Holy crap, you actually think that someone who wants to steal debit/credit cards will go to the trouble of driving all the way to your city & neighborhood, staking out your house, following you around like the freakin' FBI, and waiting for days or weeks for the opportunity to dig an account number out of the trash? Of course they'd have to dig through multiple loads of trash since they probably wouldn't know ahead of time which stores print the entire account number and which print only some digits. Wow, it sounds so simple!
There's plenty of 3rd parties that run for the Presidency (I saw something like 8 on my ballot), and in 1992 Ross Perot gained a very significant percentage of the vote. Just because people would rather vote Rep or Dem (because they always have in the past) doesn't mean they don't have more than 2 choices. Changing the voting method could make 3rd parties more *viable*, but our current system does not prevent a 3rd party candidate from becoming President, or any other position.
Every absentee vote *does* get counted eventually, states just choose to report the votes that were already counted, and let the media make their own inferences from that. If Bush leads by 500k votes, and there's only 100k absentee or provisional ballots, then why wait to count them before saying "Bush wins"?
And NO STATE releases preliminary vote tallies before the polls in a precinct are *completely* closed, and usually not until an hour or two afterwards, so all the people standing in line can finish voting before they tally the total. I was monitoring the election throughout the day and not a single news source I saw reported anything about which candidate was winning, besides the usual Nov. 1st or exit poll data. Maybe Drudge or some blogs were spouting off numbers, but certainly I didn't see any reputable programs giving results by 3 or 4 PM, most weren't doing that until 8 or 9 PM, by which time most polls were closed.
Now you could make a case for people on the West coast not turning out because they see results in certain East Coast states already coming in. But like someone else said, if you wait until an hour before your polls close and decide not to go out because of the results of some other state, you're an idiot and shouldn't vote.
And I heard someone from Boston who was interviewed on a newsradio segment make exactly that statement, in regards to the Ohio situation: "It may look like Kerry is trailing in Ohio, but all the votes haven't been counted yet. The Red Sox managed to come back three games down, and Kerry will do the same thing."
My state (Michigan) basically uses the same method. However, there's a "privacy sleeve" envelope-thing that you're supposed to slide your completed ballot into once you leave the voting booth (although our "booths" were little more than podiums with blinders on either side, so people could still walk up behind you and peek over your shoulder if they really wanted to.) Then you just feed the top part of the ballot into the scanning machine which sucks it all in, and give the sleeve back to the voting officials. If done properly, no one else should be able to see your vote. If people don't really care if others see how they voted, then they could just wave it around their heads if they wanted to.
This was my first time voting, and it's interesting how different the experience was from my expectations (probably influenced by TV or movies and such... I was expecting something more "stately" and "important-looking", not a crowded elementary-school gym with a dozen different lines)
I had a paper route when I was 12, and I used the earnings mostly to buy comic books and baseball cards, but also some Nintendo games. Had M-rated Nintendo games been available, I probably would have been fascinated enough to try to purchase one and try to play it when my parents weren't home from work yet, specifically *because* "I'm not supposed to have it" -- the same logic that applies to wanting Playboys and scrambled cable channels.
So, you say "The parents gave their kid some money to buy *something*, so they must not care what he acually buys". You could apply this logic to booze and cigarettes too, if the parent gave the kid money, they must not care if he goes out and gets ripped, but this isn't true of course.
Then again, alcohol & tobacco are federally regulated whereas movies, music, and videogames are not, they're self-regulated by the industry that creates them. I'm curious, is pornography mostly self-regulated, or is it covered by federal laws as well?
If the music industry cannot be competitive while paying all their overhead (as bloated as it might be) and giving the artists 1-5%, how could they possibly stay competitive while raising their prices another 5-15%?
So, hypothetically, say that Sony Music gets lean and mean and somehow manages to lower its CD prices by 50%, while increasing the royalties to the artist (to give everyone a warm fuzzy feeling when they buy a CD). That'd set a price at $4-8, which is *still* priced way out of realm of affordability for the average Russian, and cannot possibly compete with a guy on the streetcorner charging next to nothing! Let me repeat: a company that actually has to pay royalties to the artists *and* pay the salaries of all the people working to produce and distribute that music CAN NOT "compete" with someone who contributes 0% to the artist or the company that produces the album.
