Is this what Slashdot is degenerating into now that all the Half-Life 2 and World of Warcraft news for the day has been exhausted? Interviewing semi-regular Slashdot posters? It's "journalistic" cannibalization on a pathetic scale! Wil, we know you post here. You've posted on this topic already for chrissakes!
And you've not only been through a Slashdot interview before, you're One Of Us(tm). You must be a hell of a masochist to do it twice. Anyhow, here's my post-rant question.
Since you've had two non-fiction autobiographical books published already, have you ever considered working on any fictional work? Does that urge to write ever rise to the surface, like it did with The Man Formerly Known As WFS and the TekWar series?
After reading through the linked pages, I really didn't come away thinking I'd learned anything of value from this site other than the fact the CPU bottleneck is pretty large. The comparison really lacked in depth and breadth, as they only appear to have used two video cards, 4 processors and a couple variations on RAM. Also, the qualification for "acceptable" seemed a little arbitrary as it wasn't the 30 or 60 fps I usually see used as a rating of acceptability. (100 fps for the psychotic benchmarkers)
Also, the structure of the article could definitely have used some help. There was no clear delineation between the various tests, such as each page being used to display one processor with multiple card benchmarks. The information was largely there, but it definitely wasn't all that clearly stated. Maybe this was due to the extremely limited number of cards they were able to test with, but it still leaves me wanting to know more.
My own experience with Half-Life 2 would lead me to saying that running it is no problem, and that running it with a 2Ghz (core clock) processor and a Radeon 9800 Pro in 1024x768 should be just fine. Just keep the textures at Medium and it'd be all set. High detail textures seem to be the system killer on machines such as those.
Re:Brita filters aren't just physical filters
on
Hacking Vodka
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· Score: 3, Informative
Actually, as it's just activated carbon the one thing you don't want to run through it is any sizeable amount of bleach. Granular Activated Carbon filtration will remove some small amount of hardness from water, as well as nasty odors and other impurities.
What might be good, would be to use what's known as an "Extruded" carbon cartridge like the ones you get in the water treatment industry. Essentially a porous solid block that has 5 micron holes in it. Hacking one of these together might be a good idea for a college project. Hmm.
Pay for stuff that was free? Huh? No, that's simply wrong. Any of the mods that were absorbed into Half-Life were STILL free after Valve picked up distribution. All the listed items above were legally mine to play as soon as I put my Half-Life CD key into Steam on registering my account.
If you bought Half-Life, all those games were yours too. If you wanted to buy the games themselves with a CD and key, you could do that for less than the cost of Half-Life, but you wouldn't get the other acquired mods.
Keep in mind that Quake 2 and Half-Life are from the same era of game releases. In fact, the Half-Life engine has a fairly large chunk of Quake 2 code in it, yes. However, what Valve did was a different thing than iD. iD gave programmers source code to Doom, and later Quake and Quake 2 (Soon, Quake 3) and released things like an editor. However, Valve are the ones that actually put that power in the hands of non-programmers. Worldcraft, a map editor based on things released by iD, was actually purchased by Valve and distributed freely from that point on, eventually evolving in a way, into the Hammer editor used now. Valve shelled out the money to give people something more than they had during the development phase, and went on to bring several mods into the core of Half-Life through free patches. Keep in mind, that if you bought Half-Life in 1998, by 2004 you wound up getting Team Fortress Classic, Counter-Strike, Day of Defeat, Deathmatch Classic and Ricochet all free of charge, directly supported by Valve. That's five expansions of free gaming, brought to you by Valve themselves as they incorporated the mod developers into the company to improve the product.
Valve put the idea of modding on the map far more than iD did, simply by making it a core part of thier (nicely profitable) business plan.
How did your 2 retail copies "not work"? Were they just suffering the Steam overload problem that was affecting -everyone- or were they actually defective media? You can't fault Valve if it's the media, and if it's the Steam activation why on Earth would you return it and try another copy? Sounds like you bit your own ass with that one.
The game doesn't demand you be on-line after activation. It does require Steam, but Steam is a PART of Half-Life 2. It's the foundation the game is built upon. That's almost like bitching about having to install libraries on a Linux machine, pointless. And what bugs have you run into? There're damn few bugs for a game with Microsoft developer heritage.;)
If you have those two hours to get to work and back, you can bet your ass that you'll be encouraged by the boss to "take advantage of the time" and be doing something related to your job in the car. They might not be able to enforce it legally, but the pressure out there will be high enough that I suspect many, many people will find themselves in a position to either accept it, or be worrying that they'll be the next guy out the door when layoffs come up.
