How could I forget. Obviously the future of the country hinges on the minutae of tax policy. Here's what's going to happen. Whether Obama or Romney gets elected, taxes will be raised on some and cut on others. Services will be raised on some, and cut on others. No matter where funds come from, we can be certain they will not be spent where they are needed, but where a powerful lobby wishes them to be spent.
Neither Obama nor Romney are going to address the critical issues that face this country. Both of them are going to continue the practice of rule by lobbyist leading to policies that further economic inequality and make this country even more divided.
And most of us had NO problem with copyrights as the founding fathers intended
In order for copyright to work as the founding fathers intended, we require the same level of technology as the founding fathers had. Advances in technology have made copyright unenforceable, even for just a year. Putting the digital cat back in the bag is simply wishful thinking. We have to choose between copyright and general purpose computers. We can't have both.
Yes Romneys qualified. He's had years of experience plundering companies for his own personal profit. Now he can bring that experience to the whole country! Bain Capitol anyone?
Comedians are by and large the most honest group of people you can find. It's not funny if it's not true. Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, Louis CK, Jon Stewart. These people speak more truths than any holy man.
Those people were never going to be customers in the first place. The binary blob is a real problem for a lot of actual customers though. I have a fully open source HTPC already, I was hoping for something smaller, quieter, and less endergonic. If I have to sacrifice open source for it, that might be a deal breaker.
Because the legitimacy of the legal system depends on the consent of the people. When fine upstanding citizens like Runaway1956 delcare open disrepect for the law, that's a sign that there's something wrong. When the laws in question are legal, on the books, apparently constitutional, and flagranly disregarded by a vast swath of the population, that's a recipe for revolution.
if the Royal Navy decided tomorrow to blockade it or sink it, there is no lawful means by which the owner could hope to prevent it
Isn't that the case with any act of war? If the US decides tomorrow to bomb Iran, there is no lawful means by which the owner could hope to prevent it. That doesn't mean Iran isn't a sovereign nation.
If I were a judge I'd never rule in favor of something I know to be wrong, excessive, or unreasonable.
Which is exactly why you'll never be a judge. First, they're going to beat anything that looks like integrity out of you in law school. Then you're going to live hand to mouth defending poor people, or you're going to live like a king helping enforce those wrong, excessive, and unreasonable laws. After years of swallowing your conscience you're finally appointed to the bench, are you going to throw it all away by exercising your conscience when you know you'll just be overruled?
See, the system is rigged. You can't become a person of power without behaving like and ingratiating yourself to the people who are already powerful. No agent for change can ever arise in such a system.
Last week I was over at Fry's Electronics buying some computer equipment - they actually price-match online retailers and their salesdroids work on comission so they are a lot more useful than the guys at Best Buy (not fantastic, just better).
Lots of good points, but I had to wonder about this one. How does giving a saleman an interest in selling you the most expensive product he can make him more useful?
If I can't find any reviews for products on independent sites, I won't buy them. So if Target only carries custom products, I'm a lot less likely to find a review for that product. That means I won't be shopping at Target.
At this point, the only reason for B&M stores to exist is for time critical situations when you can't wait a day or two to get your item off the internet. There's no way they're going to be able to compete with the internet on price. Compete on convenience and charge for it. Yes, it will be a smaller market, but that's progress.
If you believe that maintaining relationships with other people is the most important thing in life, then of course you would feel this way about games.
If you believe that maintaining relationships with other people is the most important thing in life, then you'd play social games. You'd join a TF clan, or join a raiding party on WoW, or play minecraft and collaborate on a big project, or get your friends together IRL for a lan party, or just sit around at home playing Back To The Future, and letting your family watch and offer ideas.
There's nothing inherently anti-social about gaming. If anything, it's one of the most social art forms there is.
We're just stuck here. Don't feel bad, though. We're going to go extinct eventually, even if we made it out into space. If an asteroid doesn't get you, the heat death of the universe certainly will.
Unless we live in a multiverse where random big bangs periodically reintroduce order. If that's the case, the problem becomes finding, or manufacturing, new big bangs to inhabit. Unlikely? Yes, but a lot can happen in the next 10^100 years.
I'd say this bundle is unnecessary for most GNU/Linux users (we have package managers) but still handy if we need to quickly deploy anonymizing software in a public machine.
It's better to use the bundle. Information is leaky, and you can easily forget to toggle some obscure configuration option and blow your cover. If anything, browser fingerprinting is an excellent reason to use the bundle. Everyone using the bundle should have the same fingerprint, so your identity is more obscure than if you used your daily work browser which is probably identifiable.
