Ummm...Did I stutter? None of those games are FPS games are they?
Anybody who releases a FPS like Deus Ex with no multi-player support in this day and age is mentally deficient
Do you know what an FPS is? Obviously you don't play them...Deus Ex is not a SIM...it's a FPS with role-playing elements much like - Oni or Half Life. You will note that Half Life was everybody's Game of the Year when it came out and continues to make tons of cash due to the plethora of mods (Counterstrike, etc.) that have been written to use its multi-player gaming engine. The same is true of Unreal Tournament and it's excellent engine. Oni, on the other hand, bombed despite its innovative combat system and fantastic graphics because...say it with me now...It has no multi-player support.
Perhaps you should figure out what the difference between a sim, an FPS and a role-playing game is before you say anything else...
While I agree that Deus Ex was a pretty awesome FPS to play, it suffered from two incredibly large flaws:
It took about three days to beat it
It had no multi-player support for about a year
Talk about deadly combinations! If the game is eminently easy to beat, then it has to have multi-player capability to provide any value. If it has no multi-player capability, then it's gotta' have a longer, more difficult storyline that takes weeks of gameplay to finish (Thief at least did the latter).
Anybody who releases a FPS like Deus Ex with no multi-player support in this day and age is mentally deficient and can be safely referred to as "The Remains." I am not alone in the sentiment that $50 is a bit much to pay for a game with less than week of playability...tons of people never bought it because all they had to do was borrow it from a friend who was already done with it.
Not that John Romero was making things any better with his lame Daikatana piece of crap...
What, Katz twisted the truth in order to fit the thesis of his essay!?! NO! Say it ain't so! Oh, yeah, I forgot...that would pretty much be what he does for every one of his pieces...
Anyway, there is some truth to what he says, although laying the whole thing at the feet of Joseph Lieberman sounds a bit random to me...As I recall, all he wants is labeling (e.g.,.xxx TLD, etc.). I think if you sent this article (?) to him, he would be quite happy to jump all over CBS' lame ass...
USA citizens are much less informed, by public
media, about what's going on around the world.
That is a generalization and a completely non-supportable one at that. Making generalizations like that is an indication of being closed-minded, or bigoted in some way. It's like saying Jewish people are cheap, or Mexicans are lazy.
in general, they care less about the rest of the world (except when it relates to protecting USA's interests, see USA-only backing of Israels crimes.
See above.
USA citizens speak just 1 language on average, so they have less chance of knowing about others.
I can speak two and I do a lot better in Spanish than you are doing in English in this post. I know that's kind of a slam, but you started it.
USA don't care about joining world standars.
Metric system and GSM cellphones are just 2
blatant examples of "couldn't care less if
we remain isolated and use non-standard
standards, even if worse/impractical"
You may have a point there, but since we're over here on a continent without only two neighbors, cross-border cooperation is less of a priority.
5)...
Too much crap here to quote. However, I will point out that if you were to examine the source of the volunteers and the money donated to both of these organizations, you will find that we stupid Americans are the largest contributors of both. I know how much money I've contributed and my family has long supported AI with our time as letter writers and more. What have you done? Can't say I know, but judging from your biased, closed-minded post, I would bet it's nothing.
Can it be slow? Yes. Is it really in most cases? I doubt it.
One thing I know for sure...I have Charter Cable and I am supposed to get 512K down and 128K up. Off peak, I get it. Peak (say 6PM EST to 9PM) I only get about 300 - 400K. Slower than a 56K dial-up? Never.
This is about like saying "Yeah but sometimes a Porsche is slower than my Hyundai...like if it breaks down. Yeah. Then my Hyundai is faster than a Porsche 911. Of course, the only problem is my Hyundai breaks down more often than the Porsche."
LOL - Yeah i know it does get in the way, but I have two kids (one only 16 months old) and I am Director of Internet Solutions at a mid sized company, work 45-50 hours a week and spend another 10 hours driving back and forth...you obviously sleep too much...keep your sleep down to 4-5 hours and you too can play 4 hours a day:-)
napster has been a dead issue for months...the only thing keeping it alive at all is the media dorks who still think this is at all relevant to anything at all
see you on one of the gnutella hacks where i continue to freely download all the hits...all the time...all free:-P
and I won't deny that there were a lot of problems on release...the most I have ever seen in an online game.