There's no real point to cracking it if you have a legal version. You'd risk running some hacker's code on your machine just to save -maybe- 10 or 15 seconds when you loaded up a game? That's foolish. So far most crack authors have been very good about being minimalist and unintrusive, but someday, with some crack, they're going to fuck you.
And when it happens, what then? You'll have less than zero recourse. "Yes, I want to sue this guy because the illegal program he wrote to crack the protection on this software nuked my email."
I hate software licensing as much as anyone on/., but when a company like Valve goes out of their way to offer something in exchange for the authentication hassle - they deserve a fair shake.
And let's not forget, if you install a pirated version of the software, the EULA has no binding on the developer. You violated it from moment one, you could be considered to have no rights whatsoever and may only have recourse if the software causes problems in a fashion that's criminally damaging. Like, say, deleting any file with a.doc or.exe extension on your machine. (And.c for the linux-only nazis that'll show up.)
If you pirate it, Valve pretty much has the greenlight to fuck you in any way they want within the bounds of their own software and services.
Gabe could be saying what he did just to put the scare tactics out there. I would think that could be pretty effective, up to a point. It seems to me that Valve had several options for ways to make HL2 a bit more secure than the average release, by way of options like having the HL2.exe check the MD5 on the Steam.exe, and vice-versa, or other you-get-my-back-I-get-yours dual anti-piracy measures. Considering that I got over five years of playtime out of Half-Life and various mods, I think paying for HL2 was a very wise investment, and feel that people who pirate it just need to pay up and stop harming a developer that gave modding the biggest kick in the pants since inception.
"Let's let people mod our game. And what the hell, we'll buy the leading map editor for our format and give it out for free." iD didn't do that. Everyone else followed Valve's lead here.
The way I would like to see Valve approach this, would be to let people get a taste of the game with the pirated version (maybe the first 1-2 chapters) and then lock Steam down tight, wipe out a few of the required game files (like the.gcf files, nothing executable) and pull some form of identifying mark from the user. If you pirate software, and the company swipes something identifying you personally - as long as it's nothing that could be considered "theft" of data or records - morally, you deserve what you get.
I hope Valve does have some kind of a crackdown in progress, we'll have to see where it goes from here. Gabe never replied to my question about the "post-Steam" future of Half-Life 2, which is my only real concern about the authorization system.
If you look at the buildings next to it, on the east and west, you'll see those also have blacked-out rooftops. I would expect that to be the location of the anti-aircraft defenses either put in place after 9/11 or the other occurrences of people flying/crashing planes into the yard. Every so often someone would put a Piper Cherokee or a small Cessna into the ground there.
That's utter bullshit. Frivolous lawsuits are nothing compared to other places where sick, sick money is made in healthcare. And have you not noticed that Edwards is one of THE chief proponents of tort reform? Did you not hear his "three strikes" plan for stopping lawyers from filing that type of suit if they chase too many ambulances?
Yes, people are making way too much money on bullshit lawsuits, but at the same time there are way too many fuckup doctors and hospitals that need a kick in the balls when they do screw up. And since I don't think that kind of doctor -has- balls, you have to hit them in the wallet when it's legitimate.
I work for a small business, one that's struggling like crazy to keep up. And you know what hurts us the most? Healthcare. We're one of those rare things - a small business that actually provides full medical coverage to employees. We're not even a tech company, as we do water conditioning and purification work. When tax time rolls around, we get a little bit stressed about it, but then we knuckle under and get it done. When workers comp insurance comes around, THAT is where small business gets its ass kicked. Sure, I know there are a lot of "small business" geeks out there that're a corporation of one in order to get tax breaks, but the real small businesses that hurt the most are ones like mine, and a Kerry presidency would have a far greater chance of making sure our medical premiums were manageable.
As has been demonstrated in recent years, the administration has a pretty strong tendency to couch as much information as possible in the best possible political light. Say what you will about previous administrations doing the same thing or not, but the fact is the last few years have had more than one relatively infamous example of the administration pushing inaccuracies.
