Just about the only way to prove it would be to know in advance that it was loaded with counterfeit bills and have the feds bust it open and check. You'd probably still be accused, since you knew about the bills in the first place.
Well, if games were designed from the ground up with portability in mind, then porting it would be a cinch. Starting off with "Lets go with the latest directx" generally means either your game is going to be stuck on one platform or you're going to have to reinvest more money to port it.
This is standard in the US. If you have a counterfeit bill, regardless of where it came from, you have no way to recover that money.
This is mostly because of the fact that you are likely unable to prove that it really came from that ATM (maybe you brought it in yourself and used the atm for a good show).
Now, if you had a way that could prove that the ATM dispensed a counterfeit bill, you probably have a criminal case against whoever fills that ATM.
Personally, I'm glad Nintendo of Japan is providing this service to their users. Maybe things like this will get fewer buggy console titles out the door if it becomes expected that you'll exchange them for working titles.
Any good developer who paid attention in their software engineering course would know the further down the development cycle you get when you discover a problem with your specifications the more expensive it becomes to repair the problem.
And every developer with experience knows that if you took your client, beat their head against the wall for weeks, then finally cracked it open with a mallet, you're not going to get a specification to pop out. Even with the prototypes for demonstration purposes, if your boss/contract/whoever (how often are YOU in a position to do this) clamp down on the specifications at some point in the development cycle, your development cycle will never leave the "chasing new specifications" stage.
Of course, its even worse when you're doing an in-house project and your boss is the one who decides that it needs to reach a "stable" point... but, "Oh, by the way, we haven't used it for two months because the address on the bills it prints is a quarter inch off from the window on the envelope. We really need to work on this billing part of the system." Thanks a lot, boss!
Unlike ssh, rsync daemon doesn't require a user on the host system. Unlike ftp or http, rsync updates by splitting files into blocks and updating changed blocks. Unlike scp, the config file can exclude/include certain files/paths/etc. without requiring the use of filesystem permissions. (it also has password protection).
Its just the process of maintaining the vfat table that is patented, it appears. If the kernel reacts at all, they will probably make the "vfat" driver read-only, and "msdos" read-write, but with only 8.3 filenames. It would take some kernel munging but you could probably even make the vfat driver r/w, but without the ability to create or delete files.
If I gave away my famous "Maple Syrup Bread" to everyone who walked by my house. Then one day, twenty years later decided to charge $0.25/slice for it. How is that improper?
If you started to do that, people could choose to not eat Maple Syrup Bread. They won't die.
Microsoft, however, holds the monopoly position, and any company wishing to do viable business in the computer sector must bow to microsoft's standards. Thus, if they choose not to use a microsoft filesystem format, they will likely die.
You're right though, what microsoft has is specifically patents on maintaining two side-by-side entries for a file's name inside a filesystem: a short one, and a long one. That isn't really the FAT "format", its more the process of maintaining "vfat" on top of FAT.
Redoctane didn't get mentioned, but for $18.95 you get 2 games at a time, and they have a number of import games for the fanatics who want to play the games everyone else will be playing next year, but don't want to pay the $50-$70+ or so to import them.
I haven't used them personally so I can't say how their service is.
From their description of their service, it looks like you put together a wish list, and they send you games from that list when(if) they become available. Browsing through their list, they only have import sections for the dreamcast, playstation, and playstation 2, and it looks like a number of imports have been "misplaced". Looking through the ps2 titles shows they really haven't been keeping up with the times. They probably discovered that its a lot more expensive when the import games keep "disappearing" in transit than the American versions. (You'd think they'd switch to some kind of certified mail, or at least shipping with delivery confirmation...) Not to mention the support hassles from idiots who don't understand whats needed to play an imported game.
I'd probably think about it if they started tracking shipments and smacking the people who screw them (and the rest of the service users) over, and if they got some imported game cube and xbox games in, as well as newer ps2 titles. Until then they don't have much over blockbusters, seeing as most of the import titles they haven't lost yet are out in the US in English.
Anyone old enough (or curious enough) to remember The Shadow will probably remember that he wouldn't have put anything other than Lipton in his cup.
Many sponsor's ads during the radio play ages were performed inline with the show, by the show's performers, but still in such a way that they were clearly advertisements. Sure, not everything could be advertised this way, but it would probably bring back some of the creativity and interest in advertising that seems to have sunk into the world of the one-time superbowl ad.
