expense of compatability, why did the designers of the oo.org page decide to use strange java objects when a good old fashioned html link would have done better? And you have to admit a big green arrow that says download, pointing to links where one might download something, would generally be expected, well, to point to the place where you can download it. And so it does, to the ed2k and bittorrent links.
As far as the speed goes for bittorrent, I have found that you can only get something as long as other people are getting it as well because once they do they are going to shut down their clients. The typical linux distro ends up having like 3 semipermanent seeds with a blossom of others if your timing is just right. But whether you get in on the torrent when everyone else does or you end up on the tail of the dog with 3 sources to pull from that you cannot give back to, you end up with very very very slow downloads compared to straight ftp/http, or hell even scp. I have never downloaded anything off bittorrent the size of a cd in less than 3 days, and usually what I end up with is a file that is 35-75% complete and no seeds to pull from, at which point you have to start over completely or just give up. This is exacerbated by the fact that most linux distros that are distributed primarily via this method have about 6-8 cds to download. I've even had normal pdf files take 12-20 hours through bittorrent when it would take seconds otherwise. This is with unlimited upload speeds and number of downloaders, and again it does not matter in the bittorrent protocol that you are declaring an intention to allow people to download if no one else is downloading anything from you. And as I understand it they have to be downloading the same file as you are from you or it does not count, and this meshes with my experience. Which is basically why it is going to take forever; you're almost guaranteed by probability to end up being treated the same as a leecher. And meanwhile you basically cannot use the system for anything else network related. So while I am downloading something at 2kbps and maybe one person is getting 0.5kbps download of a chunk I happen to have managed to get, I can't even get out on a web browser. Yes I am aware that the settings for how much bandwidth is allowed are the culprit here, that is rather the point. bittorrent is supposed to reward greater upload maximums with greater download maximums, and at the maximum possible, it is still sucking.
And ed2k... I mean could they at least have proposed [EAX]mule? I mean I know it's the same network standard, but still.
Re:10 hours is a lot, really.
on
Yakuza Review
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· Score: 1
Billy Budd? The Great Gatsby? Animal Farm? The Stranger? Those books are all extremely short. There are unabridged dictionaries thousands of pages long but that doesn't make them good. You think perhaps the length of a book doesn't have any effect on how good it is?
Good point. I guess I was just responding to the posters assertion that most good books are only 300 pages or less. I liked a lot of short books including the ones you mentioned. The Old Man and the Sea was pretty good, so was some of the Bernard Shaw, JD Salinger, Robert van Gulik, and Stanislaw Lem stuff I have read. All rather short if not extremely so. But I read a lot of nonfiction (in fact I tend to prefer it) and that tends to run long. that's where my 800-1200 pages come from, though I have read some good novels of similar length.
Yes it does, and it was not a link, but it did have a big green arrow pointing down at the bittorent and edonkey links. Thus the only working links on that site did not lead to a download for the software. Clicking on the green area did nothing.
Could someone pls. direct me to that leak... I've searched for it for the last 2 years & I can't find anything that match your description... I think your OS is incompatible with FireFox... and it is probably done on purpose....but then again, I do only use FireFox on W2K, SuSE and OS X.
For me it wasn't the memory leaks so much as the CPU consumption (spiking and then staying at 100% CPU) that burned me. And really I only saw it on XP, though some people said that they saw it on Linux, I did not mainly because the version of Linux I was using (Ubuntu) locked in the version of FireFox. It hit me on one of the early versions of 1.5, I believe it may have been 1.5.0.1 . There was the option to roll back to 1.0.7, but given the fact that 1.5.0.1 was a security fix that was a bit laughable coming from a browser which, let's face it, has a little extra security as its main selling point. And the real dealbreaker was reading all the reports from users who were having this problem, and the Mozilla developers publically saying they had no intention of fixing it and could you please stop telling us about it because we really do not care what do you want for free you ingrate pusbags. After years of using and promoting, ( even mandating! ) Mozilla and then Firefox, I had to go look for another browser.