The rush to war based on faulty and -known- inaccurate intelligence (which was what Kerry based his stand on at the time) sources is just the best example of these. Then you can look into the medical and scientific determinations the government has made, and the fiscal ones, and see just how the projected reality has matched up -with- reality. If I were in Kerry's shoes, I wouldn't say I had -exactly- -this- -plan- to do -exactly- what needed to be done for sources of program funding, because for all I'd know the current administration cooked the fucking books in order to attack him with yet another new interpretation of the numbers as soon as he takes the bait. With Karl Rove in the White House, I wouldn't put that past them at all.
The people Kerry is talking about would be people making more than $200,000 per year. That's over sixteen thousand dollars per month. (pre-taxed income) If you have a hard time making ends meet and can't afford a house or a condo on that kind of cash, you have major, major, MAJOR financial responsibility issues. If you aren't making over $200,000 per year he is -not- talking about you when he refers to his tax cuts. Generally, when he does talk about the -rich- he is referring to people making far more than the $200,000 level.
I live in Manchester, New Hampshire in the shadow of the Boston metro area. My rent costs me $959 per month for a 2 bedroom place of medium quality. I make around $35,000 per year (pre-taxed) and the Bush tax plan didn't do fuck-all for me. I definitely agree that the tax burden is something that needs to be addressed on a local level when it comes to dealing with expenses needed to live on, but the truth is that the local area is where the -local- governments need to address the problem. Federal tax in CA too high for you with all the expenses that come from living in SF, LA, SD, or even Sacramento? Fine, make your city spend less, need less from the state, and cut your state taxes.
Even in those areas, though, $200,000 is -not- poor.
Bush has pretty well demonstrated his "sneaky bastardness" to the world for the last three years. Kerry hasn't done anything to demonstrate anything even remotely similar.
Sure, I'm -guessing- at Kerry's intentions behind his responses. I've actually been listening to him when he speaks and can generally get the feeling I understand the concept of "subtext", or reading between the lines. Could I be wrong? Sure. It does all boil down to a gut feeling, and my gut tells me he's a sincere - if frequently taken out of context - guy.
And it tells me that Bush is a lying sack of shit that hasn't accomplished anything other than uniting the Democrats against him, and the world against us.
Let me parse. Mormon persecution? The Mormons aren't persecuted for anything other than dressing funny, bigamist extremists, and shitty piss-beer. If you're German, you should hate them yourself for what they did to beer alone! Utah, a Mormon-controlled state has specific laws regulating the alcohol content of beverages in the state.
Christianity is such a fragmented bunch, it's hard to lump them all together most of the time. Some are okay - like the Episcopalians and the "live and let live" philosophy - but there're the wacky bastards like the southern Baptists that still preach the "hellfire and brimstone" sermons about casting the "faggots into the eternal flames".
The people that hate Muslims hate the Muslim faith not because of their religion, it's because they're fucking idiots that hate anyone they can't understand. And a lot of these people can't understand things as simple as "A pickup truck is not the only means of transportation.".
As to Kerry's responses on how to fund a lot of his ideas and promises, I think he's still working a lot of it out before he gives details. If he's smart, he'll be working it out well into his third year in office (as long as he starts from day one, and keeps working from there) which is the wisest thing to do.
I've noticed with a lot of politicians that the levels of response you get from them may all seem to be based on hiding something, but the motivation can be guessed at with a pretty high level of confidence.
Bush gives non-answers because he's trying to use jingoistic rah-rah America responses at every chance he gets so we don't see how he's fucked up the country's global standing (and domestic well-being) in his four year term.
Kerry gives non-answers because he's having a hard time conveying the clearest answers he -does- have through the Republican haze of accusations. That, and because in many cases he may not have an answer he's comfortable with. And what's wrong with that? It would be vastly better for those of us who understand that acknowledging that you don't -have- an answer to see him admit it, but the vast majority of people out there are being brainwashed by the Republican "Always solid, always decided, always right, always inflexible, always AMERICA!" media blitz that Kerry can't afford to show those weaknesses.
Nader on the other hand... He has nothing to lose, so he's just speaking his mind. I appreciate it, even though I just can't bring myself to agree with his views or the Libertarian party candidate's. Both want to go too far, neither would accept compromise.
