For what (little) it's worth my point was that two objects could travel away from each other with a relative speed of (2*C)-1 i.e. if they're both traveling near the speed of light, relative to each other they will be moving near twice the speed of light. Therefore if two objects were always moving at that speed (or at least since the begining of the universe) and are 14 billion light years apart, it must have taken slightly over 7 billion years for them to get to that location since the big bang requires that they must have been at least somewhat close together (give or take a few hundred million light years).
Anyway, the point being that if we can dig up two objects in space which are (I'm making up a number) 20 billion light years apart then we can say the universe is no younger than 10 billion years old. We can say it's older if we can figure out how fast those objects are moving relative to each other. So (again I'm making up numbers) if we have our two 20 billion light years separated objects and they are moving at half the speed of light away from each other (seems reasonable) then we would be able to say the universe is no younger than 40 billion years old.
I can't remember the number. I'm just wondering because while the speed our two galaxies are traveling appart (us and the one that's 12.9 billion light years away) could be 2 times the speed of light - 1 it probably isn't. Either way if we can find the two most distant galaxies from each other (as far as we can see) and factor in their speed and acceleration we could say "The Universe is at least this old.
Do I know obscure Star Wars trivia? Look at my user name. Does Sullust ring any bells?
Vader: My Lord, what of the rebel fleet mounting near Sullust.
Anyway, yeah I'm a big fan of the episodes IV-VI. My question to you is what Star Wars do you find lacking? Lets start with the ones everybody mentions: No space ships and limited (essentially no) Jedi. The first one is completely unacceptable, and if you refuse to play a star wars game until there are space ships in it then wait for the expansion. It sucks they're not in there now but that's the way it is. I would advocate to most people ridding the fence to wait until the expansion (and hence vehicles) comes out sometime early (if we're lucky) next year.
Jedi are a little trickier. It boils down to how true to the star wars univere you want this game to be. How many Jedi were running around the Galaxy between episodes IV and V? To my knowledge there was only Yoda. There may have been a few others but not very many at all. It's also damned hard to be/become a Jedi in that day and age. If you want to keep things true to the story you have to keep the number of Jedi painfully low. I'm not certain that it makes the game better, and I certainly have arguments with the way players get to become Jedi's (apprently so complicated it might as well be random), but that's an issue for another post.
So we've got those two out of the way. So what is the Star Wars universe? Well it sure as hell ain't running out in the deserts of Tatooine killing Womp Rats. Unless you're Luke Skywalker practicing his blasterin' skills ("I've killed womp rats that size back home" [note: all quotes may be slightly off, but the idea is there]). In other words, people go out hunting all the time, maybe getting paid for it is a bit silly but that begs the question: How else are you going to make money? Get a job? Doing what? I may be getting off the topic so I'll shift gears. How you make money is really more an issue with MMORPG's in general than with SWG in particular.
I'll do a quick checklist:
All major races in the game: check
Major races worth a damn playable (Bothans excepting): check
Blasters: check
Galactic Civil War: half a check (you can participate in it, but it doesn't really affect the story line [and you could argue it shouldn't if you don't believe the story should change]).
Droids:Half a check. The game lacks combat droids in a big way, but most of the other droid functionality is there (as far as I know). I'm mean, what did droids really do in the movies anyway?
Major Star Wars cities: check
Obscure trivia from the books I've never heard of before: check
Star Wars "look": This one is tricky. What have we really seen in Star Wars? A whole lot of Tatooine, a whole lot of Naboo, Coruscant (sp?) and the inside of space ships. They got Naboo and Tatooine down very well, Theed really looks like Theed. You can go to the hanger where little Anikin flew out of in Ep I and everything. The cantinas are modeled right out of Mos Eisley.
There seems to be a tendancy among players of this game (myself included) to want it to be very close to Star Wars but only in certain ways. In the universe Joe Schmo (your character) is a piss-ant. He has almost no chance of ever being a Jedi, he will never rise high in the Rebellion or the Empire, he certainly won't be storming any Deth Stars capturing princesses. Those roles are reserved for the super big time heros. Your character is not one of them. Should he be? Maybe. It might make the game more fun, but then you'd have several thousand Han Solos running around.
