Yet another man plays in a nice restaurant, lending a pleasant atmosphere for dining, and on occasion for romance. Not only does the establishment pay him, but he also receives tips from patrons that feel either obligated or grateful.
The problem with that is that a not-insignificant number of people hate these guys. They pay him to go away so they can get back to their date. They're talking and trying to get some interest going on here, and this jerk off violin player kills that by being an annoying prick at exactly the wrong moment? The only reason anybody pays the fucker is because they can't slug him.
Or should we expect all men of such talents to resign themselves to park benches and play for our delight?
No, of course not. However, we do reserve the right to dislike the guy playing in the restaurant and to complain about him interrupting our feeble attempts at making witty and charming conversation just because he wants to make a buck.
Usually when I use GDS, I don't know the name of the file. I just know that it contains information about X and possibly Y. So I search for X and Y and voila, there it is, instantly.
If all you ever search for is filenames, more power to you. Some of us are searching for facts, info, things that you don't generally put into filenames.
Example: I was going to send a letter to a friend of mine, but I couldn't find my address book (I'm not a fan of PDAs). I type my friend's name and the keyword "address" into GDS, it finds an email I received with that friends address. Copy it down, send the letter. Easy.
If you've played Half Life 2, at one point in the game there's a lot of player friendly AI characters running around, and you're basically leading squads of people around to shoot up the joint.
Well, some of these AI characters are specifically marked as medics. They are represented in your display as people with a red cross sign next to them. This indicates that if you get low on health, they'll be the guys that come up to you and say "here, take this medkit" and give you a health boost. They even do the same for other AI characters. Also, they usually have a big blatent red cross plastered on their backs. The idea is that you want to protect these guys a bit more than the other members of the squad.
Of course, none of that stops these characters from whipping out a shotgun and blowing away the dudes in the black fatigues when they have the opportunity.
I'll bet that it never really irked them too much as long as it was limited to medical packs on the sides of buildings and such, but somebody saw their kid playing HL2 and noticed one of these medics firing rounds at a helicopter or something, and there you go.
The Geneva Conventions obliged their signatories to prevent the unauthorized use of the name and emblem in wartime and peacetime in order to ensure universal respect for the emblem.
Last I checked, no game designers were signatories of the Geneva Convention.
Whew, certainly dodged a bullet there, didn't they?
The internet will revert back to days where Compuserve and AOL each had their own internet (aka intranet).
Nope, it'll never happen. It's like the cold war. Each side has too many nukes to lob at each other, and nobody will actually make the first strike.
Look at it like this: Google and other online providers are building this huge host of services. If any telco/ISP actually tries to charge them for running services over their wire, then Google simply stops running services over their wire, blocking off that section of the network entirely. Suddenly telco/ISP's customers can't access their Gmail, can't do their google searches, etc, etc. Customers bitch furiously, and start leaving ISP in droves, to competing ISP that isn't trying to be such a bastard. ISP repents and Google provides service to that segment of the network again.
No ISP is actually going to try to charge these major service providers because the end result is simply that these service providers simply cut them off. The ISP has little or no content that people actually want to use. They'd love to be in the content game, but they have proven, time and again, that they suck at it. Customers want the same content that their friends get. If my ISP does something that impacts my access to the content I want, then I'm damn well going to switch ISPs, yeah?
Google is standing up to the freakin' government to not have to release their search stats, you think they aren't going to shoot the finger to any of these ISP who tells them to buck up for use of their line? The mere fact that Google *will* cut off an ISP is enough to keep that ISP from pulling the trigger on this sort of nonsense, at least until the ISP thinks that it really can replace all the content on teh interweb.
"as ATI told us, their product will only be available in OEM systems, no doubt because of the certification issue."
Which means that somebody buys the OEM parts in bulk and sells them individually. Licensing be damned, people find a way around silly restrictions like this.
If there's no actual technological problem, then the DIYers will make it happen.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to get back to my public-safety campaign, warning gullible Americans about dangerous levels of radiation in voting booths.
That's an excellent idea. Certainly should improve the quality of leaders in this country.
If you can't see past the "poor interface" (it sucks! it's not AJAX Web 2.0 buzzword compliant. there's content instead of fluff! the horror!), then you probably don't need it.