I have no idea, everyone I know sold some blood or major organs in order to pick up at least a Radeon 9800 for this beast. We've been waiting forever for HL2, after all.
But seriously, everything I've read and heard leads me to believe that something as low as a GeForce 4 MX will be -playable- so long as your CPU isn't a total dog. And as far as CPU's go, I have a little personal anecdote on this matter myself.
My Athlon 2400+ XP burned out last night (One of the Thoroughbred-B cores) and so I was forced to slap in my old Athlon 1Ghz (Thunderbird) CPU in its place for the duration until FedEx brings me the new one I ordered today. After getting that chip in place, I loaded up the Video Stress Test from CS: Source and managed to get an almost-respectable 36 fps with the 1Ghz CPU, 1 gig of RAM, and a Radeon 9800. This was only 15 fps lower than the score I got with the 2400+. A significant hit for sure, but still playable. The video card was definitely doing the lion's share of the work, so I can't give all the credit to the processor, but I'm quite pleased to have taken a lower hit in performance than I expected. Valve's official minspec is 1.2Ghz and a DX7 card, so the range is going to be pretty broad.
For an absolute-minspec machine, I'd suggest a 1.2Ghz processor, a GeForce 4 MX 440 with 64M, 256M of RAM and enough hard drive to handle the install. That'd be playable in 800x600 I think.
Sounds to me like the big things people are looking for here are all iMac features. The noise level is really, really low, and the CPU may not be at bus speed, but it's running at half of the bus which certainly can't hurt.
The only thing you don't get with an iMac is Windows, so is this a good thing or bad?
Disclaimer: I have one of everything on my desk(s).
Quite some time ago, the people at ReplayTV promised to open the spec on the listings streams in the event of a company failure / EOL of the ReplayTV line in order that someone else might be able to take over providing listings to users.
When ReplayTV was purchased by Denon-Marantz, people wondered whether or not this was going to change. Would the promise made still be kept? I emailed to ask and find out. I got a pretty short, but slightly encouraging reply.
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Sir,
If I understood the question correctly, then you are asking that if DNNA discontinues the service for any reason, will you still be able to use the RePlays and will they provide the information necessary to load the information it requires onto it. It is my understanding that no policy has changed even though the company has changed hands. All service will remain as before, as will the policies. If you have any further questions, you will need to contact our customer support at 1-866-286-3662. I hope this adequately answers your questions and sorry for the delay in responding to your email. Have a good day.
For the last -year- I had been waiting for a chance to get a Bluetooth phone with my Verizon account. Fortunately, the same week I see that it's been released, I see posts about Verizon having totally screwed it up so I can avoid spending any cash on it.
I can understand them wanting to make more money with more feature offerings, but it's unexcusable that they don't explain things more clearly when you're shopping for a phone. The only question now, is who to switch to? My plan is up in December.
I tried to make sense of the price structures involved in AT&T Wireless' plans, as they do definitely have the best options in phones. I can't even find out anything remotely clear from the site, though. Do they charge different rates for data? Per K? Ugh.
Thanks for the help, unfortunately one of the big tricks with the RAM problem is that there is no visible setting in the BIOS for the RAM details. It seems like that's either locked down pretty tightly, or the board's designed to have a really specific tolerance level and no further. Bah.
The weirdest part of all this, is that the board in the system seems to contradict some of the information available from archive.org. I determined it was an Intel STL2 board, where the archive page copy showed it to be an L440GX which has a lower set of features. I was even able to flash the motherboard with a newer BIOS for the STL2. So now, I'm not sure if the machine is actually a complete unit that was rehabbed with a hard drive (Minspec from VA was 9G, I got mine with a 4.3G) or if it was a unit that had a motherboard upgrade some time ago, which now seems likely.
I suppose that with the motherboard information that I have, I can probably manage things just fnie, but there are still a few areas that make me wonder. My RAM seems to be the a slightly off speed, as I get an incorrect speed warning that requires an F1 to continue booting each time the system is turned on. That's going to make for an interesting day of eBay or Pricewatch next week.
Primarily though, I have to say I'm bothered by such a dearth of information being available. Why on Earth would VA entirely remove -all- information on the products they sold, not even archiving a manual?
