I think these games are terrible...I find the level of violence disgusting and I am very discouraged that the game companies are producing and marketing such slop. What next...Gang Rape III? Slicin' Dicin' Serial Killers? How about I'll do anything for Heroin: The Teenage Adventure.
That being said, I see that (as always) on slashdot, what started out as a discussion about a videogame has descended into "The United States Sucks", always the default topic on slashdot because it is popular with the 13-22 year old crowd in the US (a good chunk of the./ audience) who seem sophisitcated when they bash their own country.
Free speech in the US is not perfect, but it is more free than anywhere else. People censor sex here because the courts agreed that they can.
Running an ISP is not high-profit on a per user basis.
You get people paying a $20/month individual account fee but they want the services of a $600 dedicated connection.
So you have a choice...you limit what they can do, you ask them to leave, or you raise everyone's prices to make up for their behavior The ISP who provides me two T-1 lines as well as my home DSL service discovered 95% of it's DSL bandwidth was being used by the same 3% of the users. They had a choice; put on some limits or raise the price for everyone else.
Buffets can and sometimes do ask people not to come back, and ISPs can do it as well. It's not fair to ask the rest of us to pay $50 a month because you are a "data glutton" who does not care to pay for what he uses. If you want a commerical connection, then pay for the damn thing.
I'm annoyed at all the rude comments posted in this forum...in particular at all the people telling this guy to "get a life".
First of all, you're posting on slashdot forums that means you don't have enough to do yourself....try getting a life yourself before you criticize others.
Second, how is what he did any "worse" than adults who sit around playing Quake (or whatever) all night? How is this guy being a tron fan any geekier than my going to the Classic Gaming Expo?
Plus, he explained how he did everyhing to assist others...open source costuming, anyone?
Finally, it's really easy for you all to sit back behind your monitors and make fun of this guy's weight. Look at yourself in the mirror today (or in ten years) and see if you should really be laughing.
For the record, I have not been in costume since Halloween when I was 12, and I am actually underweight. I don't have a life...this is true. I just think you're all behaving like a bunch of 14-year-old slashdot jerks.
The 2nd amendment is outdated. We can now trust our government forever. We should give up that right and trust that the Smart People In Government will just tax us, take care of us, tell us what to do and what we can read and how to thing and when to wipe our bottom.
Just ask Thomas Paine, Jefferson or Franklin, right?
The state of Utah passed a law to ban spyware, and a spyware company based in New York (East coast, eastern time zone) is suing the State of Utah (Mountain time zone, west side of the Rocky mountains), claiming the law is unconstitutional.
So, to review:
(1) Nasty suing company in New York (2) State of Utah being sued to banning spyware.
Well, it was true. I worked there in the 1980s just before I went to the University and I got so tired of bugging people that I tended to make things up just because it seemed rude. But I got in trouble for not being agressive enough at collecting them. Before the computers arrived, I would just wait until the customer left then enter somebody elses data on the store copy of the reciept. We never looked at them again, anyway.
Also I got in trouble because the data entry people could not read my handwriting on the address sometimes; the district manager gave me a nasty phonecall.
Your point is taken, but I don't have that much disposable income anymore. If I had a choice of "basic" cable with some decent channels, it would be nice. Like "choose any 10 for $10". There are only three cable channels I watch, and at that rate I am paying like $2/hour. That is too much considering a third seems to be ads, and after-hours it is all infomercial crap.
But the problem is that cable TV is now so expensive I have had to shut it off. The "basic" package gives me all the shopping channels and religious networks. If I want the news channels, TLC, history, anything like that, I've got to drop $40+ per month. That is just too expensive for me.
I would have to agree with you on the lower-quality components. I ordered cap kits for some video monitors and the new capacitors were such off-brand components that I really wondered if I should replace the old ones...which at least were name-brand.
I think it is just a case of cost. We buy from no-name suppliers in Taiwan who offer a lower cost component, and they buy from no-name suppliers who offer them a lower-cost component and suddenly you get what you pay for.