I used Opera for awhile, but it was really strange. There were a lot of skins to choose from, and the default one was pretty ugly. Adding on customizations to try and make the interface a little more manageble from a usability standpoint as well as from a standpoint of "my god I have to look at that interface all day can it please not hurt my eyes so." I thought I had used Opera many years back and it had a reasonable interface. But now it seems they wanted to differentiate themselves. It's usually not a good idea for UI to come up with strange new ways to taunt the user and exciting alien landscapes on which lay all control of your application.
Suffice it to say I got lucky. I don't know whether the guys who were decrying all user input changed their minds or whether someone else picked up the ball, open source and all that. I have more interesting things than mozdev mailing lists to read, on my browser, except when it's broken, in which case, well then I have to use another one to figure out how to fix it. All I know is I gave up on browsing with firefox on windows for a few months and only used linux or IE (sparingly) and then one day I decided to bite the bullet and try again. As I write this from work Firefox 1.5.0.7 is happily giving me 35 windows with 4-8 tabs per window with a negligable memory footprint and pretty much no CPU usage as God intended. And having confirmed that I put that version on all my machines. It does provide a bit of a cautionary tale. Whether you are using open source or closed source software you are still at the mercy of the "vendor" unless you are ready to rewrite it yourself. And the fact that there is no browser on earth as good as firefox in any way shape or form is a bit scary, because it constitutes a new wrinkle in vendor lock in precisely the same way that no one has been able to outdo Outlook in the areas people use it for works for Microsoft.
Open Source won out this time. But the cry of the developers does tend to remind one that you will only get bugfixes and features if the developers feel like coding them or are forced to by their boss.
"After hearing chatter about PS3 pre-orders at GameStop in #ps2 on efnet, I checked your site in order to see if it was true. I figured since it was my night off, I might as well waste it camping out for a few hours...Once I got to my nearest Gamestop, I saw there was only one guy camping...He had gotten there at 5 a.m."
Now there's a gamer -- standing in line at GameStop from 6:30 to 9 qualifies as "camping out".
Too right! after all clearly the guy going there at 5am was a camper, but what the commenter left out was that *he* was a loot ninja just waiting to strike:D.
"Alright, bring in the lobbyists" is how that comic ends.
Which lobbyists?
Game industry lobbyists? Representatives of the people who setup the ESRB in the first place?
Relegious fundy lobbyists? Who think dancing leads to fornication?
"Media" lobbyists? What do they care, they just want to turn games into movies.
So back to the original question: Which lobbyists?
All of the above and more. That is the point. "Bring in the lobbyists." That's how Congress currently does things. If you have more lobbyists and give more bribes than the other guy you win. If you have no lobbyists to hawk your position you lose. Microsoft and the EFF both found this out the hard way and are "correcting" the problem, at least for themselves.
In the current system for game ratings, as it is with the movie industry, the industry controls the ratings through self-regulation. In the new order of things, lobbyists will control ths system. And Congressmen who know this and will benefit will propose legislation and people will fall for their chicanery as per usual.
Because the kind of person that will buy anti-virus software in a supermarket is not likely to know what to do with downloaded zip or rar file they will get from sourceforge.
Last time I checked, you could not even download oo.org anymore. You have to get it from bittorrent or edonkey, which is probably where most people here get MSOffice. I think it's a ridiculous requirement to ask the user to install a P2P program, especially something as notoriously slow as bittorrent, to install your program.:P The easiest way to get oo.org and install it now is to download a Linux ISO ( which requires a 30 minute straight ftp/http download versus a 7 day bittorent download that never completes ) and install Linux. Which is fine, but it defeats the purpose of replacing MSOFFICE.
Producer: Throw in some more minigames so we can boost the checkbox count.
Developer: We racked our brains but can't figure out any more in-character minigames that won't bust the budget in terms of complexity.
Producer: I don't care about that, just copy some ideas from Sims2 or Mario or FF5 or something.
Developer:...
Yes I am sure that is exactly what occurred, complete with inscrutable ellipsis. Still have not found any explanation of what the hell that means in manga / Japanese video games... It seems the question is always itself answered by ellipses.:D
Re:10 hours is a lot, really.
on
Yakuza Review
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· Score: 1
A good book doesn't cost $50 new, either. *
*Obvious exceptions include rare editions, encyclopedias, etc.
