Apple isn't free to redefine the meaning of computer at will. Unless there is specific verbage to the contrary in the EULA, then the Apple TV most certainly IS a computer and Apple can't just say "No it isn't!".
The DVR box I lease from my cable company has a CPU, OS, I/O ports, and HDD. It is not a personal computer, in the legal sense of the word. AppleTV, from what I've heard of it, is in the same boat.
You can try and be pendantic and say "it's a computer technically!" and you're right -- but so are (depending on when you bought them) your microwave, toaster, coffee pot, and air conditioner. Neither of which are "personal computers" in any real sense of the word.
Did I miss something? Is that a new spin on the "There are 10 types of people in the world, those that know binary and those that don't."? Yes. It's a spin that recognizes the concept of zero.
No, see, it doesnt work that way. What you believe cannot be proven, period, therefore it is imaginary.
1: The existence of God is proven (or disproven) definitively to every dead human being.
2: You cannot prove that yesterday happened; are you calling my Big Mac imaginary? I cannot prove you exist; are you calling/. imaginary?
3: If you can't even be bothered to understand the basic context of the word "imaginary" -- that is, "intentionally conceived without basis in reality" -- then you shouldn't use it. When you say that God is imaginary, you are implying that everyone who believes in God is intentionally stating a falsehood, which there is zero support for. The correct term you're thinking of is "false" or "wrong", which have the proper connotation of earnest belief but incorrect result.)
1: Authorize a single transaction, including date/time, CC#, expiration, and ammount.
2: Authorize "recurring payments", which stores #1 and includes what limits (if any) on the recurrence. (15/month? "paid in full" a month?)
3: For each recurring payment, including CC# (et al) and reference to #1. Processor checks #1, and if it is (1) still valid and unrefuted and (2) satisfies #2's limits processes the payments.
I'm not a mechanic but even I know that an expert can adjust his engine...
Stop. You just admitted my point.
An expert mechanic will buy his own car from an assembly line and modify it. They will get a better result than their customer, but they will tell their customer to buy an assembly line car and let him check it every few months or so. A small segment of the market will have everything hand-assembled by very well paid expert mechanics, but even those cars (yes, even every one in the Daytona 500) will use off-the-shelf parts wherever they can, because their time is simply better spent building from a solid base than making that base in the first place.
I never said that an expert won't give you a better result, in a computer or a car. You said that "All software requires a geek to install and support it", and that somehow most folk can't administer their own machines. Of course they can -- "administering" a home PC is no more difficult than the routine "drain, swap, fill" maintenance in an automobile.
All any person smart enough to pay for their own computer needs to administer their own computer is a ~ten part user guide. The lack of said guide is OUR fault, not theirs.
If your users don't know what's going on, it's YOUR fault. Your primary skill is not technical knowledge, it is communication... and, really, you seem pretty bad at it.
They have spread the myth that laypeople can administer their own machines
"GNU called. They want their snooty arrogance back!"
Face it. Complex systems become mostly worked out, and then smart experts create turn-key implementations of said systems, which after ten years or so are better than what an expert could do themselves. It happened with assembly lines. It happened with automobiles. And it happened with computers, more than ten years ago.
(And a computer really isn't THAT complicated. It's not magic, it's not rocket science. It's an automobile that uses digits, components, and abstraction rather than chemistry, mechanics, and physics.)
Because this is mudslinging, which means someone wants to lie to make HP fail. Which means that HP has something worth buying. Which, in turn, means that you should spend the ten minutes to call someone, get a straight answer, and go from there.
remember even making a single player game fun is hard...
Which has zero do to with an MMOG. A single player is balanced around a single player, typically playing a pre-known character, is the center of the whole game. A good MMOG wouldn't try and pretend that it is so, because an idea like that won't last much longer than their first chat session.
doing so with a multiplayer game with mulitiple classes and several valid avenues of advancement/playing styles is very hard and only a few companies ever get it right. The rest just hack somethign out and promise updates.
An MMOG is not a single-player CRPG with a multiplayer mode. It's an automated tabletop RPG without a GM and with rigid game-time.
Getting the darn thing right isn't hard; attracting both funding and a crowd of players to pay for said funding, and making it look PS3-style pretty is.
Though I will grant that majority rule is "working", there certainly was no turning point.
In 2000, the election was decided by the Supreme Court.
In 2002, a popular President led his party to a majority.