That's the problem. The poor interface isn't hiding anything. This "content" you speak of... where is it? Because all the actual text I see is fluff. Hard to find, hard to read, mostly worthless, fluff.
Maybe if I was a broke college student who needed second hand furniture or ther cheap used shit, then I'd be more interested. Or if I had the patience and time to wade through all the spam in what they call "discussion" areas. But I'm not poor, and there's millions of better forums out there.
I agree that a way to bring local people together is a good idea, but craigslist is possibly the worst possible implementation of such a thing. It's like he took the worst part of classified ads and made a website out of it. Sorry, but if I need pre-owned materials, I'll check the local paper or hit a local Salvation Army/Goodwill store. It's faster and I don't have to wade through all manner of idiots to do it.
I've heard of craigslist off and on for several years now, and while it's big in the bay area and NY and such, I don't live in those places. Even being in one of the main "markets" for it, I don't know *anybody* who actually uses it on any kind of regular basis. And I know lots and lots of people who use the internet for essentially everything.
Never seen the big deal. It's a poorly designed site that has very little going for it. I looked around and can't find anything of interest on there at all. Where's the fire?
Under no circumstances will I pay money to a record company ever again. I download my music illegally, and I will continue to do that, now and forever.
Try and stop me.
That said, I do sometimes pay for the music I receive. Whenever I find a good album or band that I enjoy, I go online and look for their fan club. Usually I can find an address or some other way to get a letter to the band in some fashion. Then I print out a letter that essentially says "I like your work, but I downloaded it from the internet because I hate record labels. So here's $10 and that's at least 10 times as much as they'd pay you if I bought it legitimately. Keep up the good work", stuff it and a Hamilton in an envelope and mail it off.
Okay, so I'm not "legal". But hell, that's the least of my concerns, really. With any luck, some of these bands might realize that hey, if they sell direct to their fans and avoid paying off record labels, they can make a lot more cash even if they don't have a huge audience. It's my little way of trying to make some kind of difference. Probably won't work, but it can't hurt. All I know is that it'll be a cold day in hell before I give money to Sony or anybody affilated with them.
It's a fairly well known trick, although you're correct that it's a little bit dangerous. But when you fiddle around with BIOS mods, it comes in handy to have a removable BIOS chip for just that reason.
The "When you Wish Upon A Weinstein" was never aired in the original run, so I don't know why everybody keeps pushing that as the reason for the shows cancellation. I mean, nobody ever saw it until it came out on the DVD. It was later aired on Cartoon Network, and then later aired again in the replay on Fox when they picked it back up (albeit slightly altered).
Frankly, it's not all that controversial, IMO. South Park was more controversial. Still is, for that matter.
If Fox had just given that (and Family Guy) a real timeslot where you could see it every week, maybe they'd have made more money off it.
Absolutely. Fox bungled Futurama like no other show before. Even my Tivo couldn't keep up with the continously changing schedule. The reason it got low ratings is that absolutely nobody knew when it was on.
When it started getting aired on Adult Swim, I was finally able to see a whole season or two of shows that I have never seen before. Not for lack of trying, mind you, it was just impossible to know when they aired them.
Family Guy, however, I never did understand why they cancelled it. It had a decent timeslot, and it was getting increasing numbers of viewers. They just shot it down before it built up a large audience. These days it seems like they cancel a show if it's not an instant hit, which is stupid, of course. Firefly was totally mishandled by airing the episodes wrong (you can't do that when there are story arcs and characters to be developed). They shot down Wonderfalls, a terrific show, after only 4 episodes that *nobody knew about* because they failed to advertise the thing!
Fox just has the most amazing bunch of idiots running the network. It's simply incredible how dumb these decisions are.
Agreed, but I'd say to extend that to Adblock Plus (same as Adblock but also allows for whitelisting) along with the Filterset.G auto-updater extension. The combination of these two makes ad-blocking a breeze, and fully automatic.
I would say that you're never going to cover yourself completely but it occurs to me (a naive thought no doubt) that a bittorrent-esque protocol could be formulated that made it a lot harder to prosecute people if all clients allocated 15% of their bandwidth for proxying some other data aside from the data requested.