Advertisers know that people all over tune in to the superbowl just for the ads, yet they don't seem to be spending that kind of effort on a large scale to make every day ads that interesting. Sure, there are exceptions (usually humorous ads), but not enough to keep me glued to the set during show breaks.
Probably the closest you'll get to a "good" system would be something like S/Key or Opie (debian packages: opie-server, opie-client, libpam-opie - Use OTP's for PAM authentication) for generating and using a one-time-pad of password systems. The issue in this is that you must generate the pad in some secure fashion, if someone sniffs your pad because you downloaded it over the network, you've lost.
You could easily keep a pre-generated giant pad itself on a usb drive or something similar.
The court, as well as public knowledge and perception of new laws, will ALWAYS need to reanalyze the new law with respect to the current legal structure, not one 3 years ago.
So wait, all this talk about precedent and its usage in law is completely useless? I better let the professors know that, they go on and on about these old cases that changed the way things worked. I guess all that dust from those old books must trigger hallucinations. After all I could have sworn that supreme court decisions changed law and things like Roe vs. Wade get cited over and over in abortion debates, but I guess thats a lot of hot air.
Of course if the law changes, the precedent doesn't magically change to apply directly to the new law, but if someone wins a case on the grounds of X, if X still applies to whatever law, then it is certainly a point to bring up in court. Thus, to steal jbn-o's earlier post here the fact that a court (the Supreme Court of the US, in this case, but any higher court with jurisdiction over whatever area this case is in would have done) decided in Fiest v. Rural that information itself isn't copyrightable, and is certainly a precedent to bring up in this case despite the fact that the cases are under two different laws.
As for the (now) great-grandparent post, the argument made by the poster was that "the only good ruling is one that obeys the letter of the law" despite more than two centuries of the courts performing their jobs by vetting unconstitutional laws from our legal framework and creating a large and continually growing body of case law from which precedents are drawn. The tone of his post which I gathered from "And in the future, I hope courts fully enforce every aspect of the DMCA, so that in the future, I can go to my congress person and use it as Exhibit A." among other lines, imply that he believes that a ruling that "follows the word of the law exactly" will be proof he can take to his congressperson as "evidence" of the flaws in the law, unless he believes that the law is flawed because people can fight back under it. I contend that I hope that the ruling follows the word of law because that outcome would fit my definition of "Good", which if you didn't gather from the philosophical underpinnings of my post, is perfectly subjective.
You make reference to a "principled effort". Whose principles? This returns to the "Good" and "Bad" subjectiveness. If 536 people sit around and decide their "principles" are such that they should write laws that control the flow of money in a certain way, then certainly some people would perceive the result to be a "better" legal state, while others would perceive the result to be "worse". Popping once more from the stack, we return to the notion of "Beyond Good and Evil". Does this conflict of perception somehow indicate that neither Good nor Evil exist? I'll leave that up for you to answer, and end this post in the same vague and non-committal way the great-grandparent did: it is a "really interesting question."
apt-get install foo: locate foo, download foo and its dependencies, install foo and its dependencies, uninstalls conflicting packages (yes, it tells you what its going to do before it does anything)
apt-get dist-upgrade: upgrade your debian distribution.
apt-cache search foo: regular expression search for "foo" in package name and description.
In truth, apt and rpm do not compete. Apt is a mechanism for retrieving updates in an orderly fashion, and rpm is a package manager. This is why you can get versions of apt for redhat/mandrake/etc. that use RPMs. Apt really competes with redhat's up2date software (assuming you subscribed to it).
dpkg is debian's competitor to RPM. There are a lot of things that dpkg handles better than RPM, but there are a lot of things that RPM handles better than dpkg. For instance, I'm not sure dpkg handles relocatable packages like rpm can. However, building a package for debian (as long as your program "plays nice" and uses./configure) requires editing a template control file, providing a list of configuration files, and editing the template rules file (which is just a makefile), unlike redhat, where you have to create a.spec file listing all of your patches and all of the steps for compilation, with variables and other syntax specific to rpm.
After getting extremely annoyed about something or other, Kerafyrm blows everything up, including complete destruction of the moon, and buggers off somewhere.
