Maybe it's just me, but a movie review has never influenced my decision to either go or not go to a movie. Of course, considering that the only movie reviewer I read regularly seems to hate 99% of the movies that come out, and that I only read his reviews to comment on how clueless he is at times, perhaps I am not a typical "reviewee".
Same with music. My decision to buy or not buy a CD is not influenced by MTV's "Hit Pick of the Week" or whatever crap Carson Daly happens to be shilling. Neither is it really influenced by what the radio is playing (mostly because I swear their playlist hasn't changed in five or six weeks). I buy what sounds interesting to me, and only listen to the tracks I want to.
However, I should be able to listen to it in the car, on my computer's CD player, at work, and if I want to, I should be able to rip the tracks to mp3s to play them that way.
And the fight for information has been going on for a much longer time then the last few years. And it hasn't always been music. Propaganda, spying on other countries, whatever... information has been fought over for centuries.
See, that's the odd thing. Commercials are supposed to make you think about the product and then maybe buy it. But the BFA's I routinely get on-line (thank you so much, Altavista for telling me how I can find the assholes I don't miss from high school) make me want to avoid those products so much that they might as well not be there. (And thank you, Pop-Up Killer, for getting rid of most of them.)
So, at least in my case, and I know I'm not alone, the BFA's aren't commercials. More like spam....
You're lucky. He's one of the senators from my state (South Carolina). So we have a puppet senator (Fritz), a stooge for an attorney general (Charlie Condon, the idiot who removed SC from the states arrayed against Microsoft), and nepotism in the US state attorney's office (Strom Jr., the 29 year old rube who got the office solely by being directly related to Strom Thurmond, oldest relic in office).
Frankly, I'd like it if my vote meant something, but I don't think it's every going to. If we could just get rid of the damn lobbists it would be a great step in the right direction.
Yeah, but damn near anywhere else, if you said "If you don't exclusively use my software on these lines of computers, I will raise my prices, oh and by the way, if you use some other guy's software on some other lines, you still owe me money" you'd get laughed at.
Business may not always be nice, but this is the equivalent of a mugger working over pre-schoolers.
ehh... standard deviation from the study sample? I mean, "everyone" always says you should get 8 hours of sleep a night, so that is taken as a 'standard maximum', whereas the 3.5-4.5 is the result of the study.
Exactly, it's what they could do. I daresay, at least among the Slashdot crowd, that M$ does not have anything resembling a good reputation (deservedly so from many other problems), and as a result, we tend to fear and expect the worst whenever we see something new coming from the depths of Hell(tm), excuse me, Redmond, Washington.
M$ has lost a lot of trust and goodwill with a decent percentage of computer geeks, and as such, we don't feel like trusting them whenever they do _anything_. It's simple behavior patterns. They do something we perceive as stupid/wrong/silly, we react. They do something else just as stupid/wrong/silly or worse, we react again. After enough cases, it wouldn't matter if M$ said they were giving away millions of dollars to charity organizations, we would probably see an ulterior motive.
Yeah, I've had a lot of.doc files go south on me for various reasons. I prefer.rtf if I'm going to have to take it from machine to machine because it crosses-over fairly well. If I just need to be able to print it and never change it, I store it as a.pdf.
Although wasn't there a.pdf virus, called Peachy? Or am I misremembering something else?
Yeah, and I don't think anyone knows how to talk with the silly things and drive at all.
Regardless of percentages, there are probably more cell-phones sold each year in the U.S. then any one other country. The U.S. may not be the country with the highest percentage, population wise, with the most tech toys, but in sheer volume, we're up there.
Americans are fascinated by the tech toys, and more and more of them are becoming "essential" to business. When was the last time you saw a business executive without a cell-phone or a PDA? How many do you know with pagers?
And the feeping creaturisms just add to the number bought.
Well, here in the U.S. (or at least in South Carolina) the cops can still pull you over for pretty much any reason they can think of, and the breathalyser test is used frequently, especially on Friday and Saturday nights. The penalties, from what I understand (never been charged with a DUI) are not as severe. A drunk driver can "get away" with a few points being shaved off of his license (which translates to higher insurance rates). Or he could have the book thrown at him. It all depends on the judge presiding over the case and who the defendant knows.