You're assuming that they need evidence that you are actually sharing the file. Unfortunately, so far all they've ever produced is an IP address with a claim that somebody at that IP was sharing "filename_of_something_that_looks_like_a_movie_or_ music.ext".
If they actually had to prove that the user was sharing the file itself and not just on this list they got through some unspecified and magical means, then they'd lose every case.
As the cost of fuel rises, and people in the suburbs discover they can no longer afford to live there, the suburbs will become the slums and high density housing will once again rule in the cities.
This might not be the case if telecommuting catches on in a big way, but I imagine the price of gas will go up much faster than the acceptance of telecommuting by business.
You're overestimating the importance of the price of gas. The main thing that the price of gas affects is the price of goods and services. The cost increase to the commuter is minimal, at best. Yes, it's something he notices and grumbles about, but if you actually do the math, then it's not really impacting his bottom line all that much. At least, not directly.
People move to the suburbs because they want *SPACE* in which to live. That's something you don't get downtown.
FWIW, I do live downtown. And I'm thinking of moving.:)
The problem with that theory is that it's an "if you build it, they will come" sort of theory, and it rarely works out that way.
In other words, it only works when a city experiences rapid population growth. Vancouver's population (your example) has grown by something like 25% in the last 25 years. Whereas most cities in the US are shrinking in size, rapidly.
People tend to move away from cities into the surrounding suburbs because they don't want to be packed in like sardines in the cities proper. Building efficent mass transit won't change that fact.
Slashdot Mirror
Yet another man plays in a nice restaurant, lending a pleasant atmosphere for dining, and on occasion for romance. Not only does the establishment pay him, but he also receives tips from patrons that feel either obligated or grateful.
The problem with that is that a not-insignificant number of people hate these guys. They pay him to go away so they can get back to their date. They're talking and trying to get some interest going on here, and this jerk off violin player kills that by being an annoying prick at exactly the wrong moment? The only reason anybody pays the fucker is because they can't slug him.
Or should we expect all men of such talents to resign themselves to park benches and play for our delight?
No, of course not. However, we do reserve the right to dislike the guy playing in the restaurant and to complain about him interrupting our feeble attempts at making witty and charming conversation just because he wants to make a buck.
Haven't used Google Reader yet, have you?
They'll likely integrate this with GMail at some point. But that's just my opinion.
You can do half star ratings in iTunes for Windows as well. Works exactly the same way.
g rammery/
Scripts to do it can be found here: http://ottodestruct.com/blog/category/geekery/pro
Usually when I use GDS, I don't know the name of the file. I just know that it contains information about X and possibly Y. So I search for X and Y and voila, there it is, instantly.
If all you ever search for is filenames, more power to you. Some of us are searching for facts, info, things that you don't generally put into filenames.
Example: I was going to send a letter to a friend of mine, but I couldn't find my address book (I'm not a fan of PDAs). I type my friend's name and the keyword "address" into GDS, it finds an email I received with that friends address. Copy it down, send the letter. Easy.
If you've played Half Life 2, at one point in the game there's a lot of player friendly AI characters running around, and you're basically leading squads of people around to shoot up the joint.
Well, some of these AI characters are specifically marked as medics. They are represented in your display as people with a red cross sign next to them. This indicates that if you get low on health, they'll be the guys that come up to you and say "here, take this medkit" and give you a health boost. They even do the same for other AI characters. Also, they usually have a big blatent red cross plastered on their backs. The idea is that you want to protect these guys a bit more than the other members of the squad.
Of course, none of that stops these characters from whipping out a shotgun and blowing away the dudes in the black fatigues when they have the opportunity.
I'll bet that it never really irked them too much as long as it was limited to medical packs on the sides of buildings and such, but somebody saw their kid playing HL2 and noticed one of these medics firing rounds at a helicopter or something, and there you go.
The Geneva Conventions obliged their signatories to prevent the unauthorized use of the name and emblem in wartime and peacetime in order to ensure universal respect for the emblem.
Last I checked, no game designers were signatories of the Geneva Convention.
Whew, certainly dodged a bullet there, didn't they?
