Ah, this reminds me of a story of my father's. Well, it seems that businesses had a lot of false alarms on their alarm systems, causing the police to have to go out and check the businesses. Well, after a while a fine was instituted in order to cause people to be more careful about false alarms.
In time, people were more careful about not having false alarms, but when the police department had its yearly audit, there were complaints about the alarm fine revenues being down.
Hmm... Thanks for reminding me. I've done some digging to see how that turned out. Seems the school district is unrepentant, but they gave just enough to get the kids parents off their backs.
Don't send your kids to public school. I'm serious. They are snakepits. Worse now than ever.
However, they could have prevailed in this (if the courts followed the Constitution and they could afford the legal fees), but it wasn't worth it for them to fight.
Otherwise it appears that the Church has so little faith in their own message that they have to use a secular government to enforce their views.
Ok, this is possibly a hard concept for an American to grasp, but the British government is not secular. The Church of England is essentially a branch of the British Government. Bishops of the Church get seats in the House of Lords (see Lords Spiritual. Here's more information, take special note of their finances (Church of England and this article on State Religion.)
Now, I don't know about anyone else, but as an American schoolchild I was taught from an early age that this was wicked, evil and one of the main motivating factors for the American Revolution. Honestly, it's an alien concept over here. Imagine if George W. Bush were not just president but had as one of his titles "Defender of the Faith" as head of state. Note that in the U.S. we call parts of government "Departments" while in England they are called "Ministries."
Oh, and I really wonder if using an artistic recreation of a state building could ever be forbidden in the U. S. under the First Amendment... but England has no such Amendment or indeed, a Constitution.
I leave you with this quote:
The decapitated colossus reeled like a drunken giant; but it did
not fall over. It recovered its balance by a miracle, and, no longer
heeding its steps and with the camera that fired the Heat-Ray now
rigidly upheld, it reeled swiftly upon Shepperton. The living
intelligence, the Martian within the hood, was slain and splashed to
the four winds of heaven, and the Thing was now but a mere intricate
device of metal whirling to destruction. It drove along in a straight
line, incapable of guidance. It struck the tower of Shepperton
Church, smashing it down as the impact of a battering ram might have
done, swerved aside, blundered on and collapsed with tremendous force
into the river out of my sight.
-- The War of the Worlds by Herbert George Wells
What say you, Bishop of Manchester, to Wells depiction of violence in English churches in The War of the Worlds? It's the same damned story, basically....
This is supposed to be a first person RPG, not a first person shooter. You build yourself up to be a terrifying, inhuman superman. In this way it's a descendant more from games like Shadowrun for the Sega Genesis or Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines than Doom.
I preferred melee weapons to firearms in System Shock 2. My main use for a pistol was shooting out security cameras, and I spent most of the game looking for upgrades to my pipe wrench. They had some pretty cool melee weapons as you got through the game. I tended to ignore pistols and the like, since they used ammo and I hated running out. Also they broke, which was annoying. I'd rather use psionics if I had to hit something at a distance.
Of course, the pipe wrench was actually not a bad weapon in System Shock 2 early on, provided I made good use of hacking skills.
I mean if guns were as effective as bio-enhancements, why not use them instead of turning yourself into a deformed monster?
Actually, a physical keylogger is a device that plugs in between the keyboard and the PC. Or else it could be build into a keyboard. Here's an example KeyGhost. Of course, since it's a dongle that doesn't transmit anything, you need regular physical access to the device to retrieve memory.
I think it's main use is to find out if your wife/husband or live in girlfriend/boyfriend is cheating on you, stuff like that. I owuldn't trust it for a sensitive operation like the one described in the article, too easy to discover with routine maintenance.
One that was built into an identical keyboard would be better in that case.
I could never write a story with voluntary time travel in it because it opens up too many questions.
Well, to my mind, they handled this easily enough. Hiro is an incompetant time traveller (in fact, they handle it this way in Dr. Who as well.). He basically doesn't have much ability to control where and when he'll show up. His powers seem to fade in and out. Therefore, the tension is "What if I travel in time, my powers flake out and I can't travel again and I've died and turned to dust years before Sylar was ever even born." (See Hiro's current exodus on the show, he didn't intend to end up there by any means.)
I've also seen it controlled in other stories like the Gargoyles cartoon and The Man Who Murdered Mohammed that you can't alter actual, known historical facts. If Amelia Eirhart disappears in year X and remains missing for Y number of years. You can't go back in time and bring her back to a ticker tape parade less than Y years and mess up all the history books. You could, however, bring her forward in time to Y+1 and have your tickertape parade then.