Slashdot Mirror
Is this what Slashdot is degenerating into now that all the Half-Life 2 and World of Warcraft news for the day has been exhausted? Interviewing semi-regular Slashdot posters? It's "journalistic" cannibalization on a pathetic scale! Wil, we know you post here. You've posted on this topic already for chrissakes!
And you've not only been through a Slashdot interview before, you're One Of Us(tm). You must be a hell of a masochist to do it twice. Anyhow, here's my post-rant question.
Since you've had two non-fiction autobiographical books published already, have you ever considered working on any fictional work? Does that urge to write ever rise to the surface, like it did with The Man Formerly Known As WFS and the TekWar series?
After reading through the linked pages, I really didn't come away thinking I'd learned anything of value from this site other than the fact the CPU bottleneck is pretty large. The comparison really lacked in depth and breadth, as they only appear to have used two video cards, 4 processors and a couple variations on RAM. Also, the qualification for "acceptable" seemed a little arbitrary as it wasn't the 30 or 60 fps I usually see used as a rating of acceptability. (100 fps for the psychotic benchmarkers)
Also, the structure of the article could definitely have used some help. There was no clear delineation between the various tests, such as each page being used to display one processor with multiple card benchmarks. The information was largely there, but it definitely wasn't all that clearly stated. Maybe this was due to the extremely limited number of cards they were able to test with, but it still leaves me wanting to know more.
My own experience with Half-Life 2 would lead me to saying that running it is no problem, and that running it with a 2Ghz (core clock) processor and a Radeon 9800 Pro in 1024x768 should be just fine. Just keep the textures at Medium and it'd be all set. High detail textures seem to be the system killer on machines such as those.
Actually, as it's just activated carbon the one thing you don't want to run through it is any sizeable amount of bleach. Granular Activated Carbon filtration will remove some small amount of hardness from water, as well as nasty odors and other impurities.
What might be good, would be to use what's known as an "Extruded" carbon cartridge like the ones you get in the water treatment industry. Essentially a porous solid block that has 5 micron holes in it. Hacking one of these together might be a good idea for a college project. Hmm.
Pay for stuff that was free? Huh? No, that's simply wrong. Any of the mods that were absorbed into Half-Life were STILL free after Valve picked up distribution. All the listed items above were legally mine to play as soon as I put my Half-Life CD key into Steam on registering my account.
If you bought Half-Life, all those games were yours too. If you wanted to buy the games themselves with a CD and key, you could do that for less than the cost of Half-Life, but you wouldn't get the other acquired mods.
Keep in mind that Quake 2 and Half-Life are from the same era of game releases. In fact, the Half-Life engine has a fairly large chunk of Quake 2 code in it, yes. However, what Valve did was a different thing than iD. iD gave programmers source code to Doom, and later Quake and Quake 2 (Soon, Quake 3) and released things like an editor. However, Valve are the ones that actually put that power in the hands of non-programmers. Worldcraft, a map editor based on things released by iD, was actually purchased by Valve and distributed freely from that point on, eventually evolving in a way, into the Hammer editor used now. Valve shelled out the money to give people something more than they had during the development phase, and went on to bring several mods into the core of Half-Life through free patches. Keep in mind, that if you bought Half-Life in 1998, by 2004 you wound up getting Team Fortress Classic, Counter-Strike, Day of Defeat, Deathmatch Classic and Ricochet all free of charge, directly supported by Valve. That's five expansions of free gaming, brought to you by Valve themselves as they incorporated the mod developers into the company to improve the product.
Valve put the idea of modding on the map far more than iD did, simply by making it a core part of thier (nicely profitable) business plan.
How did your 2 retail copies "not work"? Were they just suffering the Steam overload problem that was affecting -everyone- or were they actually defective media? You can't fault Valve if it's the media, and if it's the Steam activation why on Earth would you return it and try another copy? Sounds like you bit your own ass with that one.
;)
The game doesn't demand you be on-line after activation. It does require Steam, but Steam is a PART of Half-Life 2. It's the foundation the game is built upon. That's almost like bitching about having to install libraries on a Linux machine, pointless. And what bugs have you run into? There're damn few bugs for a game with Microsoft developer heritage.
If you have those two hours to get to work and back, you can bet your ass that you'll be encouraged by the boss to "take advantage of the time" and be doing something related to your job in the car. They might not be able to enforce it legally, but the pressure out there will be high enough that I suspect many, many people will find themselves in a position to either accept it, or be worrying that they'll be the next guy out the door when layoffs come up.