In 2004, dirty tricks and a near-repeat of 2000 led for many to question the basic integrty of our electoral system.
In 2006, those thoughts about dirty tricks were proven, if not without merit, then without panic.
'06 only subjected (1/2 * (1 + 1/3)/2) 1/3 of the elected federal government to an election. 2008 will affect by far a greater number, and have a correspondingly greater effect. But the end of what was a ten-year tide shifted in 2006.
The Dems do not represent the public that installed them, nor do they have any intention of reversing the war agenda.
Most Americans think that, you know, we really should (1) finish what we started and (2) bring Man's Hell on the terrorists who attacked us. You have every right to think that we should pull out now, no questions asked -- but you're not in the majority, you're not even in a plurality, and the government not agreeing with you does not mean that they aren't representing their constituents.
And that's all before we even dwell on (1) the razor-slim margin in the Senate, far less than even the 60 needed to beat a filibuster or (2) the fact that there is a sitting President who has to sign most of what Congress does.
While I'm thinking about it, why aren't the car engines run like the train engines, with the diesel motor running at a more or less constant rate refueling the batteries that run the electric motors that actually turn the wheels
Because batteries are expensive and heavy. But, don't worry, GM is working on it. (And with a $100,000 electric car on the market, it's unlikely they'll pull it due to a feasibility study.)
Oh, and many states (NY included) ban residential diesel. I couldn't get a diesel if I wanted to.
C'mon. More was done for less, on the same ground in 1776.
Nope. The 2006 elections should be marked in history, as a turning point that proved Democracy works.
It's not that you can't game the system. It's that if you do game the system, all you'll do is tilt the electorate far enough that further gaming results in revolution.
You want millions of combinations of skillsets, each combination has to be developed and balanced.
why?
In a non-level based game, your skills have to only adhere to three rules:
1: The skill should be fun. 2: No trade skill should be not worthwhile. 3: Common skills must be useful almost all the time; rare skills must not overpower common skills.
In a level-based game, you have a slightly harder design, with four rules.
3: No combination of Defensive skills should make a character invincible for the rest of their career. 4: No combination of Offensive skills should make a character useless in battle against XP-awarding foes.
Really, though, character design is not something that MMORPGs do poorly. The problem is social interaction and world statefulness. (One can only defeat Frostfire so many times before the illusion is gone.)
Firstly: those "rules" are so vague that they are virtually meaningless A statement that belies your predisposition. "Don't steal from people" is pretty cut and dry -- the only vaugeness is in who is a "people."
Second: One could come up with countless examples of those "laws" contradicting each other (e.g. what if your 'job' is that of a thief?, the institutional theft from and murdering of the Jews was permitted by Nazi law, most still consider those acts immoral) Show me a society where thievery is morally approved, and I'll show you one that steals from "not-people."
The attempted genocide of the Jews by the Nazis is a perfect example of dehumanization -- a basic requirement to violate any of our natural morality.
The entire assertion is simply false. Some societies don't view "not doing your job" as immoral, some societies deem lying as [acceptable] (e.g. white lies)
I didn't say no one lived in poverty, nor that it wasn't bad. I said that the way they calculate whether someone is poor is flawed and includes too many people who are merely "low-income".
It also includes too few who are high-debt, in that their annual net income, after you deduct debt payments, is below the poverty level.
Avoid the tax by buying with gold. It's exempt from tax due to the fact that it's a good with intrinsic value. Uhm, what?
Care to quote me the law that says that? Far as I know, the IRS et al treat any transaction as a "cash" transaction, and exempt or apply those taxes based on the good being sold or the purchaser, not the method of payment.
Can you point to an individual ever being recognized by a court of law as a "common carrier"? Can you point to any time when someone was held liable for the actions of someone else freely using their internet service, when said someone made all reasonable services to aid law enforcement (i.e., supplying them with such logs are regularly visited, banning the MAC address of anyone proven to be performing illegal actions, etc.)
I suppose it is possible in New Mexico, but many legislations prohibits "special laws", that is, laws that only apply to one or a few named individuals or companies. Yes, but as I understand it (IANAL), a law noting a name or title for something is interpreted to apply to everyone; so, if the law is to refer to all former mayors of East Bumfrak, NM as "Oh Great One", the law means "everyone has to call X that", not "X has the special right of being called that."
You wrote a book in word? Man are you masogist or something? No, he's a "writer". Anyone who writes in a layout program is, well, swatting a fly with bottle of bug spray.
