It's because your speakers suck. Honestly it is. upgrade them to decent quality component speakers and you will hear the difference. I show people how incredibly crappy XM and Sirius sounds all the time. plus a A-B compared of an mp3 to the CD is very obvious. also a car is the WORST listening environment there is the background noise level is incredibly high.
Yes, if your car has the stock speakers, even if you have the "premium sound" package are utter crap.
Which is funny at best. Why? Because do your comments it sounds like folks would be out demanding better stuff. Nope. Why not? Because we actually like the audio that we hear in the car. It works great for us. We have zero complaints with it. Why on Earth would we go out and buy speakers that would make our normal listening music suck?
If anything I wouldn't blame my existing music, I'd blame the crappy "high quality" overpriced pieces of junk that you suggested to put in my car.
I can see not hearing a difference between mp3 and CD, but can you really not tell (and aren't bothered by) the difference between a CD and FM? I mean this sincerely and with jealousy: Ignorance really is bliss.
Within a car which is where we do 98% of our listening to music, no we can't. It all sounds the same. Well, mp3s are better than CDs and FM since you don't have commercials or songs that you don't like.
Damn, what kinda cars do you have where you can actually tell the difference between FM, CDs, and MP3s while the car is running and driving down the road?
Don't get me wrong, British society has plenty of problems, not least with its government what with all of the CCTV and the war in the Middle East and the economic issues etc. but the gun policy we have here works for us and I don't really think you should be so disdainful about it. As I said before the US (which I assume you're from, if not then sorry and insert your country as appropriate) is its own place and is entitled to its own policy on the matter. I wouldn't want to pass judgement on the internal affairs of a country of which I have no great understanding.
Ok. I'll accept that your gun policy works for you. Well, then you need a sword, knife and sharp cutting instruments policy as well. Basically any sharp blade that could slice, harm or kill a human needs to be banned or placed with an extremely large tax to prevent most of the population from being able to afford them. Video games have nothing to do with knife crimes. You want to stop knife crimes? Do what worked with your guns. You ban them.
Next, you might want ban anything that could be used as a club or rocks.
Right off the bat, there's some serious overgeneralizing in that statement. However, if it is the case, then the solution is simple in concept but difficult in execution. Show young people that the system can work for them. That involves thousands of hours of education in basic finance, civics, and law. Show young people that the system can work against them. That involves an effective police force and appropriate punishments
Are you kidding? If they had an effective police force all the kids that commit assault with knifes would be in jail or atleast their version of JDC.
If they had a half way decent educational system, it would have shown what ever info/propaganda that you want shoved down them.
Do you expect anyone to show up for thousands of hours of education in basic finance, civics, and law outside of basic education? Nope. Not going to happen. If you want that it's got to be when kids are young enough to be still going to public school just because parents are using it for daycare. Then you have to cross your fingers and pray that your info/propaganda/religion takes hold so that they don't commit crimes within your society.
Were the to pool the opinions of students of Julliard rather than Stamford he'd likely get a completely different result.
If the young person in question is fond of mass produced music -- as most are I guess -- then the sound quality probably isn't important to them, just as tonal nuances wasn't important to the original musicians. For kids that are musicians themselves, and especially jazz or classical musicians, the sound quality matters a great deal.
Hey, that's like saying that Linux users like looking at the source code for every one of their apps and can tell the difference when using a closed source app. Your average user don't freaking care if its open or closed source or how buggy the devs think it is. The average users have their own standards for the apps.
This applies equally to everything. If you make X, you are aware of every flaw that your X has. Your coworkers might be able to point out the flaws to X as well. The average users of X usually will never notice. My personal example. My mom hangs wall paper. She will notice and point out little things about seams not matching or things just alittle off. If you didn't have her pointing it out, you'd never know. I rarely catch it myself. You've got the same thing apply to music, programs, or hanging wall paper. Those that do, can see the mistakes, everyone else just cares about the design that they picked out and its got to be a really bad mistake for them to pick up on it.
I would be curious to see what these kids would think about the different samples if they went a month without listening to any music. They like the hiss because they're not used to hearing anything without it (on crappy headphones none-the-less). I wanna know what happens when they "reboot" their ears. This isn't just a matter of some people prefer sennheiser headphones and some people prefer grado headphones, this is a matter of some people liking how things actually sound vs. some people liking distorted music with hiss laid over it. That's kind of unsettling to me.
I'm curious about all these that have this apparently super hearing. My wife and I have an MP3 CD player in the car and use it. We and the kids can't tell the difference between the average mp3, FM, and most CDs. I'm amazed at the BS audiophiles come up with to justify their audio opinions. If you've got portions of a populations that can't tell the freaking difference, but then Mr Super Ears can well, it ain't better cause Mr. Super Ears likes it. It's better if the average likes it.
I'd actually prefer something like this be made and sold straight to DVD. I think Star Trek or Star Wars both could easily sell just about any show that they produced straight to DVD. They'd manage 3-4 seasons without a sweat. Actually, I think that it's far past time for a Star Wars TV series.
I've always liked Trek, but it's felt bland for awhile. They are always presented as being one thing but very soon they all bring out their Kirk side. This refers to every federation leader that we've seen.
I miss B5. I feel that it managed to set a standard that Star Trek should easily be able to match or better. I mean come on any Trek series should be able to make it 5 seasons. They should easily be able to add those little background things B5 had to pull it all together. If anything, I've been kinda disappointed in Trek lately.
