But then float the idea of taxing corporations so that they'll keep jobs in america, and a lot of those same slashdotters will say it's insightfull; that it's got merit and should be considered.
Here's a better idea: drop the tariffs on goods from these countries that we outsource labor to. It's only fair for this global economy's competition to flow both ways.
Very few industries actually have NO alternatives, and quality products are always in demand.
Then where are my quality cellphones? You can pay $400 for a top-of-the-line cellphone in the US that is still nowhere near the capabilities of a run-of-the-mill Japanese phone from a year ago, much less their current top of the line.
In Tokyo you can get fiber to your place of living for less than you can get a T1 with a fraction of the bandwidth in the US. And yet our communications companies threaten to hold hostage development and expansion in order to blackmail the government over regulation. Fiber to the home? Not for ANY amount of money in most of the US, unless you're lucky to live in a place where the government saw that captialism had failed in this particular venture, and did the work itself.
When it comes to manufactured goods, yes, there is always a group of people who are willing to pay more and a group of people who are willing to offer more quality for that money. When it comes to technology and communications however, I don't see this happening.
See, I've been watching her for a few days now with my wireless TV gizmo. Picks up all these cameras around town real good. Real good, yeah.
I know she walks down 45th on the way home from work every day. Alone. Theres a nice alley there, between Washington and Main. See, here? Camera #24 ends about 3 feet to the left of it, and Camera #25 starts about 8 feet to the right. Someone could walk off of Camera #24 and never appear on Camera #25, and nobody'd be the wiser.
Did I mention how pretty she is? I've been watching her for days. Ah, here she is now, on #17. I love that suit she's wearing. Real professional looking. #32, now. Not a lot of people out today, I bet they're all watching the funeral on CNN. I've got something better to watch. So pretty.
#24 now. I can smell her perfume from here, well almost. Really all I smell is this garbage I'm hiding behind, but I know how she should smell. She should smell like roses. Hm, I only see a couple of people out on #25, and they're walking the other way. Nobody but me is looking at your daughter. Such a pretty lady.
You mean 90MB drive, right? I don't think Conner as a company made it past the 1GB or so mark;)
How do I go about checking capacitors? I know theres equipment out there to test them when they're not attached to anything, but is there some way to tell when they're still attached to the motherboard?
I love people who say things like this. It conveniently glosses over the fact that its legally impossible for an american employee of any skill level to accept a full time job for less than many outsourcers are accepting in their own country. It conveniently glosses over the fact that companies these days are hiring fresh college grads to abuse as unskilled low-paid monkeys while passing over resumes for older people with more skills (See also: "Overqualified"). (Its worth noting that people have quit calling the whole event a "correction", now that its obvious that its no longer about overpaying for American labor, but not paying for American labor at all.) It ignores the fact that there is a high cost of entry for changing skillsets for a completely different kind of employment. People suggesting that we become plumbers and electricians conveniently forget to remind us that nationwide these trades are protected by unions, and nearly everywhere, an apprenticeship is required to enter these trades. And this apprenticeship is not like a doctor's residency requirement, you can't just get one from any hospital, you have to know people (all your contacts in the computer field? useless...). Not just anyone, but the few who are willing to take on an apprentice, knowing full well when your apprenticeship is over, you'll be their competition.
As for keeping my current lifestyle, that'd be easy on half the salary of my current $40k/year job, if only I could enjoy the fruits of these cheap overseas laborers. Alas, while "importing" overseas labor into the US is basically free, actual goods are taxed to prevent the common people from enjoying exactly this.
I find it a good practice to use em until they die
Heck, I've got every harddrive I've ever owned here, even the ones that died. Someday I'll get around to making clocks from them or maybe speakers like I saw here a long while back. Recently I had a computer start acting strange on IDE (but with an adapter, the drive worked fine on SATA in that machine) so I went through ALL the old IDE drives until I found one that actually still worked... 650MB IDE drive from Conner, if I recall correctly. That drive exhibited the same issues as well, so I chalked it up to the IDE controller dying, and stuck to SATA.
If you are doing nothing wrong then there will be no probable cause to get the info.
Or you could be telling your spouse to pick up your nine year old daughter from soccer practice. I'd hate for that message to fall into the wrong hands.
