Massey:Our case made it through the courts in record time, Captain. It's a mixed bag, though. I've got good news and bad news.
Tagon:Bad news first. That gives me time to prime my weapons if necessary.
Massey:Right.
Narrator:Massey is a victim of a vailed attempt at mind control. As a result, he can see the mind of his would-be masters, but they cannot do anything about it.
Massey:The bad news is that although we won, the partnership collective refuses to honor the judgement. We'll probably never see a dime.
Massey:The good news is that the judge was feeling pretty vengeful when she assessed punitive damages. Agents of the court may destroy up to two billion kilocreds in the collective's assets, and that comes out to about one million attorney drones.
Tagon:Tell me how somebody else's revenge is good news for me?
Massey:We've been named as agents of the court. We get a bounty on every attorney we kill.
work at company in the entertainment industry which deploys 80% Macs to the desktop. There is a whole range of different generations of Apple computers here that only really leave the company when they break or are older than 10 years. I just got done deploying a circa 2002 G4 PowerMac for an intern that does its job quite well.
If you're deploying a 9 year old hardware platform that has been EOLed by the manufacturer, how are you supplying security patches? Are you relying upon Security Through Obscurity instead?
Ahh, but your healthcare system includes things like, I don't know, education about nutrition? Clamping down on food additives?
I urge you to spend some time on Gapminder. Pick any two healthcare related variables that you care to name and I can pretty much guarantee two things: One, Gapminder includes them both so you can graph them over time and two, the US is not in the top 10. Heck, these days we're lucky to be in the top 25. In some cases, we're clearly going backwards.
For example, track maternal mortality rates to GDP/capita. Watch what happens to the US after 1980, then 1992. Two Republican Congresses take office. One stops the steady decline in maternal mortality, and the other reverses it.
Heaven forbid that we continue to follow the rest of the freaking world in improving young mothers' chances of surviving child birth! That would be unAmerican!
Spend some time on Gapminder.Org. The data is all pulled from publicly available sources so it's easy to independently verify what that site can show you. A short perusal of the site will quickly make it obvious just how much those of us in the US are being cheated by the big insurance companies.
UK life expectancy 80 years. % of GDP spent on healthcare: 8.4%
US life expectancy 78 years. % of GDP spent on healthcare: 15%
In fact, the ONLY country in the world who spends more on healthcare as a percentage of GDP than the US is Timor-Leste at 16%. Most of the so-called 'socialist' medical plans are MUCH MUCH cheaper than the US and provide FAR better results. In fact, Every. Single. Country. who has a longer life expectancy than the US has a nationalized healthcare system that costs much less than ours. Why the HELL aren't the Dems hammering on this point?
Posted by a somewhat bitter US citizen who knows the answer but still doesn't like it.:-(
It's the way Microsoft, T-Mobile, Comcast and talk-show hosts have bilked people for years.
You're going to single out T-Mobile??? The one carrier in the U.S. that actually had an HTC Android phone as soon as it was released? The one carrier in the U.S. that actually seems to give a damn about not loading up their phones with all the garbage the others do? The carrier in the U.S. who doesn't make life hell if you want to use a phone that you bought some place else?
Granted, their coverage for data outside major metropolitan areas can be spotty, especially west of the Mississippi. Their coverage maps make no secret of that fact. It's a LONG leap not being satisfied with their coverage to putting them in the same category as Microsoft and Comcast. If any of the U.S. carriers belong there, it's the big three; AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon!
It's strange. I find myself in total agreement and disagreement at the same time. Part of the difference, I think, is simply that my tastes differ from yours.
For example, for the past several years my go-to game when I've got an hour to kill is Day of Defeat:Source, a WWII game that started as a player created mod for the Half-Life engine 11 years ago. Strictly multi-player, strictly PvP. Good balance of weapons and solid objectives enforcing good teamwork. Lots and lots and LOTS of player created maps providing tons of variety.
I've tried a heck of a lot of games in this genre that have come out since then. None of them really hold my attention all that well.
I'll fire up Company of Heroes when I have more time to play a skirmish battle against the computer. Again, I've looked at other games in that RTS style of play, but none seem to hold my attention for very long. The only one that has held my attention is a CoH conversion called the Eastern Front. Same solid game engine combined with a really nifty set of units.
OK, so I've got two games that I play a lot of these days. In the past I've played a lot of the old Operation Flashpoint/Arma/Arma2 series, Counter-Strike, Battlefield 1942, Starsiege:Tribes, Doom/Doom ][, and several dozen Quake/Quake 2 mods (some of which were REALLY off the wall! Remember Quess and Qrally?:-) ). I've also sampled X3:Terran Conflict, Dirt 2, Portal, and a few others. Many of the most memorable games that I've played started as player mods or by small indie publishers.
