I-19 has the signage in metric and standard since it actually enters Mexico. Mexico of course uses the metric system. I've heard that some of the highways leading into Canada are the same way (I can't confirm that since I've never been that far north).
That's odd that you say that since they've been around a lot longer than that. They started their first store in '85, and they were pretty big within a few years. I don't know the exact dates on this, but they were huge here in AZ in the late 80s, early 90s. And AZ is not known for having stores before everyone else. So I'm guessing that they were probably big elsewhere.
Not defending the grandparent post or even the original post. I think Blockbuster should get slammed for such a blatant lie about their policies.
The commercial itself doesn't require market research, it's called price shock. The commercial, and possibly the service, is aimed at Joe Blow, that uses his computer for email. Most of the Joe Blows out there haven't bought an iPod yet, because of their high cost and the high cost of songs, remember Joe Blow probably can't figure out how to rip a CD even with all of the great, easy programs out there.
Another thing that seems to elude the people in this thread is this. You keep speaking about how much you spent at the iTunes store and that you've only bought 50-200 songs etc. The Napster service is supposed to allow a person to completely fill up their nice big mp3 player immediately, not in 1 -10 years (granted, bandwidth, bankruptcy, poor software implementation etc might prevent that from happening). What that means is that all the math of cost over the years is meaningless unless you don't actually plan on filling up your mp3 player.
Just a comment from someone who is not planning on signing up for either service and probably has 100 mp3s total in my collection, all of which were ripped from my own CDs.
The funniest thing about this thread is all of the posts from the Yahoo employees masquerading as/. users. Every anti-yahoo post has 2-3 pro-yahoo posts countering it. And they all read like advertising for Yahoo (although I'd rather read a Yahoo ad than listen to one of their commercials with that yahoo yodelling their name).
Sorry, but your entire arguement amounts to saying "This takes away a kids ability to lie and cheat". The schools have been trying to do that for generations. Teachers and monitors already attempt to prevent students from doing what you say they should be allowed to do. This is a just a technological way of doing the same thing. Lying and cheating is in general a bad thing.
I can somewhat understand the arguement about removal of privacy etc, but this arguement has no valid grounds. I don't buy into that arguement either, it's not like they're implanting these things in their skin.
The Prime Directive. First we must assess that there are no life-forms on the planet before we begin the terraforming procedure (which interestingly enough is done by nothing more than sending a multi-color ray down into the planet's core). In order to do this we need to send an away team to the planet's surface. Commander Riker will lead the away team and he will take Data, Geordi and expendable-crewman #4 with him. Keep us apprised of the progress #1.
I'm guessing the idea of an iPod Shuffle began with alcohol.
Late at night somewhere in Apple Headquarters, 3 executives sitting around drinking some snooty liberal-type alcohol (I have no idea what a snooty liberal-type alcoholic beverage is, but it's my story so leave it alone).
Executive 1: We need to come up with another idea like the iPod so we can pad up our end of the year bonus reviews.
E2: Well, we could borrow a page from Gates and steal someone else's idea.
E3: Ooh, I like that. Hey, let's make some of those flash MP3 players. No one will remember how snide we were about them a year or 2 ago.
E1: But we have to make them Appley. I've got it, we'll make them look like a small iPod and take away all of the functionality.
E2: Brilliant
Camera fades out as the 3 executives get out their iCalculators to figure out how much their bonuses will be (little do they realize that their iCalculators only have 1 button...to reduce user error of course).
While I disagree with the parent post (grandparent post, whatever), I have to make comments about post.
1. The UN did impose sanctions and those sanctions were working. He had gotten rid of the weapons and UN reports indicated that. Sounds to me like they did a fine job backing up their threats. The fact that the UN took a more subtle root and imposed economic sanctions instead of just invading doesn't make them a coward, it makes them smart. If there's a way to get around war you should take it, and they did.
I agree with you that war should be avoided at costs, and I do think that the US/Bush jumped to military action too early. However, characterizing the UN sanctions/inspections as successful is way overboard. First, the economic sanctions did not work, the evidence of this is that Iraq was selling oil under the UN noses the entire time. It's actually almost comical, like one of those silly black and white movies. They were caught red-handed at least 5 or 6 times selling oil above what they were allowed and the UN just kept wagging their fingers at them (if you want proof of this, then you haven't been paying attention to international news for the past 10-14 years).