Or someone telling their latchkey kid: "I'm going to be late coming home honey, you know where the key's at." Now we know there's a key there somewhere if we just want the TV, and that the kid's parent(s) are going to be late, if we're into that sort of thing.
Guess what. If the government can read them, so can anyone else.
Everyone talks about how privacy is overrated and things like that, but all they can think of for it is because "you have something bad to hide." Just because someone wants to hide something doesn't make it bad. How about those FBI employees that were busted a few years back for illegally using wiretaps to make insider trades? It didn't take "doing something wrong" to have the feds tap those people.
Also remember: whenever the government backdoors this or that to break your privacy, all it takes is one crafty person to figure out how the government backdoor works, and then its all over the internet faster than a German phone number. Wouldn't it be hilarious if a badly formatted email could cause Carnivore to dump out all the email it had trapped? Or better yet, make it start capturing someone else's emails and send them to you?
In this case, you patent invention, Sleaze-Co steals it, you sue and win because you have the patent and Sleaze Co pays your legal bill as well as the damages.
Says who? Do you have some magic powers telling you that you're going to win? That something won't go wrong during the trial? You could end up with Your Honor, Techno Bumfuck, Presiding. Or (God forbid! Corruption?!) Your Honor, Shareholder in the Opposing Company (or Acceptor of Bribes).
You could walk out of that courtroom penniless and patentless if the judge chose to. Its a matter between the judge and the patent lawyers, and when the enemy has $billions you can bet that they've got the better lawyers, and anyone you hire to take them on will be wanting cash up front.
Whats more interesting is that sometimes what control+v pastes is different from what the middle-click pastes.
The reason is that there are actually more than one copy and paste buffer in operation. Normally there are two in X, a selection buffer (which uses the currently highlighted selection to paste) and the cut buffer. The program xcutsel lets you swap between the selection and the cut buffer for applications that don't support one or the other.
The third case is an application buffer. This is typically what you're using when you hit ctrl-v or ctrl-c, unless the application specifically captures these keypresses and handles the events required to make them use the cut buffer or selection buffer itself. Applications using the KDE or Gnome libraries have the benefit of already having this work done with them, with the additional bonus of being compatible with other KDE or Gnome programs. But, you get the penalty of not having things work the way you expect when dealing with other applications that don't use the same buffer.
Also, the reason that control C, V, and X don't do anything by default is because they were already being used as control sequences. It'd suck if you couldn't stop the program you were running because ^C was remapped to do something else.
At the very least it let's her help understand the basics of computing.
This is probably the best idea so far. Even universities churn out programmers who have no idea how the computer does what it does.
Start with basic logic (true AND true = true). From there, move to karnaugh maps, then to the idea that programming a computer is simply a matter of giving the computer a series of steps for it to follow. Explain loops and recursion here.
Don't worry about language, start with pseudocode. The idea at this point is to get her to formulate those instructions.
Once she has the concept of algorithms down, then teach her implementation. Once she sees that her instructions can be implemented in any number of ways, she'll have reached the point that with a reference book for whatever language, she will be as good a programmer as many, if not better.
If they just drop the priority a little bit, then Vonage would work fine, though there might be a court case there somewhere (would YOU like it if Ford came and let all the air out of one of your Chevy's tires?)
But what if they don't stop there? What if they drop the priority to the bottom of the pile, below P2P? By rendering it unusable, are they not then disallowing use of it?
And remember, this IS in terms of "access to their own proprietary content". From the article: "As subscribers increase their use of latency sensitive and graphic rich . . . traffic, broadband providers could give network precedence to their own revenue-generating services."
How much balkanization do we accept before it goes back to being (non-Internet) Service Providers like early AOL/Compuserve/GEnie/Q-Link?
How about this? You get your wish and Nordstrom can hire windows from Claria/Gator to pop up obscuring the view of LL Bean shoppers. Fair?
Fine then. LL Bean gets to hire people to send to Nordstrom outlet stores whose job it is to stand between certain people and the merchandise they're looking at, and telling them about all the things they can buy at LL Bean. The customers are allowed to tell the LL Bean employee to "go away", at which point the LL Bean employee must immediately stop talking and move out of the way until the customers decide to look at a different item. Then it repeats. The victims are chosen by a person outside the store, who is asking for signatures for a petition to save little puppies. This person does not mention any affiliation with Nordstrom or LL Bean, but at the very bottom of the petition in fine print is the line "You may be bothered by certain people in certain stores." Neither the document nor the petitioner gives an explanation of "bothered" or a list of "participating" stores.