I bet you also did not use styles for formatting too. Try it, prefeably in OOo, but MSword knows the concept too (but chooses to pull out your nails for entertainment instead). Styles have LONG been the hallmark of good word processing -- and OOo's styles are just as bad as Word's.
The only thing I don't like about Word '07 is how they drank the cool-aid and made styles something fundamentally different from fonts in the UI... although they did give them a nice area all of their own, and added "style-sets" to make the concept work even better.
As to the topic at hand -- anyone who wants to use OOo is getting most of a six-year-old MS UI, with a few improvements that made it through an ego-driven committee meeting. There are still a good dozen things I do in Word or Excel routinely that are either impossible or inordinately difficult in OOo, and only really one thing I can do in OOo that I can't in Word.
what is it about American cars that you feel makes them superior to European cars?
In essence, they're more tolerant of individual part failure than European cars. Every European import I've seen has been, well, finicky as to exactly how regular its maintenance is and exactly what's allowed go to wrong. The American cars, OTOH, tend to "just work."
(And this is ignoring things like "performance" and "ease of repair.")
To give an example: Two items seeking investment in england around 1775 was the steam powered troop transport and the machine gun. The companies proposed to invest in inventing and developing these. Neither stock offering for these was subsrcibed. As a result the english lost the war in America.
You're forgetting three amazingly important facts, and blatantly ignoring another.
0: Technology in the 18th century was essentially all hand-crafted, and very, VERY error prone. The first attempt at a submarine in the modern warfare was "the turtle", which failed amazingly during the revolution.
1: The UK had bigger worries at the time than the American Revolution. The armies they sent were not the best, and Parliment knew better than to try and spend more than the colonies ever sent in direct taxes.
2: The Redcoats were a highly traditional force; there's a reason for the American charactiture of them as hidebound and inflexible fools. Heck, European armies were still using human wave tactics in the first World War.
3: Even if the British were able to create a technologial advantage, and even if they were able to get them in appreciable quantity, and even if they send them to the Revolution, the advantage would not have lasted for long. Copyrights and Patents are only respected by allies in peacetime -- and the Americans ignored foreign IP for generations after '76.
The point is that there is no "universal ethics", it's all completely subjective.
Don't steal from people. Don't lie to people. Don't kill people without the blessing of the law. Do your job.
Those four items are basic morality you will find in any society with more than three generations in it. They have differing definitions of what "people" are, (and some variables as to what is and isn't property, and what is and isn't someone's job) but they're as fundamental to human psychology as the desire to mate.
And if you think that every other society has always considered itself "most humane", you're even more ignorant of history than you are of sociology. The Romans held themselves up as "civilized", the Muslims "godly", and so on. It's less than 500 years that there has been any society that valued being nice to everyone as a fundamental measure of goodness, and less than 50 that this has been a worldwide ideal.
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Apple isn't free to redefine the meaning of computer at will. Unless there is specific verbage to the contrary in the EULA, then the Apple TV most certainly IS a computer and Apple can't just say "No it isn't!".
The DVR box I lease from my cable company has a CPU, OS, I/O ports, and HDD. It is not a personal computer, in the legal sense of the word. AppleTV, from what I've heard of it, is in the same boat.
You can try and be pendantic and say "it's a computer technically!" and you're right -- but so are (depending on when you bought them) your microwave, toaster, coffee pot, and air conditioner. Neither of which are "personal computers" in any real sense of the word.
No, see, it doesnt work that way. What you believe cannot be proven, period, therefore it is imaginary.
/. imaginary?
1: The existence of God is proven (or disproven) definitively to every dead human being.
2: You cannot prove that yesterday happened; are you calling my Big Mac imaginary? I cannot prove you exist; are you calling
3: If you can't even be bothered to understand the basic context of the word "imaginary" -- that is, "intentionally conceived without basis in reality" -- then you shouldn't use it. When you say that God is imaginary, you are implying that everyone who believes in God is intentionally stating a falsehood, which there is zero support for. The correct term you're thinking of is "false" or "wrong", which have the proper connotation of earnest belief but incorrect result.)
This is easy.
1: Authorize a single transaction, including date/time, CC#, expiration, and ammount.
2: Authorize "recurring payments", which stores #1 and includes what limits (if any) on the recurrence. (15/month? "paid in full" a month?)