Are thieves that steal car stereos and resell them on the black market "competition" for stereo manufacturers? Competition would entail actually creating their own alternative to what the RIAA produces, as crappy as it might be, and selling it at lower prices. That's not what's happening.
That said, the current music industry is definately outdated and past its useful life, and artists will eventually find a more direct way to get their music out. Unfortunately, even if they're charging $0.10 for a track or $0.50 for an album, some low-life will STILL find a way to profit off of that without paying anything to the artists. Portraying bootleggers as legitimate "competition" is flat-out wrong.
There's this interesting place called a "library", perhaps you've heard of it. They keep many books there that you can look at, for no charge! Heck, you can even take most books home with you for several weeks and give it back once you've finished reading it, or decided that you want to go purchase your own copy. The downside is that it requires you to leave your cave, which I can understand many slashdotters may be uncomfortable doing.
Please tell me how a search engine like Google providing **MORE** information when you do a search instead of LESS can possibly be a bad thing? How can the "power of casual research on the Internet" be gone when they're giving you something that you never had the opportunity to search for before? The same results are still there, they're just giving you ANOTHER SOURCE of information!
If it was free radio or broadcast television, then people shouldn't really complain, because they always have the ability to simply change the channel (but they'll go ahead and complain anyway).
However, if they're paying $10-13 a month to listen to satellite radio and now a portion of that money, whether they like it or not, is going to support a person they ideologically oppose, then some people will cancel their subscriptions and they're perfectly within their rights to do so. It's their way of saying "I don't like Stern, maybe other people want to hear him, but I won't support him" and it gets their message out better than simply complaining about it.
As an extreme hypothetical example, if XM Radio gave Osama bin Laden his own radio show (and there's plenty of misguided people who see Stern as just as evil as Osama) and paid him with money you were giving them each month, you'd think twice about staying an XM subscriber, wouldn't you?
Then vote for a 3rd party like the Libertarians, who oppose the Patriot Act. Every ballot I've seen has more than two options for President, and there's no hired goons standing at the exit polls beating up people if you vote for someone other than a Democrat or a Republican.
You can complain, protest, write your congressman, and sign online petitions all you want, but unless you *vote* for someone who represents at least some of your values, nothing will change. If there's one million eligible voters out there who don't want to choose either Kerry or Bush, THEN VOTE FOR SOMEONE ELSE!
Your choice for President may not win, but it sends a more powerful message than *anything* else you could possibly do to get your opinion across.
If "prince point" and getting a good value is your main concern, why wouldn't you at least invest 30 minutes of your time to do some research before handing $50-$150 bucks to get whatever has the prettiest box or slaps "256mb" on the front? Whether a card has 128 or 256MB of memory makes much less difference than most people realize, and there's plenty of bargain cards that give great performance, you just have to know in advance what to look for.
I could've gone to Best Buy ready to part with $150 for a 1-3 year old card and gotten decent performance in older games, but I did some (easy) research and found that getting a Radeon 9800Pro on Newegg.com for just under $200 (shipping included) would give me the best value for the price and would be practically guaranteed to supply decent performance in new games for at least another year or two.
I could've also gone down to a 9600-level card for another $40-70 less if I needed to save some money for groceries... but just like you need to budget in advance for bills & food and all that, there's no reason to spend money on anything without researching first.
What, is your attention span so short you have to switch to a new game every five minutes, and can't wait 60 seconds for a reboot? Since Go is a game of *patience*, it's better not to have other "distractions" in the background, and be able to invest an hour or so in a worthwhile game.
I wouldn't mind putting in a new CD every hour or two if I wanted to change between Go, Risk, Doom 3, etc. Hell, the load time on most modern games is already over 1 or 2 minutes for loading the game, then loading the intro, or last saved game, so reboot time isn't prohibitive.
In addition, having an OS optimized for a single game lets you get the most out of your hardware (though it's not so relevant here) by cutting out all the unnessary crap running in the background. If you could get 40 FPS out of a game instead of 30, with the same hardware, why not spend 60 seconds rebooting?