Thing is, there are cases reported fairly regularly about drivers who have been busted numerous times for drunk driving, lost their licenses, kept drinking and driving, continue to get busted even more, serve little to no time, continue drinking and driving and eventually kill someone. The U.S. judicial system needs a severe overhaul, IMAO, for anything to be done. Of course, the U.S. population is much higher then any one European country AND I think we have a much worse drinking problem.
What we need is a good Orwellian system to keep drunk drivers under control.
I think the point many people are trying to make, however, is as bad as "Star Wars" and "Return of the Jedi" may have sounded initially, they don't sound nearly as bad now. Whereas "Attack of the Clones" can't help but bring up images of "Attack of the Killer Tomatoes" to me, or a number of other bad movies that simply deserve to be MiSTed.
And as a personal note, I still hate the title "The Phantom Menace". But we are still allowed our own opinions.
Somehow I think the South Carolina Attorney General won't go for it. Remember, South Carolina bowed out of the Microsoft monopoly trial pretty early on. And right now, the same idiot (Charlie Condon) is running for governor, so I don't think his attention is actually on doing his job (not that it ever has been).
Thing is, if you sign up for a Passport account with the sole purpose of seeing if you can use the DPA terms to sue them, they would probably argue that by signing up for a Passport account you are giving them permission to export your personal information.
we can retain documents pretty much indefinitely. We have a scan system where we can take any paper files and convert them to.pdfs, and then either save them to the hard disk, put them on a floppy or ZIP disk, burn them to CD, or even use the tape drive (assuming someone can find a spare tape) to save things. It makes it pretty easy to hold onto any documents we might need, even considering the size of some of these things (50+ Mb.pdfs for a lot of them).
Now what it doesn't do is stop someone from deleting the things, because I don't think there are _any_ security protocols on the machine to even slow someone down from doing so. But I don't see anyone pulling an Enron on it any time soon.
1) Lexis/Nexus is free for all law students (at least, according to the lawyer living one floor down), so they get you hooked on how useful and easy it is. Once you're hooked, it's practically over... they charge so much per minute for law firms, who pass the costs on to their clients.
2) Lexis/Nexus is constantly updated. I've been told that within a week of a decision being rendered in a court, it can be found with a search on Lexis/Nexus, although I imagine YMMV with courts out in the boonies.
3) It's not used by anywhere near the numbers of people who use Google, Yahoo, etc. And the people who do use it can generally afford to pay the charges, and what with the aforementioned ease of use, it's much better then searching shelves of books for case citations.
IANAL, but I used to work in a law library. Trust me, you can fill entire floors with regional court decisions.
Almost certainly not. The Bond movies have been made over a much longer time, and are fairly formulaic - evil mastermind, ruthless plot, at least two bimbos one of whom has a suggestive name, etc.
And they have changed actors playing Bond often enough that most people who follow the movies are used to someone only being Bond for a certain number of movies... I mean, playing Bond you've had Sean Connery, George Lazenby, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton and Pierce Brosnan.
Putting someone else in the role of Indiana Jones would kill the feeling of the movies. Just look how long "Young Indiana Jones" TV show lasted.
I thought the premise was that he would live forever if he stayed in the Grail Cave/didn't go beyond the seal. I mean, the other two knights who found the Grail died years later, although there is no conclusive evidence that they drank from the Grail.
Um, yes it can. It's most common in criminal trials, not civil ones, but if J. Random Person is convicted of murder but sentencing has not yet been passed, his actions will be pretty damn impeded by being in a small holding cell somewhere.
Now here's where the comparison breaks down. It is impossible to arrest M$. Any specific person working for the corporation, sure, but the company can not be locked up. But while the punishment phase is under review in civil cases, the party being punished usually acts on their best behavior as regards the case they were found guilty under, so as to avoid additional punishment for continuing the acts under which they were charged. Is M$ doing that?