Tor started off as a stand alone application. Then they started distributing the torbutton plugin, and deprecated the stand alone applicaion because it was too leaky. Now torbutton is deprecated because that was still too leaky. I expect this Videla bundle to be deprecated eventually, and they'll distribute VMs with browser, proxy, plugin and full disk encryption already enabled. That should be as leak free as possible.
You could say the same about any aspect of our culture. How much mental energy has been expended bloviating about film, music or art? What sort of world would we live in if the only things we ever expended mental energy on were those directly related to our survival? Isn't the whole point of human progress that we have to spend less and less time worrying about survival so that we can spend more time on things that don't matter?
Portal (1 or 2) are fun in part because they can meaningfully tell a story in that time, and you can only spend so much time on the same basic puzzle. 80 hours of random levels, which would be 12 or 13x as much content as they currently have wouldn't make for a better game.
Why not? How many levels are there in LodeRunner? I've already sunk more enjoyable time into LodeRunner than Portal has content, and I'm no where close to the end.
If you rely on narrative to make the game worthwhile, then your game isn't very good, almost by definition. If the puzzles are worth solving, they'll be fun to solve whether you have a story or not.
Uncharted is a long interactive movie. But that means that for the astronomical production costs they have they can hand do the facial animations for speach and so on. And you have time to play uncharted, infamous, batman and portal in the time it takes you to play one skyrim
Or you could watch 53 movies in the time it takes you to play one Skyrim. But why would you want to? The point isn't to play as many titles as possible, it's to enjoy as much of your free time as possible.
In this country it's still legal not to do something if you feel uncomfortable. Get a pat down and move on with your travel day...
What if the pat down makes you feel uncomfortable? This is like saying you don't have to get punched in the face, you could get kicked in the balls instead. Your choice...
Slashdot Mirror
How could I forget. Obviously the future of the country hinges on the minutae of tax policy. Here's what's going to happen. Whether Obama or Romney gets elected, taxes will be raised on some and cut on others. Services will be raised on some, and cut on others. No matter where funds come from, we can be certain they will not be spent where they are needed, but where a powerful lobby wishes them to be spent.
Neither Obama nor Romney are going to address the critical issues that face this country. Both of them are going to continue the practice of rule by lobbyist leading to policies that further economic inequality and make this country even more divided.
And most of us had NO problem with copyrights as the founding fathers intended
In order for copyright to work as the founding fathers intended, we require the same level of technology as the founding fathers had. Advances in technology have made copyright unenforceable, even for just a year. Putting the digital cat back in the bag is simply wishful thinking. We have to choose between copyright and general purpose computers. We can't have both.
If Beethoven were alive today, he'd be making tiny residuals while the recording industry made millions off of the rerelease of his works on BluRay.
Yes Romneys qualified. He's had years of experience plundering companies for his own personal profit. Now he can bring that experience to the whole country! Bain Capitol anyone?
I think this is the only time I'm ever going to agree with you. Romney and Obama hold the same corporatist positions on anything that matters.
Comedians are by and large the most honest group of people you can find. It's not funny if it's not true. Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, Louis CK, Jon Stewart. These people speak more truths than any holy man.
No, standard Christianity is every bit as weird as Mormonism. People have just grown up around it, so it gets a pass.
Those people were never going to be customers in the first place. The binary blob is a real problem for a lot of actual customers though. I have a fully open source HTPC already, I was hoping for something smaller, quieter, and less endergonic. If I have to sacrifice open source for it, that might be a deal breaker.
Because the legitimacy of the legal system depends on the consent of the people. When fine upstanding citizens like Runaway1956 delcare open disrepect for the law, that's a sign that there's something wrong. When the laws in question are legal, on the books, apparently constitutional, and flagranly disregarded by a vast swath of the population, that's a recipe for revolution.
TFA states, saliently, that where the data resides does not determine jurisdiction anyway.
It seems to be a factor in the MegaUpload case.
HTPCs mess with the signal in all kinds of ways (YUV->RGB conversion is forced, even if you select YUV, it converts to RGB then converts back)
RGB to YUV is lossless in both directions.
That was my point. The fact that war cannot be averted by legal means is irrelevant to the issue of sovereignty.
Acts of war are not necessarily wrong or illegal.
Acts of war are always extra-legal.
if the Royal Navy decided tomorrow to blockade it or sink it, there is no lawful means by which the owner could hope to prevent it
Isn't that the case with any act of war? If the US decides tomorrow to bomb Iran, there is no lawful means by which the owner could hope to prevent it. That doesn't mean Iran isn't a sovereign nation.