You also forget that some people actually turn their computers *off* when they're done using them, so there wouldn't be a difference between booting into Windows and booting into Hikarunix (which might even be faster!) All in all, sounds like a fine idea to me.
So just because people are watching MSNBC instead of NBC, or Fox News instead of Fox, or reading CNN.com instead of watching CNN, this means people aren't getting their news from a "major network"? That's a pretty shortsighted viewpoint -- all the decisions about what news to report and how to present it is still coming from the same top people, it's just presented in a slightly different method.
No, because if someone downloading a 100MB patch uploads even 10 MB during their BT session and closes it right after it's downloaded, that's still 10 MB the main servers don't have to send. Take Blizzard for example. Right now, their company's servers have to send 100% of the patch files. With BT, if they can cut that to 50% or even 80%, that's a huge benefit.
When you don't think of it in terms of people uploading movie files, and think in terms of companies using the technology to ease load on their web servers, now you're looking at BT the way the author intended!
There's a series of soft sci-fi novels (Beggars in Spain & others) devoted to this topic, based on a short novella that I read. It deals with parents genetically modifying their offspring to select sex, physical characterists, fix genetic diseases, increase mental/physical ability, and remove the need for sleep.
The basic premise is that those with parents wealthy enough to give them these "gifts" are resented by the rest of humanity, and even sometimes their own "non-modified" siblings -- they are seen as having unfair advantages in school, in sports, and everything else, since they have 30% more time to do whatever they want each day. Down the line, the sleep-less people end up as victims of harassment and attacks from normal people who feel threatened -- the novels expand from there.
I was floored when I looked at the (supposedly) most popular baby names of 2003. Number 1, 2, and 3 for boys were Aiden, Jayden, and Caden, respectively, with Hayden at #10. Real imaginative there, folks. Some of the more "traditional" bible-based names like Matthew, Jacob, and Joshua were still in there, but the list looked nothing like the relatively normal 2002 list.
Girls names were a little more normal, but the top 20 still includes such standouts as Aaliyah, Ava, Faith, and Grace.
I'm still suspicious that stupid people have been loaded the voting/polling for the latest list on purpose... but who knows.
I like Stephen Baxter's Manifold series for this reason. So far he has 3 books with the same characters and general setting, and with similar far-reaching ideas (distant future vs. distant galaxies vs. distant evolutionary lines), but each book is based in a separate "parallel universe" so you can read each one individually and not be lost. At the same time, it's "comfort food reading" as someone else said, if you've read the previous books you already know what many of the characters' personalities are, and if you like one book you'll probably like the others. Alternatively, if you hate one book, you'll hate 'em all.
Oh, and maybe with a nationwide, internet-enabled, or more expensive plan they allow you unlimited text messaging, but I have the bargain-basement basic plan. It's worked fine so far for me except for the text message annoyance and going over my 300 daytime minutes one month.
Nextel certainly does charge for incoming text messages. So far in the 6 months of owning my Nextel i60c, I've received a total of 5 text messages, none from people I know or wanted, and my bill reflected that I was charged $.10 for each. I complained to customer support several time, and was told "it's built into the voicemail system so you can't turn this 'feature' off without turning off new-voicemail-notification." I guess I didn't complain to them loudly enough to get my $.50 refunded. Recently they implemented a "no-spam-list" (that is thankfully opt-out I guess) that is supposed to filter out mass messages or other supposedly unwanted stuff, but it still let one or two in. Sucks.
While browsing Hot Topic (ugh, I know) I noticed quite a few Punk new music CD's that contain nothing but mp3 files. No clue as to what the quality is, but they fit about 300 mp3s onto a sampler for $8. Now THAT'S a good fucking deal.
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Holy crap, you actually think that someone who wants to steal debit/credit cards will go to the trouble of driving all the way to your city & neighborhood, staking out your house, following you around like the freakin' FBI, and waiting for days or weeks for the opportunity to dig an account number out of the trash? Of course they'd have to dig through multiple loads of trash since they probably wouldn't know ahead of time which stores print the entire account number and which print only some digits. Wow, it sounds so simple!