Secondly, who said that Hussein got rid of his WMDs? Certainly not the UN weapons inspectors. Their job was to catalog the amount of WMDs that he possessed and to make sure that he made no new ones, they were not overseeing the destruction of them. That catalog is available online, too lazy to look up the URL, and you can see the massive amounts that Iraqis possessed. They never claimed to have destroyed any of it, which brings to mind the question, where are they now? They certainly weren't found or destroyed by the US forces and since the Iraqis didn't destroy they must be somewhere. Just as an example, according the UN catalog, the Iraqis had 300-400 gallons of VX nerve gas. They used several gallons on the Kurds in Northern Iraq, but the rest has never been found. The entire time that he weapons inspectors were there, they were met with resistance and were rarely allowed to actually see the WMDs. Instead they were shown to empty palaces and schoolhouses etc. Once again, if you need proof of this, perhaps you should have read a bit of international news (personally I read every report from the inspectors that was made public. And there was not 1 single instance of them being allowed to see anything that they were supposed to be allowed access to).
2. If you want to talk scandals the US is no stranger, so I don't see how that in any way elevates our morals above theirs.
Eh, can't argue with you on that.
3. We didn't fight over morals, we fought over taxes and to get out from under imperialism. You might be able to argue that that's fighting for morals except for the fact that the US has conducted it's fair share of imperialism as well. US culture is a direct descendant of european culture.
I believe that you should go back to your history teachers and demand a full refund of your education. The ARW (American Revolutionary War) was not fought over taxes. The war was started over 2 issues, freedom of religion and governmental freedom. The first non-government appointed residents of the colonies were people that were refugees from the King's religion and his tight-fisted government. Remember the pilgrims? They were fleeing from the King's church, the Anglican church. There were also many that fled because they believed that they deserved more representation in government (the monarchy had lost much of his power, but it still retained what amounted to over 50% control of all government). After the colonies were established, they basically gained the religious freedom, but still were under the government's thumbnail. The whole "taxation without representation" was more of the final nail in the coffin. The colonies had started to usurp much of the crown's control over them and because of this the King started to raise taxes to very high levels. This of course led to "pat
FYI, not all of the "rest of the English speaking world" speaks British English (and therefore they do not add in a u after their o's). I have no ideas the percentages, but I'm sure that some euro fan-boy (or american-wanna-be-euro-fan-boy) will come up with some, probably from a bizarre little website that supports their opinion but fails to fact-check.
Anyways, there are even many former British colonies that don't use the King's/Queen's English (and yes, some of them are even countries other than the US).
Interesting how Apple fan-boys always come up with tid-bits like this. When MS bought those shares, they stated it was because they were helping out a "friend" and investing in their future. I seem to remember that everyone, except you apparently, saw it as an attempt by MS to prove to the DoJ that they weren't a monopoly.
Actually, Microsoft 'bought' the nonvoting stock to prevent Steve Jobs from suing their ass over blatent rips of Quicktime that was brought to his attention while Owner / CEO of NeXT.
That's odd that Apple doesn't own the patents to Quicktime. Most companies don't allow employees (even CEOs etc) to own such business critical patents, so that they can't leave the company and start taking their royalties etc. Of course this is the probably the case here as well, considering that only the inventor or the company the inventor works for can own an patent (Steve Jobs didn't write Quicktime).
You also mention that Apple had several billion in the bank. Excuse me while I laugh uncontrollably for several minutes. If they had that kind of money in the bank at the time, then they wouldn't have been pursuing bankruptcy on grounds of lack of funds to pay their debtors (which they were set to file bankruptcy right before they got the cash infusion).
One last thing, if Jobs had cancelled the alleged patent suit against MS because of the stock purchase, that would have been extortion.
Interesting version of history the Apple fan-boys come up with.
No, Apple invented a chic looking hard drive mp3 player that everybody assumed that you must be cool if you own one. And then they marketed with a series of bizarre and silly commercials that 90% of the people hated, but figured that the commercial must be so cool that they couldn't understand it and therefore they must buy an iPod to regain some of their coolness.
BTW, all 3 of those titles you mentioned are listed as running "perfectly" using Cedega (formerly WineX http://www.transgaming.com/). I can't tell you how well they really run since I haven't re-upped my subscription (gotta melt the ice cube the credit card is in).
I know this strays away from the current discussion, just thought you might interested to know that you can actually try them out on Linux
Actually the real problem with running a pirate radio station is creating interference on a commercial frequency.
I used to work at a company that did Internet over microwave and we had several instances where small pirate FM transmitters would break down our signal enough to kill all our customers connection in that area. Whenever it happened we would hire a helicopter and fly around the city to pinpoint the transmitter and then contact the FCC.