3: For each recurring payment, including CC# (et al) and reference to #1. Processor checks #1, and if it is (1) still valid and unrefuted and (2) satisfies #2's limits processes the payments.
I'm not a mechanic but even I know that an expert can adjust his engine...
Stop. You just admitted my point.
An expert mechanic will buy his own car from an assembly line and modify it. They will get a better result than their customer, but they will tell their customer to buy an assembly line car and let him check it every few months or so. A small segment of the market will have everything hand-assembled by very well paid expert mechanics, but even those cars (yes, even every one in the Daytona 500) will use off-the-shelf parts wherever they can, because their time is simply better spent building from a solid base than making that base in the first place.
I never said that an expert won't give you a better result, in a computer or a car. You said that "All software requires a geek to install and support it", and that somehow most folk can't administer their own machines. Of course they can -- "administering" a home PC is no more difficult than the routine "drain, swap, fill" maintenance in an automobile.
All any person smart enough to pay for their own computer needs to administer their own computer is a ~ten part user guide. The lack of said guide is OUR fault, not theirs.
Hi, I work in tech support.
If your users don't know what's going on, it's YOUR fault. Your primary skill is not technical knowledge, it is communication... and, really, you seem pretty bad at it.
They have spread the myth that laypeople can administer their own machines
"GNU called. They want their snooty arrogance back!"
Face it. Complex systems become mostly worked out, and then smart experts create turn-key implementations of said systems, which after ten years or so are better than what an expert could do themselves. It happened with assembly lines. It happened with automobiles. And it happened with computers, more than ten years ago.
(And a computer really isn't THAT complicated. It's not magic, it's not rocket science. It's an automobile that uses digits, components, and abstraction rather than chemistry, mechanics, and physics.)
Because this is mudslinging, which means someone wants to lie to make HP fail. Which means that HP has something worth buying. Which, in turn, means that you should spend the ten minutes to call someone, get a straight answer, and go from there.
remember even making a single player game fun is hard...
Which has zero do to with an MMOG. A single player is balanced around a single player, typically playing a pre-known character, is the center of the whole game. A good MMOG wouldn't try and pretend that it is so, because an idea like that won't last much longer than their first chat session.
doing so with a multiplayer game with mulitiple classes and several valid avenues of advancement/playing styles is very hard and only a few companies ever get it right. The rest just hack somethign out and promise updates.
An MMOG is not a single-player CRPG with a multiplayer mode. It's an automated tabletop RPG without a GM and with rigid game-time.
Getting the darn thing right isn't hard; attracting both funding and a crowd of players to pay for said funding, and making it look PS3-style pretty is.
Though I will grant that majority rule is "working", there certainly was no turning point.
In 2000, the election was decided by the Supreme Court.
In 2002, a popular President led his party to a majority.
In 2004, dirty tricks and a near-repeat of 2000 led for many to question the basic integrty of our electoral system.
In 2006, those thoughts about dirty tricks were proven, if not without merit, then without panic.
'06 only subjected (1/2 * (1 + 1/3)/2) 1/3 of the elected federal government to an election. 2008 will affect by far a greater number, and have a correspondingly greater effect. But the end of what was a ten-year tide shifted in 2006.
The Dems do not represent the public that installed them, nor do they have any intention of reversing the war agenda.
Most Americans think that, you know, we really should (1) finish what we started and (2) bring Man's Hell on the terrorists who attacked us. You have every right to think that we should pull out now, no questions asked -- but you're not in the majority, you're not even in a plurality, and the government not agreeing with you does not mean that they aren't representing their constituents.
And that's all before we even dwell on (1) the razor-slim margin in the Senate, far less than even the 60 needed to beat a filibuster or (2) the fact that there is a sitting President who has to sign most of what Congress does.
While I'm thinking about it, why aren't the car engines run like the train engines, with the diesel motor running at a more or less constant rate refueling the batteries that run the electric motors that actually turn the wheels
Because batteries are expensive and heavy. But, don't worry, GM is working on it. (And with a $100,000 electric car on the market, it's unlikely they'll pull it due to a feasibility study.)
Oh, and many states (NY included) ban residential diesel. I couldn't get a diesel if I wanted to.
This has just ruled out HP. Damned if I have to reload FreeDOS if anything goes wrong...
Stop. call HP. I guarantee you that the sales person you talk to about a no-Windows laptop can tell you what you'll have to do for warranty service.
C'mon. More was done for less, on the same ground in 1776.