A friend of mine once pointed out that it is a peculiar aspect of our (the US) economy, but one can, for less than the cost of one hour's wages, obtain the words of Caesar, Confucius, and quite a few others. It's interesting what you find in the $5 bargain bin at Barnes and Noble, and even more interesting how few people have actually read even one of the books in there.
Re:10 hours is a lot, really.
on
Yakuza Review
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· Score: 1
Most good books take about 10 hours to read, depending on your speed and the depth of the book. Think about it, 2 minutes a page, 300 page book -> 10 hours.
The best books I have read are 800-1200 pages long. Kind of breaks your little equation:D.
Pulp novels are 200-300 pages. I would not call those "the best" or even "most good books."
Re:10 hours is a lot, really.
on
Yakuza Review
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· Score: 1
Remakes of a good game can last forever, too! And thus, Nintendo goes on and on and on...
This also raises the question: should this suit be successful, how are videogames manufacturers/stores/clerks/the interweb supposed to know which people are predisposed?
That's simple enough. In order to purchase violent video games, which by the most recent scholarly definition means any video games, you must submit to a government-sponsored psychiatric evaluation. This will go on your permanent record, citizen! Only those approved as fit for video game play will be allowed to purchase them. At first, the video game store will have to give you a 5 day waiting period to receive your game whilst they perform a background check that includes checking your score on the aforementioned test. But no worries; eventually they'll be able to embed a microchip in your brain and.. oh shit they're coming!:D
Umm, if theres a hotfix available then they did fix that crash. Not sure what your goin for here.
1) Hotfixes are generally only available from microsoft support after you call and pay with a credit card.
2) Hotfixes are not real patches. That is, they aren't generally considered release quality code.
3) When the patch comes out, it may not mesh well with the hotfix, owing in part to #2
It sucks. Until a real patch is out, and available to everyone, Microsoft has not fixed the problem. And even then, judging by today's story, it is up in the air. To be fair this is not something that is unique to microsoft. Just about every software company has some equivolent to a hotfix, and software, even patches, is never guaranteed to be perfect. But still, to discount the previous poster's problem is to misunderstand the situation.
It can be locked down so that unless the employer finds a "friend" they can't see the profile. I don't see how everyone with a university e-mail address can see the profile if you set your permissions properly unless Facebook changes the rules. Which admittedly they could.
According to the TOS they could also sell your information to the highest bidder, or repackage it as a service to potential employers. "Oh look here's their blogging history. One more thing to check in addition to drug tests, background checks, employment history, and credit reports."
The best part is you already gave them permission to use and access your data. The TOS gives anyone in the world permission to see your data.
And then I suddenly thought: to Peter Jackson, dwarves appear to be figures of fun.
And they weren't so in the book? Think about it. They were afraid to face the dragon, so they attempt to dragoon an agoraphobe into stealing some of its treasure. They mess up his house and sing about breaking his china. They're portrayed as drunken, lazy, cowardly, overly materialistic buffoons. And then in the end they get involved in a battle that is ultimately parody of warfare. Dwarves are silly and petty, just like humans. That's kind of the point, to make fun of certain human failings through the example of demihumans.
The original poster is lamenting the fact that nearly all the movies these days are remakes. It's getting so bad that we have remakes of remakes of remakes. And they don't even wait 10 years between remakes anymore. After remaking all the "greatest hits" in a 30 year period, it's time to remake them again.:P It's pretty bad when you consider the movies being shown today are the same movies that were being shown 30 years ago.
As for Pixar, et al they just make the same movie every year, which is a whole order of magnitude worse than the grave-robbery referred to in the previous post. This is more like what is happening in the video game industry. Which doesn't even hide it anymore in the case of sports games named for the year in which they are released.
"Actually, I think that product is owned by Halliburton."
No, you're thinking of the folks like to assign all evil to Halliburton, but when asked to name other contractors that can step right up and provide the same experience and services in the same time frame in the same parts of the world tend to draw something of a blank. A cognitive blank, as it were.