There's plenty of 3rd parties that run for the Presidency (I saw something like 8 on my ballot), and in 1992 Ross Perot gained a very significant percentage of the vote. Just because people would rather vote Rep or Dem (because they always have in the past) doesn't mean they don't have more than 2 choices. Changing the voting method could make 3rd parties more *viable*, but our current system does not prevent a 3rd party candidate from becoming President, or any other position.
Every absentee vote *does* get counted eventually, states just choose to report the votes that were already counted, and let the media make their own inferences from that. If Bush leads by 500k votes, and there's only 100k absentee or provisional ballots, then why wait to count them before saying "Bush wins"?
And NO STATE releases preliminary vote tallies before the polls in a precinct are *completely* closed, and usually not until an hour or two afterwards, so all the people standing in line can finish voting before they tally the total. I was monitoring the election throughout the day and not a single news source I saw reported anything about which candidate was winning, besides the usual Nov. 1st or exit poll data. Maybe Drudge or some blogs were spouting off numbers, but certainly I didn't see any reputable programs giving results by 3 or 4 PM, most weren't doing that until 8 or 9 PM, by which time most polls were closed.
Now you could make a case for people on the West coast not turning out because they see results in certain East Coast states already coming in. But like someone else said, if you wait until an hour before your polls close and decide not to go out because of the results of some other state, you're an idiot and shouldn't vote.
And I heard someone from Boston who was interviewed on a newsradio segment make exactly that statement, in regards to the Ohio situation:
"It may look like Kerry is trailing in Ohio, but all the votes haven't been counted yet. The Red Sox managed to come back three games down, and Kerry will do the same thing."
My state (Michigan) basically uses the same method. However, there's a "privacy sleeve" envelope-thing that you're supposed to slide your completed ballot into once you leave the voting booth (although our "booths" were little more than podiums with blinders on either side, so people could still walk up behind you and peek over your shoulder if they really wanted to.) Then you just feed the top part of the ballot into the scanning machine which sucks it all in, and give the sleeve back to the voting officials. If done properly, no one else should be able to see your vote. If people don't really care if others see how they voted, then they could just wave it around their heads if they wanted to.
This was my first time voting, and it's interesting how different the experience was from my expectations (probably influenced by TV or movies and such... I was expecting something more "stately" and "important-looking", not a crowded elementary-school gym with a dozen different lines)
Those don't fit anywhere yet, so I'm anxiously awaiting the release of the Xgarage 2, [i]with hypersubnanoscalability[/i].
But... I like my Microsoft Xgarage, it's the only place in my house big enough to store my Xbox.
I had a paper route when I was 12, and I used the earnings mostly to buy comic books and baseball cards, but also some Nintendo games. Had M-rated Nintendo games been available, I probably would have been fascinated enough to try to purchase one and try to play it when my parents weren't home from work yet, specifically *because* "I'm not supposed to have it" -- the same logic that applies to wanting Playboys and scrambled cable channels.
So, you say "The parents gave their kid some money to buy *something*, so they must not care what he acually buys". You could apply this logic to booze and cigarettes too, if the parent gave the kid money, they must not care if he goes out and gets ripped, but this isn't true of course.
Then again, alcohol & tobacco are federally regulated whereas movies, music, and videogames are not, they're self-regulated by the industry that creates them. I'm curious, is pornography mostly self-regulated, or is it covered by federal laws as well?
If the music industry cannot be competitive while paying all their overhead (as bloated as it might be) and giving the artists 1-5%, how could they possibly stay competitive while raising their prices another 5-15%?
So, hypothetically, say that Sony Music gets lean and mean and somehow manages to lower its CD prices by 50%, while increasing the royalties to the artist (to give everyone a warm fuzzy feeling when they buy a CD). That'd set a price at $4-8, which is *still* priced way out of realm of affordability for the average Russian, and cannot possibly compete with a guy on the streetcorner charging next to nothing! Let me repeat: a company that actually has to pay royalties to the artists *and* pay the salaries of all the people working to produce and distribute that music CAN NOT "compete" with someone who contributes 0% to the artist or the company that produces the album.