It's kinda sad that the series wants to return to its roots and go out to find hot alien women.
Where do you eat dinner? McDonalds? Is a special night out Taco Bill? When I go out to dinner, the average bill for a two-up is $100 or so.
Where the hell are you getting raped at? I want city and place names so that I can put them on my never visit black list.
I can go out for a family of four in the nicest place in town and still pay under $30. One of the reasons that we switched to nice places was that fast food was getting close to that price for a family anyway.
I don't see what your complaint against Taco Bell is. In high school and most of college, Taco Bell and Subway were the best places to take a date. The only time more expensive places make sense is if you have money to burn. Girls that like wasteful guys may be impressed, but you'd be surprised at how many would rather have the money spent else where.
Hey, I may be wrong, you may be able to lay out $100 for a date every night like I lay out $30 for family eating out every night. Most folks don't have that much income to be throwing around though.
And of course, there are some dancers who do "extras" but they take that business outside the club for the reasons I gave before. Strip clubs sell fantasy, and for most sensible people, fantasy is enough. Incidentally, I know more business school and law school grads who have done "extras" to make it at their workplace than dancers who have. And my former dancer girlfriend is an amazing woman with a better moral compass than most people I've met.
Um, pond scum has a better moral compass than your average lawyer/business school grad. I'd think that your average hooker does as well. My complaint is that its illegal rather than regulated. If properly regulated, then it should be fairly safe business transaction. Those dancers may be selling fantasies, but hookers see the realities. Now, if it's moral business transaction is a completely different thing, but back to one. Your average business/lawyer school ain't very moral either; they've just got some college behind them.
That sounds like the start of a great joke, an MBA, lawyer, and hooker go to a strip club, what's the dancer's punch line?
I was asked to design and build systems to do just this too, because I could CCTV up a room cheaper than their suppliers. I built one to cover the ICT office which *we* turned on and off overnight or during the holidays to help spot where our laptops were disappearing to, and had no further part in anything else. Not only does it exist - it is happening, it is accepted and it's not being questioned by ANYONE, staff, students, parents, heads, local authorities, etc. even when they are made aware of it. That's more scary than merely "it's possible" or "it exists".
I work in a city government building. Within the last six months, the building has been wired up with 16+ cameras and a DVR for supposed building security. Every manager has been given shortcuts and use it to spy on employees in the morning, at lunch, and when they get off, or when they are just in the public areas of the building.
Oh, they don't care about the general public, unless it's someone that they actually know. It's one of those things where they like having the little bit of extra power over someone. What's really bad, is the building already and still has vericard readers all over and all employees have to use those cards to even get to work so we've already been tracked on our entrances/exits and mostly where we've been at in the building for the last 10 years or so.
There isn't any way for us to complain about this. They could just use the its your employer's building and that they aren't recording the bathrooms excuse.
People need to understand a simple concept: if you wouldn't feel comfortable saying something in front of a packed auditorium, you probably shouldn't say it in a public forum online. I absolutely defend an individual's right to express his views as he sees fit; similarly, I absolutely defend an employer's right to base his hiring decision on all publicly available information.
Most folks view talking on the internet or even slashdot more akin to talking in a packed auditorium rather than in front of one. Heck let's use slashdot as an example. We all see mainly the same headlines and summary. Then we open a thread. Depending on what you've got your filter set at you maybe be only viewing 3, 4, or 5 rated comments. Those that have been modded 4 or 5 could consider their comments being infront of an audience, but everyone else mainly would think of their stuff as being within the audience just talking. Now this is different from real life in that I can't just come in from out side pick any audience member and rehear every conversation that they've had in that auditorium ever.
I'd never want my slashdot ID matched up to my real life ID. I'm sure that I've posted things that some one doesn't like. If they had the log in they could spend an evening reading up on my comments. Now think about that. It doesn't even matter what your average posting rating is some one will dislike your views.
I feel the same way about my home country (Australia). Australians deep down are quite patriotic, but it is a quiet, learned patriotism, rather than the overt 'God bless America' flag-waving culture you see in the US. If you asked us, we wouldn't say we were patriotic. But most would, as you say, defend it to the death if there was a real threat. Life is just too good here to give up easily, it truly is one of the world's best places to live (Canada is nice too BTW from what I've seen):)
Are you two just being dense? Any group of humans on this planet will put up a fight against those that they see as invaders trying to come take their stuff! The nationalist thing is to get that personal feeling about your community expanded to your entire state/country. I'd bet that even the worst governments on the planet have no or little problems finding people to fight against foreigners. Russian Serfs would have protected Russia to the death against any others coming to invade the mother land.
You couldn't come up with much worse government example than that than maybe the US during the civil war. If I recall correctly, there were a few places where slaves were even armed to defend their homes. I think that goes more to the number one than the number two. They knew their existing lords/masters and actually feared a change in leadership. They knew their neighbors lords/masters and didn't want them taking control of their home. Of course from the slaves point of view, sure it would have been nice to run off to the Yankees, but how easy would that have been? Nah, staying at your "home" no matter how much you hate/love it and defending it is the easy human choice.
His main thesis is that the markets are essentially random and are basically impossible to predict in any meaningful way. Further there are unlikely unknown unknowns can cannot be predicted until the they occur, usually with disastrous consequences.
Oh he is wrong. They can predict things for awhile and make a killing. It's when conditions change and their models become outdated for various reasons that they've got to quickly stop using it or invent another one or risk losing everything in bad picks. I remember reading the article. If you really paid attention, this all started with the big boys just playing with it themselves and not spreading it around. There were some big boys that recognized this model wasn't working so stopped depending entirely on it. They didn't let others know because they were preparing to make a killing when conditions changed.