Slashdot Mirror
satire - noun
1. the use of irony, sarcasm, ridicule, or the like, in exposing, denouncing, or deriding vice, folly, etc.
2. a literary composition, in verse or prose, in which human folly and vice are held up to scorn, derision, or ridicule.
3. a literary genre comprising such compositions.
In what way would pretending to have a rare illness and then pretending to be cured be satire? There is a difference between "lies" and "satire."
I think that were the poster's theory correct definition #2 would clearly apply. Also the determination of whether a statement constitutes a lie or is otherwise a deception is completely irrelevant to the question of whether it qualifies as satire, or was meant in that vein.
Consider the fact that maybe you don't NEED guns for that? And should you ever DO need guns in an event like that, I'm sure there'd be no problem getting them.
I don't know of any country in the entire world with nearly as many guns as you, that are as afraid of yourselves that you are. Remember, Bush can't hold down 300 million americans alone. YOU have the power, you're just too lazy and afraid to admit it, rather relying on guns to do the talking and objecting.
Think about it. If 300 MILLION americans rose up against an abusive government, even without weapons, what the hell could they do about it?
Get your heads out of your gun-barrels and think about it. Really think about it.
ps.
I live in sweden. We have idiots. We have a government. We have idiots IN the goverment. Yet, not a single citizen here feels that guns should be a "right" so that we can defend ourselves against said goverment. And we're just a measly 9 million people over here :)
What would happen to them is the same thing that happened to the people who rose up against Hitler, Stalin, Saddam Hussein, and the Chinese government. They would be gunned down by the tools of the state and any survivors gathered for the torture chamber just to make sure the point was not lost on the rest of the populace, primarily because of the lack of means to oppose that level of force. When the Germans invaded your country resistance was only possible because guerilla fighters had weapons to use and advantage over terrain. Even then they were not expelled overnight.
There are other countries with more access to weapons than we have. I know it does not help my point, but the level of weaponry legally allowed in Iraq is shocking to most Americans. Actually, Iraq is instructive in one other way. The Shia were unable to oppose Saddam because gunships vs small arms = you are dead with your AK. The level of weaponry the common citizen has in the US is utterly impotent against the might of our military forces and machines were they ever turned against us. The only hope left is that the common soldier continues to hold true to those values that the German soldier threw away; they have sworn to defend the constitution with their life, and as long as they continue to do that they will never allow themselves to be blatantly misused.
"I find the judge's defense is sound: The judge basically identified that the level of violence in this game is already approved by society."
But that's the wrong test. There is, to my knowledge, no precedent for restraining publication of anything. Even instructions for creating a nuclear bomb in the 50's.
That's just not the case. It's sad, but there is in fact ample precedent for restricting works wholesale. Think _Ulyses_ or _Lady_Chatterly's_Lover_ or _Lolita_ or anything else on the "banned books list." The legal standard established by precedent is exactly what the judge was following here. A work can be judged obscene and therefore unworthy of first amendment protection if it holds no artistic value, appeals to the prurient interest, and meets the community's standard of obscenity. I don't agree with that but that is how the law has been interpreted for a very long time. The judge's argument here is that the community already accepts a level of violence greater than what is contained in the game as valid entertainment, and there is nothing else objectionable in the game. Therefore it fails to meet the legal standard for obscenity and must be allowed.
Personally I am an absolutist when it comes to the constitution. I think when it says "shall make no law" that's what it should mean. None of this funny business about "reasonable compromises for society" and all that. The Constitution is not reasonable and does not compromise. It is not to be held to the standard of culture that was the product of millenia of oppression and ignorance. It stands above all and should be regarded in that way. I don't think it's even useful to go too far into what the "Founding Fathers" would have allowed. They could not possibly have completely imagined what they had unleashed. They had an idea, but even they were not ready to apply it as we have by freeing slaves, allowing non-landowners/non-whites/women to vote, etc. But despite the fact the government felt the need to amend it to accomplish these things, the law was already there in the constitution and the declaration of independance. "Society" was just not ready to apply it properly just as it was not ready to accept a world without kings where free men chose their own destiny and "class" no longer mattered.