At the risk of sounding "me too", I've got to agree that it can be disappointing how under-educated the/. community can be when it comes to non-tech issues.
This is fantastic news, if it works. This is exactly what the web should be about. The free exchange of knowledge is what the information age should be all about.
I was told there was "nothing wrong with me", and I have a chronic disease. That's why I had to leave medicine and my MD degree behind...because I was convinced my it was "just stress" and I was making myself sick.
For several years I was told it was "all in my head" and even though I had already figured out what the disease was. If I told the physicians what I had figured out and the evidence to back it up, they labeled me as a hypochondriac and sent me out the door.
I was starting to think they were right until I almost died, then biopsies confirmed what I had suspected all along. But I had never been examined or tested properly.
Agreed. If there was not incentive to make money, Myriad would not have developed the procedure at all. This represents several years of work, and they have to pay it back somehow.
Hell, there are a lot of causes for breast cancer, but when is the last time you saw somebody crying out for testicular cancer?
How many males do you know who have even had a testicular screening exam? It's like a breast exam was 30 years ago; they are afraid to ask and too embarassed to talk about it. And most physicians don't want to deal with it so they don't bring it up.
I used to work in heath care. I've seen young men die or be castrated from testicular cancer. And nobody cares; they get no sympathy from the world at large. If a female has a breast removed the world crowds around her to express their sympathy. But if a young man in his 20s has his testicles removed society:
(1) does not want to hear about it 'cause it is "dirty".
(2) Tells him not to whine about it; just "be a man".
(3) If he feels that he is no longer a man or is upset that he cannot bear children, he is told that he is some sort of monobrow stupid male lacking in sophistication. An "enlightened" male is supposed to just shrug it off and not be bothered by it. Testicles are literally what make men into men; the hormones change body development. But society does not allow men to be upset by their loss.
If you told a female who thinks her body was mutilated by a mastectomy that she just needs to pull herself up and "get over it", you would be nailed to a post by 500 breast cancer support groups. That sort of thing happens all the time in testicular cancer to young men (kids, really) and nobody gives a damn about them.
So don't tell me that male cancers or health problems are treated more seriously than female. That is a complete pile of crap.
LCDs produce a lot of waste during manufacturing. While I have no numbers to back me up, I would suspect an LCD to consume as many or more resources to produce than a CRT of the same size. There is a high defect rate on the screens, and LCD screens are manufactured in a manner similar to semiconductors which is a very nasty process. Yes, the lead is a problem in the CRT. But the LCD backlight does use a high-voltage power supply and I have yet to see one that can be replaced for less than the cost of a new monitor.
Also, most people replace CRTs that still work fine, but are just too old, too low-resolution, or "are not cool looking".
I take the other path; I buy a very nice CRT and keep it as long as I can; my main CRT is going on six years old now. Perhaps one day LCD screens will be just as good and I can use them. But AFAIK they are not any more "environmentally friendly".
They usually get it right. The news loves to make a massive deal about their screwups, but all of these things are high-risk.
With paper-thin budgets thanks to our damn legislators, they do what they can with what they have...but space is not cheap, and mistakes happen when you try to "do it cheap".
The company will declare bankruptcy and walk away. They'll just start again and do it until they get caught.
Some of our junk faxes here try very hard to look like they came from the benefits department at our "home office". But since our "benefits department" is in the next cubicle, I don't believe them.
One thing I never explained...what I was referring to by "shipped" was the tendancy for upper-class European (usually British) families to ship "problem children" (illegitimate, retarded, criminal, big jerk) to the United States so they would not give the family a bad name. This was mainly in the 18th and 19th centuries.
I suspect that this is the reason for a higher-than-normal problems in some groups in the US and Australia. I don't know if this is some sort of a genetic issue, or--as I suspect--a case of children acting like their parents.
One of my ancestors was an illegitimate child of a British duke, so I know what I am talking about here...he was a "problem" they got rid of by shipping him to the US.