However, FC has made a ton of improvements in two weeks. For all of you saying that the game is unplayable and you can't do anything:
I built one character to level 11, decided I didn't like it, started over and built another to level 15 already and I don't play more than 4 hours a day
I have completed over 20 missions and have the tokens to prove it...they pretty much all seem to work for me now, though they didn't all work in beta
My son has a level 21 character
My son's best friend has a level 22 character
I have seen people online who are already above level 30
So apparently some of us seem to be able to play. The biggest problems most of the whiners have are...a)they don't update their video drivers...b)they stay in and around the cities with the 10,000 other lamers who refuse to listen to advice. If you leave the cities and venture out to the countryside and small towns, you can hunt, buy equipment, and generally level to your heart's content with minor lag problems. Yeah, I still lose connection...about once every 3 or four hours...that's acceptable for a new online game. If all the morons would get out of the major cities like FC has advised them to do until lag is under control, perhaps they would be able to play the game too. In the meantime, I'm just glad they are there and staying out of our way...
That's what comes of jumping to conclusions...if you had actually read the book, you would have learned that:
a) while the comparisons to modern-day (1970s) middle eastern politics are obvious, (i.e. melange = oil) they are only a minor sub theme
b) the "megalomaniac white guy" is completely convinced that he cannot save the "idiot nomads" and is in fact sure he will destroy them, but feels he has little choice if he wishes to save the human species from a path of decay and eventual extinction due to inbreeding...the destruction of the Fremen and Arrakis is his source of sadness and eventual withdrawal from the system in the sequels
c) the book is really about politics -- there is a quote in the series somewhere to the effect that "all political systems - yes all - no matter how they start out, eventually decay into a form of feudalism, with planned succesion of power and fealty chains" and if you think about that my deluded friend, you will realize that we are experiencing said changeover in the US right now
d) originality is not a qualification for great literature -- Homer's Odyssey has been copied so many times you can't even count them, and many of the versions, including James Joyce's are considered to be masterworks of literature
e) you have a chip on your shoulder that has affected your ability to reason rationally, although you can spout racial nonsense right up there with Farrakhan
i'm glad to hear someone else is doing this besides me...i go through the cookies about once a week and change numbers, dates and even urls around to fuck up their tracking data...if enough people started doing this, it would all be worthless:-)
Why is anyone surprised that a company has the right to read your email or even tap your office phone line if they wish? They pay you for your time, they own the computer, they pay for your connection, they pay for the desk and the chair you're sitting on, so why wouldn't they own everything that comes out of there? Now if there was a pay phone in the lunch room and they bugged that, then you would have something to complain about because you paid for the call. Why are you sending emails from work (on company time presumably) that include content you wouldn't want the company to read? Go home and do it...
Actually, the last two companies I worked for had clear policies regarding the use of computer equipment, email, etc. for personal reasons, and you had to read and sign them in order to work there. I only saw them used once...the guy they fired was spending hours surfing porn sites from his desk. If you don't like the rules, you can always go work somewhere else. It's no different from dress codes, drug testing, etc.
The scary part of this article is the information about your medical history and bill paying online...those are items which should be protected by the Fourth Ammendment. I pay my bills online, but I do so using my local bank (where I already had an account prior to online payment) so I wonder where I stand? I mean, can't I argue that it's just an extension of what I was already doing using checks, and that if the rules were going to change, they would have had to tell me that up front? Seems like a good lawyer would have a pretty good case for a lawsuit there if the bank released that information to someone...
who (in the US) would sign up with an isp that had its email servers located in Japan?!? "Gee...I wonder why it always takes 10 minutes to download my 3 lousy email messages...and they always take so long to show up..."
I can't believe the load of crap I'm reading here...this is very simple:
The FBI can already tap whatever they want to with a court order
One of the reasons they might be tapping someone would be...(wait for it)...suspicion of espionage! (Shocking, eh?)
If such suspicion existed, they certainly wouldn't want a foreign company in on the tapping, now would they?