Now that I think about it, it may be possible to take this a step further. If the courts find that Best Buy et al did in fact misrepresent the ownership of copyright, then there is another word in our good legal system called "Fraud". If entity X uses lies (a misrepresentation) to attempt to obtain money from entity Y, then X is engaging in fraud and is probably criminally prosecutable. Of course, in FatWallet's case, the companies probably only went as far as the takedown notices, however if any of them threatened a lawsuit with an offer to settle out of court...
The bottom line here is that a good and a bad ruling are really interesting questions.
Lets step back from Nietzsche here for a second and get over the whole jenseits von Gut und Bose concept. "Bad" occurs when people are hurt in various ways, "Good" occurs when people are helped in various ways. When the two conflict, how do you determine what is "Good" and what is "Bad"?
Needless to say, your concept of "Bad" has one small problem: if the court rules against an abuse of a law, this becomes Precedent, and can be used to protect against further abuse of that law or other similar laws. I'm sure if "your people" in Congress did manage to repeal the DMCA, it would be back in a couple of years under a new name, however the legal precedent will be in a musty old law book a hundred years from now. Thus, in the long term for the proper operation of justice, your "Bad" is actually "Good".
In this particular case, the point is pretty moot. The letter of the law specifies that fact cannot be copyrighted. Represenations of facts can be copyrighted (for instance, the artwork, layout, and lettering of the flyers in question) but the prices on those ads are factual information that cannot be copyrighted, and therefore cannot be "infringed". Thus, the defendents in this lawsuit have no grounds to have invoked the DMCA, and with no possible way of proving any kind of infringement are liable for damages incurred by their actions (including attourney fees) under Section 512(f) of the DMCA ("misrepresentation").
Thus assuming the court bothers to uphold the law as written, the whole point is moot, everyone is happy (well, except you, since if you took this to your congresscritter their answer would be "well thats good, it worked!"). Of course, lawyers use all sorts of slick talking, and will probably fling all sorts of lingo at the jury if this does manage to go to trial in attempts to confuse them on the matter, so if FatWallet fails to get summary judgement in their favor, all bets are off, as usual.
Most of the fuss is that it potentially allows other retailers very good competitive intelligence to be able to "scoop" them and beat their pricing by just a bit, I think.
shame that by the time fatwallet gets a hold of them, many places' flyers are already printed or on their way to be printed.
Xenosaga had no purely random battles, and if you had the skills, you could dodge most of the normal battles (there was a training thing on this early in the game) and the result?
It became known as "the movie you sometimes play". (I thought it was a good game, hopefully xenosaga 2 will get a US release, the trailers I've seen give me goosebumps in a good way)
Whats needed isn't so much "no random battles" as maybe options for 1) automatic battles with AIs that don't suck and kill your characters 2) an option to turn off all special effects to speed up fighting (not just short versions of whatever animations, but pick an option and the numbers just pop up immediately, next turn) and 3) the idea that monsters that are far too low a level to even bother the characters would be afraid enough to not even approach and bother them.
The problem with the idea of "clearing out" an area and leaving it empty is that there will always be power-levellers who would get pissy when their monsters run out.
Actually, it can be circumvented by pretty much anything, since its a crappy system that doesn't even examine the content, it just checks every now and then and flags everyone using Kazaa as "evil" regardless of what they're doing on it, according to the students there who have posted about it.
I understand that it is vogue in many minority "clickish" groups to engage in vitriolic hyperbole in regards to our President.
Yeah, too bad so much of this vitrol is true. Take a look at this article on ZDnet. Its about that guy at Intel that got arrested, and the "evidence" that let the US hold him for over a month in solitary confinement (check the date on the article and the date in the story). He was a Citizen of The United States. A citizen. You know, the people who make up this country, live here, and who are guaranteed certain rights such as due process, a speedy trial, and representation? You? Me? Note also the end of the article:
A Washington Post investigation last fall said the Justice Department has imprisoned at least 44 people, including seven U.S. citizens, under the same law, with some held for many months and possibly over a year.
So he's not an isolated case.
According to what was released by the government (who has recently felt an unusual need to hide the truth from its people on a lot of things, such as trials, so its entirely possible they have other charges they're neglecting to let us know about) Mike's crimes were growing a beard after the sept. 11 attacks and visiting China during the same time that a group of other people arrested the year before had visited. Ah, sweet justice.
