In the real world, probably no effect at all. The number of people who actually make a real world living from a game like that is extremely small, and so most of the money "lost" was already budgeted/removed from the economy before it was lost.
There's a difference between donating some genetic material to a couple who can't conceive on their own, and being a father.
This man, at the request of the couple he was donating the material to, signed away any rights/claims to being a father. This is completely and utterly wrongheaded on behalf of the state, and I hope the man is able to take it to appeals.
And I say that as a lesbian who has been in a similar situation to the women in this case. (we ended up not having kids, but were looking at the possibility).
I thought it was stability control that was mandatory (in Europe anyway)?
Different jurisdictions, yadda yadda. In Canada, traction control is mandatory. (and with it, stability control and anti-lock brakes, because you can't have traction control without those two)
There, now that we have that out of the way, and are safe from unnecessary ad hominem attacks (that, by the way, is the reason I chose this user name: it's a pretty good asshole detector. People who pass the test are the ones who don't comment on it as part of their justification for why they think they're right and I'm wrong), we can simply say that I don't really care whether he'd been doing it for months or years. He still wore a wearable video camera into a movie theatre. It's clear he didn't think about the repercussions for his actions, and rather than whine about how he got hassled by the FBI on the Internet (where such claims are essentially unverifiable), perhaps he should be taking a good long look at himself and why he didn't realize that it'd be a bad idea in the first place.
Except for RAM, the vast majority of PC users will never fully max out their machine. They won't even get close to what the CPU can do. Even 10 years ago when someone asked me what kind of PC they should buy, I would tell them to buy the oldest machine they can find with twice as much memory as they think they need -- because in my experience, lots of RAM contributes more to the longevity of a machine than loads of CPU.
The plural of anecdote is not data, but I figured I'd lend a me-too to support what you're saying --
I have a gaming system. It's 2 years old. Core i5 2500k, overclocked at 4.8GHz, with 16GB of RAM. I bought it for $1000, 2 years ago, and haven't needed to upgrade anything. Not even the video card. It's currently connected to the TV via HDMI, with an xbox controller connected to it, and I play Steam games on the big screen with it. It'll be a while before it needs any kind of upgrade, in part because I've gone to Linux on the gaming machine (was originally Windows 7), and in part because since buying a Playstation, I don't see much point in playing the rat race on the desktop.
I'm currently typing this on a 3-year old Dell Vostro v130n, which came with Ubuntu 10.04, 2GB of RAM, and a dual core 1.2GHz Sandy Bridge celeron. The version of Linux that's on it has changed to something much more modern, but other than that, it does *everything* I want on a laptop. I literally cannot see any reason to ever replace this laptop before it dies a horrible death. That could happen as soon as I click submit to this comment, but it could also be years before that happens. My next laptop will probably be a chromebook... wiped for my preferred flavour of Linux, but the majority of computer users wouldn't even need to do that, because ChromeOS does everything they want with their computers for a fraction of the cost of buying a Windows machine, let alone something like a Macbook Pro or Air.
Vista didn't actually suck all that much if you used it for enough time... the real problem with Vista* was that it took a while for the prefetch service to learn which applications you used most frequently. Once it got a handle on what you liked to do with the system, it was actually fairly zippy. During the first couple of weeks with Vista, however, it was horrible. SP1 improved this, but it was still an unpleasant experience for its first few weeks.
* -- that's aside from the obvious bits about driver incompatibility and the fact that they dropped an OS with a 1GB minimum RAM requirement (2GB for 64-bit) in an era when it was normal to see systems with 512MB.
Or, you know, he just didn't think it bothered anyone and no one said anything to him until the FBI dragged him out of a theater. Maybe he didn't see any reason for carrying two pairs of glasses around for doing different things. I only need glasses for reading. I don't wear them all the time and I don't carry them with me because it's a pain to carry a fragile pair of glasses around unless your actually wearing them. Glasses are too fragile to just stick in your pant pocket and cases for them are too bulky.
He still wore a wearable video camera into a movie theatre. What the hell did he think would happen?
It boggles the mind that people are being apologists for what he did. I agree that it probably didn't need involvement of the FBI, but how anybody could be so incredibly naive as to think that wearing a video camera into a movie theatre would be a good idea is just incredible.
Perhaps if he was able to scrape together $1500 for Google Glass (presumably more since he's got prescription lenses in it), he could have found $50 for a pair of cheap prescription glasses to use in places where Glass either isn't feasible or allowed....
If it's his only pair of prescription lenses, then he's an idiot. If he owns other prescription lenses but decided to bring the wearable video camera to a movie theater anyway, then he's at best a troll and at worse, still an idiot.