The FBI is simply saying that they would want an assurance that they would still be able to tap, and that they wouldn't have to rely on a foreign company and non-American citizens (who might see or hear something top secret) to carry out the court order. In the words of the immortal bard, you are all making "Much Ado About Nothing."
The KKK may not be nice, but they are not in the same league as the Fascists: the experience is just not comparable.
It's a difference of quantity alone -- if the KKK were to take control of the US government, then they would be fascists for all intents and purposes would they not? And I guarantee that given a few years of free reign, they could commit just as many atrocities as Hitler.
I don't think that the advantage of free speech in opposing hate crimes lies in `defeating bad ideas'.
Did I say that? I thought I said "Things never got any better because we tried to pass laws against them -- they got better because we educated people enough to where they realized those guys in white sheets were crazies who fed on hatred."
Passing laws that limit free speech based on whether the speech is "good speech" or "bad speech" presupposes that the person(s) passing those laws is able to distinguish between the two. Personally, I don't want the US government or the French government making that decision for me since they have both proven to be motivated by forces other than my best interest. As soon as I give US lawmakers the opportunity to do that, some idiot like Jesse Helms will want to ban discussion of gay lifestyles, communist and socialist ideologies, and maybe even strawberry ice cream just because he doesn't like it. More importantly, if we happen to be in an economic recession at the time, he will probably succeed because he will blame strawberry ice cream and the rest for the fact that many people have no jobs.
But anyway...the point of the entire post to begin with was just this: The French would have us believe that they are going to take the CIA to court for industrial espionage -- that is a load of bullshit because everybody knows that all G-8 (and most of the second tier countries as well) do the same thing whenever it benefits them and the opportunity presents itself. Or would you have us believe that France, the UK, et. al. maintain intelligence services only to spy on countries they declared to be enemies beforehand? Please, assure me how they have NEVER spied on the US or any other allies for any reason at all because they always play fair. The entire article and the premise behind it was nothing more than a bunch of hot air being used so some politician or other could play to an audience of conservative businessmen somewhere.
we never had any experience with Fascist government. However, we have had plenty of experience with hate crimes in the persons of a bunch of kooks calling themselves the KKK who were a driving political force in the south throughout the 1950s and 60s. Guess what? Things never got any better because we tried to pass laws against them -- they got better because we educated people enough to where they realized those guys in white sheets were crazies who fed on hatred.
We're not perfect and we don't claim to be, but you're right -- we continue to take the high moral ground. And even if Fascists came into greater power, that still wouldn't be a good reason to take the low moral ground, would it?
You don't defeat bad ideas with censorship...quite the opposite...you defeat them with information and knowledge.
We're talking about the country whose court system told Yahoo they have to ban the sales of Nazi paraphenalia to their citizens through their auction site, and stop listing hate sites.
Hey, I can't abide prejudice or bigotry at all, but censorship is obviously not the solution and it never has been. Now all the same posters who keep crying for free speech are going to ignore the fact that France is the leading censor in Europe? Give me a break.
French industrial espionage is a well-documented fact of life and even the article here stresses that what the US might have uncovered was evidence that Airbus was trying to bribe their way into the Saudi Arabian market because they couldn't sell into it any other way. F**k the French...they are the supreme hypocrites of Europe and nobody really gives a shit what their impotent courts do...not even Jerry Yang. If Yahoo feels confident in ignoring their rulings, how do you think the US government feels about it?
Has anyone discovered the self-contradicting, raving-sans-cogitation, improperly-linked-pen-and-brain gene so that we can prevent the propagation of further Katzes? Or, barring that...can someone tell me how to filter him off my/. home page?
"Litteracy alone is a problem in the US...?"
on
Frankenstein Time
·
· Score: 1
It's obviously a problem wherever you come from, anyway:-) Grammar too. According to your sentence, the US must be awesome since literacy is the ONLY problem we have...
Leaving aside the fact that this analogy makes no sense...Here is the most obvious difference:
"If I left my parked car unlocked and someone hopped in and stole it..."Did you leave the keys in it too? If not, then it can be argued that you took reasonable precautions by taking the keys with you. If you left the keys in it, then you did not, and it is quite possible that you could be held liable.