Every time we try to apply the needs of "our heritage" and "society" to these things we take a step backward. That's why the constitution should be interpreted literally and followed as the supreme law of the land. It doesn't say "you have freedom of speech as long as you do not offend the most prudish of minds." It does not say you have the "right to be secure in [your] papers, effects" etc except when the government feels the need to pry. It says no and it means it. "make no law." Do not touch this area of life.
There have always been people who want to move backwards and want to change things back the way they used to be, especially people who once held more sway than they do now. They will always have an excuse, some reasonable argument why you should allow them to have their way. And that is why we should always follow the constitution. We should say that no means no, period. To believe this is alreday the case is to suffer from grave naivite and serious error.
SERIOUSLY. Show me proof because I am 100% sure you are full of shit. No judge in their right mind would allow a free speech law to stand like that. If they did, it would be struck on appeal (and it WOULD be appealed).
This is not a question of freedom of speech. If the laws barred such games from being sold/produced/owned at all then it would violate the first amendment (among other things) and therefore would be struck down. Which has already happened. However, the question of whether such material is to be allowed in the hands of minors is a seperate issue. Historically courts have upheld laws restricting minors' access to certain materials (such as pornography) without the consent of their parents.
The poster is correct in stating that laws that require vendors to be responsible for checking the age of customers who buy certain games/videos/music cds has generally been upheld for the same reason that laws requiring stores to check ages for cigarettes/alcohol/firearms/pornography. The argument that it presents an undue burden on the retailer was not upheld, and the laws themselves do not directly challenge constitutional rights as currently interpreted by the courts since adults still have access to these things.
The wider question, where because of these burdens and economic factors retailers/moviehouses demand that media be censored to meet the standard of their market, as happens with movies needing a certain rating or the "Wal-Mart version" of a cd, sanitized so that it no longer has a "mature" rating, and its effect on the ability of content providers to create unhindered works of art and adults to access those works has not been addressed as far as I know. I'm not sure the courts are the right answer for that question, but it is a societal problem that must be faced as surely as the problem of unsupervised, unguided/misguided children and the damage they cause because their parents refuse to take responsibility and do their jobs.
I spoke too soon. It looks like the 100%cpu thing is still happening occasionally. There isn't much to go on; today when it happened I only had 5 firefox windows up, mostly with only one tab. None of the pages were dynamic, either. I expect to see that sometimes if there are flash pages or some other dynamic code, stuff that self-refreshes, etc. But if the page has already been rendered and is not being refreshed, there is no applet or flash plugin being run because of the page... what could firefox possibly be doing with all those cycles?
http://download.openoffice.org/2.0.3/index.html
So the big green area doesn't say download ?
Yes it does, and it was not a link, but it did have a big green arrow pointing down at the bittorent and edonkey links. Thus the only working links on that site did not lead to a download for the software. Clicking on the green area did nothing.
I was able to make the green area do something later. When I had tried before hovering on the aforementioned green area did not produce the mouseover changes associated with links, and you could click all you wanted but it was not going anywhere. So I basically assumed, although I think I have run into this before because there was some deja vu here, that the image was just that, an image, with a big green arrow pointing to the normal links, which did behave as expected, pointing to ed2k or bittorrents. After looking again at the code for the page I suspect some kind of java strangeness was involved, and given that I was looking at the page in Windows the fact I recently rebooted to clear some other oddities must be weighed in.
But it does beg the question. Especially given how much the open source community decries fanciness such as flash (which I initially suspected as the culprit given the behaviour of this embedded object) at the expense of compatability, why did the designers of the oo.org page decide to use strange java objects when a good old fashioned html link would have done better? And you have to admit a big green arrow that says download, pointing to links where one might download something, would generally be expected, well, to point to the place where you can download it. And so it does, to the ed2k and bittorrent links.
As far as the speed goes for bittorrent, I have found that you can only get something as long as other people are getting it as well because once they do they are going to shut down their clients. The typical linux distro ends up having like 3 semipermanent seeds with a blossom of others if your timing is just right. But whether you get in on the torrent when everyone else does or you end up on the tail of the dog with 3 sources to pull from that you cannot give back to, you end up with very very very slow downloads compared to straight ftp/http, or hell even scp.