There's no real point to cracking it if you have a legal version. You'd risk running some hacker's code on your machine just to save -maybe- 10 or 15 seconds when you loaded up a game? That's foolish. So far most crack authors have been very good about being minimalist and unintrusive, but someday, with some crack, they're going to fuck you.
/., but when a company like Valve goes out of their way to offer something in exchange for the authentication hassle - they deserve a fair shake.
And when it happens, what then? You'll have less than zero recourse. "Yes, I want to sue this guy because the illegal program he wrote to crack the protection on this software nuked my email."
I hate software licensing as much as anyone on
And let's not forget, if you install a pirated version of the software, the EULA has no binding on the developer. You violated it from moment one, you could be considered to have no rights whatsoever and may only have recourse if the software causes problems in a fashion that's criminally damaging. Like, say, deleting any file with a .doc or .exe extension on your machine. (And .c for the linux-only nazis that'll show up.)
If you pirate it, Valve pretty much has the greenlight to fuck you in any way they want within the bounds of their own software and services.
Gabe could be saying what he did just to put the scare tactics out there. I would think that could be pretty effective, up to a point. It seems to me that Valve had several options for ways to make HL2 a bit more secure than the average release, by way of options like having the HL2.exe check the MD5 on the Steam.exe, and vice-versa, or other you-get-my-back-I-get-yours dual anti-piracy measures. Considering that I got over five years of playtime out of Half-Life and various mods, I think paying for HL2 was a very wise investment, and feel that people who pirate it just need to pay up and stop harming a developer that gave modding the biggest kick in the pants since inception.
.gcf files, nothing executable) and pull some form of identifying mark from the user. If you pirate software, and the company swipes something identifying you personally - as long as it's nothing that could be considered "theft" of data or records - morally, you deserve what you get.
"Let's let people mod our game. And what the hell, we'll buy the leading map editor for our format and give it out for free." iD didn't do that. Everyone else followed Valve's lead here.
The way I would like to see Valve approach this, would be to let people get a taste of the game with the pirated version (maybe the first 1-2 chapters) and then lock Steam down tight, wipe out a few of the required game files (like the
I hope Valve does have some kind of a crackdown in progress, we'll have to see where it goes from here. Gabe never replied to my question about the "post-Steam" future of Half-Life 2, which is my only real concern about the authorization system.
If you look at the buildings next to it, on the east and west, you'll see those also have blacked-out rooftops. I would expect that to be the location of the anti-aircraft defenses either put in place after 9/11 or the other occurrences of people flying/crashing planes into the yard. Every so often someone would put a Piper Cherokee or a small Cessna into the ground there.
That's utter bullshit. Frivolous lawsuits are nothing compared to other places where sick, sick money is made in healthcare. And have you not noticed that Edwards is one of THE chief proponents of tort reform? Did you not hear his "three strikes" plan for stopping lawyers from filing that type of suit if they chase too many ambulances?
Yes, people are making way too much money on bullshit lawsuits, but at the same time there are way too many fuckup doctors and hospitals that need a kick in the balls when they do screw up. And since I don't think that kind of doctor -has- balls, you have to hit them in the wallet when it's legitimate.
I work for a small business, one that's struggling like crazy to keep up. And you know what hurts us the most? Healthcare. We're one of those rare things - a small business that actually provides full medical coverage to employees. We're not even a tech company, as we do water conditioning and purification work. When tax time rolls around, we get a little bit stressed about it, but then we knuckle under and get it done. When workers comp insurance comes around, THAT is where small business gets its ass kicked. Sure, I know there are a lot of "small business" geeks out there that're a corporation of one in order to get tax breaks, but the real small businesses that hurt the most are ones like mine, and a Kerry presidency would have a far greater chance of making sure our medical premiums were manageable.
As has been demonstrated in recent years, the administration has a pretty strong tendency to couch as much information as possible in the best possible political light. Say what you will about previous administrations doing the same thing or not, but the fact is the last few years have had more than one relatively infamous example of the administration pushing inaccuracies.