O.k. I guess that you could call the entire stock market gambling on a large scale, but it is bit more predictable than that in some instances. The problem is that there is no magic formula that makes it easily predictable for everyone. Those that do discover localized working models make tons of money and spend lots of effort not letting others know their methods.
yes, i completely agree with you. the focus on quarterly earnings is representative of "short-termism" everywhere, which is usually detrimental to long term value preservation.
i guess what i should have said is that greed is not going anywhere. harness it when you can and don't be surprised when it causes people to do things that harm others.
If you want your company to focus on long term profits, then you'll likely find that it is a family or employ owned business that doesn't offer any public stock. They don't want you telling them in any form or fashion how to run their business. Here is a question for slashdot. Those that work at companies that are entirely family or employ owned, do you feel that your company is in better shape than those public stock corporations?
Can you imagine if Hamlet never came to an end (ok, if you've ever sat through a bad student production, it might have felt like that) but instead ran on for 17 plays, with 8-12 comprising the little-loved Finland arc, play 4 introducing a new love interest who got written out in play 9 and then the whole thing stopped abruptly after play 17 because the Globe burned down? How many modern TV stories have been ruined by this kind of thing? The X-Files? Lost? Buffy?
You are judging two different things. You should have the comparison be sit down and watch all of Shakespeare's plays vs watching a watching season of any show of your choice on DVD. I have no idea how many plays Shakespeare produced, but I can't stand most of them that I've been exposed to. Now let's compare that to B5, Smallville, or Buffy. Taken individually, each show is usually a complete product. It's taken as a whole where each wraps around your head and you've just gotta find out what happens next to these folks. Actually, I'd say that they are getting better now with DVD releases of at least finishing a show/season in such a manner that its a fair pausing spot that may or may not be resumed if it does great on DVD sales. B5 was great for all the little things in one episode becoming important later on.
It reminds me of something that I was forced to read in college. It was a French soap opera thing were basically a single writer produced dozens and dozens of books set around his slightly different Paris. All those little people in one book might or might not get a book of their own. I wonder if we had complete Roman or Greek plays if they had the same thing back then. This concept doesn't seem new. It's just that the stage effects and presentation that have changed somewhat over 2 thousand years.
Screw this idea. I just want a few million people to pressure the FDA to make more known drugs over counter drugs rather than requiring a doctor visit. My kid had strep throat last week. My wife has it this week. We'd much rather go to walmart buy what ever the antibiotic or box labeled take this for strep throat rather than the system we have now.
For new drugs or unknown experimental crap our existing system is great. For getting drugs away from requiring doctors and where any mom can decide to buy it and give it to their kid, our entire outlook drugs needs to change a little.
I know for a fact that I wouldn't want to test any "new" drug on my family. I also know that I have no problems giving any of a variety of kids medicines to my kids or taking equate pain reliever when I feel that I need it. Heck, I feel that's great that I can take a pill and not have allergy symptoms for 1 day without having to go through a doctor. Why couldn't we have had that 5-10 years ago though?
For dangerous/lethal or very addicting drugs, sure keep them requiring a doctor, but for anything a doctor routinely will gives out to folks to use where they need to follow simple directions, why can't we start making our own decisions abit more? Hmm. It's our health at stake not theirs.
In your country if you're accused of a crime you consider it a natural right to have access to a free lawyer and access to free legal advice is enshrined in the highest law of the land. The spirit of socialism at its finest! But oddly there's no "socialism" conflict in that area, even from the "libertarians".
But when it comes to the right to some basic level of healthcare, no go. If you're poor you and your children can suffer.
Are you kidding? When that document was written, slavery was an accepted national institution. Do you really think that they give a care for the lower classes health care?
The only reason that they've got that free legal thing is to stop/slow/prevent the government just arresting/jailing the poor folk for no/little reason and keeping them in jail for years at a time. From the way that I'd always understood it, it wasn't that it was a common thing in Britain, but that it if you were of a party/group that got on the wrong side of those that were on top and running things then this could easily happen to you to silence you. Most of the things in that document were about groups meeting together and spreading ideas and keeping the government from just coming into your home and having you provide the room and board for government employees. Do you really think that we'd have had them if in there if those abuses weren't at least common to the group that was writing the document.
Now think about the health care bit. What was the state of health care at that time? Heck, they were most likely almost better off avoiding doctors in that time and knew it. Do you really think that they'd have sentenced the poor to a national health care system if they wanted wanted to keep them somewhat safe and sound?
I wouldn't want a national health care system either if most of the doctors can't do squat except seem to speed up your dieing. Things have vastly changed though. Now doctors can do stuff that helps.
Heck, if the constitution were written today, it would have more in there about home, auto, and health insurance, broadband internet or cell phone coverage and less or nothing in there about freedom of speech/gathering, bearing arms, or most of the other stuff. The crap that we care about has changed, and we don't appreciate why those things were put into the bill of rights any more.
Dark Cloud? That's child abuse!:-) I hit a brick wall in the game when I had to level up the guy with the hammer because he was a required character on a level. Combine that with the water thing and the repairing weapons thing, which means you can end a level with essentially less money than you had when you went in, and you can find yourself in a position of becoming less able and less able to be able to pass that brick wall. The game needed more balancing work.