Did you know that Bush said he doesn't read the newspapers? Yeah, thats right, he "trusts" his advisors to tell him whats worth knowing in the news. These are the same people that brought us nukes in the middle east, magical disappearing WMDs that nobody has found yet, and our current foreign policy of "piss everyone off".
Nobody "underestimates" Bush. The fact is, the poor man is an idiot and a puppet for the people pulling his strings and whispering in his ear who we didn't vote for and who we have no control over. Your examples of Germany and Japan are great ones, too bad they shine brighter than the US right now.
So why spend time working on a feature that most of the players have little skill in using anyway?
Aside from the "feature" of having brave players trying it out and learning to be social as a side effect, what about the few hundred million other people out there? You know, the kind of people who aren't the loner geek sterotype, and might be interested in a game where they can use their social skills as a "strength"? Might be a large target market out there somewhere, but you won't know until you either do some research or just blindly try it and hope your company folds.
I think the more reasonable expectation is that a cup of coffee served to you at a restaurant is served at a temperature where you can ingest it.
In other news, millions across America suffer serious burns after ingesting soup straight off the stove, eating pies straight out the oven, and drinking coffee straight from Mr. Coffee.
One young man, horribly scarred by his fateful encounter with Mr. Coffee, commented: "I expected it to be colder, after all my old coffee pot used to make my coffee an hour before I woke up so it would be ready. This new one doesn't have that feature, so I expected it to be the same temperature as the hour-old coffee was before. Was I so wrong?"
Several lawyers have been overheard contacting these poor individuals, in an attempt to arrange a class-action lawsuit against the laws of thermodynamics. "Clearly this business of heat moving from a hot thing to a cooler thing is dangerous stuff. After millions and millions of burns, you'd think that energy would know better." No word on whether this lawsuit would expand to include the many people who are burned with electricity when sticking their fingers in light sockets.
Now, my understanding of the vacuum command was that it effectively took the DB offline (not good with the hit-rate I have), and my understanding of 'auto-vacuum' was that it would negate that effective downtime. It appears that that is not the case.
Normal VACUUM commands do not lock tables as of 7.3. Only the full vacuum command does this, which you probably only need to use when permanently retiring a client, rather than just rotating out their data, as the lock is used to actually repack the database on the filesystem to reduce the filesize.
For your needs the normal vacuum provided by auto-vacuum should be sufficient, as you're going to fill up the empty filespace with the next period's data anyway.
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So.. how are you supposed to prove it?
Exactly.
Just about the only way to prove it would be to know in advance that it was loaded with counterfeit bills and have the feds bust it open and check. You'd probably still be accused, since you knew about the bills in the first place.
Well, if games were designed from the ground up with portability in mind, then porting it would be a cinch. Starting off with "Lets go with the latest directx" generally means either your game is going to be stuck on one platform or you're going to have to reinvest more money to port it.
This is standard in the US. If you have a counterfeit bill, regardless of where it came from, you have no way to recover that money.
This is mostly because of the fact that you are likely unable to prove that it really came from that ATM (maybe you brought it in yourself and used the atm for a good show).
Now, if you had a way that could prove that the ATM dispensed a counterfeit bill, you probably have a criminal case against whoever fills that ATM.
Personally, I'm glad Nintendo of Japan is providing this service to their users. Maybe things like this will get fewer buggy console titles out the door if it becomes expected that you'll exchange them for working titles.
Any good developer who paid attention in their software engineering course would know the further down the development cycle you get when you discover a problem with your specifications the more expensive it becomes to repair the problem.
And every developer with experience knows that if you took your client, beat their head against the wall for weeks, then finally cracked it open with a mallet, you're not going to get a specification to pop out. Even with the prototypes for demonstration purposes, if your boss/contract/whoever (how often are YOU in a position to do this) clamp down on the specifications at some point in the development cycle, your development cycle will never leave the "chasing new specifications" stage.
Of course, its even worse when you're doing an in-house project and your boss is the one who decides that it needs to reach a "stable" point... but, "Oh, by the way, we haven't used it for two months because the address on the bills it prints is a quarter inch off from the window on the envelope. We really need to work on this billing part of the system." Thanks a lot, boss!
What's the point of another network protocol
Unlike ssh, rsync daemon doesn't require a user on the host system. Unlike ftp or http, rsync updates by splitting files into blocks and updating changed blocks. Unlike scp, the config file can exclude/include certain files/paths/etc. without requiring the use of filesystem permissions. (it also has password protection).