You're right, there really isn't much in the way of risk taking by the major studios. Guess what? It's ALWAYS been that way.
By far, the best games that I've played have all come from indie publishing houses or player created mods. The sad fact is, I also think that a great deal of creativity is lost because we simply don't see much in the way of player mods any more.
The best advice that I can give you is to quit buying games from the big houses. Start digging online for the off the wall ones. Go to Good Old Games for a cheap source of retro gaming.
The nice thing about Steam and other online distribution systems is that they have huge catalogs of these indie games. Go ahead and browse through the Steam store some time. You'll find a lot of stuff out there.
A lot of it's crap, yes. But when you're only paying a few bucks, so what? And the gems you occasionally stumble over make the search worth it.:-)
But in February 2002, the Supreme Court surprised the world by granting our petition to review the D.C. Circuit opinion. Argument was set for October of 2002. The summer would be spent writing briefs and preparing for argument.
It is over a year later as I write these words. It is still astonishingly hard. If you know anything at all about this story, you know that we lost the appeal. And if you know something more than just the minimum, you probably think there was no way this case could have been won. After our defeat, I received literally thousands of missives by well-wishers and supporters, thanking me for my work on behalf of this noble but doomed cause. And none from this pile was more significant to me than the e-mail from my client, Eric Eldred.
But my client and these friends were wrong. This case could have been won. It should have been won. And no matter how hard I try to retell this story to myself, I can never escape believing that my own mistake lost it.
...
When the Chief Justice called me to begin my argument, I began where I intended to stay: on the question of the limits on Congress's power. This was a case about enumerated powers, I said, and whether those enumerated powers had any limit.
Justice O'Connor stopped me within one minute of my opening. The history was bothering her.
justice o'connor: Congress has extended the term so often through the years, and if you are right, don't we run the risk of upsetting previous extensions of time? I mean, this seems to be a practice that began with the very first act.
She was quite willing to concede "that this flies directly in the face of what the framers had in mind." But my response again and again was to emphasize limits on Congress's power.
mr. lessig: Well, if it flies in the face of what the framers had in mind, then the question is, is there a way of interpreting their words that gives effect to what they had in mind, and the answer is yes.
There were two points in this argument when I should have seen where the Court was going. The first was a question by Justice Kennedy, who observed,
justice kennedy: Well, I suppose implicit in the argument that the '76 act, too, should have been declared void, and that we might leave it alone because of the disruption, is that for all these years the act has impeded progress in science and the useful arts. I just don't see any empirical evidence for that.
Here follows my clear mistake. Like a professor correcting a student, I answered,
mr. lessig: Justice, we are not making an empirical claim at all. Nothing in our Copyright Clause claim hangs upon the empirical assertion about impeding progress. Our only argument is this is a structural limit necessary to assure that what would be an effectively perpetual term not be permitted under the copyright laws.
That was a correct answer, but it wasn't the right answer. The right answer was instead that there was an obvious and profound harm. Any number of briefs had been written about it. He wanted to hear it. And here was the place Don Ayer's advice should have mattered. This was a softball; my answer was a swing and a miss.
You're kidding, right? Just because Amazon is the biggest online bookseller doesn't mean that you can't find dozens of alternatives with a little research. Heck, that function is now baked right into calibre:
A great feature is "Get Books" which allows you to search for a book by title and author and returns the list of web stores that sell it in ebook form, allowing you to easily find the lowest prices for popular books or search many different places for hard to find ebook editions.
Note: any serious bibliophile or bookworm who isn't using calibre to keep track of their e-book library needs to go check it out, right now. This is the model that puts the user in control, not the vendors.
This is so the truth its sad. I worked for the Big Yellow tag for 12 years and Geek Squad for 7 of them. Everything the last poster says is dead on. Geek Squad was great until it got bestbuyed.
Give me a break! Your market before Best Buy bought you out was the artsy types here in the Twin Cities. That's why you drove those old Citroens with the lousy paint jobs, wore the white shirts, black pants, and goofy glasses. It was to make those interior designers and advertising people feel good about themselves because at least they weren't YOU.
Geek Squad was NEVER about knowing what to do when faced with a real problem. If you couldn't get their printer driver working in 10 minutes, or find the On/Off button on their monitor, you farmed it out to one of our local shops here who had some real talent.
Having never played the games I have no idea how closely (if at all) they follow the game plot(s). My guess is, not closely at all? Still, the Resident Evil movies weren't THAT bad if you took them as a pretty typical zombie flick franchise.