BTW, the FCC doesn't send you a letter or subpoena asking you to turn off your transmitter, they send the FBI Hostage Recovery Team. You know the guys that set up 2-3 snipers and then a dozen highly trained agents armed with MP-5s wearing all black tactile gear come barrelling up in Suburans. We watched them take down a house that had a transmitter and it was much more impressive than the movies or counter-strike. They carted off the teenager and his parents. The kid got 4 years in juvy (he was 14) and his mom got 5 years in a fed prison since all the equipment was bought in her name.
Anyways, my point is, if you're going to do something like this, spend the money and get the real equipment. The reason why that transmitter was causing us interference was because it was cheap shoddy stuff that couldn't pass FCC regulations (I don't know the specifics on what was the cause, I do IT not EM).
I'm sure that there are plenty of intelligent, well-reasoned and courteous users of so-called "low-power FM". But the only side that I've seen is the selfish "pirates". I recently worked for a company in a large metropolitan area that provided wireless high-speed Internet access (over 1/3 of our customers used Linux as their main OS). During the 2 years that I worked in that city, we had over a dozen clashes with these "pirates". These "pirates" would, either due to faulty equipment or operator error, bleed their signals over into our bandwidth (we were operating in our legally owned frequencies in the Microwave spectrum, just so you can get an idea of just how much bleed over these guys were causing). This would cause our customers to either experience severe slowdowns in speeds or complete loss of connectivity. Sometimes it only affected a few customers, but usually it would affect hundreds of users. Our engineers would have to triangulate the source (they even once had to hire a helicopter to fly around in, since the signal was so buggy) and then bring the FCC and Sheriff's department out to the house. The FCC would try to frighten them with empty threats of felony charges, which usually was enough to scare them into either fixing their equipment, learning how to use it or giving up on it altogether.
What always amazed me about this though, was how these "pirates" always became very indignant and self-righteous when they were confronted. It was as if they believed that their right to freedom of speech superceded everyone else's rights that they affected. All those people who relied on our service for access to the Internet, for knowledge, education, entertainment and yes, the ability to express their ideas and opinions on the net.
I'm sure that the majority of those involved in this movement are not so self-centered. I'm not passing judgement on your right to broadcast or on any of the laws restricting or allowing broadcasting. Just wanted to offer a point of view from the other side of electromagnetic spectrum.
Slashdot Mirror
They prefer to be called "Little Towers", you insensitive clod.
I-19 has the signage in metric and standard since it actually enters Mexico. Mexico of course uses the metric system. I've heard that some of the highways leading into Canada are the same way (I can't confirm that since I've never been that far north).
That's odd that you say that since they've been around a lot longer than that. They started their first store in '85, and they were pretty big within a few years. I don't know the exact dates on this, but they were huge here in AZ in the late 80s, early 90s. And AZ is not known for having stores before everyone else. So I'm guessing that they were probably big elsewhere.
Not defending the grandparent post or even the original post. I think Blockbuster should get slammed for such a blatant lie about their policies.
The commercial itself doesn't require market research, it's called price shock. The commercial, and possibly the service, is aimed at Joe Blow, that uses his computer for email. Most of the Joe Blows out there haven't bought an iPod yet, because of their high cost and the high cost of songs, remember Joe Blow probably can't figure out how to rip a CD even with all of the great, easy programs out there.
Another thing that seems to elude the people in this thread is this. You keep speaking about how much you spent at the iTunes store and that you've only bought 50-200 songs etc. The Napster service is supposed to allow a person to completely fill up their nice big mp3 player immediately, not in 1 -10 years (granted, bandwidth, bankruptcy, poor software implementation etc might prevent that from happening). What that means is that all the math of cost over the years is meaningless unless you don't actually plan on filling up your mp3 player.
Just a comment from someone who is not planning on signing up for either service and probably has 100 mp3s total in my collection, all of which were ripped from my own CDs.
The funniest thing about this thread is all of the posts from the Yahoo employees masquerading as /. users. Every anti-yahoo post has 2-3 pro-yahoo posts countering it. And they all read like advertising for Yahoo (although I'd rather read a Yahoo ad than listen to one of their commercials with that yahoo yodelling their name).
Sorry, but your entire arguement amounts to saying "This takes away a kids ability to lie and cheat". The schools have been trying to do that for generations. Teachers and monitors already attempt to prevent students from doing what you say they should be allowed to do. This is a just a technological way of doing the same thing. Lying and cheating is in general a bad thing.
I can somewhat understand the arguement about removal of privacy etc, but this arguement has no valid grounds. I don't buy into that arguement either, it's not like they're implanting these things in their skin.
The Prime Directive. First we must assess that there are no life-forms on the planet before we begin the terraforming procedure (which interestingly enough is done by nothing more than sending a multi-color ray down into the planet's core). In order to do this we need to send an away team to the planet's surface. Commander Riker will lead the away team and he will take Data, Geordi and expendable-crewman #4 with him. Keep us apprised of the progress #1.