Dark Cloud 2 on the other hand fixes that, you can actually earn money. Much better game, well worth playing.
Got 'em both for Christmas. We've not bet the bonus dungeon of dark cloud, yet. I'm on like level 65 of the demon shaft. I was waiting to beat that before starting Dark Cloud 2. We didn't have any problems earning money. The problem is that even now at the end game bonus dungeon, you just don't earn anything. It's worse than dragon quest! (O.k. you do earn about 20 units of wealth per monster, but when the gems cost 3000 units of wealth each? And I hate their fishing minigame.) My advice is to take Hammer back to that first dungeon and level his weapon up there. Actually, at that point playing with Hammer was more a matter of luck than anything else. That game was fiendishly difficult in dungeon one! That just made us want to bet to more. It was a family project.
Microsoft seems to be ignoring the lesson here: You can't trust machines to babysit children.
Um, sure you can. Just don't expect them to be babysat well. Hey, my PS2 with Puzzle Quest or Dark Cloud works great for babysitting my kids. Doesn't mean that they won't stop playing the PS2 and start doing anything else though.
Re:When I think about the internet in 1996
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So many sites that were popular in that timeframe are no longer around. Internet Archives doesn't capture all those funny, cool sites that used to be there and are, sadly, no longer around.
What you mean the folks back in HS or college that spent time building a "subject shrine." on their favorite topic on geocities or angelfire and then got bored with it? Now we've got wikipedia, myspace, and facebook that serves the same niche. Actually wikipedia is slightly better in that you and all your friends are jointly editing the shrine to your topic so in theory it gets better. Actually, little subject wikis are mostly the best thing for your tiny subject that wikipedia doesn't want on their site.;) You and all the other fans of that subject know that site's address and just work off it. And with google anyone new to the subject and actually find that site.
Now a days, you can waste time watching TV, anime, youtube, back then streaming audio was painful and you loved it when 3MB mp3s actually finished downloading from those ftp sites. I remember it taking days to download 300MB in college. I last weekend; I downloaded two dozen or so 150MB files, and they took maybe most of the morning.
I've meant to build several topic shrine websites, but I was generally happy just finding the work of others on those subjects. It's like webcomics. How many of those little webcomics last more than 6 months? O.k. there are a few that I come across and find out that they've been around for 5-6 years and just stopped updating last month or so. Or life happens; they get out of school, or change jobs or just get tired off it. It happens all the time.
It depends. You've already established that you have have a criminally-inclined genius and a ruthless, murderous streak. But more is required.
1. Can your organization's name be turned into a suitably menacing acronym? 2. Henchmen with unusual and remarkable deformities? 3. Henchwomen with names both unlikely and sexually suggestive? 4. Do you have a white persian cat? 5. Do you enjoy monologuing? 6. Can you credibly threaten the destruction of western civilization while maintaining a PG-13 rating?
I have to wonder how many billionaires tried this... They got 1. They skipped 2. 3 was fun. It turns out that most of them are allergic to 4. 5 turns out to be boring. 6 is where it turns out to be far funnier to just have fun with those 3 women. Why was it I even cared about taking over the world if I could afford a massive mobile base, a personal merc defense force, and lots of hot women?
Sigh. You are assuming that the EU will fall for nonsense like that again. As their announcement indicates, they learned from the WMP crap Microsoft pulled. Mozilla is on board to offer advice as well. They are not going to let Microsoft get away with any tricks this time, I bet.
Oh this is funny. Do you really think that even Mozilla would be able to come out on top? I see some Faustian deal where MS only appears to loose, but actually wins big later. Sorry, I'm just cynical. Really, I'd be happy if the EU just fined MS $100B and accepted no software/product vouchers to try to get out of it. If MS did attempt that, I'd actually want the EU to nationalize all MS assets that are in the EU.
Heck, I usually like MS products. I just would rather them get a sharp quick visible punishment rather than something that they can and will weasel out of.
I don't understand the people mocking this. Sure this is probably a service a la geocities with a minority of webpages worth of any interest. But some are. Internet gains million of new users and publishers and people just dismiss this as non-significant while we should try to build bridges. As ugly a Myspace-QQ bridge may sound, it could be a worthwhile objective...
There are times that I'd like to give China a small hint on the best way to culturally take the US would be. First mandate an entire generation of Chinese students learn some English. Next give/sell that entire generation net books/internet cell phones. Now you just tell that generation to pick a few English/US sites and let the rest of the world know the real average Chinese view point on various subjects.
Utter chaos happens or no one notices?
How would slashdot change if we suddenly gained double or triple the current user base yet all active average Chinese folks?
Because the BBC (and many others) have thousands of employees, and millions of dollars, and can potentially publish hundreds of stories/articles a second.
Slashdot, has like 35 employees, and fuck all for money in comparison, and the stories are published in sequence/intervals, rather than as they happen, or even as soon as possible.
It's been said before, but this is by no means the latest, freshest, most up to date news on the web, frankly I'm surprised it got here as quick as it did (although a few people mentioned it in off-topic comments hours ago)
We've got thousands of users that submit stories don't we? We need a better way of utilizing those thousands of users in order to pick fresher stories. I'm surprised it hasn't already happened already.
(I was tempted to make a joke about email services being like girlfriends and how you don't need one that never goes down, but I thought that might be tacky.:) )
Um, I don't know about you, but my spouse does go down fairly often. Say about twice a week. Now my e-mail provider may have what an hour or two down time through out the year. I don't think that I'd compare the two at all.