Yes, some people do that. Other people have better things to do with their life than to spend 30 minutes every day in a store. I buy food maybe once in two weeks. Some of it is in cans, other is dry (pasta, rice, flour) and other is frozen, so it can be stored nearly forever. I load the car pretty well on those trips. The store is in about 40 minutes of driving from my home. (There are stores closer than that; the closest is about 15 minutes away, but I dislike it.) I usually stop by the better store when I am in the area for other reasons; and when you are free to pick the day, it's not difficult to find time.
See there's the issue. The closest store to you is a 15 minute drive away. The closest store to me is a 2 minute walk. Sure, stock up on staples that don't expire (just bought a 20lb bag of rice today, for example, which is several months' supply), but when you live that close to a store with a good deli/meat section and good produce, why wouldn't you walk there to get fresh ingredients daily? They're much better for you than frozen when it's in season, and meat that hasn't been frozen tastes way better.
I drive significantly less than I did 10 years ago. I moved into the city, and am now able to take public transit to work, which was, previously, the lion's share of my driving.
As for the why... the price of fuel is a pretty big factor. Between that, and the fact that I'm now living in an area where public transit is a viable option, I don't really see the point in driving the car for anything other than shopping trips, and I can do most of those on the weekend. The very few things I may need during the week can be had at the grocery store, deli, or drug store across the street from my apartment building.
I still own a car, and I can't see myself ever giving it up, but I don't *need* to drive everywhere like I did when I lived in the country.
Gentoo isn't actually that bad, though it does require a little more understanding of how the system works than something like Ubuntu. It does have a fairly decent package management system though, and because most of what you're using is compiled it tends to be a fairly fast system to use.
Each to their own. For me, computers have gotten fast enough that I don't really care about a few milliseconds here or there, and am currently using a Ubuntu derivative now for ease of package management (and because this particular one has a DE that I can't find elsewhere yet, as it's too new). But I did use Slackware for nearly 15 years before I decided I wanted something that was less involved for the package management. That's the beauty of the system -- you can do what you want with it, and there's many many different paths to accomplishing the same goal.
CADT also brings us cheesy, amateur-hour user interfaces, butt-fuck-ugly skins and themes, and terrible usability.
GTK isn't inherently riddled with those problems though. I mean, yes, most of the time when you see it, it's pretty god-awful, but it *is* possible to design a UI in GTK that looks pretty good, and which has a degree of UI uniformity. Take a look at elementary OS for an example of how it's possible to do GTK right. (and yes, I realize I'm cherry-picking an example, and that it's incredibly easy to find examples of GTK done horribly horribly wrong)
Of course, to throw a little gasoline on the fire, I prefer Enlightenment...;)
I'd suggest you try a turnkey solution like Roku or a WDTV Live!.
Yes, I was using Windows Media Center for a while as well... I hadn't pirated it either (had a legal license), and it was ok. Especially if you installed the CCCP on it so it could play more types of files, but I find that a WDTV Live! uses a lot less electricity, and does basically the same thing, only better because it's a tool designed specifically for the task.
A flat touch screen is a TERRIBLE interface for controlling media.
Really? I find it very good for navigating DLNA content on my stereo, because I can easily scroll through the list of content and then just tap on the song/album I want to play.... It's *way* better than using the original remote that came with it...
Well thanks for your references to the cheap, elegant, well-documented and functional solutions that already exist. I find those really helpful.
Oh wait, I don't because they don't exist.
Really? Funny. I thought that the WDTV Live! I bought was pretty cheap, all things considered. It does exactly what he wants (to replace the Netgear box he currently has), and it can play off network-mounted file shares, meaning that he doesn't actually have to install any packages on his Mint box at all, just tell it to share the folder in question by Samba.
Unless you think that setting up a Samba share is an unsolved problem?
I have a WDTV Live! and it plays just about everything I have ever tried to throw at it. It has a Netflix client which I use extensively, as well as Hulu and other streaming media services. And it has built-in wireless N, in addition to Ethernet connectivity.
I stream media from a NAS which is sharing using SMB/Windows share. It supports DLNA, but I only use that for audio (because my stereo amplifier has a DLNA client built in for audio), but it can also build a media library for the audio files from the SMB share, and index them by all of the info in the metadata tags. Very happy with it.
The names may change, but there are similar programs in other countries. Many are less visible, because they just crank it into other welfare programs, where is disappears. Its still there, and when paying out money, you don't know if the money was used for crack or crackers..