None of those jobs listed involve a lot of "innovation" or re-education to move up to a higher level on the job scale.
No, but nearly nation-wide they are all protected by powerful unions and licensing that requires apprenticeship as a barrier to entry. You don't become a plumber or electrician without being very good friends with one willing to accept you as an apprentice (and when you're done, you're competition! You better be VERY good friends before you ask.)
Congratulations! You have fallen into their trap. The RIAA desperately wants you to believe that you have to buy music from them, and heck I bet they'd even settle for you stealing music for them (hey, if all that unchecked windows piracy got MS where it is now...)
But they don't want you to know about the other way to get music:
Make it
Yeah. Independent music will be the death of the RIAA yet. When you've had enough of britney spears strutting around on stage and crooning the same old same old, turn to the indie scene and see what people are making. Nobody good enough? Pick up an instrument and see if you can do better.
Don't expect to get a giant audience. Once the RIAA has convinced everyone that its illegal to share music online, they'll steal the copyrights of all the music and have the government declare themselves the sole recipient of any money for distribution of music, like they have for webcasting. Once that happens, you'll be hard pressed to find anything to let you record and distribute your songs for free, even if you wanted to.
So, just sit back, enjoy the canned music, and don't mind the RIAA as they wheedle and lie into the monopoly position.
Silly boy, don't you realize that the RIAA's members take all that out of the artist's hide? thats why unless you're a megastar, you can never break even on your recording contract. If you sold a million CDs, thats because they spent $10 million promoting you. If you sold 10 million CDs, thats because they spent $100 million. Or so they say, anyway. I'm sure they've got enough people in the right places to make sure all those millions get spent, somehow. Possibly on nice mansions for the CEO to stay in?
Any individual - most individuals, even - won't have any change of behaviour, but a measurable number will buy the advertised product because they saw the ad.
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
If this was the case, why haven't I got a giant stack of tampons here? I'm a guy, I don't use them, but I see all these advertisements for them, and by your logic I'm therefore compelled to buy them.
Unfortunately your logic simplifies things too much. You don't see an ad for shampoo, run out to the store and buy Head and Shoulders, and return home just in time to see an ad for Zest. No, there is a higher level at work here in rational people. An ad for Brand X Foo works because you need Foo and because you saw the ad for Brand X. These two combined cause you to act. I suspect even in irrational people something similar occurs, except that for those people up late nights compulsively dialing every toll free infomercial number, seeing the product also produces a need for the product.
Likewise, playing quake doesn't make you go out and kill people. You feel a need to kill people, then the fact that you play quake perhaps influences the manner of murder.
This isn't meant to condone child pr0n, as some child is being victimized to produce that stuff, but perpetuating this junk even to attack child pornography is wrong.
And what is Mr. Seller's incentive to use this version of Mr. Escrow's service? What happens if the item disappears? If you claim to have returned it?
Real escrow works because Mr. Escrow holds both the item and the money to prove to the seller that the item exists, and to prove to the buyer that the money exists. The buyer knows the seller can't pretend the buyer didn't send him the item, and the seller knows the buyer can't take the money and run. In your case Mr. Buyer will just claim that he never received the item and demand the refund from Mr. Escrow.
If everyone used Certifiable delivery of both the money and the goods, that part of the problem would go away escrow or not, but nobody is willing to pay the extra money for certified mail.
The lack of Lift/Throw bothers me a bit, but thats because I would use Lift/Throw to finish item world levels in under a minute.
Even without it the game plays pretty well. I've only put in 3 hours and have only mastered basic miracles (I manage to get lucky every now and then and get flows to mix and point the right way to get one of the other colored miracles every now and then)
There is something of a double-edged sword in the battle system though. The attack-counterattack nature of the "battles" make for the ability to finish some fights quickly, but make it harder to get characters into position for miracles or chains without accidentially killing everything off with counterattacks.
Here's one with a bit of a non-standard play mechanism: Every Extend
I've also worked out how to recompile noiz2sa on Linux (it uses SDL, it just needs a makefile change and changing "\" to "/" in file paths) and thanks for the link to the other game there, I'm going to try building it on Linux as well.