Does anyone know of a program similar to rsync
Nah, there wasn't a point to it.
Its just the process of maintaining the vfat table that is patented, it appears. If the kernel reacts at all, they will probably make the "vfat" driver read-only, and "msdos" read-write, but with only 8.3 filenames. It would take some kernel munging but you could probably even make the vfat driver r/w, but without the ability to create or delete files.
If I gave away my famous "Maple Syrup Bread" to everyone who walked by my house. Then one day, twenty years later decided to charge $0.25/slice for it. How is that improper?
If you started to do that, people could choose to not eat Maple Syrup Bread. They won't die.
Microsoft, however, holds the monopoly position, and any company wishing to do viable business in the computer sector must bow to microsoft's standards. Thus, if they choose not to use a microsoft filesystem format, they will likely die.
You're right though, what microsoft has is specifically patents on maintaining two side-by-side entries for a file's name inside a filesystem: a short one, and a long one. That isn't really the FAT "format", its more the process of maintaining "vfat" on top of FAT.
Redoctane didn't get mentioned, but for $18.95 you get 2 games at a time, and they have a number of import games for the fanatics who want to play the games everyone else will be playing next year, but don't want to pay the $50-$70+ or so to import them.
I haven't used them personally so I can't say how their service is.
From their description of their service, it looks like you put together a wish list, and they send you games from that list when(if) they become available. Browsing through their list, they only have import sections for the dreamcast, playstation, and playstation 2, and it looks like a number of imports have been "misplaced". Looking through the ps2 titles shows they really haven't been keeping up with the times. They probably discovered that its a lot more expensive when the import games keep "disappearing" in transit than the American versions. (You'd think they'd switch to some kind of certified mail, or at least shipping with delivery confirmation...) Not to mention the support hassles from idiots who don't understand whats needed to play an imported game.
I'd probably think about it if they started tracking shipments and smacking the people who screw them (and the rest of the service users) over, and if they got some imported game cube and xbox games in, as well as newer ps2 titles. Until then they don't have much over blockbusters, seeing as most of the import titles they haven't lost yet are out in the US in English.
Anyone old enough (or curious enough) to remember The Shadow will probably remember that he wouldn't have put anything other than Lipton in his cup.
Many sponsor's ads during the radio play ages were performed inline with the show, by the show's performers, but still in such a way that they were clearly advertisements. Sure, not everything could be advertised this way, but it would probably bring back some of the creativity and interest in advertising that seems to have sunk into the world of the one-time superbowl ad.
Advertisers know that people all over tune in to the superbowl just for the ads, yet they don't seem to be spending that kind of effort on a large scale to make every day ads that interesting. Sure, there are exceptions (usually humorous ads), but not enough to keep me glued to the set during show breaks.
Probably the closest you'll get to a "good" system would be something like S/Key or Opie (debian packages: opie-server, opie-client, libpam-opie - Use OTP's for PAM authentication) for generating and using a one-time-pad of password systems. The issue in this is that you must generate the pad in some secure fashion, if someone sniffs your pad because you downloaded it over the network, you've lost.
You could easily keep a pre-generated giant pad itself on a usb drive or something similar.
The court, as well as public knowledge and perception of new laws, will ALWAYS need to reanalyze the new law with respect to the current legal structure, not one 3 years ago.
So wait, all this talk about precedent and its usage in law is completely useless? I better let the professors know that, they go on and on about these old cases that changed the way things worked. I guess all that dust from those old books must trigger hallucinations. After all I could have sworn that supreme court decisions changed law and things like Roe vs. Wade get cited over and over in abortion debates, but I guess thats a lot of hot air.
Of course if the law changes, the precedent doesn't magically change to apply directly to the new law, but if someone wins a case on the grounds of X, if X still applies to whatever law, then it is certainly a point to bring up in court. Thus, to steal jbn-o's earlier post here the fact that a court (the Supreme Court of the US, in this case, but any higher court with jurisdiction over whatever area this case is in would have done) decided in Fiest v. Rural that information itself isn't copyrightable, and is certainly a precedent to bring up in this case despite the fact that the cases are under two different laws.