Nope. The 2006 elections should be marked in history, as a turning point that proved Democracy works.
It's not that you can't game the system. It's that if you do game the system, all you'll do is tilt the electorate far enough that further gaming results in revolution.
You want millions of combinations of skillsets, each combination has to be developed and balanced.
why?
In a non-level based game, your skills have to only adhere to three rules:
1: The skill should be fun.
2: No trade skill should be not worthwhile.
3: Common skills must be useful almost all the time; rare skills must not overpower common skills.
In a level-based game, you have a slightly harder design, with four rules.
3: No combination of Defensive skills should make a character invincible for the rest of their career.
4: No combination of Offensive skills should make a character useless in battle against XP-awarding foes.
Really, though, character design is not something that MMORPGs do poorly. The problem is social interaction and world statefulness. (One can only defeat Frostfire so many times before the illusion is gone.)
The attempted genocide of the Jews by the Nazis is a perfect example of dehumanization -- a basic requirement to violate any of our natural morality.
The entire assertion is simply false. Some societies don't view "not doing your job" as immoral, some societies deem lying as [acceptable] (e.g. white lies)
Name three. Heck, name one. I'll wait.
I didn't say no one lived in poverty, nor that it wasn't bad. I said that the way they calculate whether someone is poor is flawed and includes too many people who are merely "low-income".
It also includes too few who are high-debt, in that their annual net income, after you deduct debt payments, is below the poverty level.
Care to quote me the law that says that? Far as I know, the IRS et al treat any transaction as a "cash" transaction, and exempt or apply those taxes based on the good being sold or the purchaser, not the method of payment.
The only thing I don't like about Word '07 is how they drank the cool-aid and made styles something fundamentally different from fonts in the UI... although they did give them a nice area all of their own, and added "style-sets" to make the concept work even better.
As to the topic at hand -- anyone who wants to use OOo is getting most of a six-year-old MS UI, with a few improvements that made it through an ego-driven committee meeting. There are still a good dozen things I do in Word or Excel routinely that are either impossible or inordinately difficult in OOo, and only really one thing I can do in OOo that I can't in Word.
No, you got your arses kicked. Your last people were air-lifted under fire off the roof of your embassy.
Years after we stopped fighting the war. It'd be like russia invading Germany in 1960, and then saying we lost WWII.
what is it about American cars that you feel makes them superior to European cars?
In essence, they're more tolerant of individual part failure than European cars. Every European import I've seen has been, well, finicky as to exactly how regular its maintenance is and exactly what's allowed go to wrong. The American cars, OTOH, tend to "just work."
(And this is ignoring things like "performance" and "ease of repair.")
To give an example: Two items seeking investment in england around 1775 was the steam powered troop transport and the machine gun. The companies proposed to invest in inventing and developing these. Neither stock offering for these was subsrcibed. As a result the english lost the war in America.
You're forgetting three amazingly important facts, and blatantly ignoring another.
0: Technology in the 18th century was essentially all hand-crafted, and very, VERY error prone. The first attempt at a submarine in the modern warfare was "the turtle", which failed amazingly during the revolution.
1: The UK had bigger worries at the time than the American Revolution. The armies they sent were not the best, and Parliment knew better than to try and spend more than the colonies ever sent in direct taxes.
2: The Redcoats were a highly traditional force; there's a reason for the American charactiture of them as hidebound and inflexible fools. Heck, European armies were still using human wave tactics in the first World War.
3: Even if the British were able to create a technologial advantage, and even if they were able to get them in appreciable quantity, and even if they send them to the Revolution, the advantage would not have lasted for long. Copyrights and Patents are only respected by allies in peacetime -- and the Americans ignored foreign IP for generations after '76.
The point is that there is no "universal ethics", it's all completely subjective.
Don't steal from people. Don't lie to people. Don't kill people without the blessing of the law. Do your job.
Those four items are basic morality you will find in any society with more than three generations in it. They have differing definitions of what "people" are, (and some variables as to what is and isn't property, and what is and isn't someone's job) but they're as fundamental to human psychology as the desire to mate.
And if you think that every other society has always considered itself "most humane", you're even more ignorant of history than you are of sociology. The Romans held themselves up as "civilized", the Muslims "godly", and so on. It's less than 500 years that there has been any society that valued being nice to everyone as a fundamental measure of goodness, and less than 50 that this has been a worldwide ideal.