The rush to war based on faulty and -known- inaccurate intelligence (which was what Kerry based his stand on at the time) sources is just the best example of these. Then you can look into the medical and scientific determinations the government has made, and the fiscal ones, and see just how the projected reality has matched up -with- reality. If I were in Kerry's shoes, I wouldn't say I had -exactly- -this- -plan- to do -exactly- what needed to be done for sources of program funding, because for all I'd know the current administration cooked the fucking books in order to attack him with yet another new interpretation of the numbers as soon as he takes the bait. With Karl Rove in the White House, I wouldn't put that past them at all.
The people Kerry is talking about would be people making more than $200,000 per year. That's over sixteen thousand dollars per month. (pre-taxed income) If you have a hard time making ends meet and can't afford a house or a condo on that kind of cash, you have major, major, MAJOR financial responsibility issues. If you aren't making over $200,000 per year he is -not- talking about you when he refers to his tax cuts. Generally, when he does talk about the -rich- he is referring to people making far more than the $200,000 level.
I live in Manchester, New Hampshire in the shadow of the Boston metro area. My rent costs me $959 per month for a 2 bedroom place of medium quality. I make around $35,000 per year (pre-taxed) and the Bush tax plan didn't do fuck-all for me. I definitely agree that the tax burden is something that needs to be addressed on a local level when it comes to dealing with expenses needed to live on, but the truth is that the local area is where the -local- governments need to address the problem. Federal tax in CA too high for you with all the expenses that come from living in SF, LA, SD, or even Sacramento? Fine, make your city spend less, need less from the state, and cut your state taxes.
Even in those areas, though, $200,000 is -not- poor.
Bush has pretty well demonstrated his "sneaky bastardness" to the world for the last three years. Kerry hasn't done anything to demonstrate anything even remotely similar.
Sure, I'm -guessing- at Kerry's intentions behind his responses. I've actually been listening to him when he speaks and can generally get the feeling I understand the concept of "subtext", or reading between the lines. Could I be wrong? Sure. It does all boil down to a gut feeling, and my gut tells me he's a sincere - if frequently taken out of context - guy.
And it tells me that Bush is a lying sack of shit that hasn't accomplished anything other than uniting the Democrats against him, and the world against us.
Buh?
Let me parse. Mormon persecution? The Mormons aren't persecuted for anything other than dressing funny, bigamist extremists, and shitty piss-beer. If you're German, you should hate them yourself for what they did to beer alone! Utah, a Mormon-controlled state has specific laws regulating the alcohol content of beverages in the state.
Christianity is such a fragmented bunch, it's hard to lump them all together most of the time. Some are okay - like the Episcopalians and the "live and let live" philosophy - but there're the wacky bastards like the southern Baptists that still preach the "hellfire and brimstone" sermons about casting the "faggots into the eternal flames".
The people that hate Muslims hate the Muslim faith not because of their religion, it's because they're fucking idiots that hate anyone they can't understand. And a lot of these people can't understand things as simple as "A pickup truck is not the only means of transportation.".
"Charlatan", "Ponzi"
As to Kerry's responses on how to fund a lot of his ideas and promises, I think he's still working a lot of it out before he gives details. If he's smart, he'll be working it out well into his third year in office (as long as he starts from day one, and keeps working from there) which is the wisest thing to do.
I've noticed with a lot of politicians that the levels of response you get from them may all seem to be based on hiding something, but the motivation can be guessed at with a pretty high level of confidence.
Bush gives non-answers because he's trying to use jingoistic rah-rah America responses at every chance he gets so we don't see how he's fucked up the country's global standing (and domestic well-being) in his four year term.
Kerry gives non-answers because he's having a hard time conveying the clearest answers he -does- have through the Republican haze of accusations. That, and because in many cases he may not have an answer he's comfortable with. And what's wrong with that? It would be vastly better for those of us who understand that acknowledging that you don't -have- an answer to see him admit it, but the vast majority of people out there are being brainwashed by the Republican "Always solid, always decided, always right, always inflexible, always AMERICA!" media blitz that Kerry can't afford to show those weaknesses.
Nader on the other hand... He has nothing to lose, so he's just speaking his mind. I appreciate it, even though I just can't bring myself to agree with his views or the Libertarian party candidate's. Both want to go too far, neither would accept compromise.
I have no idea, everyone I know sold some blood or major organs in order to pick up at least a Radeon 9800 for this beast. We've been waiting forever for HL2, after all.