One, I don't want to know what fluids you're leaving on documents around your office.
Two, have you ever seen how many people handle some documents?
Three, depending on the type of paper, fingerprints may or may not show up better.
Four, like anyone wants to do a compartive DNA scan, even if it would work on something like finger oils, or a fingerprint match just to determine if they sent a document?
More then you'd think. Credit card fraud is still a major problem, and you're giving people yet another plastic card to lose, misplace, what have you. Even the scams that shouldn't work anymore because they're so old still work on occassion, like writing a credit card company and telling them you moved and lost your card during the trip. 99.99% of the time, they won't fall for it, but all you need is that one time.
And how easily are wallets lost or stolen? God help you if you get mugged...
I don't know about you, but while my bank has my signature on file, I don't think they have the nice shiny handwriting recognition software that will enable them to determine that a particular signature of my name was written by me in the same style, written by me when I'm tired, written by me when my hands are cramped from working on minatures, forged by someone else, whatever.
Kierthos
Re:I dont want to start a flame war but....
on
Farscape Video Game
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
You must be trolling, but I don't seem to care much... the first Star Trek series had dreck-all for a budget, ST:TNG ripped off a bunch of old episodes from the original series, and Voyager, to put it in simple terms, sucked.
Farscape may not be able to claim complete originality, if there even is such a thing any more in the sci-fi genre, but it is quite good. They don't make up their own science as they go along nearly as much as any of the Star Trek series do, especially Voyager, the characters are not one-dimensional, like most of the original series of Star Trek, and the sets are fairly well done.
Hands down, Farscape is, IMAO, the best sci-fi series on TV right now.
Slashdot Mirror
1) Who invented the radio? (Marconi)
Except that the Supreme Court ruled that Marconi invented nothing that wasn't already covered by the patents of Tesla, Lodge and Stone.
Kierthos
Well, as long as you're not playing a Shaman, you should be at least advancing in level. :P
Kierthos
Maybe it's just me, but a movie review has never influenced my decision to either go or not go to a movie. Of course, considering that the only movie reviewer I read regularly seems to hate 99% of the movies that come out, and that I only read his reviews to comment on how clueless he is at times, perhaps I am not a typical "reviewee".
Same with music. My decision to buy or not buy a CD is not influenced by MTV's "Hit Pick of the Week" or whatever crap Carson Daly happens to be shilling. Neither is it really influenced by what the radio is playing (mostly because I swear their playlist hasn't changed in five or six weeks). I buy what sounds interesting to me, and only listen to the tracks I want to.
However, I should be able to listen to it in the car, on my computer's CD player, at work, and if I want to, I should be able to rip the tracks to mp3s to play them that way.
And the fight for information has been going on for a much longer time then the last few years. And it hasn't always been music. Propaganda, spying on other countries, whatever... information has been fought over for centuries.
Kierthos
See, that's the odd thing. Commercials are supposed to make you think about the product and then maybe buy it. But the BFA's I routinely get on-line (thank you so much, Altavista for telling me how I can find the assholes I don't miss from high school) make me want to avoid those products so much that they might as well not be there. (And thank you, Pop-Up Killer, for getting rid of most of them.)
So, at least in my case, and I know I'm not alone, the BFA's aren't commercials. More like spam....
Kierthos
You're lucky. He's one of the senators from my state (South Carolina). So we have a puppet senator (Fritz), a stooge for an attorney general (Charlie Condon, the idiot who removed SC from the states arrayed against Microsoft), and nepotism in the US state attorney's office (Strom Jr., the 29 year old rube who got the office solely by being directly related to Strom Thurmond, oldest relic in office).
Frankly, I'd like it if my vote meant something, but I don't think it's every going to. If we could just get rid of the damn lobbists it would be a great step in the right direction.
Kierthos
Yeah, but damn near anywhere else, if you said "If you don't exclusively use my software on these lines of computers, I will raise my prices, oh and by the way, if you use some other guy's software on some other lines, you still owe me money" you'd get laughed at.
Business may not always be nice, but this is the equivalent of a mugger working over pre-schoolers.