I have never downloaded anything off bittorrent the size of a cd in less than 3 days, and usually what I end up with is a file that is 35-75% complete and no seeds to pull from, at which point you have to start over completely or just give up. This is exacerbated by the fact that most linux distros that are distributed primarily via this method have about 6-8 cds to download. I've even had normal pdf files take 12-20 hours through bittorrent when it would take seconds otherwise. This is with unlimited upload speeds and number of downloaders, and again it does not matter in the bittorrent protocol that you are declaring an intention to allow people to download if no one else is downloading anything from you. And as I understand it they have to be downloading the same file as you are from you or it does not count, and this meshes with my experience. Which is basically why it is going to take forever; you're almost guaranteed by probability to end up being treated the same as a leecher. And meanwhile you basically cannot use the system for anything else network related. So while I am downloading something at 2kbps and maybe one person is getting 0.5kbps download of a chunk I happen to have managed to get, I can't even get out on a web browser. Yes I am aware that the settings for how much bandwidth is allowed are the culprit here, that is rather the point. bittorrent is supposed to reward greater upload maximums with greater download maximums, and at the maximum possible, it is still sucking.
And ed2k ... I mean could they at least have proposed [EAX]mule? I mean I know it's the same network standard, but still.
Billy Budd? The Great Gatsby? Animal Farm? The Stranger? Those books are all extremely short. There are unabridged dictionaries thousands of pages long but that doesn't make them good. You think perhaps the length of a book doesn't have any effect on how good it is?
Good point. I guess I was just responding to the posters assertion that most good books are only 300 pages or less. I liked a lot of short books including the ones you mentioned. The Old Man and the Sea was pretty good, so was some of the Bernard Shaw, JD Salinger, Robert van Gulik, and Stanislaw Lem stuff I have read. All rather short if not extremely so. But I read a lot of nonfiction (in fact I tend to prefer it) and that tends to run long. that's where my 800-1200 pages come from, though I have read some good novels of similar length.
http://download.openoffice.org/2.0.3/index.html
So the big green area doesn't say download ?
Yes it does, and it was not a link, but it did have a big green arrow pointing down at the bittorent and edonkey links. Thus the only working links on that site did not lead to a download for the software. Clicking on the green area did nothing.
Could someone pls. direct me to that leak... I've searched for it for the last 2 years & I can't find anything that match your description... ...but then again, I do only use FireFox on W2K, SuSE and OS X.
I think your OS is incompatible with FireFox... and it is probably done on purpose.
For me it wasn't the memory leaks so much as the CPU consumption (spiking and then staying at 100% CPU) that burned me. And really I only saw it on XP, though some people said that they saw it on Linux, I did not mainly because the version of Linux I was using (Ubuntu) locked in the version of FireFox. It hit me on one of the early versions of 1.5, I believe it may have been 1.5.0.1 . There was the option to roll back to 1.0.7, but given the fact that 1.5.0.1 was a security fix that was a bit laughable coming from a browser which, let's face it, has a little extra security as its main selling point. And the real dealbreaker was reading all the reports from users who were having this problem, and the Mozilla developers publically saying they had no intention of fixing it and could you please stop telling us about it because we really do not care what do you want for free you ingrate pusbags. After years of using and promoting, ( even mandating! ) Mozilla and then Firefox, I had to go look for another browser.
I used Opera for awhile, but it was really strange. There were a lot of skins to choose from, and the default one was pretty ugly. Adding on customizations to try and make the interface a little more manageble from a usability standpoint as well as from a standpoint of "my god I have to look at that interface all day can it please not hurt my eyes so." I thought I had used Opera many years back and it had a reasonable interface. But now it seems they wanted to differentiate themselves. It's usually not a good idea for UI to come up with strange new ways to taunt the user and exciting alien landscapes on which lay all control of your application.