But seriously, everything I've read and heard leads me to believe that something as low as a GeForce 4 MX will be -playable- so long as your CPU isn't a total dog. And as far as CPU's go, I have a little personal anecdote on this matter myself.
My Athlon 2400+ XP burned out last night (One of the Thoroughbred-B cores) and so I was forced to slap in my old Athlon 1Ghz (Thunderbird) CPU in its place for the duration until FedEx brings me the new one I ordered today. After getting that chip in place, I loaded up the Video Stress Test from CS: Source and managed to get an almost-respectable 36 fps with the 1Ghz CPU, 1 gig of RAM, and a Radeon 9800. This was only 15 fps lower than the score I got with the 2400+. A significant hit for sure, but still playable. The video card was definitely doing the lion's share of the work, so I can't give all the credit to the processor, but I'm quite pleased to have taken a lower hit in performance than I expected. Valve's official minspec is 1.2Ghz and a DX7 card, so the range is going to be pretty broad.
For an absolute-minspec machine, I'd suggest a 1.2Ghz processor, a GeForce 4 MX 440 with 64M, 256M of RAM and enough hard drive to handle the install. That'd be playable in 800x600 I think.
Sounds to me like the big things people are looking for here are all iMac features. The noise level is really, really low, and the CPU may not be at bus speed, but it's running at half of the bus which certainly can't hurt.
The only thing you don't get with an iMac is Windows, so is this a good thing or bad?
Disclaimer: I have one of everything on my desk(s).
Small, stout and -wrinkly- is normal. But green?
For god's sakes man, if it's green GET IT CHECKED!
Quite some time ago, the people at ReplayTV promised to open the spec on the listings streams in the event of a company failure / EOL of the ReplayTV line in order that someone else might be able to take over providing listings to users.
When ReplayTV was purchased by Denon-Marantz, people wondered whether or not this was going to change. Would the promise made still be kept? I emailed to ask and find out. I got a pretty short, but slightly encouraging reply.
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Sir,
If I understood the question correctly, then you are asking that if DNNA discontinues the service for any reason, will you still be able to use the RePlays and will they provide the information necessary to load the information it requires onto it. It is my understanding that no policy has changed even though the company has changed hands. All service will remain as before, as will the policies. If you have any further questions, you will need to contact our customer support at 1-866-286-3662. I hope this adequately answers your questions and sorry for the delay in responding to your email. Have a good day.
respectfully always,
RePlayTV
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The response could have been worse, right?
For the last -year- I had been waiting for a chance to get a Bluetooth phone with my Verizon account. Fortunately, the same week I see that it's been released, I see posts about Verizon having totally screwed it up so I can avoid spending any cash on it.
I can understand them wanting to make more money with more feature offerings, but it's unexcusable that they don't explain things more clearly when you're shopping for a phone. The only question now, is who to switch to? My plan is up in December.
I tried to make sense of the price structures involved in AT&T Wireless' plans, as they do definitely have the best options in phones. I can't even find out anything remotely clear from the site, though. Do they charge different rates for data? Per K? Ugh.
Thanks for the help, unfortunately one of the big tricks with the RAM problem is that there is no visible setting in the BIOS for the RAM details. It seems like that's either locked down pretty tightly, or the board's designed to have a really specific tolerance level and no further. Bah.
The weirdest part of all this, is that the board in the system seems to contradict some of the information available from archive.org. I determined it was an Intel STL2 board, where the archive page copy showed it to be an L440GX which has a lower set of features. I was even able to flash the motherboard with a newer BIOS for the STL2. So now, I'm not sure if the machine is actually a complete unit that was rehabbed with a hard drive (Minspec from VA was 9G, I got mine with a 4.3G) or if it was a unit that had a motherboard upgrade some time ago, which now seems likely.
I suppose that with the motherboard information that I have, I can probably manage things just fnie, but there are still a few areas that make me wonder. My RAM seems to be the a slightly off speed, as I get an incorrect speed warning that requires an F1 to continue booting each time the system is turned on. That's going to make for an interesting day of eBay or Pricewatch next week.
Primarily though, I have to say I'm bothered by such a dearth of information being available. Why on Earth would VA entirely remove -all- information on the products they sold, not even archiving a manual?