Are thieves that steal car stereos and resell them on the black market "competition" for stereo manufacturers? Competition would entail actually creating their own alternative to what the RIAA produces, as crappy as it might be, and selling it at lower prices. That's not what's happening.
That said, the current music industry is definately outdated and past its useful life, and artists will eventually find a more direct way to get their music out. Unfortunately, even if they're charging $0.10 for a track or $0.50 for an album, some low-life will STILL find a way to profit off of that without paying anything to the artists. Portraying bootleggers as legitimate "competition" is flat-out wrong.
the staff of two local indy shops know me by name and taste
I'm glad that my local indy shops merely know me by smell, and not taste...
There's this interesting place called a "library", perhaps you've heard of it. They keep many books there that you can look at, for no charge! Heck, you can even take most books home with you for several weeks and give it back once you've finished reading it, or decided that you want to go purchase your own copy. The downside is that it requires you to leave your cave, which I can understand many slashdotters may be uncomfortable doing.
Please tell me how a search engine like Google providing **MORE** information when you do a search instead of LESS can possibly be a bad thing? How can the "power of casual research on the Internet" be gone when they're giving you something that you never had the opportunity to search for before? The same results are still there, they're just giving you ANOTHER SOURCE of information!
If it was free radio or broadcast television, then people shouldn't really complain, because they always have the ability to simply change the channel (but they'll go ahead and complain anyway).
However, if they're paying $10-13 a month to listen to satellite radio and now a portion of that money, whether they like it or not, is going to support a person they ideologically oppose, then some people will cancel their subscriptions and they're perfectly within their rights to do so. It's their way of saying "I don't like Stern, maybe other people want to hear him, but I won't support him" and it gets their message out better than simply complaining about it.
As an extreme hypothetical example, if XM Radio gave Osama bin Laden his own radio show (and there's plenty of misguided people who see Stern as just as evil as Osama) and paid him with money you were giving them each month, you'd think twice about staying an XM subscriber, wouldn't you?
Then vote for a 3rd party like the Libertarians, who oppose the Patriot Act. Every ballot I've seen has more than two options for President, and there's no hired goons standing at the exit polls beating up people if you vote for someone other than a Democrat or a Republican.
You can complain, protest, write your congressman, and sign online petitions all you want, but unless you *vote* for someone who represents at least some of your values, nothing will change. If there's one million eligible voters out there who don't want to choose either Kerry or Bush, THEN VOTE FOR SOMEONE ELSE!
Your choice for President may not win, but it sends a more powerful message than *anything* else you could possibly do to get your opinion across.
If "prince point" and getting a good value is your main concern, why wouldn't you at least invest 30 minutes of your time to do some research before handing $50-$150 bucks to get whatever has the prettiest box or slaps "256mb" on the front? Whether a card has 128 or 256MB of memory makes much less difference than most people realize, and there's plenty of bargain cards that give great performance, you just have to know in advance what to look for.
I could've gone to Best Buy ready to part with $150 for a 1-3 year old card and gotten decent performance in older games, but I did some (easy) research and found that getting a Radeon 9800Pro on Newegg.com for just under $200 (shipping included) would give me the best value for the price and would be practically guaranteed to supply decent performance in new games for at least another year or two.
I could've also gone down to a 9600-level card for another $40-70 less if I needed to save some money for groceries... but just like you need to budget in advance for bills & food and all that, there's no reason to spend money on anything without researching first.
What, is your attention span so short you have to switch to a new game every five minutes, and can't wait 60 seconds for a reboot? Since Go is a game of *patience*, it's better not to have other "distractions" in the background, and be able to invest an hour or so in a worthwhile game.
I wouldn't mind putting in a new CD every hour or two if I wanted to change between Go, Risk, Doom 3, etc. Hell, the load time on most modern games is already over 1 or 2 minutes for loading the game, then loading the intro, or last saved game, so reboot time isn't prohibitive.
In addition, having an OS optimized for a single game lets you get the most out of your hardware (though it's not so relevant here) by cutting out all the unnessary crap running in the background. If you could get 40 FPS out of a game instead of 30, with the same hardware, why not spend 60 seconds rebooting?