Oh, and the Terminator films? Tough to say. History might be invulnerable to changes, in which case the stories lack drama except for the historical facts we don't know. Like, if Connor had a girlfriend, well, she might be killed because we know nothing about her. We know that if Connor was actually killed then what has happened is a new parallel timeline was created so we don't really have to worry if they exist simultaneously. If the one timeline overwrites the other one, then we have a paradox, a result without a cause.
A simple search on the subject reveals that HBO programming and, in my case, Braveheart on AMC are among the many selections now restricted for playback or recording by Windows Media Center Edition. What's next, restricting every piece of programming on television?"
On the plus side for the HBO programming, there are only 2 episodes left, then there's no more need of them.
After a Windows Update a couple of days ago, my PC went out. Hmm... a strange coincidence. Too bad I already formatted it and reinstalled from another WinXP disk my roommates happened to have lying around.... This information might've been handy then...
For example, I think it's a pretty recent development that a non-trivial bloc of the population would actually cheer for the assassination of President Bush.
Wait, what?!?
Your statement has confused me. We are speaking, I believe, about a time in history when the United States of America was in the throes of a brutal civil war. We're talking about massive armed rebellion against Lincoln's government, including such things as ironclads, the 19th century's superweapon and large amounts of professionally trained soldiers. All of this was specifically because a significant portion of the population was horrified at the election of Lincoln. It was specifically against Lincoln and the policies they expected him to enact.
Thousands of people cheered the assassination of Lincoln and feted John Wilkes Booth as a hero, a Brutus of the modern world (this was how he saw himself, as well).
Just because they lost the war, doesn't mean they weren't cheering Lincoln's assassination.
Consumption of goods and services in increasing. Clearly, people have much more disposable income now than they did in the past. Have you ever talked to people about what life was like in the 1950s, or 1960s? Chances are they didn't have 2 cars, a TV in every room, and didn't eat out 3 nights a week, like your typical middle class family now. The kids didn't have a bedroom filled with toys like they do now.
I want to look at this, let's see, where to begin.
Consumption of goods and services in increasing. Clearly, people have much more disposable income now than they did in the past.
Have you ever talked to people about what life was like in the 1950s, or 1960s? Chances are they didn't have 2 cars, a TV in every room, and didn't eat out 3 nights a week, like your typical middle class family now. The kids didn't have a bedroom filled with toys like they do now.
None of that stuff matters. The only important things are:
1. How much was money worth in those days compared to today? Worth being determined not by the amount of worthless consumer junk you can buy, but by it's value versus common commodities.
2. How much was the average working class salary in todays dollars?
3. How much consumer debt were people carrying?
4. How much savings in todays value of money did the average person have (in various age groups, the average 30 year old, for instance)?
I want to let people draw their own conclusions. I have an opinion on what those conclusions should be, but I'll keep them to myself for now.
Well, except for one thing; I believe that the American economy jumped out of a Tech Bubble into a Housing Bubble, and that the Housing Bubble is in the process of ending. I'm not alone..
In Mark Ames Going Postal, he points out that Harris and Klebold had rigged up a fairly impressive explosive device (really a cluster of them, 99 IEDs, positioned to do huge damage and take many lives) that fortunately failed to go off, at which point they switched to Plan B. (Read the Wikipedia article for how helpful the gun laws they violated before the massacre were in stopping them.)
Actually, though, everyone already knows this from Oklahoma City, but that particular massacre is always downplayed or not mentioned when events like this occur. Mainly because it doesn't help push the anti-First or anti-Second amendment agendas.
Gun control isn't about disarming "bad guys" it is about disarming basically law-abiding dissenters, period. Mainly so they won't fight back when they are being marched off to the gas chambers.
The Sega Genesis version was released in 1991 and was a widely popular with comic book fans, helping to establish the success of the 16-bit Mega Drive/Genesis system. Critics noted that the game had superior graphics, sound and faithfully recreated the characters for the video game universe, even allowing the player to take pictures of the major and minor enemies in the video game to sell at the Daily Bugle to buy more web fluid. The game had four different difficult levels and a contest was held to see who could successfully complete the game in the ultra-hard nightmare mode.
.
According to developer Randel B. Reiss, this version was a huge commercial success: two thirds of all Genesis owners at the time also bought the game, and single-handedly convinced Marvel Comics not to cancel the licensing deal they had with Sega. [1]
-- The Amazing Spider-Man vs. The Kingpin
I don't think that this title deserved to be knocked. It was one of the better Genesis games available. Of course, my favorite Spider-Man licensed game is still Revenge of Shinobi....