OK, not yet in the US, but there are cases of Church sanctioned lying out there:
Condoms are made with holes that allow AIDS to pass through. As if the original claim wasn't bad enough, read to the bottom and note that there is (admittedly hearsay) claims that people are being told that condoms are laced with AIDS in the first place.
Or, if you want a little closer to home, you can see what people think about Bush's abstinence-only sex ed drive: How we look and act abroad
Admittedly Fox News, but opens with a great quote: "(Abstinence education) tells teens they have a choice," said Jennifer Marshall, family issues director for the Heritage Foundation... and what would this be, a choice between no sex, and ignorant unprotected sex?
I only have ancedotal evidence for this (my boss's wife is an OB/GYN) but there are people out there who at least make a good show of ignorance about their own body. His wife has seen patients who apparently didn't know that they don't pee from their vagina. Some who didn't know that they were pregnant at late stages - with high obesity rates, who notices a few extra pounds around the middle? Hormone treatments, The Pill, and the crap in our environment already mess with periods, even more so in young people who haven't established a regular enough cycle to notice missing a month or two yet.
The problem with this approach is it rules out an entire class of problems such as class B inherits from class A, has such and such static methods and member variables..... what is the output of this code?
Which you could do just as easily in pseudocode as well, you're already halfway there.
Students get this information in high school and/or junior high.
Better check your school. A lot of them now are teaching boys and girls that they have evil monsters between their legs that should never be touched or shown to anyone else.
Or whatever other lies the religious right wants them to teach this year, hoping that by keeping people stupid, they'll somehow teach them to overcome their natural reproductive urges.
There should be defensive patents, patents issued saying "we figured out how to do this on our own, we don't want to stop other people form figuring out the same thing we just don't want to be prevented from using our inventions."
Actually, there are. They're called Statutory Invention Registration these days. For a very small fee you can just register that you invented something, without actually obtaining patent protection for it. But, the patent office will have that you invented it on file.
Serves us? Ha, as if we had the money to get the AG to pay attention to us anyway. It'd be interesting to see someone try and fail to get the government's support in a case.
Slashdot Mirror
But then float the idea of taxing corporations so that they'll keep jobs in america, and a lot of those same slashdotters will say it's insightfull; that it's got merit and should be considered.
Here's a better idea: drop the tariffs on goods from these countries that we outsource labor to. It's only fair for this global economy's competition to flow both ways.
Very few industries actually have NO alternatives, and quality products are always in demand.
Then where are my quality cellphones? You can pay $400 for a top-of-the-line cellphone in the US that is still nowhere near the capabilities of a run-of-the-mill Japanese phone from a year ago, much less their current top of the line.
In Tokyo you can get fiber to your place of living for less than you can get a T1 with a fraction of the bandwidth in the US. And yet our communications companies threaten to hold hostage development and expansion in order to blackmail the government over regulation. Fiber to the home? Not for ANY amount of money in most of the US, unless you're lucky to live in a place where the government saw that captialism had failed in this particular venture, and did the work itself.
When it comes to manufactured goods, yes, there is always a group of people who are willing to pay more and a group of people who are willing to offer more quality for that money. When it comes to technology and communications however, I don't see this happening.
Your daughter is real pretty, isn't she?
See, I've been watching her for a few days now with my wireless TV gizmo. Picks up all these cameras around town real good. Real good, yeah.
I know she walks down 45th on the way home from work every day. Alone. Theres a nice alley there, between Washington and Main. See, here? Camera #24 ends about 3 feet to the left of it, and Camera #25 starts about 8 feet to the right. Someone could walk off of Camera #24 and never appear on Camera #25, and nobody'd be the wiser.
Did I mention how pretty she is? I've been watching her for days. Ah, here she is now, on #17. I love that suit she's wearing. Real professional looking. #32, now. Not a lot of people out today, I bet they're all watching the funeral on CNN. I've got something better to watch. So pretty.
#24 now. I can smell her perfume from here, well almost. Really all I smell is this garbage I'm hiding behind, but I know how she should smell. She should smell like roses. Hm, I only see a couple of people out on #25, and they're walking the other way. Nobody but me is looking at your daughter. Such a pretty lady.
Here she comes now...
You mean 90MB drive, right? I don't think Conner as a company made it past the 1GB or so mark ;)
How do I go about checking capacitors? I know theres equipment out there to test them when they're not attached to anything, but is there some way to tell when they're still attached to the motherboard?