You also forget that some people actually turn their computers *off* when they're done using them, so there wouldn't be a difference between booting into Windows and booting into Hikarunix (which might even be faster!) All in all, sounds like a fine idea to me.
No, not quite informative... it was Guillermo Díaz (Scarface) who said that specific line. Dave Chappelle is good though.
So just because people are watching MSNBC instead of NBC, or Fox News instead of Fox, or reading CNN.com instead of watching CNN, this means people aren't getting their news from a "major network"? That's a pretty shortsighted viewpoint -- all the decisions about what news to report and how to present it is still coming from the same top people, it's just presented in a slightly different method.
Damn, I want to know what kind of friends you have where sniffing bicycle seats and biting fart bubbles comes up in casual conversation.
No, because if someone downloading a 100MB patch uploads even 10 MB during their BT session and closes it right after it's downloaded, that's still 10 MB the main servers don't have to send. Take Blizzard for example. Right now, their company's servers have to send 100% of the patch files. With BT, if they can cut that to 50% or even 80%, that's a huge benefit.
When you don't think of it in terms of people uploading movie files, and think in terms of companies using the technology to ease load on their web servers, now you're looking at BT the way the author intended!
There's a series of soft sci-fi novels (Beggars in Spain & others) devoted to this topic, based on a short novella that I read. It deals with parents genetically modifying their offspring to select sex, physical characterists, fix genetic diseases, increase mental/physical ability, and remove the need for sleep.
The basic premise is that those with parents wealthy enough to give them these "gifts" are resented by the rest of humanity, and even sometimes their own "non-modified" siblings -- they are seen as having unfair advantages in school, in sports, and everything else, since they have 30% more time to do whatever they want each day. Down the line, the sleep-less people end up as victims of harassment and attacks from normal people who feel threatened -- the novels expand from there.
I was floored when I looked at the (supposedly) most popular baby names of 2003. Number 1, 2, and 3 for boys were Aiden, Jayden, and Caden, respectively, with Hayden at #10. Real imaginative there, folks. Some of the more "traditional" bible-based names like Matthew, Jacob, and Joshua were still in there, but the list looked nothing like the relatively normal 2002 list.
Girls names were a little more normal, but the top 20 still includes such standouts as Aaliyah, Ava, Faith, and Grace.
I'm still suspicious that stupid people have been loaded the voting/polling for the latest list on purpose... but who knows.
I like Stephen Baxter's Manifold series for this reason. So far he has 3 books with the same characters and general setting, and with similar far-reaching ideas (distant future vs. distant galaxies vs. distant evolutionary lines), but each book is based in a separate "parallel universe" so you can read each one individually and not be lost. At the same time, it's "comfort food reading" as someone else said, if you've read the previous books you already know what many of the characters' personalities are, and if you like one book you'll probably like the others. Alternatively, if you hate one book, you'll hate 'em all.
Oh, and maybe with a nationwide, internet-enabled, or more expensive plan they allow you unlimited text messaging, but I have the bargain-basement basic plan. It's worked fine so far for me except for the text message annoyance and going over my 300 daytime minutes one month.
Nextel certainly does charge for incoming text messages. So far in the 6 months of owning my Nextel i60c, I've received a total of 5 text messages, none from people I know or wanted, and my bill reflected that I was charged $.10 for each. I complained to customer support several time, and was told "it's built into the voicemail system so you can't turn this 'feature' off without turning off new-voicemail-notification." I guess I didn't complain to them loudly enough to get my $.50 refunded. Recently they implemented a "no-spam-list" (that is thankfully opt-out I guess) that is supposed to filter out mass messages or other supposedly unwanted stuff, but it still let one or two in. Sucks.
Yeah, she'd get hit up by 10,000 geeks looking for a date instead of 10,000 lawyers looking to sue. I'm not sure which is worse.
While browsing Hot Topic (ugh, I know) I noticed quite a few Punk new music CD's that contain nothing but mp3 files. No clue as to what the quality is, but they fit about 300 mp3s onto a sampler for $8. Now THAT'S a good fucking deal.