As for the (now) great-grandparent post, the argument made by the poster was that "the only good ruling is one that obeys the letter of the law" despite more than two centuries of the courts performing their jobs by vetting unconstitutional laws from our legal framework and creating a large and continually growing body of case law from which precedents are drawn. The tone of his post which I gathered from "And in the future, I hope courts fully enforce every aspect of the DMCA, so that in the future, I can go to my congress person and use it as Exhibit A." among other lines, imply that he believes that a ruling that "follows the word of the law exactly" will be proof he can take to his congressperson as "evidence" of the flaws in the law, unless he believes that the law is flawed because people can fight back under it. I contend that I hope that the ruling follows the word of law because that outcome would fit my definition of "Good", which if you didn't gather from the philosophical underpinnings of my post, is perfectly subjective.
You make reference to a "principled effort". Whose principles? This returns to the "Good" and "Bad" subjectiveness. If 536 people sit around and decide their "principles" are such that they should write laws that control the flow of money in a certain way, then certainly some people would perceive the result to be a "better" legal state, while others would perceive the result to be "worse". Popping once more from the stack, we return to the notion of "Beyond Good and Evil". Does this conflict of perception somehow indicate that neither Good nor Evil exist? I'll leave that up for you to answer, and end this post in the same vague and non-committal way the great-grandparent did: it is a "really interesting question."
What can apt-get do?
./configure) requires editing a template control file, providing a list of configuration files, and editing the template rules file (which is just a makefile), unlike redhat, where you have to create a .spec file listing all of your patches and all of the steps for compilation, with variables and other syntax specific to rpm.
apt-get install foo: locate foo, download foo and its dependencies, install foo and its dependencies, uninstalls conflicting packages (yes, it tells you what its going to do before it does anything)
apt-get dist-upgrade: upgrade your debian distribution.
apt-cache search foo: regular expression search for "foo" in package name and description.
In truth, apt and rpm do not compete. Apt is a mechanism for retrieving updates in an orderly fashion, and rpm is a package manager. This is why you can get versions of apt for redhat/mandrake/etc. that use RPMs. Apt really competes with redhat's up2date software (assuming you subscribed to it).
dpkg is debian's competitor to RPM. There are a lot of things that dpkg handles better than RPM, but there are a lot of things that RPM handles better than dpkg. For instance, I'm not sure dpkg handles relocatable packages like rpm can. However, building a package for debian (as long as your program "plays nice" and uses
After getting extremely annoyed about something or other, Kerafyrm blows everything up, including complete destruction of the moon, and buggers off somewhere.
Reminds me of a CS Lewis story....
Now that I think about it, it may be possible to take this a step further. If the courts find that Best Buy et al did in fact misrepresent the ownership of copyright, then there is another word in our good legal system called "Fraud". If entity X uses lies (a misrepresentation) to attempt to obtain money from entity Y, then X is engaging in fraud and is probably criminally prosecutable. Of course, in FatWallet's case, the companies probably only went as far as the takedown notices, however if any of them threatened a lawsuit with an offer to settle out of court...
The bottom line here is that a good and a bad ruling are really interesting questions.
Lets step back from Nietzsche here for a second and get over the whole jenseits von Gut und Bose concept. "Bad" occurs when people are hurt in various ways, "Good" occurs when people are helped in various ways. When the two conflict, how do you determine what is "Good" and what is "Bad"?
Needless to say, your concept of "Bad" has one small problem: if the court rules against an abuse of a law, this becomes Precedent, and can be used to protect against further abuse of that law or other similar laws. I'm sure if "your people" in Congress did manage to repeal the DMCA, it would be back in a couple of years under a new name, however the legal precedent will be in a musty old law book a hundred years from now. Thus, in the long term for the proper operation of justice, your "Bad" is actually "Good".
In this particular case, the point is pretty moot. The letter of the law specifies that fact cannot be copyrighted. Represenations of facts can be copyrighted (for instance, the artwork, layout, and lettering of the flyers in question) but the prices on those ads are factual information that cannot be copyrighted, and therefore cannot be "infringed". Thus, the defendents in this lawsuit have no grounds to have invoked the DMCA, and with no possible way of proving any kind of infringement are liable for damages incurred by their actions (including attourney fees) under Section 512(f) of the DMCA ("misrepresentation").
Thus assuming the court bothers to uphold the law as written, the whole point is moot, everyone is happy (well, except you, since if you took this to your congresscritter their answer would be "well thats good, it worked!"). Of course, lawyers use all sorts of slick talking, and will probably fling all sorts of lingo at the jury if this does manage to go to trial in attempts to confuse them on the matter, so if FatWallet fails to get summary judgement in their favor, all bets are off, as usual.