I like 'em better than the Romero originals if only because RE movies actually have more sympathetic characters. I never did like Romero's automatic assumption that people would always turn on each other rather than band together to deal with disaster.
Wow, that's messed up. Cable is treated the same as plumbing in Minnesota: A basic part of the infrastructure of a building. The company I work for recently moved about 2,000 people into a new building. We chose to re-use the existing cable plant instead of wiring all new.
That's not normally our practice because we have frequently found that the old cable didn't meet our needs, but still. We've always had the option here and in most other states where we've moved people into an existing building.
Sounds to me like the cable pullers must have quietly greased a few palms in California a while back.:-)
Umm, you clearly don't know Americans as well as you think you do. Top Gear is not exactly regarded as a pristine example of high journalism on this side of the pond, either. It's a popular show because (gasp!) we think it's FUNNY!
Barry: This is a critical point. Thereâ(TM)s a huge data set proving that digital books are a price-sensitive market, and that maximum revenues are achieved at a price point between $.99 and $4.99. So the question is: why arenâ(TM)t publishers pricing digital books to maximize digital profits?
Joe: Because they're protecting their paper sales.
Barry: Exactly.
Joe: It's awfully dangerous for an industry to ignore (or even blatantly antagonize) their customers in order to protect self-interest.
This is one thing that puts me off buying ebooks. At the moment they are overpriced.
Another problem is that they come with DRM, and running a free operating system I cannot read them and have to resort to other methods to obtain a free copy. I would much rather purchase a reasonably priced ebook with no DRM so that some money goes to the author.
We are left with the same untenable situation with ebooks as there was with the music industry, that is that you get a better ebook for free which is flexible and can be read on any ereader than you get by purchasing for £12 from an official ebook retailer.
I'm burning mod points to post this, but this needed to be addressed. What you're saying is true for the large publishing houses, but a little bit of googling will find PLENTY of material to read for reasonable prices. One example turned up in Stanza's FAQ. For those who are not familiar with Stanza, it is a free ebook reader for iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch platforms. I've had it for a while and am very happy with it.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're deploying a 9 year old hardware platform that has been EOLed by the manufacturer, how are you supplying security patches? Are you relying upon Security Through Obscurity instead?
Ahh, but your healthcare system includes things like, I don't know, education about nutrition? Clamping down on food additives?
I urge you to spend some time on Gapminder. Pick any two healthcare related variables that you care to name and I can pretty much guarantee two things: One, Gapminder includes them both so you can graph them over time and two, the US is not in the top 10. Heck, these days we're lucky to be in the top 25. In some cases, we're clearly going backwards.
For example, track maternal mortality rates to GDP/capita. Watch what happens to the US after 1980, then 1992. Two Republican Congresses take office. One stops the steady decline in maternal mortality, and the other reverses it.
Heaven forbid that we continue to follow the rest of the freaking world in improving young mothers' chances of surviving child birth! That would be unAmerican!
Spend some time on Gapminder.Org. The data is all pulled from publicly available sources so it's easy to independently verify what that site can show you. A short perusal of the site will quickly make it obvious just how much those of us in the US are being cheated by the big insurance companies.
From Gapminder.Org for 2006:
UK life expectancy 80 years. % of GDP spent on healthcare: 8.4%
US life expectancy 78 years. % of GDP spent on healthcare: 15%
In fact, the ONLY country in the world who spends more on healthcare as a percentage of GDP than the US is Timor-Leste at 16%. Most of the so-called 'socialist' medical plans are MUCH MUCH cheaper than the US and provide FAR better results. In fact, Every. Single. Country. who has a longer life expectancy than the US has a nationalized healthcare system that costs much less than ours. Why the HELL aren't the Dems hammering on this point?
Posted by a somewhat bitter US citizen who knows the answer but still doesn't like it. :-(
Sorry, I ran out of mod points on Friday. :(
This is overlooked time and again.
Facebook is actually losing customers in North America and Europe.
You're going to single out T-Mobile??? The one carrier in the U.S. that actually had an HTC Android phone as soon as it was released? The one carrier in the U.S. that actually seems to give a damn about not loading up their phones with all the garbage the others do? The carrier in the U.S. who doesn't make life hell if you want to use a phone that you bought some place else?
Granted, their coverage for data outside major metropolitan areas can be spotty, especially west of the Mississippi. Their coverage maps make no secret of that fact. It's a LONG leap not being satisfied with their coverage to putting them in the same category as Microsoft and Comcast. If any of the U.S. carriers belong there, it's the big three; AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon!
It's strange. I find myself in total agreement and disagreement at the same time. Part of the difference, I think, is simply that my tastes differ from yours.