TFA *did* have the Einstein logo when I first saw it today. The joke foot was added later.
This guy is good, but he's not nearly as entertaining or mind-warping as the TimeCube guy. Four days in one!!!
The internet will revert back to days where Compuserve and AOL each had their own internet (aka intranet).
Nope, it'll never happen. It's like the cold war. Each side has too many nukes to lob at each other, and nobody will actually make the first strike.
Look at it like this: Google and other online providers are building this huge host of services. If any telco/ISP actually tries to charge them for running services over their wire, then Google simply stops running services over their wire, blocking off that section of the network entirely. Suddenly telco/ISP's customers can't access their Gmail, can't do their google searches, etc, etc. Customers bitch furiously, and start leaving ISP in droves, to competing ISP that isn't trying to be such a bastard. ISP repents and Google provides service to that segment of the network again.
No ISP is actually going to try to charge these major service providers because the end result is simply that these service providers simply cut them off. The ISP has little or no content that people actually want to use. They'd love to be in the content game, but they have proven, time and again, that they suck at it. Customers want the same content that their friends get. If my ISP does something that impacts my access to the content I want, then I'm damn well going to switch ISPs, yeah?
Google is standing up to the freakin' government to not have to release their search stats, you think they aren't going to shoot the finger to any of these ISP who tells them to buck up for use of their line? The mere fact that Google *will* cut off an ISP is enough to keep that ISP from pulling the trigger on this sort of nonsense, at least until the ISP thinks that it really can replace all the content on teh interweb.
"as ATI told us, their product will only be available in OEM systems, no doubt because of the certification issue."
Which means that somebody buys the OEM parts in bulk and sells them individually. Licensing be damned, people find a way around silly restrictions like this.
If there's no actual technological problem, then the DIYers will make it happen.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to get back to my public-safety campaign, warning gullible Americans about dangerous levels of radiation in voting booths.
That's an excellent idea. Certainly should improve the quality of leaders in this country.
I mean, hell, it can't hurt.
"No officer, I'm not drinking, I'm analysing radio signals to help in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence."
So basically you get to drink a bottle of whiskey before building your computer. Does that sound like a good idea to anyone else?
Are you suggesting that there's another way to build a computer?
If you can't see past the "poor interface" (it sucks! it's not AJAX Web 2.0 buzzword compliant. there's content instead of fluff! the horror!), then you probably don't need it.
That's the problem. The poor interface isn't hiding anything. This "content" you speak of... where is it? Because all the actual text I see is fluff. Hard to find, hard to read, mostly worthless, fluff.
Maybe if I was a broke college student who needed second hand furniture or ther cheap used shit, then I'd be more interested. Or if I had the patience and time to wade through all the spam in what they call "discussion" areas. But I'm not poor, and there's millions of better forums out there.
I agree that a way to bring local people together is a good idea, but craigslist is possibly the worst possible implementation of such a thing. It's like he took the worst part of classified ads and made a website out of it. Sorry, but if I need pre-owned materials, I'll check the local paper or hit a local Salvation Army/Goodwill store. It's faster and I don't have to wade through all manner of idiots to do it.
I've heard of craigslist off and on for several years now, and while it's big in the bay area and NY and such, I don't live in those places. Even being in one of the main "markets" for it, I don't know *anybody* who actually uses it on any kind of regular basis. And I know lots and lots of people who use the internet for essentially everything.
Never seen the big deal. It's a poorly designed site that has very little going for it. I looked around and can't find anything of interest on there at all. Where's the fire?
Under no circumstances will I pay money to a record company ever again. I download my music illegally, and I will continue to do that, now and forever.
Try and stop me.
That said, I do sometimes pay for the music I receive. Whenever I find a good album or band that I enjoy, I go online and look for their fan club. Usually I can find an address or some other way to get a letter to the band in some fashion. Then I print out a letter that essentially says "I like your work, but I downloaded it from the internet because I hate record labels. So here's $10 and that's at least 10 times as much as they'd pay you if I bought it legitimately. Keep up the good work", stuff it and a Hamilton in an envelope and mail it off.