My point is this, I'm going to guess that what you find the game lacking in is adventure and I agree with you whole heartedly. While it might be silly to think you'd ever attack a major imperial ship, what about a small fort? Yes they have that in the game, but it's lam
not gungans or jawas or things like that which would at least be recognizable as a Star Wars creature
Not that this means the boards were necissarily a great deal of misinformation, but Gungans and Jawas are in the game. Indeed there are several Gungan camps littered about Naboo, an area of static Gungan quests in or near the "sacred place" or something like that. There is also a static Jawa camp of some sort (I've never been there so I can't describe it). While it doesn't have any missions associated with it (that I know of) there are certainly lots of Jawas. To add another there is also "Fort Tusken" where you the goal is to (surprise) kill all the Tuskens including some leader Tusken Raider.
I wish I could detail more of the quests but I'm not a fighter (I'm a musician) so I've not done most of them. You can however meet Darth Vader, Princess Leia (sp?), the emperor, Jaba, etc... I'm not saying that these encounters will blow your mind, and indeed may be disappointing, but the star wars is there.
If you're willing to work for it (and I do mean work) you can get a couple AT-STs to follow you around and smack people up real good.
Anyway, the rule of thumb for all boards is you're going to get way more negative information than positive. Few people want to talk about the good stuff because it's not much fun, same reason theres so much "bad news." Posts of "Things I like about this game" just don't stay high on the boards very long.
I find it kind of funny that those numbers are really close except RedHat/Novel have ten times the market cap SCO does and IBM has 100 times the market cap RedHat/Novel do. This isn't supposed to be important, just thought it odd that these numbers are almost exact multiples of each other.
True, but on every Redhat installation since at least 7.0 and probably earlier both Apache and Sendmail were turned on by default. There may not be a big glaring worm like Code Red for Apache, but if having IIS turned on by default is a reason to criticize Microsoft, then having Apache on by default is certainly a reason to criticize RedHat (and probably other vendors, I don't know what any of the others turn on by default). Sendmail I understand to an extent, but not Apache.
Yeah, analysts expected them to loose a hell of allot of money, and instead they just lost allot of money. Just because you beat expectations doesn't mean your doing well.
Remember boys and girls, the next time you are confronted by the police over illegal drug posession, or distribution of pirated music/software, immedately and violently assault the next person you see. That way you can get your sentance reduced from 3-10 years to 6 months.
Heres the thing though, sure I have no idea what that says, but that's just because somebody decided to be very clever/brief/or both. Half my job is to write Perl scripts and sure there are about a million neato tricks that I could use to make my code really short and impossible to read but I never learned them and have no intention to. If you want, Perl can look more or less exactly like C, or if you want it can look like the above. It's all a matter of what you want out of perl.
When they say theres more than one way to do it, syntax is included in there too.
It may be prudent, and it may save you to $20 to $30 in the long run, but in the short run I get to go ahead and watch all the movies at home whenever I feel like it, and don't have to wait until November of 2004 or possibly later for the final boxed set of LOTR to come out. If such a box set comes and contains more goodies that make it worth an extra $60 or whatever it costs, then I'll probably buy it too, and won't care one bit that I own some movies two or three times. In essence, it's worth $30 for me to watch FoTR and all it's bonus stuff now even if it means I might wind up buying it again in the future. Of course NewLine will have to put enough goodies on there to make me feel it's worth it, whoever made X-Men 1.5 failed to do that, so it's getting a rental.
Could this be compared to when linuxgruven (or whatever that linux certification training company was) guaranteed that you'd get a job (with them if necessary) after you got your cert?
Resistance, is futile. We are TiVo. Your primitive television cannot resist the power of the TiVo.