On the other hand, if you're working 40 hours per week at the minimum wage in Canada, you are not poor enough as to qualify for welfare as well.... That's kind of the point I'm making. Yes, other countries have poverty, but no, other countries don't have people working full time who still qualify for income subsidy.
Foodstamps are run out of the Department of Agriculture, who also end up handing out price supports, and land banking payments. The mission of the department is to make sure every American gets fed.
That's a large part of it. But I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around something that was in the summary: it said that 1 in 7 Americans are on stamps. That's an appalling statistic -- 1 in 7 Americans are poor enough that they wouldn't be able to feed themselves without government assistance?
While I agree that paying farmers not to actually produce food is ridiculous, plenty of other countries manage to feed their people without needing to resort to a program like that. Food stamps aren't the problem, they're the symptom.
Last week, when we had -30'C with wind chill in -40'C range for a week, my car was a rough start after 3 days in the driveway, but it still started and ran just fine. Just let it idle long enough to warm up (my car has a "cold engine" idiot light, wait for it to go off), and you'll be fine.
The *big* mistake people make with their cars when it gets really cold is using their car for short hops without giving it time to warm up. That's bad for engine durability, and the more immediate problem it causes is that it drains the battery. It takes more energy to start a car in the winter, and that means it needs to be running for longer in order to recharge. Waiting for the car to warm up before driving off will help with that, but you'll still probably have a problem by the end of the season if all you're doing is a 5 minute jaunt to the grocery store and back.
Looked at a map recently? Getting to 0'F in Nevada is pretty significant, for most of the state. Kentucky's the same latitude, and I've seen Kentucky shut down for 1" of snow -- they just don't have the necessary equipment to clear the snow/ice from the roads, because they usually don't get it.
Similarly, -40'C is business as usual for the January freeze in this part of Canada (and northern parts of the US). I wore a 2nd scarf last week as I went about my usual business. In parts of the States, however, -40'C is apocalyptic.
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In game, it'll probably drive in-game prices up.
In the real world, probably no effect at all. The number of people who actually make a real world living from a game like that is extremely small, and so most of the money "lost" was already budgeted/removed from the economy before it was lost.
Have you seen the list of health problems that purebred dogs have to deal with these days?
There's a difference between donating some genetic material to a couple who can't conceive on their own, and being a father.
This man, at the request of the couple he was donating the material to, signed away any rights/claims to being a father. This is completely and utterly wrongheaded on behalf of the state, and I hope the man is able to take it to appeals.
And I say that as a lesbian who has been in a similar situation to the women in this case. (we ended up not having kids, but were looking at the possibility).
No. You're fucked, because you took drugs to feel better.
You may be more contageous because of the bugs replicating, but the real problem is the huge number of them flooding and overwhelming your own system.
Because all the dealers will get together and form a consortium that will pay off the insurance companies to institute that policy.
That'll work great with anti-trust laws.... let alone jurisdictions where the insurance is government....
I thought it was stability control that was mandatory (in Europe anyway)?
Different jurisdictions, yadda yadda. In Canada, traction control is mandatory. (and with it, stability control and anti-lock brakes, because you can't have traction control without those two)
Apologists.
There, now that we have that out of the way, and are safe from unnecessary ad hominem attacks (that, by the way, is the reason I chose this user name: it's a pretty good asshole detector. People who pass the test are the ones who don't comment on it as part of their justification for why they think they're right and I'm wrong), we can simply say that I don't really care whether he'd been doing it for months or years. He still wore a wearable video camera into a movie theatre. It's clear he didn't think about the repercussions for his actions, and rather than whine about how he got hassled by the FBI on the Internet (where such claims are essentially unverifiable), perhaps he should be taking a good long look at himself and why he didn't realize that it'd be a bad idea in the first place.
Except for RAM, the vast majority of PC users will never fully max out their machine. They won't even get close to what the CPU can do. Even 10 years ago when someone asked me what kind of PC they should buy, I would tell them to buy the oldest machine they can find with twice as much memory as they think they need -- because in my experience, lots of RAM contributes more to the longevity of a machine than loads of CPU.
The plural of anecdote is not data, but I figured I'd lend a me-too to support what you're saying --
I have a gaming system. It's 2 years old. Core i5 2500k, overclocked at 4.8GHz, with 16GB of RAM. I bought it for $1000, 2 years ago, and haven't needed to upgrade anything. Not even the video card. It's currently connected to the TV via HDMI, with an xbox controller connected to it, and I play Steam games on the big screen with it. It'll be a while before it needs any kind of upgrade, in part because I've gone to Linux on the gaming machine (was originally Windows 7), and in part because since buying a Playstation, I don't see much point in playing the rat race on the desktop.