I was generalizing, which is always bad, including right now. My comments about Europe sending their "scum class" to the US is poorly worded and refers to events 100 years ago. If I had been thinking with the logical rather than the emotional part of my brain, I would have rewritten the entire argument.
I would suspect the percentage of European-born drug users in the US as a population of US drug abusers is avoid education because it is too "mainstream" to be intelligent--it's not cool to be smart in the youth populations in many of our larger cities; the poorer, less educated and more downtrodden you can appear, the better. I would not expect somebody in the US to know the details of Hungary (like their wonderful Tokay wines), I would at least expect them to know of the capital.
But when I have seen on European television seems to be people going into the poorest US neighborhoods and finding some citizen who did not even complete high school, then firing a bunch of questions at them.
This happened in Salt Lake City during the Olympics; French TV was filming at an Afghan restaurant during the olympic opening ceremonies.
I talked to the restaurant owner the next day. He was very upset. The French had done a whole story about how his restraunt was empty because Americans are "so scared and stupid" they think they will be poisoned at an Afhgan restaurant...they did not mention that the opening ceremonies were on and the entire downtown area was either glued to their TV or watching the 24-inch firework shells launching from the tops of the downtown buildings.
My European coworkers were always laughing at me because of what some American pop star said or did. Or telling me I loved violence and wanted to murder people because of some action movie produced in the US. Or explaining to me things like "the capital of France is Paris", just in case I did not know.
Even a person I worked with from the UK told me how violent and crime-ridden the US was compared to England...even though it turned out the rates in her home town of London were actually higher.
Slashdot Mirror
I think these games are terrible...I find the level of violence disgusting and I am very discouraged that the game companies are producing and marketing such slop. What next...Gang Rape III? Slicin' Dicin' Serial Killers? How about I'll do anything for Heroin: The Teenage Adventure.
./ audience) who seem sophisitcated when they bash their own country.
That being said, I see that (as always) on slashdot, what started out as a discussion about a videogame has descended into "The United States Sucks", always the default topic on slashdot because it is popular with the 13-22 year old crowd in the US (a good chunk of the
Free speech in the US is not perfect, but it is more free than anywhere else. People censor sex here because the courts agreed that they can.
Running an ISP is not high-profit on a per user basis.
You get people paying a $20/month individual account fee but they want the services of a $600 dedicated connection.
So you have a choice...you limit what they can do, you ask them to leave, or you raise everyone's prices to make up for their behavior The ISP who provides me two T-1 lines as well as my home DSL service discovered 95% of it's DSL bandwidth was being used by the same 3% of the users. They had a choice; put on some limits or raise the price for everyone else.
Buffets can and sometimes do ask people not to come back, and ISPs can do it as well. It's not fair to ask the rest of us to pay $50 a month because you are a "data glutton" who does not care to pay for what he uses. If you want a commerical connection, then pay for the damn thing.
The've got engine upgrades to 190HP available from DMC USA.
\begin{rant}
I'm annoyed at all the rude comments posted in this forum...in particular at all the people telling this guy to "get a life".
First of all, you're posting on slashdot forums that means you don't have enough to do yourself....try getting a life yourself before you criticize others.
Second, how is what he did any "worse" than adults who sit around playing Quake (or whatever) all night? How is this guy being a tron fan any geekier than my going to the Classic Gaming Expo?
Plus, he explained how he did everyhing to assist others...open source costuming, anyone?
Finally, it's really easy for you all to sit back behind your monitors and make fun of this guy's weight. Look at yourself in the mirror today (or in ten years) and see if you should really be laughing.
For the record, I have not been in costume since Halloween when I was 12, and I am actually underweight. I don't have a life...this is true. I just think you're all behaving like a bunch of 14-year-old slashdot jerks.
\end{rant}
The 2nd amendment is outdated. We can now trust our government forever. We should give up that right and trust that the Smart People In Government will just tax us, take care of us, tell us what to do and what we can read and how to thing and when to wipe our bottom.
Just ask Thomas Paine, Jefferson or Franklin, right?