In all honesty. The only concern I have (as a TiVo owner) is that if I ever an HDTV or a dish I have to get a new TiVo. The most compelling thing is the HD DirecTV/TiVo in one unit. At least I think they have those. I know they have HD DirectTV and DirectTV/TiVo units, and I'm pretty sure they have HD TiVo's. Seem's like they could roll all of those into one. Anyway...
What I've yet to see anyone point out, and haven't seen anyone mention one way or the other when the DVD's were announed is: Will the 4 disc set include the original cut of the movie, or just the newer longer version.
For what it's worth I bought the recent version and my only complaint is that there is no director's commentary, that is the feature I bought a DVD player for. Picture and sound quality be damned.
Re:Whoa whoa whoa hotshot...
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I find it funny that despite my defence of it, and how much I enjoy parts of wrestling, stating such things still caries a stigma like no other. You can be a fan of allot of silly or lude things and not get half the ridicule you'll draw by stating you are a fan of wrestling. Everyone just assumes your that you're an idiot who thinks it's real, or phenominally childish. I guess wrestling earned it's reputation though, considering such a large amount of the show is very childish... oh well, such is life.
Re:Whoa whoa whoa hotshot...
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Sorry if I gave the impression that I was insulting wrestling, I use the term "wrasslin" purley out of affection. Though this is neither the topic nor the forum, I've got the karma to burn so who cares. I too am a fan of our beloved "sports entertainment" even during the last year or so of its doldrums. I've watched the mess that was the ungodly wcw/ecw invasion and the crap that followed. All so I could occasionally get a good Kurt Angle or Chris Benoit match.
Wrestling is one of those interesting things (at least to me) whose value can't really be explained. It's grown men in their underwear pretending to fight, and yet theres something more to it. Something that makes 4 hours of crappy television worth 15 minutes of gold. In few other venues of entertainment would the fans say "this products sucks and I do not enjoy watching it," and yet continue to watch. It's because at some point, be it when you met the much maligned Von Erics, or when I saw the Undertaker debut (on TV, never been to a live show) something so enjoyable happens that you're desperate to get that back.
I'm a fan of football and baseball, yet what are often heralded as some of the greatest moments in those sports (such as Oaklands game saving catch over the wall a couple of nights ago) can't begin to compare with the elation I feel when watching RVD and Eddie Gurrero in a ladder match. I knew who was going to win that match before it started, just like you know the good guy is going to win at the end of practically every movie you see, but it's the process of getting from the beginning to the inevitable end that you're interested in.
Saddly, it seems like the true artists in wrestling have never really gotten their fair shake in the big times, they sit somewhere in the middle of the card providing the real entertainment, while the guys who can talk decently get the top story lines and drive the shows. Granted it would probably be a dull time if all we got was technical wrestling. After all, we need to have some idea of why these two men in their underwear are pretending to fight.
Anyway, all that aside, I don't "suggest" anyone try to like wrestling. It's like Linux or vi, you know what it is and what it's all about. If your the kind of person who would be interested in one of those things you'll eventually find your way to, no amount of forcing someone to use either or watch wrestling is going to make them like it.
I wasn't going to respond to this until I came to a rather unsettling realization. You are of course right when you say that the World Wildlife Fund had the name first, I'll even grant that they used the acronym first though I'm not sure. Whats got me botehred though, is that I much like a great many other people, applied a good old doulbe standard. I'd rather WWE be able to use the WWF moniker and the World Wildlife Fund just not worry about it. WWE certainly didn't have any complaints with the World Wildlife Fund using the name, the Fund are the folks who made it a binary issue.
But that's not really the point, the point is that the World Wildlife Fund has as much right to the name as Nissan Computers has to nissan.com. They've got a name, they weren't piggybacking off another companies success, and they got there first. Those are usually the criteria we use when defending some guy with a URL. The wrestling use of WWF is certainly better known, but that argument is the very one we deride when judging cases like the one of nissan.com. Sue nissan motors is better known than nissan computers, but nissan computers has just as much right to the name as the car company.