I'm currently typing this on a 3-year old Dell Vostro v130n, which came with Ubuntu 10.04, 2GB of RAM, and a dual core 1.2GHz Sandy Bridge celeron. The version of Linux that's on it has changed to something much more modern, but other than that, it does *everything* I want on a laptop. I literally cannot see any reason to ever replace this laptop before it dies a horrible death. That could happen as soon as I click submit to this comment, but it could also be years before that happens. My next laptop will probably be a chromebook... wiped for my preferred flavour of Linux, but the majority of computer users wouldn't even need to do that, because ChromeOS does everything they want with their computers for a fraction of the cost of buying a Windows machine, let alone something like a Macbook Pro or Air.
Vista didn't actually suck all that much if you used it for enough time... the real problem with Vista* was that it took a while for the prefetch service to learn which applications you used most frequently. Once it got a handle on what you liked to do with the system, it was actually fairly zippy. During the first couple of weeks with Vista, however, it was horrible. SP1 improved this, but it was still an unpleasant experience for its first few weeks.
* -- that's aside from the obvious bits about driver incompatibility and the fact that they dropped an OS with a 1GB minimum RAM requirement (2GB for 64-bit) in an era when it was normal to see systems with 512MB.
Or, you know, he just didn't think it bothered anyone and no one said anything to him until the FBI dragged him out of a theater. Maybe he didn't see any reason for carrying two pairs of glasses around for doing different things. I only need glasses for reading. I don't wear them all the time and I don't carry them with me because it's a pain to carry a fragile pair of glasses around unless your actually wearing them. Glasses are too fragile to just stick in your pant pocket and cases for them are too bulky.
He still wore a wearable video camera into a movie theatre. What the hell did he think would happen?
It boggles the mind that people are being apologists for what he did. I agree that it probably didn't need involvement of the FBI, but how anybody could be so incredibly naive as to think that wearing a video camera into a movie theatre would be a good idea is just incredible.
Perhaps if he was able to scrape together $1500 for Google Glass (presumably more since he's got prescription lenses in it), he could have found $50 for a pair of cheap prescription glasses to use in places where Glass either isn't feasible or allowed....
http://www.zennioptical.com/lo...
If it's his only pair of prescription lenses, then he's an idiot. If he owns other prescription lenses but decided to bring the wearable video camera to a movie theater anyway, then he's at best a troll and at worse, still an idiot.
Yes, some people do that. Other people have better things to do with their life than to spend 30 minutes every day in a store. I buy food maybe once in two weeks. Some of it is in cans, other is dry (pasta, rice, flour) and other is frozen, so it can be stored nearly forever. I load the car pretty well on those trips. The store is in about 40 minutes of driving from my home. (There are stores closer than that; the closest is about 15 minutes away, but I dislike it.) I usually stop by the better store when I am in the area for other reasons; and when you are free to pick the day, it's not difficult to find time.
See there's the issue. The closest store to you is a 15 minute drive away. The closest store to me is a 2 minute walk. Sure, stock up on staples that don't expire (just bought a 20lb bag of rice today, for example, which is several months' supply), but when you live that close to a store with a good deli/meat section and good produce, why wouldn't you walk there to get fresh ingredients daily? They're much better for you than frozen when it's in season, and meat that hasn't been frozen tastes way better.
I drive significantly less than I did 10 years ago. I moved into the city, and am now able to take public transit to work, which was, previously, the lion's share of my driving.
As for the why... the price of fuel is a pretty big factor. Between that, and the fact that I'm now living in an area where public transit is a viable option, I don't really see the point in driving the car for anything other than shopping trips, and I can do most of those on the weekend. The very few things I may need during the week can be had at the grocery store, deli, or drug store across the street from my apartment building.
I still own a car, and I can't see myself ever giving it up, but I don't *need* to drive everywhere like I did when I lived in the country.
Gentoo isn't actually that bad, though it does require a little more understanding of how the system works than something like Ubuntu. It does have a fairly decent package management system though, and because most of what you're using is compiled it tends to be a fairly fast system to use.
Each to their own. For me, computers have gotten fast enough that I don't really care about a few milliseconds here or there, and am currently using a Ubuntu derivative now for ease of package management (and because this particular one has a DE that I can't find elsewhere yet, as it's too new). But I did use Slackware for nearly 15 years before I decided I wanted something that was less involved for the package management. That's the beauty of the system -- you can do what you want with it, and there's many many different paths to accomplishing the same goal.
CADT also brings us cheesy, amateur-hour user interfaces, butt-fuck-ugly skins and themes, and terrible usability.
