bringing Nazis or Hitler into an argument on a completely unrelated subject is the hallmark of weak debate skills and/or a weak case.
first of all terms such as "left" "right" "liberal" and "conservative" have little meaning anymore, any even less when comparing the 1930's incarnations of these poorly defined groups to their contemporary counterparts.
it was the "right" in classic terms that viewed itself as against empowering federal the government and against military interventionism, trying to blame hypothetically preventable actions during the second world war on one political party or ideology is a cheap shot and pandering for emotions. I agree a lot of time was wasted and many lives could have been saved had countries gotten involved sooner but as with everything in government, politics played a large role in the decision making process of both major parties.
On the issue of nuclear power, there are some obvious advantages to other energy sources but one disadvantage that is often overlooked is that the total lifetime cost of nuclear power is practically impossible to measure. The relatively low cost of power generation while the plant is operational is offset by the large initial cost of construction, and the absolutely enormous costs of decommission and cleanup. When a nuclear power plant goes out of service it leaves a massive complex and surrounding area that is all contaminated to various degrees, no one wants to live near it and no one wants to pay for the cleanup.
If they are forced to defend this sort of behavior they can portray it as simply an extension of logging all email traffic, which most ISP's have been doing for a pretty long time now. And not many people seem to be very worked up over that (I'm not saying they shouldn't be).
I would expect that some ISP's have been doing this for a while or at least experimenting with it on a small scale. If they feel they can get away with it even if they don't have any immediate need yet they probably view it as a potential resource, or at least something that doesn't hurt to have.
At worst they waste a little money on tape backup, they have potential advertising data, and there are other hypothetical benefits for them. For example if there was ever a criminal investigation, having the ability to (or to not) "discover" evidence that could incriminate a party because the information came across their network probably seems like a good thing to them. (remember the multiple times in the last few years emails have come back to haunt people and companies in court).
From the viewpoint of an ISP they really have nothing to lose by doing this, unless security/privacy is a major selling point for them (i.e. http://www.uncensorednews.com/), which for Comcast I'm guessing it isn't.
Creative usted to be good, now they make trash
on
Testing the Audigy
·
· Score: 1
I really wish everyone would stop looking at creative as having the highest quality sound equipment, just because most people see them as the only game in town doesn't make them any good. After having used a Live! card for over a year (yes I realize the Audigy is a new card, nice ripp-off of the herc gtxp with that external box btw) and having talked with several other people with cards in the same family I can say with absolute certainty that the Live! cards are the worst sound cards out there right now.
Some people defend these cards saying they have never had a problem with them, which I can see, I can imagine someone who does nothing but listen to mp3's over computer speakers and maby play games to never notice any big problems with them, particularly if they got a lucky mix of hardware (esp their motherboard).
But for anyone who happens to have a motherboard with a kt133/kt133a chipset this card is a curse, I spent a great deal of time trying to figure out why I was experiencing the data corruption problems and sound-loop crashes, and static at high levels, which are now well documented, and I might add, completely the fault of the sound card.
Some people blame it on the fact that the card hogs the pci bus way more than any sound card should (a few months ago I wouldn't have believed it if someone had claimed their sound card corrupted files on their hard drive as they moved them), some blame a fault in the firmware, and some blame it on the terrible drivers, especially the WinNT drivers which were clearly rushed since they use a significant amount of processor more than the 9x drivers in benchmarks to do the same thing and had features removed to get the first Win2000 version of them out the door which were never added back.
The data corruption problems have been fixed for the most part if you use a recent bios and a new set of the via ide drivers, and in some cases (myself for example) turn off delay transaction and lower the clock speed, along with other bios changes that hurt overall performance. But the sound crackling issues still exist, if I start to move something between two ide drives while doing something like playing an mp3 I can easily here crackling noises, also if you connect the live to a good set of speakers you can hear a huge amount of background static.
Some people may experience no problems, but if you are one of the unlucky ones you will have huge problems and creative will never do anything about it, after their last card tortured me I will never trust any of their hardware again. Do yourself a favor and get a "Hercules game theater xp" or a "turtle beach santa cruz" or a phillips card, but stay away from creative unless you enjoy pain or like to gamble.
Not sure if anyone mentioned it already but Ad Muncher http://www.admuncher.com/ is the best (imo) ad blocking program out there, it doesn't hog processor(popupkiller), or crash(popupkiller), or have a terrible ui (Proxomitron), and it's not tied to any particular browser(popup-ad-filter).
The installer is 65k total, written in assembly, it uses very little memory and virtually no processor, and is extremely customizable. The "advanced filters" option lets you specify any text in the page source to be replaced on the fly and supports wildcards, it can block banner and popup servers directly and not even draw the ad or the space it would take up, and it has lots of useful options like the block images with "typical banner dimensions" option stops a lot of ads without you ever having to take the time to make a filter for a particular one.