Okay, what's the first rule of slashdot?
(1) Read the article.
Or even read the posting!
The company is in New York. Not Utah.
The state of Utah passed a law to ban spyware, and a spyware company based in New York (East coast, eastern time zone) is suing the State of Utah (Mountain time zone, west side of the Rocky mountains), claiming the law is unconstitutional.
So, to review:
(1) Nasty suing company in New York
(2) State of Utah being sued to banning spyware.
Got it now?
I agree that a lot of the ./ group will not give good advice, but neither will an electrician.
What you really need here is an experienced telco person.
Well, it was true. I worked there in the 1980s just before I went to the University and I got so tired of bugging people that I tended to make things up just because it seemed rude. But I got in trouble for not being agressive enough at collecting them. Before the computers arrived, I would just wait until the customer left then enter somebody elses data on the store copy of the reciept. We never looked at them again, anyway.
Also I got in trouble because the data entry people could not read my handwriting on the address sometimes; the district manager gave me a nasty phonecall.
Your point is taken, but I don't have that much disposable income anymore. If I had a choice of "basic" cable with some decent channels, it would be nice. Like "choose any 10 for $10". There are only three cable channels I watch, and at that rate I am paying like $2/hour. That is too much considering a third seems to be ads, and after-hours it is all infomercial crap.
Yeah, you have a good point.
But the problem is that cable TV is now so expensive
I have had to shut it off. The "basic" package
gives me all the shopping channels and religious
networks. If I want the news channels, TLC, history, anything like that, I've got to drop $40+ per month. That is just too expensive for me.
I would have to agree with you on the lower-quality components. I ordered cap kits for some video monitors and the new capacitors were such off-brand components that I really wondered if I should replace the old ones...which at least were name-brand.
I think it is just a case of cost. We buy from no-name suppliers in Taiwan who offer a lower cost component, and they buy from no-name suppliers who offer them a lower-cost component and suddenly you get what you pay for.
Mil-grade tantalum caps are very expensive, and
very good.
At the risk of sounding "me too", I've got to agree /. community can be when it comes to non-tech issues.
that it can be disappointing how under-educated the
This is fantastic news, if it works. This is exactly what the web should be about. The free exchange of knowledge is what the information age
should be all about.
I was told there was "nothing wrong with me", and I have a chronic disease. That's why I had to leave medicine and my MD degree behind...because I was convinced my it was "just stress" and I was making myself sick.
For several years I was told it was "all in my head" and even though I had already figured out what the disease was. If I told the physicians what I had figured out and the evidence to back it up, they labeled me as a hypochondriac and sent me out the door.
I was starting to think they were right until I almost died, then biopsies confirmed what I had suspected all along. But I had never been examined or tested properly.
Agreed. If there was not incentive to make money, Myriad would not have developed the procedure at all. This represents several years of work, and they have to pay it back somehow.
This is moderated as score 3?
Hell, there are a lot of causes for breast cancer, but when is the last time you saw somebody crying out for testicular cancer?
How many males do you know who have even had a testicular screening exam? It's like a breast exam was 30 years ago; they are afraid to ask and too embarassed to talk about it. And most physicians don't want to deal with it so they don't bring it up.
I used to work in heath care. I've seen young men die or be castrated from testicular cancer. And nobody cares; they get no sympathy from the world at large. If a female has a breast removed the world crowds around her to express their sympathy. But if a young man in his 20s has his testicles removed society:
(1) does not want to hear about it 'cause it is "dirty".
(2) Tells him not to whine about it; just "be a man".
(3) If he feels that he is no longer a man or is upset that he cannot bear children, he is told that he is some sort of monobrow stupid male lacking in sophistication. An "enlightened" male is supposed to just shrug it off and not be bothered by it. Testicles are literally what make men into men; the hormones change body development. But society does not allow men to be upset by their loss.
If you told a female who thinks her body was mutilated by a mastectomy that she just needs to pull herself up and "get over it", you would be nailed to a post by 500 breast cancer support groups. That sort of thing happens all the time in testicular cancer to young men (kids, really) and nobody gives a damn about them.