I love people who say things like this. It conveniently glosses over the fact that its legally impossible for an american employee of any skill level to accept a full time job for less than many outsourcers are accepting in their own country. It conveniently glosses over the fact that companies these days are hiring fresh college grads to abuse as unskilled low-paid monkeys while passing over resumes for older people with more skills (See also: "Overqualified"). (Its worth noting that people have quit calling the whole event a "correction", now that its obvious that its no longer about overpaying for American labor, but not paying for American labor at all.) It ignores the fact that there is a high cost of entry for changing skillsets for a completely different kind of employment. People suggesting that we become plumbers and electricians conveniently forget to remind us that nationwide these trades are protected by unions, and nearly everywhere, an apprenticeship is required to enter these trades. And this apprenticeship is not like a doctor's residency requirement, you can't just get one from any hospital, you have to know people (all your contacts in the computer field? useless...). Not just anyone, but the few who are willing to take on an apprentice, knowing full well when your apprenticeship is over, you'll be their competition.
As for keeping my current lifestyle, that'd be easy on half the salary of my current $40k/year job, if only I could enjoy the fruits of these cheap overseas laborers. Alas, while "importing" overseas labor into the US is basically free, actual goods are taxed to prevent the common people from enjoying exactly this.
I find it a good practice to use em until they die
Heck, I've got every harddrive I've ever owned here, even the ones that died. Someday I'll get around to making clocks from them or maybe speakers like I saw here a long while back. Recently I had a computer start acting strange on IDE (but with an adapter, the drive worked fine on SATA in that machine) so I went through ALL the old IDE drives until I found one that actually still worked... 650MB IDE drive from Conner, if I recall correctly. That drive exhibited the same issues as well, so I chalked it up to the IDE controller dying, and stuck to SATA.
If you are doing nothing wrong then there will be no probable cause to get the info.
Or you could be telling your spouse to pick up your nine year old daughter from soccer practice. I'd hate for that message to fall into the wrong hands.
Or someone telling their latchkey kid: "I'm going to be late coming home honey, you know where the key's at." Now we know there's a key there somewhere if we just want the TV, and that the kid's parent(s) are going to be late, if we're into that sort of thing.
Guess what. If the government can read them, so can anyone else.
Everyone talks about how privacy is overrated and things like that, but all they can think of for it is because "you have something bad to hide." Just because someone wants to hide something doesn't make it bad. How about those FBI employees that were busted a few years back for illegally using wiretaps to make insider trades? It didn't take "doing something wrong" to have the feds tap those people.
Also remember: whenever the government backdoors this or that to break your privacy, all it takes is one crafty person to figure out how the government backdoor works, and then its all over the internet faster than a German phone number. Wouldn't it be hilarious if a badly formatted email could cause Carnivore to dump out all the email it had trapped? Or better yet, make it start capturing someone else's emails and send them to you?
In this case, you patent invention, Sleaze-Co steals it, you sue and win because you have the patent and Sleaze Co pays your legal bill as well as the damages.
Says who? Do you have some magic powers telling you that you're going to win? That something won't go wrong during the trial? You could end up with Your Honor, Techno Bumfuck, Presiding. Or (God forbid! Corruption?!) Your Honor, Shareholder in the Opposing Company (or Acceptor of Bribes).
You could walk out of that courtroom penniless and patentless if the judge chose to. Its a matter between the judge and the patent lawyers, and when the enemy has $billions you can bet that they've got the better lawyers, and anyone you hire to take them on will be wanting cash up front.
If we're going to talk about SAC when you're talking about fansub quality, I have only four words for you:
Mass Naked Child Events
Now thats kwality kontrol!
Whats more interesting is that sometimes what control+v pastes is different from what the middle-click pastes.
The reason is that there are actually more than one copy and paste buffer in operation. Normally there are two in X, a selection buffer (which uses the currently highlighted selection to paste) and the cut buffer. The program xcutsel lets you swap between the selection and the cut buffer for applications that don't support one or the other.
The third case is an application buffer. This is typically what you're using when you hit ctrl-v or ctrl-c, unless the application specifically captures these keypresses and handles the events required to make them use the cut buffer or selection buffer itself. Applications using the KDE or Gnome libraries have the benefit of already having this work done with them, with the additional bonus of being compatible with other KDE or Gnome programs. But, you get the penalty of not having things work the way you expect when dealing with other applications that don't use the same buffer.