Slashdot Mirror
It's because your speakers suck. Honestly it is. upgrade them to decent quality component speakers and you will hear the difference. I show people how incredibly crappy XM and Sirius sounds all the time. plus a A-B compared of an mp3 to the CD is very obvious. also a car is the WORST listening environment there is the background noise level is incredibly high.
Yes, if your car has the stock speakers, even if you have the "premium sound" package are utter crap.
Which is funny at best. Why? Because do your comments it sounds like folks would be out demanding better stuff. Nope. Why not? Because we actually like the audio that we hear in the car. It works great for us. We have zero complaints with it. Why on Earth would we go out and buy speakers that would make our normal listening music suck?
If anything I wouldn't blame my existing music, I'd blame the crappy "high quality" overpriced pieces of junk that you suggested to put in my car.
I can see not hearing a difference between mp3 and CD, but can you really not tell (and aren't bothered by) the difference between a CD and FM?
I mean this sincerely and with jealousy: Ignorance really is bliss.
Within a car which is where we do 98% of our listening to music, no we can't. It all sounds the same. Well, mp3s are better than CDs and FM since you don't have commercials or songs that you don't like.
Damn, what kinda cars do you have where you can actually tell the difference between FM, CDs, and MP3s while the car is running and driving down the road?
Don't get me wrong, British society has plenty of problems, not least with its government what with all of the CCTV and the war in the Middle East and the economic issues etc. but the gun policy we have here works for us and I don't really think you should be so disdainful about it. As I said before the US (which I assume you're from, if not then sorry and insert your country as appropriate) is its own place and is entitled to its own policy on the matter. I wouldn't want to pass judgement on the internal affairs of a country of which I have no great understanding.
Ok. I'll accept that your gun policy works for you. Well, then you need a sword, knife and sharp cutting instruments policy as well. Basically any sharp blade that could slice, harm or kill a human needs to be banned or placed with an extremely large tax to prevent most of the population from being able to afford them. Video games have nothing to do with knife crimes. You want to stop knife crimes? Do what worked with your guns. You ban them.
Next, you might want ban anything that could be used as a club or rocks.
Right off the bat, there's some serious overgeneralizing in that statement. However, if it is the case, then the solution is simple in concept but difficult in execution.
Show young people that the system can work for them. That involves thousands of hours of education in basic finance, civics, and law.
Show young people that the system can work against them. That involves an effective police force and appropriate punishments
Are you kidding? If they had an effective police force all the kids that commit assault with knifes would be in jail or atleast their version of JDC.
If they had a half way decent educational system, it would have shown what ever info/propaganda that you want shoved down them.
Do you expect anyone to show up for thousands of hours of education in basic finance, civics, and law outside of basic education? Nope. Not going to happen. If you want that it's got to be when kids are young enough to be still going to public school just because parents are using it for daycare. Then you have to cross your fingers and pray that your info/propaganda/religion takes hold so that they don't commit crimes within your society.
Were the to pool the opinions of students of Julliard rather than Stamford he'd likely get a completely different result.
If the young person in question is fond of mass produced music -- as most are I guess -- then the sound quality probably isn't important to them, just as tonal nuances wasn't important to the original musicians. For kids that are musicians themselves, and especially jazz or classical musicians, the sound quality matters a great deal.
Hey, that's like saying that Linux users like looking at the source code for every one of their apps and can tell the difference when using a closed source app. Your average user don't freaking care if its open or closed source or how buggy the devs think it is. The average users have their own standards for the apps.
This applies equally to everything. If you make X, you are aware of every flaw that your X has. Your coworkers might be able to point out the flaws to X as well. The average users of X usually will never notice. My personal example. My mom hangs wall paper. She will notice and point out little things about seams not matching or things just alittle off. If you didn't have her pointing it out, you'd never know. I rarely catch it myself. You've got the same thing apply to music, programs, or hanging wall paper. Those that do, can see the mistakes, everyone else just cares about the design that they picked out and its got to be a really bad mistake for them to pick up on it.
I would be curious to see what these kids would think about the different samples if they went a month without listening to any music. They like the hiss because they're not used to hearing anything without it (on crappy headphones none-the-less). I wanna know what happens when they "reboot" their ears. This isn't just a matter of some people prefer sennheiser headphones and some people prefer grado headphones, this is a matter of some people liking how things actually sound vs. some people liking distorted music with hiss laid over it. That's kind of unsettling to me.
I'm curious about all these that have this apparently super hearing. My wife and I have an MP3 CD player in the car and use it. We and the kids can't tell the difference between the average mp3, FM, and most CDs. I'm amazed at the BS audiophiles come up with to justify their audio opinions. If you've got portions of a populations that can't tell the freaking difference, but then Mr Super Ears can well, it ain't better cause Mr. Super Ears likes it. It's better if the average likes it.
I'd actually prefer something like this be made and sold straight to DVD. I think Star Trek or Star Wars both could easily sell just about any show that they produced straight to DVD. They'd manage 3-4 seasons without a sweat. Actually, I think that it's far past time for a Star Wars TV series.
I've always liked Trek, but it's felt bland for awhile. They are always presented as being one thing but very soon they all bring out their Kirk side. This refers to every federation leader that we've seen.
I miss B5. I feel that it managed to set a standard that Star Trek should easily be able to match or better. I mean come on any Trek series should be able to make it 5 seasons. They should easily be able to add those little background things B5 had to pull it all together. If anything, I've been kinda disappointed in Trek lately.