For example, for the past several years my go-to game when I've got an hour to kill is Day of Defeat:Source, a WWII game that started as a player created mod for the Half-Life engine 11 years ago. Strictly multi-player, strictly PvP. Good balance of weapons and solid objectives enforcing good teamwork. Lots and lots and LOTS of player created maps providing tons of variety.
I've tried a heck of a lot of games in this genre that have come out since then. None of them really hold my attention all that well.
I'll fire up Company of Heroes when I have more time to play a skirmish battle against the computer. Again, I've looked at other games in that RTS style of play, but none seem to hold my attention for very long. The only one that has held my attention is a CoH conversion called the Eastern Front. Same solid game engine combined with a really nifty set of units.
OK, so I've got two games that I play a lot of these days. In the past I've played a lot of the old Operation Flashpoint/Arma/Arma2 series, Counter-Strike, Battlefield 1942, Starsiege:Tribes, Doom/Doom ][, and several dozen Quake/Quake 2 mods (some of which were REALLY off the wall! Remember Quess and Qrally? :-) ). I've also sampled X3:Terran Conflict, Dirt 2, Portal, and a few others. Many of the most memorable games that I've played started as player mods or by small indie publishers.
You're right, there really isn't much in the way of risk taking by the major studios. Guess what? It's ALWAYS been that way.
By far, the best games that I've played have all come from indie publishing houses or player created mods. The sad fact is, I also think that a great deal of creativity is lost because we simply don't see much in the way of player mods any more.
The best advice that I can give you is to quit buying games from the big houses. Start digging online for the off the wall ones. Go to Good Old Games for a cheap source of retro gaming.
The nice thing about Steam and other online distribution systems is that they have huge catalogs of these indie games. Go ahead and browse through the Steam store some time. You'll find a lot of stuff out there.
A lot of it's crap, yes. But when you're only paying a few bucks, so what? And the gems you occasionally stumble over make the search worth it. :-)
Make sure you study the historical trends documented at http://www.gapminder.org/>Gapminder.Org before beginning your coloring. :-)
More like 170 ms. (Gotta allow for processing time plus the wait for the acknowledgement to get back to the gov't or it'd be more like 60 ms.)
I burned through my mod points just yesterday. Dangit. :(
:-)
You're kidding, right? Just because Amazon is the biggest online bookseller doesn't mean that you can't find dozens of alternatives with a little research. Heck, that function is now baked right into calibre:
The site's front page has a video with a quick walkthrough of the feature set. There is also a video for the new stuff in version 0.8.
Note: any serious bibliophile or bookworm who isn't using calibre to keep track of their e-book library needs to go check it out, right now. This is the model that puts the user in control, not the vendors.
Give me a break! Your market before Best Buy bought you out was the artsy types here in the Twin Cities. That's why you drove those old Citroens with the lousy paint jobs, wore the white shirts, black pants, and goofy glasses. It was to make those interior designers and advertising people feel good about themselves because at least they weren't YOU.
Geek Squad was NEVER about knowing what to do when faced with a real problem. If you couldn't get their printer driver working in 10 minutes, or find the On/Off button on their monitor, you farmed it out to one of our local shops here who had some real talent.
"What's that sound?" :D
No, no shame at all. That was very deliberate!
Having never played the games I have no idea how closely (if at all) they follow the game plot(s). My guess is, not closely at all? Still, the Resident Evil movies weren't THAT bad if you took them as a pretty typical zombie flick franchise.
I like 'em better than the Romero originals if only because RE movies actually have more sympathetic characters. I never did like Romero's automatic assumption that people would always turn on each other rather than band together to deal with disaster.
Wow, that's messed up. Cable is treated the same as plumbing in Minnesota: A basic part of the infrastructure of a building. The company I work for recently moved about 2,000 people into a new building. We chose to re-use the existing cable plant instead of wiring all new.
That's not normally our practice because we have frequently found that the old cable didn't meet our needs, but still. We've always had the option here and in most other states where we've moved people into an existing building.
Sounds to me like the cable pullers must have quietly greased a few palms in California a while back. :-)
Nice way to selectively quote. Please re-read my post. The word you missed was....?
Umm, you clearly don't know Americans as well as you think you do. Top Gear is not exactly regarded as a pristine example of high journalism on this side of the pond, either. It's a popular show because (gasp!) we think it's FUNNY!
I'm burning mod points to post this, but this needed to be addressed. What you're saying is true for the large publishing houses, but a little bit of googling will find PLENTY of material to read for reasonable prices. One example turned up in Stanza's FAQ. For those who are not familiar with Stanza, it is a free ebook reader for iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch platforms. I've had it for a while and am very happy with it.
Amen, hallelujah! Somebody actually put their finger on the REAL problem!