Also, the reason that control C, V, and X don't do anything by default is because they were already being used as control sequences. It'd suck if you couldn't stop the program you were running because ^C was remapped to do something else.
At the very least it let's her help understand the basics of computing.
This is probably the best idea so far. Even universities churn out programmers who have no idea how the computer does what it does.
Start with basic logic (true AND true = true). From there, move to karnaugh maps, then to the idea that programming a computer is simply a matter of giving the computer a series of steps for it to follow. Explain loops and recursion here.
Don't worry about language, start with pseudocode. The idea at this point is to get her to formulate those instructions.
Once she has the concept of algorithms down, then teach her implementation. Once she sees that her instructions can be implemented in any number of ways, she'll have reached the point that with a reference book for whatever language, she will be as good a programmer as many, if not better.
The question then is "how far will they go?"
If they just drop the priority a little bit, then Vonage would work fine, though there might be a court case there somewhere (would YOU like it if Ford came and let all the air out of one of your Chevy's tires?)
But what if they don't stop there? What if they drop the priority to the bottom of the pile, below P2P? By rendering it unusable, are they not then disallowing use of it?
And remember, this IS in terms of "access to their own proprietary content". From the article: "As subscribers increase their use of latency sensitive and graphic rich . . . traffic, broadband providers could give network precedence to their own revenue-generating services."
How much balkanization do we accept before it goes back to being (non-Internet) Service Providers like early AOL/Compuserve/GEnie/Q-Link?
How about this? You get your wish and Nordstrom can hire windows from Claria/Gator to pop up obscuring the view of LL Bean shoppers. Fair?
Fine then. LL Bean gets to hire people to send to Nordstrom outlet stores whose job it is to stand between certain people and the merchandise they're looking at, and telling them about all the things they can buy at LL Bean. The customers are allowed to tell the LL Bean employee to "go away", at which point the LL Bean employee must immediately stop talking and move out of the way until the customers decide to look at a different item. Then it repeats. The victims are chosen by a person outside the store, who is asking for signatures for a petition to save little puppies. This person does not mention any affiliation with Nordstrom or LL Bean, but at the very bottom of the petition in fine print is the line "You may be bothered by certain people in certain stores." Neither the document nor the petitioner gives an explanation of "bothered" or a list of "participating" stores.
None of those jobs listed involve a lot of "innovation" or re-education to move up to a higher level on the job scale.
No, but nearly nation-wide they are all protected by powerful unions and licensing that requires apprenticeship as a barrier to entry. You don't become a plumber or electrician without being very good friends with one willing to accept you as an apprentice (and when you're done, you're competition! You better be VERY good friends before you ask.)
There are 2 ways to get music
Congratulations! You have fallen into their trap. The RIAA desperately wants you to believe that you have to buy music from them, and heck I bet they'd even settle for you stealing music for them (hey, if all that unchecked windows piracy got MS where it is now...)
But they don't want you to know about the other way to get music:
Make it
Yeah. Independent music will be the death of the RIAA yet. When you've had enough of britney spears strutting around on stage and crooning the same old same old, turn to the indie scene and see what people are making. Nobody good enough? Pick up an instrument and see if you can do better.
Don't expect to get a giant audience. Once the RIAA has convinced everyone that its illegal to share music online, they'll steal the copyrights of all the music and have the government declare themselves the sole recipient of any money for distribution of music, like they have for webcasting. Once that happens, you'll be hard pressed to find anything to let you record and distribute your songs for free, even if you wanted to.
So, just sit back, enjoy the canned music, and don't mind the RIAA as they wheedle and lie into the monopoly position.
Silly boy, don't you realize that the RIAA's members take all that out of the artist's hide? thats why unless you're a megastar, you can never break even on your recording contract. If you sold a million CDs, thats because they spent $10 million promoting you. If you sold 10 million CDs, thats because they spent $100 million. Or so they say, anyway. I'm sure they've got enough people in the right places to make sure all those millions get spent, somehow. Possibly on nice mansions for the CEO to stay in?
Any individual - most individuals, even - won't have any change of behaviour, but a measurable number will buy the advertised product because they saw the ad.