It's kinda sad that the series wants to return to its roots and go out to find hot alien women.
Where do you eat dinner? McDonalds? Is a special night out Taco Bill?
When I go out to dinner, the average bill for a two-up is $100 or so.
Where the hell are you getting raped at? I want city and place names so that I can put them on my never visit black list.
I can go out for a family of four in the nicest place in town and still pay under $30. One of the reasons that we switched to nice places was that fast food was getting close to that price for a family anyway.
I don't see what your complaint against Taco Bell is. In high school and most of college, Taco Bell and Subway were the best places to take a date. The only time more expensive places make sense is if you have money to burn. Girls that like wasteful guys may be impressed, but you'd be surprised at how many would rather have the money spent else where.
Hey, I may be wrong, you may be able to lay out $100 for a date every night like I lay out $30 for family eating out every night. Most folks don't have that much income to be throwing around though.
And of course, there are some dancers who do "extras" but they take that business outside the club for the reasons I gave before. Strip clubs sell fantasy, and for most sensible people, fantasy is enough. Incidentally, I know more business school and law school grads who have done "extras" to make it at their workplace than dancers who have. And my former dancer girlfriend is an amazing woman with a better moral compass than most people I've met.
Um, pond scum has a better moral compass than your average lawyer/business school grad. I'd think that your average hooker does as well. My complaint is that its illegal rather than regulated. If properly regulated, then it should be fairly safe business transaction. Those dancers may be selling fantasies, but hookers see the realities. Now, if it's moral business transaction is a completely different thing, but back to one. Your average business/lawyer school ain't very moral either; they've just got some college behind them.
That sounds like the start of a great joke, an MBA, lawyer, and hooker go to a strip club, what's the dancer's punch line?
I was asked to design and build systems to do just this too, because I could CCTV up a room cheaper than their suppliers. I built one to cover the ICT office which *we* turned on and off overnight or during the holidays to help spot where our laptops were disappearing to, and had no further part in anything else. Not only does it exist - it is happening, it is accepted and it's not being questioned by ANYONE, staff, students, parents, heads, local authorities, etc. even when they are made aware of it. That's more scary than merely "it's possible" or "it exists".
I work in a city government building. Within the last six months, the building has been wired up with 16+ cameras and a DVR for supposed building security. Every manager has been given shortcuts and use it to spy on employees in the morning, at lunch, and when they get off, or when they are just in the public areas of the building.
Oh, they don't care about the general public, unless it's someone that they actually know. It's one of those things where they like having the little bit of extra power over someone. What's really bad, is the building already and still has vericard readers all over and all employees have to use those cards to even get to work so we've already been tracked on our entrances/exits and mostly where we've been at in the building for the last 10 years or so.
There isn't any way for us to complain about this. They could just use the its your employer's building and that they aren't recording the bathrooms excuse.
People need to understand a simple concept: if you wouldn't feel comfortable saying something in front of a packed auditorium, you probably shouldn't say it in a public forum online. I absolutely defend an individual's right to express his views as he sees fit; similarly, I absolutely defend an employer's right to base his hiring decision on all publicly available information.
Most folks view talking on the internet or even slashdot more akin to talking in a packed auditorium rather than in front of one. Heck let's use slashdot as an example. We all see mainly the same headlines and summary. Then we open a thread. Depending on what you've got your filter set at you maybe be only viewing 3, 4, or 5 rated comments. Those that have been modded 4 or 5 could consider their comments being infront of an audience, but everyone else mainly would think of their stuff as being within the audience just talking. Now this is different from real life in that I can't just come in from out side pick any audience member and rehear every conversation that they've had in that auditorium ever.
I'd never want my slashdot ID matched up to my real life ID. I'm sure that I've posted things that some one doesn't like. If they had the log in they could spend an evening reading up on my comments. Now think about that. It doesn't even matter what your average posting rating is some one will dislike your views.
I feel the same way about my home country (Australia). Australians deep down are quite patriotic, but it is a quiet, learned patriotism, rather than the overt 'God bless America' flag-waving culture you see in the US. If you asked us, we wouldn't say we were patriotic. But most would, as you say, defend it to the death if there was a real threat. Life is just too good here to give up easily, it truly is one of the world's best places to live (Canada is nice too BTW from what I've seen) :)
Are you two just being dense? Any group of humans on this planet will put up a fight against those that they see as invaders trying to come take their stuff! The nationalist thing is to get that personal feeling about your community expanded to your entire state/country. I'd bet that even the worst governments on the planet have no or little problems finding people to fight against foreigners. Russian Serfs would have protected Russia to the death against any others coming to invade the mother land.
You couldn't come up with much worse government example than that than maybe the US during the civil war. If I recall correctly, there were a few places where slaves were even armed to defend their homes. I think that goes more to the number one than the number two. They knew their existing lords/masters and actually feared a change in leadership. They knew their neighbors lords/masters and didn't want them taking control of their home. Of course from the slaves point of view, sure it would have been nice to run off to the Yankees, but how easy would that have been? Nah, staying at your "home" no matter how much you hate/love it and defending it is the easy human choice.
His main thesis is that the markets are essentially random and are basically impossible to predict in any meaningful way. Further there are unlikely unknown unknowns can cannot be predicted until the they occur, usually with disastrous consequences.