Okay, so I'm not "legal". But hell, that's the least of my concerns, really. With any luck, some of these bands might realize that hey, if they sell direct to their fans and avoid paying off record labels, they can make a lot more cash even if they don't have a huge audience. It's my little way of trying to make some kind of difference. Probably won't work, but it can't hurt. All I know is that it'll be a cold day in hell before I give money to Sony or anybody affilated with them.
Yep. Still have my original Tivonet card in my original Series 1 unit.
Hooray Tridge! Hooray beer!
Considering that a low end Dell can cost 30 or 40 Hamiltons, I'd say that he got one of the smaller ones...
It's a fairly well known trick, although you're correct that it's a little bit dangerous. But when you fiddle around with BIOS mods, it comes in handy to have a removable BIOS chip for just that reason.
http://www.google.com/search?q=bios+hot+swapping
The "When you Wish Upon A Weinstein" was never aired in the original run, so I don't know why everybody keeps pushing that as the reason for the shows cancellation. I mean, nobody ever saw it until it came out on the DVD. It was later aired on Cartoon Network, and then later aired again in the replay on Fox when they picked it back up (albeit slightly altered).
Frankly, it's not all that controversial, IMO. South Park was more controversial. Still is, for that matter.
If Fox had just given that (and Family Guy) a real timeslot where you could see it every week, maybe they'd have made more money off it.
Absolutely. Fox bungled Futurama like no other show before. Even my Tivo couldn't keep up with the continously changing schedule. The reason it got low ratings is that absolutely nobody knew when it was on.
When it started getting aired on Adult Swim, I was finally able to see a whole season or two of shows that I have never seen before. Not for lack of trying, mind you, it was just impossible to know when they aired them.
Family Guy, however, I never did understand why they cancelled it. It had a decent timeslot, and it was getting increasing numbers of viewers. They just shot it down before it built up a large audience. These days it seems like they cancel a show if it's not an instant hit, which is stupid, of course. Firefly was totally mishandled by airing the episodes wrong (you can't do that when there are story arcs and characters to be developed). They shot down Wonderfalls, a terrific show, after only 4 episodes that *nobody knew about* because they failed to advertise the thing!
Fox just has the most amazing bunch of idiots running the network. It's simply incredible how dumb these decisions are.
Agreed, but I'd say to extend that to Adblock Plus (same as Adblock but also allows for whitelisting) along with the Filterset.G auto-updater extension. The combination of these two makes ad-blocking a breeze, and fully automatic.
I would say that you're never going to cover yourself completely but it occurs to me (a naive thought no doubt) that a bittorrent-esque protocol could be formulated that made it a lot harder to prosecute people if all clients allocated 15% of their bandwidth for proxying some other data aside from the data requested.
_ music.ext".
You're assuming that they need evidence that you are actually sharing the file. Unfortunately, so far all they've ever produced is an IP address with a claim that somebody at that IP was sharing "filename_of_something_that_looks_like_a_movie_or
If they actually had to prove that the user was sharing the file itself and not just on this list they got through some unspecified and magical means, then they'd lose every case.
As the cost of fuel rises, and people in the suburbs discover they can no longer afford to live there, the suburbs will become the slums and high density housing will once again rule in the cities.
:)
This might not be the case if telecommuting catches on in a big way, but I imagine the price of gas will go up much faster than the acceptance of telecommuting by business.
You're overestimating the importance of the price of gas. The main thing that the price of gas affects is the price of goods and services. The cost increase to the commuter is minimal, at best. Yes, it's something he notices and grumbles about, but if you actually do the math, then it's not really impacting his bottom line all that much. At least, not directly.
People move to the suburbs because they want *SPACE* in which to live. That's something you don't get downtown.
FWIW, I do live downtown. And I'm thinking of moving.
The problem with that theory is that it's an "if you build it, they will come" sort of theory, and it rarely works out that way.
In other words, it only works when a city experiences rapid population growth. Vancouver's population (your example) has grown by something like 25% in the last 25 years. Whereas most cities in the US are shrinking in size, rapidly.
People tend to move away from cities into the surrounding suburbs because they don't want to be packed in like sardines in the cities proper. Building efficent mass transit won't change that fact.