Similarly, "..if one were to leave a loaded gun laying about..."Where did they leave it? Was it in a house with the doors locked, or was it laying on a street corner with the safety off?
The legal question is one of taking what the average person would consider to be reasonable precautions to prevent misuse. In my view, the guy has absolutely no case either way, because Nike took what most people would consider to be reasonable precautions no matter what level of security they had...After all, someone can break a window on the house, get in and steal the gun, and use it to commit a crime and you will not be liable as long as you reported the theft. This theft wouldn't even require the special skills required to spoof the "from address" on an email...just the ability to break a window. I don't even think NSI could be held accountable unless you could prove gross negligence on their part.
invariably false in one respect or another. Check the benchmarks and you will see all sorts of different results...
I can tell you this though if you are a gamer -- I own 2 Falcon Northwest Mach V PCs (indisputably the fastest gaming machines on the planet, albeit a bit pricey). For those of you who don't know them, they build custom gaming rigs from scratch, to your order, with exactly the components you want starting with the motherboard. Go to a gaming show like E3 and you'll see their boxes in many booths because game companies know and want their games to look as good as possible.
When I was purchasing the newest one back in Novemeber, Falcon told me that they were recommending an Athlon. I said, "Huh?! You're kidding me! Come on! I know AMD is getting better, but..." They said...Look, we have a rep in this business for making the best gaming machines on the market. Customers like you buy from us only because we're the best. We wouldn't say this if we hadn't tested the crap out of these machines in every way. In every test we ran, Athlon's outperform PIIIs at the same clock speed by about 10%. The only question we've had for the past few months was reliability, and they've finally overcome all those problems. (Falcon picks up any faulty machine under warranty from your house and overnights it to their shop, fixes it, and overnights it back to the customer for free. That's a warranty!) We'll custom build you a PIII if you want, but honestly, we recommend the Athlon...
I bought the Athlon 650 and it rocks! Two days later I bought a crapload of AMD stock at $28 a share...and the rest, my friend, is history.
used in court that is...because in order to use it in court they would have to name sources and the source would have to name who they were working for...how many judges do you think would give equal consideration to evidence that was dug up by a PI working for Oracle? Not many, I think. I don't think any of those "front groups" have been influencing the court case either.
I think Oracle never intended to do anything other than leak stories to the press weekly and mount a bad PR campaign against MS. The one is just as bad as the other...Larry Ellison is even more fanatical than Bill Gates if you ask me...just look at that whole war with the local townsfolk over his private jet. We're talking two of a kind...birds of a feather...Hitler and Stalin. Let 'em shoot each other at high noon and we'll all be better off.:-)
Note that David Stanley was a con artist first and only became a dot-commie later when he realized the opportunity.
As someone else said below...it's all about greed. If somebody keeps telling you how he's going to make you a millionaire, and how easy and painless it's going to be, call the FBI. "Oy! Such a deal I got for you. Regis Philbin himself could not make you a millionaire any faster...":-)
If your family's newspaper prints stories and writes editorial as well as you do, it would be a terrible loss if online news were to stop that from taking place.
My apologies for reproducing what I read somewhere else without dissecting it properly...it's just that Katz guy that gets my blood boiling with his bad journalism.:-)
Best of luck and continued press runs throughout the new millenium...
Slashdot Mirror
Anybody who releases a FPS like Deus Ex with no multi-player support in this day and age is mentally deficient
Do you know what an FPS is? Obviously you don't play them...Deus Ex is not a SIM...it's a FPS with role-playing elements much like - Oni or Half Life. You will note that Half Life was everybody's Game of the Year when it came out and continues to make tons of cash due to the plethora of mods (Counterstrike, etc.) that have been written to use its multi-player gaming engine. The same is true of Unreal Tournament and it's excellent engine. Oni, on the other hand, bombed despite its innovative combat system and fantastic graphics because...say it with me now...It has no multi-player support.
Perhaps you should figure out what the difference between a sim, an FPS and a role-playing game is before you say anything else...