Oh he is wrong. They can predict things for awhile and make a killing. It's when conditions change and their models become outdated for various reasons that they've got to quickly stop using it or invent another one or risk losing everything in bad picks. I remember reading the article. If you really paid attention, this all started with the big boys just playing with it themselves and not spreading it around. There were some big boys that recognized this model wasn't working so stopped depending entirely on it. They didn't let others know because they were preparing to make a killing when conditions changed.
O.k. I guess that you could call the entire stock market gambling on a large scale, but it is bit more predictable than that in some instances. The problem is that there is no magic formula that makes it easily predictable for everyone. Those that do discover localized working models make tons of money and spend lots of effort not letting others know their methods.
yes, i completely agree with you. the focus on quarterly earnings is representative of "short-termism" everywhere, which is usually detrimental to long term value preservation.
i guess what i should have said is that greed is not going anywhere. harness it when you can and don't be surprised when it causes people to do things that harm others.
If you want your company to focus on long term profits, then you'll likely find that it is a family or employ owned business that doesn't offer any public stock. They don't want you telling them in any form or fashion how to run their business. Here is a question for slashdot. Those that work at companies that are entirely family or employ owned, do you feel that your company is in better shape than those public stock corporations?
Can you imagine if Hamlet never came to an end (ok, if you've ever sat through a bad student production, it might have felt like that) but instead ran on for 17 plays, with 8-12 comprising the little-loved Finland arc, play 4 introducing a new love interest who got written out in play 9 and then the whole thing stopped abruptly after play 17 because the Globe burned down? How many modern TV stories have been ruined by this kind of thing? The X-Files? Lost? Buffy?
You are judging two different things. You should have the comparison be sit down and watch all of Shakespeare's plays vs watching a watching season of any show of your choice on DVD. I have no idea how many plays Shakespeare produced, but I can't stand most of them that I've been exposed to. Now let's compare that to B5, Smallville, or Buffy. Taken individually, each show is usually a complete product. It's taken as a whole where each wraps around your head and you've just gotta find out what happens next to these folks. Actually, I'd say that they are getting better now with DVD releases of at least finishing a show/season in such a manner that its a fair pausing spot that may or may not be resumed if it does great on DVD sales. B5 was great for all the little things in one episode becoming important later on.
It reminds me of something that I was forced to read in college. It was a French soap opera thing were basically a single writer produced dozens and dozens of books set around his slightly different Paris. All those little people in one book might or might not get a book of their own. I wonder if we had complete Roman or Greek plays if they had the same thing back then. This concept doesn't seem new. It's just that the stage effects and presentation that have changed somewhat over 2 thousand years.
Screw this idea. I just want a few million people to pressure the FDA to make more known drugs over counter drugs rather than requiring a doctor visit. My kid had strep throat last week. My wife has it this week. We'd much rather go to walmart buy what ever the antibiotic or box labeled take this for strep throat rather than the system we have now.
For new drugs or unknown experimental crap our existing system is great. For getting drugs away from requiring doctors and where any mom can decide to buy it and give it to their kid, our entire outlook drugs needs to change a little.
I know for a fact that I wouldn't want to test any "new" drug on my family. I also know that I have no problems giving any of a variety of kids medicines to my kids or taking equate pain reliever when I feel that I need it. Heck, I feel that's great that I can take a pill and not have allergy symptoms for 1 day without having to go through a doctor. Why couldn't we have had that 5-10 years ago though?
For dangerous/lethal or very addicting drugs, sure keep them requiring a doctor, but for anything a doctor routinely will gives out to folks to use where they need to follow simple directions, why can't we start making our own decisions abit more? Hmm. It's our health at stake not theirs.
In your country if you're accused of a crime you consider it a natural right to have access to a free lawyer and access to free legal advice is enshrined in the highest law of the land. The spirit of socialism at its finest! But oddly there's no "socialism" conflict in that area, even from the "libertarians".
But when it comes to the right to some basic level of healthcare, no go. If you're poor you and your children can suffer.
Are you kidding? When that document was written, slavery was an accepted national institution. Do you really think that they give a care for the lower classes health care?
The only reason that they've got that free legal thing is to stop/slow/prevent the government just arresting/jailing the poor folk for no/little reason and keeping them in jail for years at a time. From the way that I'd always understood it, it wasn't that it was a common thing in Britain, but that it if you were of a party/group that got on the wrong side of those that were on top and running things then this could easily happen to you to silence you. Most of the things in that document were about groups meeting together and spreading ideas and keeping the government from just coming into your home and having you provide the room and board for government employees. Do you really think that we'd have had them if in there if those abuses weren't at least common to the group that was writing the document.
Now think about the health care bit. What was the state of health care at that time? Heck, they were most likely almost better off avoiding doctors in that time and knew it. Do you really think that they'd have sentenced the poor to a national health care system if they wanted wanted to keep them somewhat safe and sound?
I wouldn't want a national health care system either if most of the doctors can't do squat except seem to speed up your dieing. Things have vastly changed though. Now doctors can do stuff that helps.
Heck, if the constitution were written today, it would have more in there about home, auto, and health insurance, broadband internet or cell phone coverage and less or nothing in there about freedom of speech/gathering, bearing arms, or most of the other stuff. The crap that we care about has changed, and we don't appreciate why those things were put into the bill of rights any more.
Dark Cloud? That's child abuse! :-) I hit a brick wall in the game when I had to level up the guy with the hammer because he was a required character on a level. Combine that with the water thing and the repairing weapons thing, which means you can end a level with essentially less money than you had when you went in, and you can find yourself in a position of becoming less able and less able to be able to pass that brick wall. The game needed more balancing work.