So effectively what I've done is picked the guy who I want to win, and geared an argument to defend him. Certainly not uncommon in the world today. Perhaps, and here I'll begin rambling so bear with me or just stop reading, its the fact that the World Wildlife Fund filed the suit claiming the (then) World Wrestling Federation could no longer use their name of 20+ years. At this point I've been conditioned to believe that whoever files a suit is a greedy petty twit who deserves to loose. Stand up comics, SNL, and goobers sueing because McDonalds made them fat have done that. Of course there's lots of valid suits like when my car blows up and kills my dog or something, then that's okay, but the instant I hear "lawsuit" I just say "uggghh..." and tune out. I"m not going to foward a consipiracy theory about how this helps large corps, but it is at least lucky:) Mostly though, it's telling of me, and whoever may be similar to me in this regard.
Thanks for bearing with me on that. So in conclusion, crow tastes remarkably like chicken...
When I say WWF what do you think of first: a) World Wrestling Federation b) World Wildlife Fund
Aparently British courts believe that most people will answer B and have ruled that the (now) WWE no longer use WWF as people might confuse it with the World Wildlife Fund. It's obviously a bunch of white hairs (literally) frowning upon that rubbish on television in favor of the much more civilized environmentalists. It's not at all different than the myriad domain disputes that populate Slashdot, only this time both companies are big, its just that one is being discriminated against based on their content.
Of course I don't seriously expect the Slashdot crowd to care about wrasslin', but it's interesting to see that all courts can be dumb when deciding who gets to use what name, not just domain name courts.
Sure they'll loose money, but they'll just blame the lost revenue on people still pirating movies, which means we need even more laws to stop those damn dirty pirates...
Well crap, the Macs suck thing was a joke, I even surounded it in anglebraket joke slash anglebraket but those obviously didn't get printed. So for clarification, Macs don't suck...
Okay, you got me. I was wrong about Bluetooth (I'm wishing I'd read this long one before the short one below it, alas) it sounds pretty slick. Which I guess brings up a point which isn't really relevant to the whole Mac thing, and kinda is. Why didn't I know Bluetooth was slick? I heard about it when it was vaporware, then heard about it when it was first shown at Comdex, then heard... nothing... then I heard that very few people are buying Bluetooth stuff. I can't name a single product (before this Ericson phone) and maybe a couple tablet PC's that use Bluetooth, and I read Slashdot everyday and some other geek sites etc...
It's more or less the Tivo problem. Tivo kicks total ass, but no one but the people who took a gamble on it know it. At least Tivo advertises (albeit poorly). What's happened here is I've just played out the good old lazy consumer role. If big tech companies don't relentlessly tell me how cool their tech is, I won't think it's cool either.
You are correct sir. I made an incorect hypothesis, a useless technology does indeed exist. I appologize. Do the other two I mentioned exist too? Then there would be three useless technologies in the world. Fancy that.
Note: I'm not saying Bluetooth is completely useless, I've just never seen an application for them that I felt was worth any real money.
A higher resale value or resale percentage of value? If a Mac and PC drop 50% in value over a year (that's of course generous but whatever), the average Mac is going to be worth $750 and the average PC is going to be worth $500. So you can say that the Mac has a higher resale value, but that would only be because of the initial higher first sale cost. Of course they might have a higher resale percentage of value, I honestly don't know, just looking for clarification.
For the record, I really like Mac's and OS X. I would use a Mac but for two problems:
1) Lack of games. This has not been fixed, you've got Warcraft III; not Neverwinter Nights. It's the same reason I don't buy a Game Cube. Super Smash Bros. sure is neat, but it's not worth $200.
2) Cost. I cannot aford a Mac. I wish I enough money to buy one. I do not resent the people can because they have this much money, nor am I particularly impressed that you have that much money. I do not hate you because you own a Mac, please do not look down on me because I don't.