This has been a long time coming, Capcom giving up on making arcade hardware a while ago was a pretty strong sign arcades were on the way out this just makes it official.
I spent a great deal of time in arcades back in their prime, playing games like SF2, MK2, and all those classic Capcom side-scrollers. During summers often times I would go to a local nickel arcade two or three times a week and spend all day there when I could.
Back in the heyday of Street Fighter lots of people went to arcades, some of them went for the competition or the feel but most went because the games there (with their combined 20mhz processors) blew away anything you could get elsewhere by a wide margin. But it's different now, if you look at consoles (the Dreamcast for example) and compare a game to it's equivalent in the arcade (several Street Fighters for example) nothing has been downsampled and it runs at full speed easily.
So arcades started searching for something new they could provide that you couldn't get at home, and the only real thing that has come out of it is the gimmick games, the ones that have special hardware, stand on skis, sit on a motorcycle, dance on a platform, look through a scope. And from their desperation for a profit combined with the more elaborate hardware the price to play has increased greatly which has just made things worse.
It's sad to see them go but it's been pretty clear this was happening, over the last 5 years most of the arcades here have shut down, all that's left are the tiny ones crammed in the corner of malls or movie theaters or mini golf places, and even those have few people, and if you want to play an old pinball machine you probably have to go to a bar.
I'm really going to miss the arcade atmosphere, it's one thing to rail someone in Quake who is on the other side of the world but it's a different thing to toast the guy standing right next to you. And to you guys who say 'no big loss, i have my playstation', you are probably not the people who were really into arcades. Holding some little piece of hollow plastic in your hands is not the same as having a full sized joystick and real (clicking) arcade buttons that won't move an inch no matter how hard you slam on them. Or when you and another player barely clear a level in a game like "Lucky & Wild", gun in one hand steering wheel in the other and foot on the pedal, trying to stretch your quarter as far as it will go.
It's just a different feeling, I think other people who grew up eating dots and throwing fireballs know what I mean.
This isn't really anything new, there have been at least 2 other programs out there which completely remove the top and bottom ad bars (and cut off the slack space), the best one being "AIM Adjuster" (it doesn't work correctly with the new AIM released today (yet) but it works perfectly with all previous versions).
There will always be a way to remove the ads from AIM, people were doing it (better) before Frankel and they will keep doing it regardless of what happens to him, only reason this is a story is cause the person writing the program is owned by AOL, not because it's anything new.
Slashdot Mirror
bringing Nazis or Hitler into an argument on a completely unrelated subject is the hallmark of weak debate skills and/or a weak case.
first of all terms such as "left" "right" "liberal" and "conservative" have little meaning anymore, any even less when comparing the 1930's incarnations of these poorly defined groups to their contemporary counterparts.
it was the "right" in classic terms that viewed itself as against empowering federal the government and against military interventionism, trying to blame hypothetically preventable actions during the second world war on one political party or ideology is a cheap shot and pandering for emotions. I agree a lot of time was wasted and many lives could have been saved had countries gotten involved sooner but as with everything in government, politics played a large role in the decision making process of both major parties.
On the issue of nuclear power, there are some obvious advantages to other energy sources but one disadvantage that is often overlooked is that the total lifetime cost of nuclear power is practically impossible to measure. The relatively low cost of power generation while the plant is operational is offset by the large initial cost of construction, and the absolutely enormous costs of decommission and cleanup. When a nuclear power plant goes out of service it leaves a massive complex and surrounding area that is all contaminated to various degrees, no one wants to live near it and no one wants to pay for the cleanup.
I'm sure someone posted it already and I just missed it but in case someone hasn't seen the 1 second being cut, it's there
If they are forced to defend this sort of behavior they can portray it as simply an extension of logging all email traffic, which most ISP's have been doing for a pretty long time now. And not many people seem to be very worked up over that (I'm not saying they shouldn't be).
I would expect that some ISP's have been doing this for a while or at least experimenting with it on a small scale. If they feel they can get away with it even if they don't have any immediate need yet they probably view it as a potential resource, or at least something that doesn't hurt to have.
At worst they waste a little money on tape backup, they have potential advertising data, and there are other hypothetical benefits for them. For example if there was ever a criminal investigation, having the ability to (or to not) "discover" evidence that could incriminate a party because the information came across their network probably seems like a good thing to them. (remember the multiple times in the last few years emails have come back to haunt people and companies in court).
From the viewpoint of an ISP they really have nothing to lose by doing this, unless security/privacy is a major selling point for them (i.e. http://www.uncensorednews.com/), which for Comcast I'm guessing it isn't.