Suffice it to say I got lucky. I don't know whether the guys who were decrying all user input changed their minds or whether someone else picked up the ball, open source and all that. I have more interesting things than mozdev mailing lists to read, on my browser, except when it's broken, in which case, well then I have to use another one to figure out how to fix it. All I know is I gave up on browsing with firefox on windows for a few months and only used linux or IE (sparingly) and then one day I decided to bite the bullet and try again. As I write this from work Firefox 1.5.0.7 is happily giving me 35 windows with 4-8 tabs per window with a negligable memory footprint and pretty much no CPU usage as God intended. And having confirmed that I put that version on all my machines. It does provide a bit of a cautionary tale. Whether you are using open source or closed source software you are still at the mercy of the "vendor" unless you are ready to rewrite it yourself. And the fact that there is no browser on earth as good as firefox in any way shape or form is a bit scary, because it constitutes a new wrinkle in vendor lock in precisely the same way that no one has been able to outdo Outlook in the areas people use it for works for Microsoft.
Open Source won out this time. But the cry of the developers does tend to remind one that you will only get bugfixes and features if the developers feel like coding them or are forced to by their boss.
"After hearing chatter about PS3 pre-orders at GameStop in #ps2 on efnet, I checked your site in order to see if it was true. I figured since it was my night off, I might as well waste it camping out for a few hours...Once I got to my nearest Gamestop, I saw there was only one guy camping...He had gotten there at 5 a.m."
Now there's a gamer -- standing in line at GameStop from 6:30 to 9 qualifies as "camping out".
Too right! after all clearly the guy going there at 5am was a camper, but what the commenter left out was that *he* was a loot ninja just waiting to strike :D.
"Alright, bring in the lobbyists" is how that comic ends.
Which lobbyists?
Game industry lobbyists? Representatives of the people who setup the ESRB in the first place?
Relegious fundy lobbyists? Who think dancing leads to fornication?
"Media" lobbyists? What do they care, they just want to turn games into movies.
So back to the original question: Which lobbyists?
All of the above and more. That is the point. "Bring in the lobbyists." That's how Congress currently does things. If you have more lobbyists and give more bribes than the other guy you win. If you have no lobbyists to hawk your position you lose. Microsoft and the EFF both found this out the hard way and are "correcting" the problem, at least for themselves.
In the current system for game ratings, as it is with the movie industry, the industry controls the ratings through self-regulation. In the new order of things, lobbyists will control ths system. And Congressmen who know this and will benefit will propose legislation and people will fall for their chicanery as per usual.
Because the kind of person that will buy anti-virus software in a supermarket is not likely to know what to do with downloaded zip or rar file they will get from sourceforge.
Last time I checked, you could not even download oo.org anymore. You have to get it from bittorrent or edonkey, which is probably where most people here get MSOffice. I think it's a ridiculous requirement to ask the user to install a P2P program, especially something as notoriously slow as bittorrent, to install your program. :P The easiest way to get oo.org and install it now is to download a Linux ISO ( which requires a 30 minute straight ftp/http download versus a 7 day bittorent download that never completes ) and install Linux. Which is fine, but it defeats the purpose of replacing MSOFFICE.
Producer: Throw in some more minigames so we can boost the checkbox count.
Developer: We racked our brains but can't figure out any more in-character minigames that won't bust the budget in terms of complexity.
Producer: I don't care about that, just copy some ideas from Sims2 or Mario or FF5 or something.
Developer: ...
Yes I am sure that is exactly what occurred, complete with inscrutable ellipsis. Still have not found any explanation of what the hell that means in manga / Japanese video games... It seems the question is always itself answered by ellipses. :D
A good book doesn't cost $50 new, either. *
*Obvious exceptions include rare editions, encyclopedias, etc.
A friend of mine once pointed out that it is a peculiar aspect of our (the US) economy, but one can, for less than the cost of one hour's wages, obtain the words of Caesar, Confucius, and quite a few others. It's interesting what you find in the $5 bargain bin at Barnes and Noble, and even more interesting how few people have actually read even one of the books in there.
Most good books take about 10 hours to read, depending on your speed and the depth of the book. Think about it, 2 minutes a page, 300 page book -> 10 hours.
The best books I have read are 800-1200 pages long. Kind of breaks your little equation :D.