Slashdot Mirror
For what (little) it's worth my point was that two objects could travel away from each other with a relative speed of (2*C)-1 i.e. if they're both traveling near the speed of light, relative to each other they will be moving near twice the speed of light. Therefore if two objects were always moving at that speed (or at least since the begining of the universe) and are 14 billion light years apart, it must have taken slightly over 7 billion years for them to get to that location since the big bang requires that they must have been at least somewhat close together (give or take a few hundred million light years).
Anyway, the point being that if we can dig up two objects in space which are (I'm making up a number) 20 billion light years apart then we can say the universe is no younger than 10 billion years old. We can say it's older if we can figure out how fast those objects are moving relative to each other. So (again I'm making up numbers) if we have our two 20 billion light years separated objects and they are moving at half the speed of light away from each other (seems reasonable) then we would be able to say the universe is no younger than 40 billion years old.
I can't remember the number. I'm just wondering because while the speed our two galaxies are traveling appart (us and the one that's 12.9 billion light years away) could be 2 times the speed of light - 1 it probably isn't. Either way if we can find the two most distant galaxies from each other (as far as we can see) and factor in their speed and acceleration we could say "The Universe is at least this old.
Just curious...
Do I know obscure Star Wars trivia? Look at my user name. Does Sullust ring any bells?
Vader: My Lord, what of the rebel fleet mounting near Sullust.
Anyway, yeah I'm a big fan of the episodes IV-VI. My question to you is what Star Wars do you find lacking? Lets start with the ones everybody mentions: No space ships and limited (essentially no) Jedi. The first one is completely unacceptable, and if you refuse to play a star wars game until there are space ships in it then wait for the expansion. It sucks they're not in there now but that's the way it is. I would advocate to most people ridding the fence to wait until the expansion (and hence vehicles) comes out sometime early (if we're lucky) next year.
Jedi are a little trickier. It boils down to how true to the star wars univere you want this game to be. How many Jedi were running around the Galaxy between episodes IV and V? To my knowledge there was only Yoda. There may have been a few others but not very many at all. It's also damned hard to be/become a Jedi in that day and age. If you want to keep things true to the story you have to keep the number of Jedi painfully low. I'm not certain that it makes the game better, and I certainly have arguments with the way players get to become Jedi's (apprently so complicated it might as well be random), but that's an issue for another post.
So we've got those two out of the way. So what is the Star Wars universe? Well it sure as hell ain't running out in the deserts of Tatooine killing Womp Rats. Unless you're Luke Skywalker practicing his blasterin' skills ("I've killed womp rats that size back home" [note: all quotes may be slightly off, but the idea is there]). In other words, people go out hunting all the time, maybe getting paid for it is a bit silly but that begs the question: How else are you going to make money? Get a job? Doing what? I may be getting off the topic so I'll shift gears. How you make money is really more an issue with MMORPG's in general than with SWG in particular.
I'll do a quick checklist:
All major races in the game: check
Major races worth a damn playable (Bothans excepting): check
Blasters: check
Galactic Civil War: half a check (you can participate in it, but it doesn't really affect the story line [and you could argue it shouldn't if you don't believe the story should change]).
Droids:Half a check. The game lacks combat droids in a big way, but most of the other droid functionality is there (as far as I know). I'm mean, what did droids really do in the movies anyway?
Major Star Wars cities: check
Obscure trivia from the books I've never heard of before: check
Star Wars "look": This one is tricky. What have we really seen in Star Wars? A whole lot of Tatooine, a whole lot of Naboo, Coruscant (sp?) and the inside of space ships. They got Naboo and Tatooine down very well, Theed really looks like Theed. You can go to the hanger where little Anikin flew out of in Ep I and everything. The cantinas are modeled right out of Mos Eisley.
There seems to be a tendancy among players of this game (myself included) to want it to be very close to Star Wars but only in certain ways. In the universe Joe Schmo (your character) is a piss-ant. He has almost no chance of ever being a Jedi, he will never rise high in the Rebellion or the Empire, he certainly won't be storming any Deth Stars capturing princesses. Those roles are reserved for the super big time heros. Your character is not one of them. Should he be? Maybe. It might make the game more fun, but then you'd have several thousand Han Solos running around.