The History of Titus Oates is instructive here. He went through periods of amazing success followed by periods of abject failure, by telling outlandish lies about a politically unpopular scapegoat.
Great but now can we learn from our past mistakes of the 1990's?
You know, I actually remember being employed in the 90's. I remember the mistakes of the 90's.
Well, except they weren't really mistakes, any more than a 3 Card Monty dealer has made a mistake when it turns out you can't actually win at 3 Card Monty.
The truth is the mistakes of the 90's were primarily mistakes of finance, and this is a common problem in American business. The trouble is it is fairly easy to turn a business sector that's a home for honest, profitable business into a home for various scams.
The stuff you are talking about? Well, a lot of it has to do with the lesser position IT workers are in now versus the 90's. In the 90's IT workers were at the top of the food chain. Investors were investing in Internet startups. In order to attract investing dollars, you needed tech workers and there weren't enough to go around.
Tech was sexy and the idiocyncracies of West Coast tech workers (particularly former Phreakers like Woz and Jobs) were considered sexy. You didn't want to be the IT worker in the suit because that wasn't what investors wanted to see.
I remember one of my bosses dressing up to go to a meeting with IBM and the IBM people taking pains to tell her that IBM was hip now and there was no need to be so formal in the meetings. The whole culture was different because it was a tech bubble.
I never want to see a bubble like that in my line of work again because I value stability, but seriously, it had a lot more to do with button down finance types misreading the market and throwing money at dubious business plans than wearing jeans to work.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds like someone needs to buy his girlfriend a Scarlet Witch outfit....
Sobering Journalism
I don't know, I think it is a little ironic that now they are voluntarily in that position.
Maybe when the British get the presidency, they could suggest some changes in the way the Germans do things?
In time, people were more careful about not having false alarms, but when the police department had its yearly audit, there were complaints about the alarm fine revenues being down.
See this link... Gamer To Attend Graduation; FBISD Records Cite 'Terroristic Threat'
Don't send your kids to public school. I'm serious. They are snakepits. Worse now than ever.
However, they could have prevailed in this (if the courts followed the Constitution and they could afford the legal fees), but it wasn't worth it for them to fight.
Now, I don't know about anyone else, but as an American schoolchild I was taught from an early age that this was wicked, evil and one of the main motivating factors for the American Revolution. Honestly, it's an alien concept over here. Imagine if George W. Bush were not just president but had as one of his titles "Defender of the Faith" as head of state. Note that in the U.S. we call parts of government "Departments" while in England they are called "Ministries."
So, actually, Sony is in luck in this case. Th CoE is pretty decadent, and has to resort to suing in court like a common nobody, instead of just ordering the Sony people to be drawn and quartered for treason, blasphemy and whatever other crimes they could come up with.
Penny for the Guy?
Oh, and I really wonder if using an artistic recreation of a state building could ever be forbidden in the U. S. under the First Amendment... but England has no such Amendment or indeed, a Constitution.
I leave you with this quote:
What say you, Bishop of Manchester, to Wells depiction of violence in English churches in The War of the Worlds? It's the same damned story, basically....I preferred melee weapons to firearms in System Shock 2. My main use for a pistol was shooting out security cameras, and I spent most of the game looking for upgrades to my pipe wrench. They had some pretty cool melee weapons as you got through the game. I tended to ignore pistols and the like, since they used ammo and I hated running out. Also they broke, which was annoying. I'd rather use psionics if I had to hit something at a distance.
Of course, the pipe wrench was actually not a bad weapon in System Shock 2 early on, provided I made good use of hacking skills.
I mean if guns were as effective as bio-enhancements, why not use them instead of turning yourself into a deformed monster?
You mean Heroes lied to me?
On the plus side, if things get bad enough there are 5 families that will have a new sideline....
I think it's main use is to find out if your wife/husband or live in girlfriend/boyfriend is cheating on you, stuff like that. I owuldn't trust it for a sensitive operation like the one described in the article, too easy to discover with routine maintenance.
One that was built into an identical keyboard would be better in that case.
I've also seen it controlled in other stories like the Gargoyles cartoon and The Man Who Murdered Mohammed that you can't alter actual, known historical facts. If Amelia Eirhart disappears in year X and remains missing for Y number of years. You can't go back in time and bring her back to a ticker tape parade less than Y years and mess up all the history books. You could, however, bring her forward in time to Y+1 and have your tickertape parade then.
Oh, and the Terminator films? Tough to say. History might be invulnerable to changes, in which case the stories lack drama except for the historical facts we don't know. Like, if Connor had a girlfriend, well, she might be killed because we know nothing about her. We know that if Connor was actually killed then what has happened is a new parallel timeline was created so we don't really have to worry if they exist simultaneously. If the one timeline overwrites the other one, then we have a paradox, a result without a cause.