So don't tell me that male cancers or health problems are treated more seriously than female. That is a complete pile of crap.
Minux was the basis for the Linux kernel, true.
But FSF developed the rest of the operating system, as AFAIK the compiler.
LCDs produce a lot of waste during manufacturing. While I have no numbers to back me up, I would suspect an LCD to consume as many or more resources to produce than a CRT of the same size. There is a high defect rate on the screens, and LCD screens are manufactured in a manner similar to semiconductors which is a very nasty process. Yes, the lead is a problem in the CRT. But the LCD backlight does use a high-voltage power supply and I have yet to see one that can be replaced for less than the cost of a new monitor.
Also, most people replace CRTs that still work fine, but are just too old, too low-resolution, or "are not cool looking".
I take the other path; I buy a very nice CRT and keep it as long as I can; my main CRT is going on six years old now. Perhaps one day LCD screens will be just as good and I can use them. But AFAIK they are not any more "environmentally friendly".
They usually get it right. The news loves to make a massive deal about their screwups, but all of these things are high-risk.
With paper-thin budgets thanks to our damn legislators, they do what they can with what they have...but space is not cheap, and mistakes happen when you try to "do it cheap".
I think he misspelled "Babar Shop"... So I assume he meant a hip store that sells cartoon Elephant memorabilia.
Now that would be cool!
Remember, recordable CDs are not quite the same format as a standard CD, either.
The company will declare bankruptcy and walk away. They'll just start again and do it until they get caught.
Some of our junk faxes here try very hard to look like they came from the benefits department at our "home office". But since our "benefits department" is in the next cubicle, I don't believe them.
One thing I never explained...what I was referring to by "shipped" was the tendancy for upper-class European (usually British) families to ship "problem children" (illegitimate, retarded, criminal, big jerk) to the United States so they would not give the family a bad name. This was mainly in the 18th and 19th centuries.
I suspect that this is the reason for a higher-than-normal problems in some groups in the US and Australia. I don't know if this is some sort of a genetic issue, or--as I suspect--a case of children acting like their parents.
One of my ancestors was an illegitimate child of a British duke, so I know what I am talking about here...he was a "problem" they got rid of by shipping him to the US.
Your comments are intelligent and well-taken.
I was generalizing, which is always bad, including right now. My comments about Europe sending their "scum class" to the US is poorly worded and refers to events 100 years ago. If I had been thinking with the logical rather than the emotional part of my brain, I would have rewritten the entire argument.
I would suspect the percentage of European-born drug users in the US as a population of US drug abusers is avoid education because it is too "mainstream" to be intelligent--it's not cool to be smart in the youth populations in many of our larger cities; the poorer, less educated and more downtrodden you can appear, the better. I would not expect somebody in the US to know the details of Hungary (like their wonderful Tokay wines), I would at least expect them to know of the capital.
But when I have seen on European television seems to be people going into the poorest US neighborhoods and finding some citizen who did not even complete high school, then firing a bunch of questions at them.
This happened in Salt Lake City during the Olympics; French TV was filming at an Afghan restaurant during the olympic opening ceremonies.
I talked to the restaurant owner the next day. He was very upset. The French had done a whole story about how his restraunt was empty because Americans are "so scared and stupid" they think they will be poisoned at an Afhgan restaurant...they did not mention that the opening ceremonies were on and the entire downtown area was either glued to their TV or watching the 24-inch firework shells launching from the tops of the downtown buildings.
My European coworkers were always laughing at me because of what some American pop star said or did. Or telling me I loved violence and wanted to murder people because of some action movie produced in the US. Or explaining to me things like "the capital of France is Paris", just in case I did not know.
Even a person I worked with from the UK told me how violent and crime-ridden the US was compared to England...even though it turned out the rates in her home town of London were actually higher.
And remember, Big Brother Is Watching You.
(Insert Ayn Rand joke here)