- It took about three days to beat it
- It had no multi-player support for about a year
Talk about deadly combinations! If the game is eminently easy to beat, then it has to have multi-player capability to provide any value. If it has no multi-player capability, then it's gotta' have a longer, more difficult storyline that takes weeks of gameplay to finish (Thief at least did the latter).Anybody who releases a FPS like Deus Ex with no multi-player support in this day and age is mentally deficient and can be safely referred to as "The Remains." I am not alone in the sentiment that $50 is a bit much to pay for a game with less than week of playability...tons of people never bought it because all they had to do was borrow it from a friend who was already done with it.
Not that John Romero was making things any better with his lame Daikatana piece of crap...
Anyway, there is some truth to what he says, although laying the whole thing at the feet of Joseph Lieberman sounds a bit random to me...As I recall, all he wants is labeling (e.g., .xxx TLD, etc.). I think if you sent this article (?) to him, he would be quite happy to jump all over CBS' lame ass...
That is a generalization and a completely non-supportable one at that. Making generalizations like that is an indication of being closed-minded, or bigoted in some way. It's like saying Jewish people are cheap, or Mexicans are lazy.
in general, they care less about the rest of the world (except when it relates to protecting USA's interests, see USA-only backing of Israels crimes.
See above.
USA citizens speak just 1 language on average, so they have less chance of knowing about others.
I can speak two and I do a lot better in Spanish than you are doing in English in this post. I know that's kind of a slam, but you started it.
USA don't care about joining world standars. Metric system and GSM cellphones are just 2 blatant examples of "couldn't care less if we remain isolated and use non-standard standards, even if worse/impractical"
You may have a point there, but since we're over here on a continent without only two neighbors, cross-border cooperation is less of a priority.
5)...
Too much crap here to quote. However, I will point out that if you were to examine the source of the volunteers and the money donated to both of these organizations, you will find that we stupid Americans are the largest contributors of both. I know how much money I've contributed and my family has long supported AI with our time as letter writers and more. What have you done? Can't say I know, but judging from your biased, closed-minded post, I would bet it's nothing.
One thing I know for sure...I have Charter Cable and I am supposed to get 512K down and 128K up. Off peak, I get it. Peak (say 6PM EST to 9PM) I only get about 300 - 400K. Slower than a 56K dial-up? Never.
This is about like saying "Yeah but sometimes a Porsche is slower than my Hyundai...like if it breaks down. Yeah. Then my Hyundai is faster than a Porsche 911. Of course, the only problem is my Hyundai breaks down more often than the Porsche."
LOL - Yeah i know it does get in the way, but I have two kids (one only 16 months old) and I am Director of Internet Solutions at a mid sized company, work 45-50 hours a week and spend another 10 hours driving back and forth...you obviously sleep too much...keep your sleep down to 4-5 hours and you too can play 4 hours a day :-)
see you on one of the gnutella hacks where i continue to freely download all the hits...all the time...all free :-P
However, FC has made a ton of improvements in two weeks. For all of you saying that the game is unplayable and you can't do anything:
- I built one character to level 11, decided I didn't like it, started over and built another to level 15 already and I don't play more than 4 hours a day
- I have completed over 20 missions and have the tokens to prove it...they pretty much all seem to work for me now, though they didn't all work in beta
- My son has a level 21 character
- My son's best friend has a level 22 character
- I have seen people online who are already above level 30
So apparently some of us seem to be able to play. The biggest problems most of the whiners have are...a)they don't update their video drivers...b)they stay in and around the cities with the 10,000 other lamers who refuse to listen to advice. If you leave the cities and venture out to the countryside and small towns, you can hunt, buy equipment, and generally level to your heart's content with minor lag problems. Yeah, I still lose connection...about once every 3 or four hours...that's acceptable for a new online game. If all the morons would get out of the major cities like FC has advised them to do until lag is under control, perhaps they would be able to play the game too. In the meantime, I'm just glad they are there and staying out of our way...a) while the comparisons to modern-day (1970s) middle eastern politics are obvious, (i.e. melange = oil) they are only a minor sub theme
b) the "megalomaniac white guy" is completely convinced that he cannot save the "idiot nomads" and is in fact sure he will destroy them, but feels he has little choice if he wishes to save the human species from a path of decay and eventual extinction due to inbreeding...the destruction of the Fremen and Arrakis is his source of sadness and eventual withdrawal from the system in the sequels
c) the book is really about politics -- there is a quote in the series somewhere to the effect that "all political systems - yes all - no matter how they start out, eventually decay into a form of feudalism, with planned succesion of power and fealty chains" and if you think about that my deluded friend, you will realize that we are experiencing said changeover in the US right now
d) originality is not a qualification for great literature -- Homer's Odyssey has been copied so many times you can't even count them, and many of the versions, including James Joyce's are considered to be masterworks of literature
e) you have a chip on your shoulder that has affected your ability to reason rationally, although you can spout racial nonsense right up there with Farrakhan
i'm glad to hear someone else is doing this besides me...i go through the cookies about once a week and change numbers, dates and even urls around to fuck up their tracking data...if enough people started doing this, it would all be worthless :-)
Actually, the last two companies I worked for had clear policies regarding the use of computer equipment, email, etc. for personal reasons, and you had to read and sign them in order to work there. I only saw them used once...the guy they fired was spending hours surfing porn sites from his desk. If you don't like the rules, you can always go work somewhere else. It's no different from dress codes, drug testing, etc.