My point is this, I'm going to guess that what you find the game lacking in is adventure and I agree with you whole heartedly. While it might be silly to think you'd ever attack a major imperial ship, what about a small fort? Yes they have that in the game, but it's lam
not gungans or jawas or things like that which would at least be recognizable as a Star Wars creature
Not that this means the boards were necissarily a great deal of misinformation, but Gungans and Jawas are in the game. Indeed there are several Gungan camps littered about Naboo, an area of static Gungan quests in or near the "sacred place" or something like that. There is also a static Jawa camp of some sort (I've never been there so I can't describe it). While it doesn't have any missions associated with it (that I know of) there are certainly lots of Jawas. To add another there is also "Fort Tusken" where you the goal is to (surprise) kill all the Tuskens including some leader Tusken Raider.
I wish I could detail more of the quests but I'm not a fighter (I'm a musician) so I've not done most of them. You can however meet Darth Vader, Princess Leia (sp?), the emperor, Jaba, etc... I'm not saying that these encounters will blow your mind, and indeed may be disappointing, but the star wars is there.
If you're willing to work for it (and I do mean work) you can get a couple AT-STs to follow you around and smack people up real good.
Anyway, the rule of thumb for all boards is you're going to get way more negative information than positive. Few people want to talk about the good stuff because it's not much fun, same reason theres so much "bad news." Posts of "Things I like about this game" just don't stay high on the boards very long.
Interesting, these are the market cap's for the various comapnies involved:
SCOX: 146.2M link
Red Hat: 1.142B link
Novel: 1.337B link
IBM: 139.9B link
I find it kind of funny that those numbers are really close except RedHat/Novel have ten times the market cap SCO does and IBM has 100 times the market cap RedHat/Novel do. This isn't supposed to be important, just thought it odd that these numbers are almost exact multiples of each other.
oh those pirates.
I thought you were talking about the ones in the Carribean.
True, but on every Redhat installation since at least 7.0 and probably earlier both Apache and Sendmail were turned on by default. There may not be a big glaring worm like Code Red for Apache, but if having IIS turned on by default is a reason to criticize Microsoft, then having Apache on by default is certainly a reason to criticize RedHat (and probably other vendors, I don't know what any of the others turn on by default). Sendmail I understand to an extent, but not Apache.
Since when has apple cared if their stuff is expensive?
"They beat analysts' expectations"
Yeah, analysts expected them to loose a hell of allot of money, and instead they just lost allot of money. Just because you beat expectations doesn't mean your doing well.
Remember boys and girls, the next time you are confronted by the police over illegal drug posession, or distribution of pirated music/software, immedately and violently assault the next person you see. That way you can get your sentance reduced from 3-10 years to 6 months.
Heres the thing though, sure I have no idea what that says, but that's just because somebody decided to be very clever/brief/or both. Half my job is to write Perl scripts and sure there are about a million neato tricks that I could use to make my code really short and impossible to read but I never learned them and have no intention to. If you want, Perl can look more or less exactly like C, or if you want it can look like the above. It's all a matter of what you want out of perl.
When they say theres more than one way to do it, syntax is included in there too.
It may be prudent, and it may save you to $20 to $30 in the long run, but in the short run I get to go ahead and watch all the movies at home whenever I feel like it, and don't have to wait until November of 2004 or possibly later for the final boxed set of LOTR to come out. If such a box set comes and contains more goodies that make it worth an extra $60 or whatever it costs, then I'll probably buy it too, and won't care one bit that I own some movies two or three times. In essence, it's worth $30 for me to watch FoTR and all it's bonus stuff now even if it means I might wind up buying it again in the future. Of course NewLine will have to put enough goodies on there to make me feel it's worth it, whoever made X-Men 1.5 failed to do that, so it's getting a rental.
Could this be compared to when linuxgruven (or whatever that linux certification training company was) guaranteed that you'd get a job (with them if necessary) after you got your cert?
Not nearly as bad though.
Resistance, is futile. We are TiVo. Your primitive television cannot resist the power of the TiVo.