Pulp novels are 200-300 pages. I would not call those "the best" or even "most good books."
Remakes of a good game can last forever, too! And thus, Nintendo goes on and on and on...
(Don't stop believin'!)
Oh yes, and they do it over and over and over.
Won't be getting a PS3 for KH3.
Two words for you, son. White Knights.
If I wasn't getting a PS3 before, I sure as hell am getting one now.
This also raises the question: should this suit be successful, how are videogames manufacturers/stores/clerks/the interweb supposed to know which people are predisposed?
That's simple enough. In order to purchase violent video games, which by the most recent scholarly definition means any video games, you must submit to a government-sponsored psychiatric evaluation. This will go on your permanent record, citizen! Only those approved as fit for video game play will be allowed to purchase them. At first, the video game store will have to give you a 5 day waiting period to receive your game whilst they perform a background check that includes checking your score on the aforementioned test. But no worries; eventually they'll be able to embed a microchip in your brain and.. oh shit they're coming! :D
Umm, if theres a hotfix available then they did fix that crash. Not sure what your goin for here.
1) Hotfixes are generally only available from microsoft support after you call and pay with a credit card.
2) Hotfixes are not real patches. That is, they aren't generally considered release quality code.
3) When the patch comes out, it may not mesh well with the hotfix, owing in part to #2
It sucks. Until a real patch is out, and available to everyone, Microsoft has not fixed the problem. And even then, judging by today's story, it is up in the air. To be fair this is not something that is unique to microsoft. Just about every software company has some equivolent to a hotfix, and software, even patches, is never guaranteed to be perfect. But still, to discount the previous poster's problem is to misunderstand the situation.
It can be locked down so that unless the employer finds a "friend" they can't see the profile. I don't see how everyone with a university e-mail address can see the profile if you set your permissions properly unless Facebook changes the rules. Which admittedly they could.
According to the TOS they could also sell your information to the highest bidder, or repackage it as a service to potential employers. "Oh look here's their blogging history. One more thing to check in addition to drug tests, background checks, employment history, and credit reports."
The best part is you already gave them permission to use and access your data. The TOS gives anyone in the world permission to see your data.
And then I suddenly thought: to Peter Jackson, dwarves appear to be figures of fun.
And they weren't so in the book? Think about it. They were afraid to face the dragon, so they attempt to dragoon an agoraphobe into stealing some of its treasure. They mess up his house and sing about breaking his china. They're portrayed as drunken, lazy, cowardly, overly materialistic buffoons. And then in the end they get involved in a battle that is ultimately parody of warfare. Dwarves are silly and petty, just like humans. That's kind of the point, to make fun of certain human failings through the example of demihumans.
Whose grave are you robbing when you make movies about King Kong and Godzilla?
Presumably that of these guys.
The original poster is lamenting the fact that nearly all the movies these days are remakes. It's getting so bad that we have remakes of remakes of remakes. And they don't even wait 10 years between remakes anymore. After remaking all the "greatest hits" in a 30 year period, it's time to remake them again. :P It's pretty bad when you consider the movies being shown today are the same movies that were being shown 30 years ago.
As for Pixar, et al they just make the same movie every year, which is a whole order of magnitude worse than the grave-robbery referred to in the previous post. This is more like what is happening in the video game industry. Which doesn't even hide it anymore in the case of sports games named for the year in which they are released.
On November 3rd, 2004, civil war was narrowly averted when Kerry supporters realized that only 0.03% of them owned a gun.
On the other side of that coin, it is instructive to remember that the previous civil war started after the Conservatives lost an election.
"Actually, I think that product is owned by Halliburton."
No, you're thinking of the folks like to assign all evil to Halliburton, but when asked to name other contractors that can step right up and provide the same experience and services in the same time frame in the same parts of the world tend to draw something of a blank. A cognitive blank, as it were.
cognitive dissonance
I think that phrase does not mean what you think it means.
This way men could find out how wives can re-wire us; OH GOD! We need a clue here! How do they do it???
It's very simple. They simply manipulate the control wire. Every man has one ... you should ask your wife to show you where yours is. :D