I'm guessing the idea of an iPod Shuffle began with alcohol.
Late at night somewhere in Apple Headquarters, 3 executives sitting around drinking some snooty liberal-type alcohol (I have no idea what a snooty liberal-type alcoholic beverage is, but it's my story so leave it alone).
Executive 1: We need to come up with another idea like the iPod so we can pad up our end of the year bonus reviews.
E2: Well, we could borrow a page from Gates and steal someone else's idea.
E3: Ooh, I like that. Hey, let's make some of those flash MP3 players. No one will remember how snide we were about them a year or 2 ago.
E1: But we have to make them Appley. I've got it, we'll make them look like a small iPod and take away all of the functionality.
E2: Brilliant
Camera fades out as the 3 executives get out their iCalculators to figure out how much their bonuses will be (little do they realize that their iCalculators only have 1 button...to reduce user error of course).
While I disagree with the parent post (grandparent post, whatever), I have to make comments about post.
1. The UN did impose sanctions and those sanctions were working. He had gotten rid of the weapons and UN reports indicated that. Sounds to me like they did a fine job backing up their threats. The fact that the UN took a more subtle root and imposed economic sanctions instead of just invading doesn't make them a coward, it makes them smart. If there's a way to get around war you should take it, and they did.
I agree with you that war should be avoided at costs, and I do think that the US/Bush jumped to military action too early. However, characterizing the UN sanctions/inspections as successful is way overboard. First, the economic sanctions did not work, the evidence of this is that Iraq was selling oil under the UN noses the entire time. It's actually almost comical, like one of those silly black and white movies. They were caught red-handed at least 5 or 6 times selling oil above what they were allowed and the UN just kept wagging their fingers at them (if you want proof of this, then you haven't been paying attention to international news for the past 10-14 years).
Secondly, who said that Hussein got rid of his WMDs? Certainly not the UN weapons inspectors. Their job was to catalog the amount of WMDs that he possessed and to make sure that he made no new ones, they were not overseeing the destruction of them. That catalog is available online, too lazy to look up the URL, and you can see the massive amounts that Iraqis possessed. They never claimed to have destroyed any of it, which brings to mind the question, where are they now? They certainly weren't found or destroyed by the US forces and since the Iraqis didn't destroy they must be somewhere. Just as an example, according the UN catalog, the Iraqis had 300-400 gallons of VX nerve gas. They used several gallons on the Kurds in Northern Iraq, but the rest has never been found. The entire time that he weapons inspectors were there, they were met with resistance and were rarely allowed to actually see the WMDs. Instead they were shown to empty palaces and schoolhouses etc. Once again, if you need proof of this, perhaps you should have read a bit of international news (personally I read every report from the inspectors that was made public. And there was not 1 single instance of them being allowed to see anything that they were supposed to be allowed access to).
2. If you want to talk scandals the US is no stranger, so I don't see how that in any way elevates our morals above theirs.
Eh, can't argue with you on that.
3. We didn't fight over morals, we fought over taxes and to get out from under imperialism. You might be able to argue that that's fighting for morals except for the fact that the US has conducted it's fair share of imperialism as well. US culture is a direct descendant of european culture.
I believe that you should go back to your history teachers and demand a full refund of your education. The ARW (American Revolutionary War) was not fought over taxes. The war was started over 2 issues, freedom of religion and governmental freedom. The first non-government appointed residents of the colonies were people that were refugees from the King's religion and his tight-fisted government. Remember the pilgrims? They were fleeing from the King's church, the Anglican church. There were also many that fled because they believed that they deserved more representation in government (the monarchy had lost much of his power, but it still retained what amounted to over 50% control of all government). After the colonies were established, they basically gained the religious freedom, but still were under the government's thumbnail. The whole "taxation without representation" was more of the final nail in the coffin. The colonies had started to usurp much of the crown's control over them and because of this the King started to raise taxes to very high levels. This of course led to "pat
FYI, not all of the "rest of the English speaking world" speaks British English (and therefore they do not add in a u after their o's). I have no ideas the percentages, but I'm sure that some euro fan-boy (or american-wanna-be-euro-fan-boy) will come up with some, probably from a bizarre little website that supports their opinion but fails to fact-check.
Anyways, there are even many former British colonies that don't use the King's/Queen's English (and yes, some of them are even countries other than the US).
Interesting how Apple fan-boys always come up with tid-bits like this. When MS bought those shares, they stated it was because they were helping out a "friend" and investing in their future. I seem to remember that everyone, except you apparently, saw it as an attempt by MS to prove to the DoJ that they weren't a monopoly.