In all honesty. The only concern I have (as a TiVo owner) is that if I ever an HDTV or a dish I have to get a new TiVo. The most compelling thing is the HD DirecTV/TiVo in one unit. At least I think they have those. I know they have HD DirectTV and DirectTV/TiVo units, and I'm pretty sure they have HD TiVo's. Seem's like they could roll all of those into one. Anyway...
One of us
One of us
One of us
What I've yet to see anyone point out, and haven't seen anyone mention one way or the other when the DVD's were announed is: Will the 4 disc set include the original cut of the movie, or just the newer longer version.
For what it's worth I bought the recent version and my only complaint is that there is no director's commentary, that is the feature I bought a DVD player for. Picture and sound quality be damned.
I find it funny that despite my defence of it, and how much I enjoy parts of wrestling, stating such things still caries a stigma like no other. You can be a fan of allot of silly or lude things and not get half the ridicule you'll draw by stating you are a fan of wrestling. Everyone just assumes your that you're an idiot who thinks it's real, or phenominally childish. I guess wrestling earned it's reputation though, considering such a large amount of the show is very childish... oh well, such is life.
Sorry if I gave the impression that I was insulting wrestling, I use the term "wrasslin" purley out of affection. Though this is neither the topic nor the forum, I've got the karma to burn so who cares. I too am a fan of our beloved "sports entertainment" even during the last year or so of its doldrums. I've watched the mess that was the ungodly wcw/ecw invasion and the crap that followed. All so I could occasionally get a good Kurt Angle or Chris Benoit match.
Wrestling is one of those interesting things (at least to me) whose value can't really be explained. It's grown men in their underwear pretending to fight, and yet theres something more to it. Something that makes 4 hours of crappy television worth 15 minutes of gold. In few other venues of entertainment would the fans say "this products sucks and I do not enjoy watching it," and yet continue to watch. It's because at some point, be it when you met the much maligned Von Erics, or when I saw the Undertaker debut (on TV, never been to a live show) something so enjoyable happens that you're desperate to get that back.
I'm a fan of football and baseball, yet what are often heralded as some of the greatest moments in those sports (such as Oaklands game saving catch over the wall a couple of nights ago) can't begin to compare with the elation I feel when watching RVD and Eddie Gurrero in a ladder match. I knew who was going to win that match before it started, just like you know the good guy is going to win at the end of practically every movie you see, but it's the process of getting from the beginning to the inevitable end that you're interested in.
Saddly, it seems like the true artists in wrestling have never really gotten their fair shake in the big times, they sit somewhere in the middle of the card providing the real entertainment, while the guys who can talk decently get the top story lines and drive the shows. Granted it would probably be a dull time if all we got was technical wrestling. After all, we need to have some idea of why these two men in their underwear are pretending to fight.
Anyway, all that aside, I don't "suggest" anyone try to like wrestling. It's like Linux or vi, you know what it is and what it's all about. If your the kind of person who would be interested in one of those things you'll eventually find your way to, no amount of forcing someone to use either or watch wrestling is going to make them like it.
I wasn't going to respond to this until I came to a rather unsettling realization. You are of course right when you say that the World Wildlife Fund had the name first, I'll even grant that they used the acronym first though I'm not sure. Whats got me botehred though, is that I much like a great many other people, applied a good old doulbe standard. I'd rather WWE be able to use the WWF moniker and the World Wildlife Fund just not worry about it. WWE certainly didn't have any complaints with the World Wildlife Fund using the name, the Fund are the folks who made it a binary issue.
:) Mostly though, it's telling of me, and whoever may be similar to me in this regard.
But that's not really the point, the point is that the World Wildlife Fund has as much right to the name as Nissan Computers has to nissan.com. They've got a name, they weren't piggybacking off another companies success, and they got there first. Those are usually the criteria we use when defending some guy with a URL. The wrestling use of WWF is certainly better known, but that argument is the very one we deride when judging cases like the one of nissan.com. Sue nissan motors is better known than nissan computers, but nissan computers has just as much right to the name as the car company.