Kierthos
I was under the impression that all lawyers are de facto officers of the court. I'm sure I saw/read that somewhere....
Kierthos
ehh... standard deviation from the study sample? I mean, "everyone" always says you should get 8 hours of sleep a night, so that is taken as a 'standard maximum', whereas the 3.5-4.5 is the result of the study.
Kierthos
Exactly, it's what they could do. I daresay, at least among the Slashdot crowd, that M$ does not have anything resembling a good reputation (deservedly so from many other problems), and as a result, we tend to fear and expect the worst whenever we see something new coming from the depths of Hell(tm), excuse me, Redmond, Washington.
M$ has lost a lot of trust and goodwill with a decent percentage of computer geeks, and as such, we don't feel like trusting them whenever they do _anything_. It's simple behavior patterns. They do something we perceive as stupid/wrong/silly, we react. They do something else just as stupid/wrong/silly or worse, we react again. After enough cases, it wouldn't matter if M$ said they were giving away millions of dollars to charity organizations, we would probably see an ulterior motive.
Kierthos
Yeah, I've had a lot of .doc files go south on me for various reasons. I prefer .rtf if I'm going to have to take it from machine to machine because it crosses-over fairly well. If I just need to be able to print it and never change it, I store it as a .pdf.
.pdf virus, called Peachy? Or am I misremembering something else?
Although wasn't there a
Kierthos
True, the exact quote was:
"During my service in the United States Congress I took the initiative in creating the Internet."
Which is still an exaggeration, of course. Not that anyone in politics ever lies....
Kierthos
Yeah, and I don't think anyone knows how to talk with the silly things and drive at all.
Regardless of percentages, there are probably more cell-phones sold each year in the U.S. then any one other country. The U.S. may not be the country with the highest percentage, population wise, with the most tech toys, but in sheer volume, we're up there.
Americans are fascinated by the tech toys, and more and more of them are becoming "essential" to business. When was the last time you saw a business executive without a cell-phone or a PDA? How many do you know with pagers?
And the feeping creaturisms just add to the number bought.
Kierthos
Well, here in the U.S. (or at least in South Carolina) the cops can still pull you over for pretty much any reason they can think of, and the breathalyser test is used frequently, especially on Friday and Saturday nights. The penalties, from what I understand (never been charged with a DUI) are not as severe. A drunk driver can "get away" with a few points being shaved off of his license (which translates to higher insurance rates). Or he could have the book thrown at him. It all depends on the judge presiding over the case and who the defendant knows.
Thing is, there are cases reported fairly regularly about drivers who have been busted numerous times for drunk driving, lost their licenses, kept drinking and driving, continue to get busted even more, serve little to no time, continue drinking and driving and eventually kill someone. The U.S. judicial system needs a severe overhaul, IMAO, for anything to be done. Of course, the U.S. population is much higher then any one European country AND I think we have a much worse drinking problem.
What we need is a good Orwellian system to keep drunk drivers under control.
Kierthos
I think the point many people are trying to make, however, is as bad as "Star Wars" and "Return of the Jedi" may have sounded initially, they don't sound nearly as bad now. Whereas "Attack of the Clones" can't help but bring up images of "Attack of the Killer Tomatoes" to me, or a number of other bad movies that simply deserve to be MiSTed.
And as a personal note, I still hate the title "The Phantom Menace". But we are still allowed our own opinions.
Kierthos
Somehow I think the South Carolina Attorney General won't go for it. Remember, South Carolina bowed out of the Microsoft monopoly trial pretty early on. And right now, the same idiot (Charlie Condon) is running for governor, so I don't think his attention is actually on doing his job (not that it ever has been).
Kierthos
Thing is, if you sign up for a Passport account with the sole purpose of seeing if you can use the DPA terms to sue them, they would probably argue that by signing up for a Passport account you are giving them permission to export your personal information.
Kierthos
we can retain documents pretty much indefinitely. We have a scan system where we can take any paper files and convert them to .pdfs, and then either save them to the hard disk, put them on a floppy or ZIP disk, burn them to CD, or even use the tape drive (assuming someone can find a spare tape) to save things. It makes it pretty easy to hold onto any documents we might need, even considering the size of some of these things (50+ Mb .pdfs for a lot of them).