The scary part of this article is the information about your medical history and bill paying online...those are items which should be protected by the Fourth Ammendment. I pay my bills online, but I do so using my local bank (where I already had an account prior to online payment) so I wonder where I stand? I mean, can't I argue that it's just an extension of what I was already doing using checks, and that if the rules were going to change, they would have had to tell me that up front? Seems like a good lawyer would have a pretty good case for a lawsuit there if the bank released that information to someone...
which proceeds to discuss things like your medical history online, paying bills online (not from work), etc.
I can't believe the load of crap I'm reading here...this is very simple:
- The FBI can already tap whatever they want to with a court order
- One of the reasons they might be tapping someone would be...(wait for it)...suspicion of espionage! (Shocking, eh?)
- If such suspicion existed, they certainly wouldn't want a foreign company in on the tapping, now would they?
The FBI is simply saying that they would want an assurance that they would still be able to tap, and that they wouldn't have to rely on a foreign company and non-American citizens (who might see or hear something top secret) to carry out the court order. In the words of the immortal bard, you are all making "Much Ado About Nothing."It's a difference of quantity alone -- if the KKK were to take control of the US government, then they would be fascists for all intents and purposes would they not? And I guarantee that given a few years of free reign, they could commit just as many atrocities as Hitler.
I don't think that the advantage of free speech in opposing hate crimes lies in `defeating bad ideas'.
Did I say that? I thought I said "Things never got any better because we tried to pass laws against them -- they got better because we educated people enough to where they realized those guys in white sheets were crazies who fed on hatred."
Passing laws that limit free speech based on whether the speech is "good speech" or "bad speech" presupposes that the person(s) passing those laws is able to distinguish between the two. Personally, I don't want the US government or the French government making that decision for me since they have both proven to be motivated by forces other than my best interest. As soon as I give US lawmakers the opportunity to do that, some idiot like Jesse Helms will want to ban discussion of gay lifestyles, communist and socialist ideologies, and maybe even strawberry ice cream just because he doesn't like it. More importantly, if we happen to be in an economic recession at the time, he will probably succeed because he will blame strawberry ice cream and the rest for the fact that many people have no jobs.
But anyway...the point of the entire post to begin with was just this: The French would have us believe that they are going to take the CIA to court for industrial espionage -- that is a load of bullshit because everybody knows that all G-8 (and most of the second tier countries as well) do the same thing whenever it benefits them and the opportunity presents itself. Or would you have us believe that France, the UK, et. al. maintain intelligence services only to spy on countries they declared to be enemies beforehand? Please, assure me how they have NEVER spied on the US or any other allies for any reason at all because they always play fair. The entire article and the premise behind it was nothing more than a bunch of hot air being used so some politician or other could play to an audience of conservative businessmen somewhere.
We're not perfect and we don't claim to be, but you're right -- we continue to take the high moral ground. And even if Fascists came into greater power, that still wouldn't be a good reason to take the low moral ground, would it?