So effectively what I've done is picked the guy who I want to win, and geared an argument to defend him. Certainly not uncommon in the world today. Perhaps, and here I'll begin rambling so bear with me or just stop reading, its the fact that the World Wildlife Fund filed the suit claiming the (then) World Wrestling Federation could no longer use their name of 20+ years. At this point I've been conditioned to believe that whoever files a suit is a greedy petty twit who deserves to loose. Stand up comics, SNL, and goobers sueing because McDonalds made them fat have done that. Of course there's lots of valid suits like when my car blows up and kills my dog or something, then that's okay, but the instant I hear "lawsuit" I just say "uggghh..." and tune out. I"m not going to foward a consipiracy theory about how this helps large corps, but it is at least lucky
Thanks for bearing with me on that. So in conclusion, crow tastes remarkably like chicken...
When I say WWF what do you think of first:
a) World Wrestling Federation
b) World Wildlife Fund
Aparently British courts believe that most people will answer B and have ruled that the (now) WWE no longer use WWF as people might confuse it with the World Wildlife Fund. It's obviously a bunch of white hairs (literally) frowning upon that rubbish on television in favor of the much more civilized environmentalists. It's not at all different than the myriad domain disputes that populate Slashdot, only this time both companies are big, its just that one is being discriminated against based on their content.
Of course I don't seriously expect the Slashdot crowd to care about wrasslin', but it's interesting to see that all courts can be dumb when deciding who gets to use what name, not just domain name courts.
Sure they'll loose money, but they'll just blame the lost revenue on people still pirating movies, which means we need even more laws to stop those damn dirty pirates...
Nah, its just that nobody wants to live in Canada so theres more bandwidth to go around.
Kidding of course...
Well crap, the Macs suck thing was a joke, I even surounded it in anglebraket joke slash anglebraket but those obviously didn't get printed. So for clarification, Macs don't suck...
Okay, you got me. I was wrong about Bluetooth (I'm wishing I'd read this long one before the short one below it, alas) it sounds pretty slick. Which I guess brings up a point which isn't really relevant to the whole Mac thing, and kinda is. Why didn't I know Bluetooth was slick? I heard about it when it was vaporware, then heard about it when it was first shown at Comdex, then heard... nothing... then I heard that very few people are buying Bluetooth stuff. I can't name a single product (before this Ericson phone) and maybe a couple tablet PC's that use Bluetooth, and I read Slashdot everyday and some other geek sites etc...
It's more or less the Tivo problem. Tivo kicks total ass, but no one but the people who took a gamble on it know it. At least Tivo advertises (albeit poorly). What's happened here is I've just played out the good old lazy consumer role. If big tech companies don't relentlessly tell me how cool their tech is, I won't think it's cool either.
Mac's still suck though...
You are correct sir. I made an incorect hypothesis, a useless technology does indeed exist. I appologize. Do the other two I mentioned exist too? Then there would be three useless technologies in the world. Fancy that.
Note: I'm not saying Bluetooth is completely useless, I've just never seen an application for them that I felt was worth any real money.
A higher resale value or resale percentage of value? If a Mac and PC drop 50% in value over a year (that's of course generous but whatever), the average Mac is going to be worth $750 and the average PC is going to be worth $500. So you can say that the Mac has a higher resale value, but that would only be because of the initial higher first sale cost. Of course they might have a higher resale percentage of value, I honestly don't know, just looking for clarification.
For the record, I really like Mac's and OS X. I would use a Mac but for two problems:
1) Lack of games. This has not been fixed, you've got Warcraft III; not Neverwinter Nights. It's the same reason I don't buy a Game Cube. Super Smash Bros. sure is neat, but it's not worth $200.
2) Cost. I cannot aford a Mac. I wish I enough money to buy one. I do not resent the people can because they have this much money, nor am I particularly impressed that you have that much money. I do not hate you because you own a Mac, please do not look down on me because I don't.