Now what it doesn't do is stop someone from deleting the things, because I don't think there are _any_ security protocols on the machine to even slow someone down from doing so. But I don't see anyone pulling an Enron on it any time soon.
Kierthos
That's a bit different.
1) Lexis/Nexus is free for all law students (at least, according to the lawyer living one floor down), so they get you hooked on how useful and easy it is. Once you're hooked, it's practically over... they charge so much per minute for law firms, who pass the costs on to their clients.
2) Lexis/Nexus is constantly updated. I've been told that within a week of a decision being rendered in a court, it can be found with a search on Lexis/Nexus, although I imagine YMMV with courts out in the boonies.
3) It's not used by anywhere near the numbers of people who use Google, Yahoo, etc. And the people who do use it can generally afford to pay the charges, and what with the aforementioned ease of use, it's much better then searching shelves of books for case citations.
IANAL, but I used to work in a law library. Trust me, you can fill entire floors with regional court decisions.
Kierthos
Almost certainly not. The Bond movies have been made over a much longer time, and are fairly formulaic - evil mastermind, ruthless plot, at least two bimbos one of whom has a suggestive name, etc.
And they have changed actors playing Bond often enough that most people who follow the movies are used to someone only being Bond for a certain number of movies... I mean, playing Bond you've had Sean Connery, George Lazenby, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton and Pierce Brosnan.
Putting someone else in the role of Indiana Jones would kill the feeling of the movies. Just look how long "Young Indiana Jones" TV show lasted.
Kierthos
I thought the premise was that he would live forever if he stayed in the Grail Cave/didn't go beyond the seal. I mean, the other two knights who found the Grail died years later, although there is no conclusive evidence that they drank from the Grail.
Kierthos
Um, yes it can. It's most common in criminal trials, not civil ones, but if J. Random Person is convicted of murder but sentencing has not yet been passed, his actions will be pretty damn impeded by being in a small holding cell somewhere.
Now here's where the comparison breaks down. It is impossible to arrest M$. Any specific person working for the corporation, sure, but the company can not be locked up. But while the punishment phase is under review in civil cases, the party being punished usually acts on their best behavior as regards the case they were found guilty under, so as to avoid additional punishment for continuing the acts under which they were charged. Is M$ doing that?
Kierthos
One, I don't want to know what fluids you're leaving on documents around your office.
Two, have you ever seen how many people handle some documents?
Three, depending on the type of paper, fingerprints may or may not show up better.
Four, like anyone wants to do a compartive DNA scan, even if it would work on something like finger oils, or a fingerprint match just to determine if they sent a document?
Kierthos
More then you'd think. Credit card fraud is still a major problem, and you're giving people yet another plastic card to lose, misplace, what have you. Even the scams that shouldn't work anymore because they're so old still work on occassion, like writing a credit card company and telling them you moved and lost your card during the trip. 99.99% of the time, they won't fall for it, but all you need is that one time.
And how easily are wallets lost or stolen? God help you if you get mugged...
Kierthos
I don't know about you, but while my bank has my signature on file, I don't think they have the nice shiny handwriting recognition software that will enable them to determine that a particular signature of my name was written by me in the same style, written by me when I'm tired, written by me when my hands are cramped from working on minatures, forged by someone else, whatever.
Kierthos
You must be trolling, but I don't seem to care much... the first Star Trek series had dreck-all for a budget, ST:TNG ripped off a bunch of old episodes from the original series, and Voyager, to put it in simple terms, sucked.
Farscape may not be able to claim complete originality, if there even is such a thing any more in the sci-fi genre, but it is quite good. They don't make up their own science as they go along nearly as much as any of the Star Trek series do, especially Voyager, the characters are not one-dimensional, like most of the original series of Star Trek, and the sets are fairly well done.
Hands down, Farscape is, IMAO, the best sci-fi series on TV right now.
Kierthos