If I were a judge I'd never rule in favor of something I know to be wrong, excessive, or unreasonable.
Which is exactly why you'll never be a judge. First, they're going to beat anything that looks like integrity out of you in law school. Then you're going to live hand to mouth defending poor people, or you're going to live like a king helping enforce those wrong, excessive, and unreasonable laws. After years of swallowing your conscience you're finally appointed to the bench, are you going to throw it all away by exercising your conscience when you know you'll just be overruled?
See, the system is rigged. You can't become a person of power without behaving like and ingratiating yourself to the people who are already powerful. No agent for change can ever arise in such a system.
Last week I was over at Fry's Electronics buying some computer equipment - they actually price-match online retailers and their salesdroids work on comission so they are a lot more useful than the guys at Best Buy (not fantastic, just better).
Lots of good points, but I had to wonder about this one. How does giving a saleman an interest in selling you the most expensive product he can make him more useful?
If I can't find any reviews for products on independent sites, I won't buy them. So if Target only carries custom products, I'm a lot less likely to find a review for that product. That means I won't be shopping at Target.
At this point, the only reason for B&M stores to exist is for time critical situations when you can't wait a day or two to get your item off the internet. There's no way they're going to be able to compete with the internet on price. Compete on convenience and charge for it. Yes, it will be a smaller market, but that's progress.
If you believe that maintaining relationships with other people is the most important thing in life, then of course you would feel this way about games.
If you believe that maintaining relationships with other people is the most important thing in life, then you'd play social games. You'd join a TF clan, or join a raiding party on WoW, or play minecraft and collaborate on a big project, or get your friends together IRL for a lan party, or just sit around at home playing Back To The Future, and letting your family watch and offer ideas.
There's nothing inherently anti-social about gaming. If anything, it's one of the most social art forms there is.
We're just stuck here. Don't feel bad, though. We're going to go extinct eventually, even if we made it out into space. If an asteroid doesn't get you, the heat death of the universe certainly will.
Unless we live in a multiverse where random big bangs periodically reintroduce order. If that's the case, the problem becomes finding, or manufacturing, new big bangs to inhabit. Unlikely? Yes, but a lot can happen in the next 10^100 years.
Which obviously means that no one will ever be able to do it.
I'd say this bundle is unnecessary for most GNU/Linux users (we have package managers) but still handy if we need to quickly deploy anonymizing software in a public machine.
It's better to use the bundle. Information is leaky, and you can easily forget to toggle some obscure configuration option and blow your cover. If anything, browser fingerprinting is an excellent reason to use the bundle. Everyone using the bundle should have the same fingerprint, so your identity is more obscure than if you used your daily work browser which is probably identifiable.
Tor started off as a stand alone application. Then they started distributing the torbutton plugin, and deprecated the stand alone applicaion because it was too leaky. Now torbutton is deprecated because that was still too leaky. I expect this Videla bundle to be deprecated eventually, and they'll distribute VMs with browser, proxy, plugin and full disk encryption already enabled. That should be as leak free as possible.
You could say the same about any aspect of our culture. How much mental energy has been expended bloviating about film, music or art? What sort of world would we live in if the only things we ever expended mental energy on were those directly related to our survival? Isn't the whole point of human progress that we have to spend less and less time worrying about survival so that we can spend more time on things that don't matter?
Portal (1 or 2) are fun in part because they can meaningfully tell a story in that time, and you can only spend so much time on the same basic puzzle. 80 hours of random levels, which would be 12 or 13x as much content as they currently have wouldn't make for a better game.
Why not? How many levels are there in LodeRunner? I've already sunk more enjoyable time into LodeRunner than Portal has content, and I'm no where close to the end.
If you rely on narrative to make the game worthwhile, then your game isn't very good, almost by definition. If the puzzles are worth solving, they'll be fun to solve whether you have a story or not.
Uncharted is a long interactive movie. But that means that for the astronomical production costs they have they can hand do the facial animations for speach and so on. And you have time to play uncharted, infamous, batman and portal in the time it takes you to play one skyrim
Or you could watch 53 movies in the time it takes you to play one Skyrim. But why would you want to? The point isn't to play as many titles as possible, it's to enjoy as much of your free time as possible.
Where can I get a copy of the studies, complete with experimental methods and data analysis?
In this country it's still legal not to do something if you feel uncomfortable. Get a pat down and move on with your travel day...
What if the pat down makes you feel uncomfortable? This is like saying you don't have to get punched in the face, you could get kicked in the balls instead. Your choice...