GTK isn't inherently riddled with those problems though. I mean, yes, most of the time when you see it, it's pretty god-awful, but it *is* possible to design a UI in GTK that looks pretty good, and which has a degree of UI uniformity. Take a look at elementary OS for an example of how it's possible to do GTK right. (and yes, I realize I'm cherry-picking an example, and that it's incredibly easy to find examples of GTK done horribly horribly wrong)
Of course, to throw a little gasoline on the fire, I prefer Enlightenment... ;)
I'd suggest you try a turnkey solution like Roku or a WDTV Live!.
Yes, I was using Windows Media Center for a while as well... I hadn't pirated it either (had a legal license), and it was ok. Especially if you installed the CCCP on it so it could play more types of files, but I find that a WDTV Live! uses a lot less electricity, and does basically the same thing, only better because it's a tool designed specifically for the task.
A flat touch screen is a TERRIBLE interface for controlling media.
Really? I find it very good for navigating DLNA content on my stereo, because I can easily scroll through the list of content and then just tap on the song/album I want to play.... It's *way* better than using the original remote that came with it...
Well thanks for your references to the cheap, elegant, well-documented and functional solutions that already exist. I find those really helpful.
Oh wait, I don't because they don't exist.
Really? Funny. I thought that the WDTV Live! I bought was pretty cheap, all things considered. It does exactly what he wants (to replace the Netgear box he currently has), and it can play off network-mounted file shares, meaning that he doesn't actually have to install any packages on his Mint box at all, just tell it to share the folder in question by Samba.
Unless you think that setting up a Samba share is an unsolved problem?
Ditto.
I have a WDTV Live! and it plays just about everything I have ever tried to throw at it. It has a Netflix client which I use extensively, as well as Hulu and other streaming media services. And it has built-in wireless N, in addition to Ethernet connectivity.
I stream media from a NAS which is sharing using SMB/Windows share. It supports DLNA, but I only use that for audio (because my stereo amplifier has a DLNA client built in for audio), but it can also build a media library for the audio files from the SMB share, and index them by all of the info in the metadata tags. Very happy with it.
The names may change, but there are similar programs in other countries. Many are less visible, because they just crank it into other welfare programs, where is disappears. Its still there, and when paying out money, you don't know if the money was used for crack or crackers..
On the other hand, if you're working 40 hours per week at the minimum wage in Canada, you are not poor enough as to qualify for welfare as well.... That's kind of the point I'm making. Yes, other countries have poverty, but no, other countries don't have people working full time who still qualify for income subsidy.
Foodstamps are run out of the Department of Agriculture, who also end up handing out price supports, and land banking payments. The mission of the department is to make sure every American gets fed.
That's a large part of it. But I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around something that was in the summary: it said that 1 in 7 Americans are on stamps. That's an appalling statistic -- 1 in 7 Americans are poor enough that they wouldn't be able to feed themselves without government assistance?
While I agree that paying farmers not to actually produce food is ridiculous, plenty of other countries manage to feed their people without needing to resort to a program like that. Food stamps aren't the problem, they're the symptom.
According to that map, there seems to be a rather large American population in Cuba, too...
Didn't realize gitmo had gotten that big....
I'm leaning more towards something with your car.
Last week, when we had -30'C with wind chill in -40'C range for a week, my car was a rough start after 3 days in the driveway, but it still started and ran just fine. Just let it idle long enough to warm up (my car has a "cold engine" idiot light, wait for it to go off), and you'll be fine.
The *big* mistake people make with their cars when it gets really cold is using their car for short hops without giving it time to warm up. That's bad for engine durability, and the more immediate problem it causes is that it drains the battery. It takes more energy to start a car in the winter, and that means it needs to be running for longer in order to recharge. Waiting for the car to warm up before driving off will help with that, but you'll still probably have a problem by the end of the season if all you're doing is a 5 minute jaunt to the grocery store and back.
Two pairs of jeans (the thick kind we used to have back then) were barely enough to keep my legs warm during that walk.
Jeans are absolutely the last thing you want to be wearing in cold weather. The cotton in them is hydrophilic, and that will only amplify the cold.
Even polyester is better than denim for cold weather...
Looked at a map recently? Getting to 0'F in Nevada is pretty significant, for most of the state. Kentucky's the same latitude, and I've seen Kentucky shut down for 1" of snow -- they just don't have the necessary equipment to clear the snow/ice from the roads, because they usually don't get it.
Similarly, -40'C is business as usual for the January freeze in this part of Canada (and northern parts of the US). I wore a 2nd scarf last week as I went about my usual business. In parts of the States, however, -40'C is apocalyptic.