Actually, Microsoft 'bought' the nonvoting stock to prevent Steve Jobs from suing their ass over blatent rips of Quicktime that was brought to his attention while Owner / CEO of NeXT.
That's odd that Apple doesn't own the patents to Quicktime. Most companies don't allow employees (even CEOs etc) to own such business critical patents, so that they can't leave the company and start taking their royalties etc. Of course this is the probably the case here as well, considering that only the inventor or the company the inventor works for can own an patent (Steve Jobs didn't write Quicktime).
You also mention that Apple had several billion in the bank. Excuse me while I laugh uncontrollably for several minutes. If they had that kind of money in the bank at the time, then they wouldn't have been pursuing bankruptcy on grounds of lack of funds to pay their debtors (which they were set to file bankruptcy right before they got the cash infusion).
One last thing, if Jobs had cancelled the alleged patent suit against MS because of the stock purchase, that would have been extortion.
Interesting version of history the Apple fan-boys come up with.
No, Apple invented a chic looking hard drive mp3 player that everybody assumed that you must be cool if you own one. And then they marketed with a series of bizarre and silly commercials that 90% of the people hated, but figured that the commercial must be so cool that they couldn't understand it and therefore they must buy an iPod to regain some of their coolness.
more like Holy War.
Don't you know that you've called forth the forces of the DistroTrolls? We'll all be wiped out.
Nah, slashdotters would complain about it not being "free, as in beer"
BTW, all 3 of those titles you mentioned are listed as running "perfectly" using Cedega (formerly WineX http://www.transgaming.com/). I can't tell you how well they really run since I haven't re-upped my subscription (gotta melt the ice cube the credit card is in).
I know this strays away from the current discussion, just thought you might interested to know that you can actually try them out on Linux
I think they are referring to when things became available. The space shuttle was designed and built during the 70s, but didn't get launched into space until April 12, 1981 http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/shuttle/archives/sts-1 /index.html
Actually the real problem with running a pirate radio station is creating interference on a commercial frequency.
I used to work at a company that did Internet over microwave and we had several instances where small pirate FM transmitters would break down our signal enough to kill all our customers connection in that area. Whenever it happened we would hire a helicopter and fly around the city to pinpoint the transmitter and then contact the FCC.
BTW, the FCC doesn't send you a letter or subpoena asking you to turn off your transmitter, they send the FBI Hostage Recovery Team. You know the guys that set up 2-3 snipers and then a dozen highly trained agents armed with MP-5s wearing all black tactile gear come barrelling up in Suburans. We watched them take down a house that had a transmitter and it was much more impressive than the movies or counter-strike. They carted off the teenager and his parents. The kid got 4 years in juvy (he was 14) and his mom got 5 years in a fed prison since all the equipment was bought in her name.
Anyways, my point is, if you're going to do something like this, spend the money and get the real equipment. The reason why that transmitter was causing us interference was because it was cheap shoddy stuff that couldn't pass FCC regulations (I don't know the specifics on what was the cause, I do IT not EM).
I'm sure that there are plenty of intelligent, well-reasoned and courteous users of so-called "low-power FM". But the only side that I've seen is the selfish "pirates". I recently worked for a company in a large metropolitan area that provided wireless high-speed Internet access (over 1/3 of our customers used Linux as their main OS). During the 2 years that I worked in that city, we had over a dozen clashes with these "pirates". These "pirates" would, either due to faulty equipment or operator error, bleed their signals over into our bandwidth (we were operating in our legally owned frequencies in the Microwave spectrum, just so you can get an idea of just how much bleed over these guys were causing). This would cause our customers to either experience severe slowdowns in speeds or complete loss of connectivity. Sometimes it only affected a few customers, but usually it would affect hundreds of users. Our engineers would have to triangulate the source (they even once had to hire a helicopter to fly around in, since the signal was so buggy) and then bring the FCC and Sheriff's department out to the house. The FCC would try to frighten them with empty threats of felony charges, which usually was enough to scare them into either fixing their equipment, learning how to use it or giving up on it altogether.
What always amazed me about this though, was how these "pirates" always became very indignant and self-righteous when they were confronted. It was as if they believed that their right to freedom of speech superceded everyone else's rights that they affected. All those people who relied on our service for access to the Internet, for knowledge, education, entertainment and yes, the ability to express their ideas and opinions on the net.
I'm sure that the majority of those involved in this movement are not so self-centered. I'm not passing judgement on your right to broadcast or on any of the laws restricting or allowing broadcasting. Just wanted to offer a point of view from the other side of electromagnetic spectrum.