I really wish everyone would stop looking at creative as having the highest quality sound equipment, just because most people see them as the only game in town doesn't make them any good. After having used a Live! card for over a year (yes I realize the Audigy is a new card, nice ripp-off of the herc gtxp with that external box btw) and having talked with several other people with cards in the same family I can say with absolute certainty that the Live! cards are the worst sound cards out there right now.
Some people defend these cards saying they have never had a problem with them, which I can see, I can imagine someone who does nothing but listen to mp3's over computer speakers and maby play games to never notice any big problems with them, particularly if they got a lucky mix of hardware (esp their motherboard).
But for anyone who happens to have a motherboard with a kt133/kt133a chipset this card is a curse, I spent a great deal of time trying to figure out why I was experiencing the data corruption problems and sound-loop crashes, and static at high levels, which are now well documented, and I might add, completely the fault of the sound card.
Some people blame it on the fact that the card hogs the pci bus way more than any sound card should (a few months ago I wouldn't have believed it if someone had claimed their sound card corrupted files on their hard drive as they moved them), some blame a fault in the firmware, and some blame it on the terrible drivers, especially the WinNT drivers which were clearly rushed since they use a significant amount of processor more than the 9x drivers in benchmarks to do the same thing and had features removed to get the first Win2000 version of them out the door which were never added back.
The data corruption problems have been fixed for the most part if you use a recent bios and a new set of the via ide drivers, and in some cases (myself for example) turn off delay transaction and lower the clock speed, along with other bios changes that hurt overall performance. But the sound crackling issues still exist, if I start to move something between two ide drives while doing something like playing an mp3 I can easily here crackling noises, also if you connect the live to a good set of speakers you can hear a huge amount of background static.
Some people may experience no problems, but if you are one of the unlucky ones you will have huge problems and creative will never do anything about it, after their last card tortured me I will never trust any of their hardware again. Do yourself a favor and get a "Hercules game theater xp" or a "turtle beach santa cruz" or a phillips card, but stay away from creative unless you enjoy pain or like to gamble.
Not sure if anyone mentioned it already but Ad Muncher http://www.admuncher.com/ is the best (imo) ad blocking program out there, it doesn't hog processor(popupkiller), or crash(popupkiller), or have a terrible ui (Proxomitron), and it's not tied to any particular browser(popup-ad-filter).
The installer is 65k total, written in assembly, it uses very little memory and virtually no processor, and is extremely customizable. The "advanced filters" option lets you specify any text in the page source to be replaced on the fly and supports wildcards, it can block banner and popup servers directly and not even draw the ad or the space it would take up, and it has lots of useful options like the block images with "typical banner dimensions" option stops a lot of ads without you ever having to take the time to make a filter for a particular one.
This has been a long time coming, Capcom giving up on making arcade hardware a while ago was a pretty strong sign arcades were on the way out this just makes it official.
I spent a great deal of time in arcades back in their prime, playing games like SF2, MK2, and all those classic Capcom side-scrollers. During summers often times I would go to a local nickel arcade two or three times a week and spend all day there when I could.
Back in the heyday of Street Fighter lots of people went to arcades, some of them went for the competition or the feel but most went because the games there (with their combined 20mhz processors) blew away anything you could get elsewhere by a wide margin. But it's different now, if you look at consoles (the Dreamcast for example) and compare a game to it's equivalent in the arcade (several Street Fighters for example) nothing has been downsampled and it runs at full speed easily.
So arcades started searching for something new they could provide that you couldn't get at home, and the only real thing that has come out of it is the gimmick games, the ones that have special hardware, stand on skis, sit on a motorcycle, dance on a platform, look through a scope. And from their desperation for a profit combined with the more elaborate hardware the price to play has increased greatly which has just made things worse.
It's sad to see them go but it's been pretty clear this was happening, over the last 5 years most of the arcades here have shut down, all that's left are the tiny ones crammed in the corner of malls or movie theaters or mini golf places, and even those have few people, and if you want to play an old pinball machine you probably have to go to a bar.
I'm really going to miss the arcade atmosphere, it's one thing to rail someone in Quake who is on the other side of the world but it's a different thing to toast the guy standing right next to you. And to you guys who say 'no big loss, i have my playstation', you are probably not the people who were really into arcades. Holding some little piece of hollow plastic in your hands is not the same as having a full sized joystick and real (clicking) arcade buttons that won't move an inch no matter how hard you slam on them. Or when you and another player barely clear a level in a game like "Lucky & Wild", gun in one hand steering wheel in the other and foot on the pedal, trying to stretch your quarter as far as it will go.
It's just a different feeling, I think other people who grew up eating dots and throwing fireballs know what I mean.
There will always be a way to remove the ads from AIM, people were doing it (better) before Frankel and they will keep doing it regardless of what happens to him, only reason this is a story is cause the person writing the program is owned by AOL, not because it's anything new.