You don't defeat bad ideas with censorship...quite the opposite...you defeat them with information and knowledge.
Hey, I can't abide prejudice or bigotry at all, but censorship is obviously not the solution and it never has been. Now all the same posters who keep crying for free speech are going to ignore the fact that France is the leading censor in Europe? Give me a break.
French industrial espionage is a well-documented fact of life and even the article here stresses that what the US might have uncovered was evidence that Airbus was trying to bribe their way into the Saudi Arabian market because they couldn't sell into it any other way. F**k the French...they are the supreme hypocrites of Europe and nobody really gives a shit what their impotent courts do...not even Jerry Yang. If Yahoo feels confident in ignoring their rulings, how do you think the US government feels about it?
Now where did I put that capitally-punished-murderer brain?
Has anyone discovered the self-contradicting, raving-sans-cogitation, improperly-linked-pen-and-brain gene so that we can prevent the propagation of further Katzes? Or, barring that...can someone tell me how to filter him off my /. home page?
It's obviously a problem wherever you come from, anyway :-) Grammar too. According to your sentence, the US must be awesome since literacy is the ONLY problem we have...
"If I left my parked car unlocked and someone hopped in and stole it..."Did you leave the keys in it too? If not, then it can be argued that you took reasonable precautions by taking the keys with you. If you left the keys in it, then you did not, and it is quite possible that you could be held liable.
Similarly, "..if one were to leave a loaded gun laying about..."Where did they leave it? Was it in a house with the doors locked, or was it laying on a street corner with the safety off?
The legal question is one of taking what the average person would consider to be reasonable precautions to prevent misuse. In my view, the guy has absolutely no case either way, because Nike took what most people would consider to be reasonable precautions no matter what level of security they had...After all, someone can break a window on the house, get in and steal the gun, and use it to commit a crime and you will not be liable as long as you reported the theft. This theft wouldn't even require the special skills required to spoof the "from address" on an email...just the ability to break a window. I don't even think NSI could be held accountable unless you could prove gross negligence on their part.
I can tell you this though if you are a gamer -- I own 2 Falcon Northwest Mach V PCs (indisputably the fastest gaming machines on the planet, albeit a bit pricey). For those of you who don't know them, they build custom gaming rigs from scratch, to your order, with exactly the components you want starting with the motherboard. Go to a gaming show like E3 and you'll see their boxes in many booths because game companies know and want their games to look as good as possible.
When I was purchasing the newest one back in Novemeber, Falcon told me that they were recommending an Athlon. I said, "Huh?! You're kidding me! Come on! I know AMD is getting better, but..." They said...Look, we have a rep in this business for making the best gaming machines on the market. Customers like you buy from us only because we're the best. We wouldn't say this if we hadn't tested the crap out of these machines in every way. In every test we ran, Athlon's outperform PIIIs at the same clock speed by about 10%. The only question we've had for the past few months was reliability, and they've finally overcome all those problems. (Falcon picks up any faulty machine under warranty from your house and overnights it to their shop, fixes it, and overnights it back to the customer for free. That's a warranty!) We'll custom build you a PIII if you want, but honestly, we recommend the Athlon...
I bought the Athlon 650 and it rocks! Two days later I bought a crapload of AMD stock at $28 a share...and the rest, my friend, is history.
I think Oracle never intended to do anything other than leak stories to the press weekly and mount a bad PR campaign against MS. The one is just as bad as the other...Larry Ellison is even more fanatical than Bill Gates if you ask me...just look at that whole war with the local townsfolk over his private jet. We're talking two of a kind...birds of a feather...Hitler and Stalin. Let 'em shoot each other at high noon and we'll all be better off. :-)
I'd mod it up if I had the power :-)
As someone else said below...it's all about greed. If somebody keeps telling you how he's going to make you a millionaire, and how easy and painless it's going to be, call the FBI. "Oy! Such a deal I got for you. Regis Philbin himself could not make you a millionaire any faster..." :-)
My apologies for reproducing what I read somewhere else without dissecting it properly...it's just that Katz guy that gets my blood boiling with his bad journalism. :-)
Best of luck and continued press runs throughout the new millenium...