So, who's up for a game of Timemaster, I'll GM...
After a Windows Update a couple of days ago, my PC went out. Hmm... a strange coincidence. Too bad I already formatted it and reinstalled from another WinXP disk my roommates happened to have lying around.... This information might've been handy then...
Wait, what?!?
Your statement has confused me. We are speaking, I believe, about a time in history when the United States of America was in the throes of a brutal civil war. We're talking about massive armed rebellion against Lincoln's government, including such things as ironclads, the 19th century's superweapon and large amounts of professionally trained soldiers. All of this was specifically because a significant portion of the population was horrified at the election of Lincoln. It was specifically against Lincoln and the policies they expected him to enact.
Thousands of people cheered the assassination of Lincoln and feted John Wilkes Booth as a hero, a Brutus of the modern world (this was how he saw himself, as well).
Just because they lost the war, doesn't mean they weren't cheering Lincoln's assassination.
Consumption of goods and services in increasing. Clearly, people have much more disposable income now than they did in the past.
Debt financed consumption does not count as disposable income. Of course, debt financed consumption must eventually come to an end, so we'll see. Some people have been using ridiculous credit instruments to finance a lifestyle outside of what they could ever possible afford.
Have you ever talked to people about what life was like in the 1950s, or 1960s? Chances are they didn't have 2 cars, a TV in every room, and didn't eat out 3 nights a week, like your typical middle class family now. The kids didn't have a bedroom filled with toys like they do now.
None of that stuff matters. The only important things are:
1. How much was money worth in those days compared to today? Worth being determined not by the amount of worthless consumer junk you can buy, but by it's value versus common commodities.
2. How much was the average working class salary in todays dollars?
3. How much consumer debt were people carrying?
4. How much savings in todays value of money did the average person have (in various age groups, the average 30 year old, for instance)?
I want to let people draw their own conclusions. I have an opinion on what those conclusions should be, but I'll keep them to myself for now.
Well, except for one thing; I believe that the American economy jumped out of a Tech Bubble into a Housing Bubble, and that the Housing Bubble is in the process of ending. I'm not alone..
Trust me, they aren't going to be giving out prorated refunds....
The protagonist uses a claw hammer similar to the that Cho poses with in his NBC manifesto to take on a hallway full of thugs and to do amateur dental work on one of his enemies.
So, Hammer plus Asian guy equals Mad Dog Killer in the minds of the Fort Bend Police.
Actually, though, everyone already knows this from Oklahoma City, but that particular massacre is always downplayed or not mentioned when events like this occur. Mainly because it doesn't help push the anti-First or anti-Second amendment agendas.
Gun control isn't about disarming "bad guys" it is about disarming basically law-abiding dissenters, period. Mainly so they won't fight back when they are being marched off to the gas chambers.
Preaching to the choir, brother...
But I have one question for the school board. Did they bother to make sure that he weighs as much as a duck before they took action against him?
Remember De-CSS?
The History of Titus Oates is instructive here. He went through periods of amazing success followed by periods of abject failure, by telling outlandish lies about a politically unpopular scapegoat.
Why this isn't another bubble
Of course, I suppose the rejoinder is, "yet..."
On the other hand... I had a lot of fun during the bubble....
Well, except they weren't really mistakes, any more than a 3 Card Monty dealer has made a mistake when it turns out you can't actually win at 3 Card Monty.
The truth is the mistakes of the 90's were primarily mistakes of finance, and this is a common problem in American business. The trouble is it is fairly easy to turn a business sector that's a home for honest, profitable business into a home for various scams.
The stuff you are talking about? Well, a lot of it has to do with the lesser position IT workers are in now versus the 90's. In the 90's IT workers were at the top of the food chain. Investors were investing in Internet startups. In order to attract investing dollars, you needed tech workers and there weren't enough to go around.
Tech was sexy and the idiocyncracies of West Coast tech workers (particularly former Phreakers like Woz and Jobs) were considered sexy. You didn't want to be the IT worker in the suit because that wasn't what investors wanted to see.
I remember one of my bosses dressing up to go to a meeting with IBM and the IBM people taking pains to tell her that IBM was hip now and there was no need to be so formal in the meetings. The whole culture was different because it was a tech bubble.
I never want to see a bubble like that in my line of work again because I value stability, but seriously, it had a lot more to do with button down finance types misreading the market and throwing money at dubious business plans than wearing jeans to work.