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
If this was the case, why haven't I got a giant stack of tampons here? I'm a guy, I don't use them, but I see all these advertisements for them, and by your logic I'm therefore compelled to buy them.
Unfortunately your logic simplifies things too much. You don't see an ad for shampoo, run out to the store and buy Head and Shoulders, and return home just in time to see an ad for Zest. No, there is a higher level at work here in rational people. An ad for Brand X Foo works because you need Foo and because you saw the ad for Brand X. These two combined cause you to act. I suspect even in irrational people something similar occurs, except that for those people up late nights compulsively dialing every toll free infomercial number, seeing the product also produces a need for the product.
Likewise, playing quake doesn't make you go out and kill people. You feel a need to kill people, then the fact that you play quake perhaps influences the manner of murder.
This isn't meant to condone child pr0n, as some child is being victimized to produce that stuff, but perpetuating this junk even to attack child pornography is wrong.
And what is Mr. Seller's incentive to use this version of Mr. Escrow's service? What happens if the item disappears? If you claim to have returned it?
Real escrow works because Mr. Escrow holds both the item and the money to prove to the seller that the item exists, and to prove to the buyer that the money exists. The buyer knows the seller can't pretend the buyer didn't send him the item, and the seller knows the buyer can't take the money and run. In your case Mr. Buyer will just claim that he never received the item and demand the refund from Mr. Escrow.
If everyone used Certifiable delivery of both the money and the goods, that part of the problem would go away escrow or not, but nobody is willing to pay the extra money for certified mail.
The lack of Lift/Throw bothers me a bit, but thats because I would use Lift/Throw to finish item world levels in under a minute.
Even without it the game plays pretty well. I've only put in 3 hours and have only mastered basic miracles (I manage to get lucky every now and then and get flows to mix and point the right way to get one of the other colored miracles every now and then)
There is something of a double-edged sword in the battle system though. The attack-counterattack nature of the "battles" make for the ability to finish some fights quickly, but make it harder to get characters into position for miracles or chains without accidentially killing everything off with counterattacks.
Here's one with a bit of a non-standard play mechanism: Every Extend
I've also worked out how to recompile noiz2sa on Linux (it uses SDL, it just needs a makefile change and changing "\" to "/" in file paths) and thanks for the link to the other game there, I'm going to try building it on Linux as well.
OK, not yet in the US, but there are cases of Church sanctioned lying out there:
... and what would this be, a choice between no sex, and ignorant unprotected sex?
Condoms are made with holes that allow AIDS to pass through. As if the original claim wasn't bad enough, read to the bottom and note that there is (admittedly hearsay) claims that people are being told that condoms are laced with AIDS in the first place.
Or, if you want a little closer to home, you can see what people think about Bush's abstinence-only sex ed drive:
How we look and act abroad
Admittedly Fox News, but opens with a great quote: "(Abstinence education) tells teens they have a choice," said Jennifer Marshall, family issues director for the Heritage Foundation
I only have ancedotal evidence for this (my boss's wife is an OB/GYN) but there are people out there who at least make a good show of ignorance about their own body. His wife has seen patients who apparently didn't know that they don't pee from their vagina. Some who didn't know that they were pregnant at late stages - with high obesity rates, who notices a few extra pounds around the middle? Hormone treatments, The Pill, and the crap in our environment already mess with periods, even more so in young people who haven't established a regular enough cycle to notice missing a month or two yet.
The problem with this approach is it rules out an entire class of problems such as class B inherits from class A, has such and such static methods and member variables..... what is the output of this code?
Which you could do just as easily in pseudocode as well, you're already halfway there.
Students get this information in high school and/or junior high.
Better check your school. A lot of them now are teaching boys and girls that they have evil monsters between their legs that should never be touched or shown to anyone else.
Or whatever other lies the religious right wants them to teach this year, hoping that by keeping people stupid, they'll somehow teach them to overcome their natural reproductive urges.
There should be defensive patents, patents issued saying "we figured out how to do this on our own, we don't want to stop other people form figuring out the same thing we just don't want to be prevented from using our inventions."
Actually, there are. They're called Statutory Invention Registration these days. For a very small fee you can just register that you invented something, without actually obtaining patent protection for it. But, the patent office will have that you invented it on file.
Serves us? Ha, as if we had the money to get the AG to pay attention to us anyway. It'd be interesting to see someone try and fail to get the government's support in a case.