Dark Cloud 2 on the other hand fixes that, you can actually earn money. Much better game, well worth playing.
Got 'em both for Christmas. We've not bet the bonus dungeon of dark cloud, yet. I'm on like level 65 of the demon shaft. I was waiting to beat that before starting Dark Cloud 2. We didn't have any problems earning money. The problem is that even now at the end game bonus dungeon, you just don't earn anything. It's worse than dragon quest! (O.k. you do earn about 20 units of wealth per monster, but when the gems cost 3000 units of wealth each? And I hate their fishing minigame.) My advice is to take Hammer back to that first dungeon and level his weapon up there. Actually, at that point playing with Hammer was more a matter of luck than anything else. That game was fiendishly difficult in dungeon one! That just made us want to bet to more. It was a family project.
Microsoft seems to be ignoring the lesson here: You can't trust machines to babysit children.
Um, sure you can. Just don't expect them to be babysat well. Hey, my PS2 with Puzzle Quest or Dark Cloud works great for babysitting my kids. Doesn't mean that they won't stop playing the PS2 and start doing anything else though.
So many sites that were popular in that timeframe are no longer around. Internet Archives doesn't capture all those funny, cool sites that used to be there and are, sadly, no longer around.
What you mean the folks back in HS or college that spent time building a "subject shrine." on their favorite topic on geocities or angelfire and then got bored with it? Now we've got wikipedia, myspace, and facebook that serves the same niche. Actually wikipedia is slightly better in that you and all your friends are jointly editing the shrine to your topic so in theory it gets better. Actually, little subject wikis are mostly the best thing for your tiny subject that wikipedia doesn't want on their site. ;) You and all the other fans of that subject know that site's address and just work off it. And with google anyone new to the subject and actually find that site.
Now a days, you can waste time watching TV, anime, youtube, back then streaming audio was painful and you loved it when 3MB mp3s actually finished downloading from those ftp sites. I remember it taking days to download 300MB in college. I last weekend; I downloaded two dozen or so 150MB files, and they took maybe most of the morning.
I've meant to build several topic shrine websites, but I was generally happy just finding the work of others on those subjects. It's like webcomics. How many of those little webcomics last more than 6 months? O.k. there are a few that I come across and find out that they've been around for 5-6 years and just stopped updating last month or so. Or life happens; they get out of school, or change jobs or just get tired off it. It happens all the time.
It depends. You've already established that you have have a criminally-inclined genius and a ruthless, murderous streak. But more is required.
1. Can your organization's name be turned into a suitably menacing acronym?
2. Henchmen with unusual and remarkable deformities?
3. Henchwomen with names both unlikely and sexually suggestive?
4. Do you have a white persian cat?
5. Do you enjoy monologuing?
6. Can you credibly threaten the destruction of western civilization while maintaining a PG-13 rating?
I have to wonder how many billionaires tried this... They got 1. They skipped 2. 3 was fun. It turns out that most of them are allergic to 4. 5 turns out to be boring. 6 is where it turns out to be far funnier to just have fun with those 3 women. Why was it I even cared about taking over the world if I could afford a massive mobile base, a personal merc defense force, and lots of hot women?
Sigh. You are assuming that the EU will fall for nonsense like that again. As their announcement indicates, they learned from the WMP crap Microsoft pulled. Mozilla is on board to offer advice as well. They are not going to let Microsoft get away with any tricks this time, I bet.
Oh this is funny. Do you really think that even Mozilla would be able to come out on top? I see some Faustian deal where MS only appears to loose, but actually wins big later. Sorry, I'm just cynical. Really, I'd be happy if the EU just fined MS $100B and accepted no software/product vouchers to try to get out of it. If MS did attempt that, I'd actually want the EU to nationalize all MS assets that are in the EU.
Heck, I usually like MS products. I just would rather them get a sharp quick visible punishment rather than something that they can and will weasel out of.
I don't understand the people mocking this. Sure this is probably a service a la geocities with a minority of webpages worth of any interest. But some are. Internet gains million of new users and publishers and people just dismiss this as non-significant while we should try to build bridges. As ugly a Myspace-QQ bridge may sound, it could be a worthwhile objective...
There are times that I'd like to give China a small hint on the best way to culturally take the US would be. First mandate an entire generation of Chinese students learn some English. Next give/sell that entire generation net books/internet cell phones. Now you just tell that generation to pick a few English/US sites and let the rest of the world know the real average Chinese view point on various subjects.
Utter chaos happens or no one notices?
How would slashdot change if we suddenly gained double or triple the current user base yet all active average Chinese folks?
Because the BBC (and many others) have thousands of employees, and millions of dollars, and can potentially publish hundreds of stories/articles a second.
Slashdot, has like 35 employees, and fuck all for money in comparison, and the stories are published in sequence/intervals, rather than as they happen, or even as soon as possible.
It's been said before, but this is by no means the latest, freshest, most up to date news on the web, frankly I'm surprised it got here as quick as it did (although a few people mentioned it in off-topic comments hours ago)
We've got thousands of users that submit stories don't we? We need a better way of utilizing those thousands of users in order to pick fresher stories. I'm surprised it hasn't already happened already.
(I was tempted to make a joke about email services being like girlfriends and how you don't need one that never goes down, but I thought that might be tacky. :) )
Um, I don't know about you, but my spouse does go down fairly often. Say about twice a week. Now my e-mail provider may have what an hour or two down time through out the year. I don't think that I'd compare the two at all.