Most of the fuss is that it potentially allows other retailers very good competitive intelligence to be able to "scoop" them and beat their pricing by just a bit, I think.
shame that by the time fatwallet gets a hold of them, many places' flyers are already printed or on their way to be printed.
Nice excuse to throw lawyers around though.
Xenosaga had no purely random battles, and if you had the skills, you could dodge most of the normal battles (there was a training thing on this early in the game) and the result?
It became known as "the movie you sometimes play". (I thought it was a good game, hopefully xenosaga 2 will get a US release, the trailers I've seen give me goosebumps in a good way)
Whats needed isn't so much "no random battles" as maybe options for 1) automatic battles with AIs that don't suck and kill your characters 2) an option to turn off all special effects to speed up fighting (not just short versions of whatever animations, but pick an option and the numbers just pop up immediately, next turn) and 3) the idea that monsters that are far too low a level to even bother the characters would be afraid enough to not even approach and bother them.
The problem with the idea of "clearing out" an area and leaving it empty is that there will always be power-levellers who would get pissy when their monsters run out.
Actually, it can be circumvented by pretty much anything, since its a crappy system that doesn't even examine the content, it just checks every now and then and flags everyone using Kazaa as "evil" regardless of what they're doing on it, according to the students there who have posted about it.
Yeah, too bad so much of this vitrol is true. Take a look at this article on ZDnet. Its about that guy at Intel that got arrested, and the "evidence" that let the US hold him for over a month in solitary confinement (check the date on the article and the date in the story). He was a Citizen of The United States. A citizen. You know, the people who make up this country, live here, and who are guaranteed certain rights such as due process, a speedy trial, and representation? You? Me? Note also the end of the article:
So he's not an isolated case.
According to what was released by the government (who has recently felt an unusual need to hide the truth from its people on a lot of things, such as trials, so its entirely possible they have other charges they're neglecting to let us know about) Mike's crimes were growing a beard after the sept. 11 attacks and visiting China during the same time that a group of other people arrested the year before had visited. Ah, sweet justice.
Did you know that Bush said he doesn't read the newspapers? Yeah, thats right, he "trusts" his advisors to tell him whats worth knowing in the news. These are the same people that brought us nukes in the middle east, magical disappearing WMDs that nobody has found yet, and our current foreign policy of "piss everyone off".
As for Bush's belief in "democracy", he'd rather be a dictator. Out of context? Joking? You decide.
Nobody "underestimates" Bush. The fact is, the poor man is an idiot and a puppet for the people pulling his strings and whispering in his ear who we didn't vote for and who we have no control over. Your examples of Germany and Japan are great ones, too bad they shine brighter than the US right now.
Now the black hatters are going to have to call off their plans for the year so they can prove Microsoft's "high probability" wrong.
That, or switch to trying to take over their Mr. Coffee instead of their source code.
So why spend time working on a feature that most of the players have little skill in using anyway?
Aside from the "feature" of having brave players trying it out and learning to be social as a side effect, what about the few hundred million other people out there? You know, the kind of people who aren't the loner geek sterotype, and might be interested in a game where they can use their social skills as a "strength"? Might be a large target market out there somewhere, but you won't know until you either do some research or just blindly try it and hope your company folds.
You have to choose between GNOME and KDE.
Thats funny, I chose Window Maker.
I think the more reasonable expectation is that a cup of coffee served to you at a restaurant is served at a temperature where you can ingest it.
In other news, millions across America suffer serious burns after ingesting soup straight off the stove, eating pies straight out the oven, and drinking coffee straight from Mr. Coffee.
One young man, horribly scarred by his fateful encounter with Mr. Coffee, commented: "I expected it to be colder, after all my old coffee pot used to make my coffee an hour before I woke up so it would be ready. This new one doesn't have that feature, so I expected it to be the same temperature as the hour-old coffee was before. Was I so wrong?"
Several lawyers have been overheard contacting these poor individuals, in an attempt to arrange a class-action lawsuit against the laws of thermodynamics. "Clearly this business of heat moving from a hot thing to a cooler thing is dangerous stuff. After millions and millions of burns, you'd think that energy would know better." No word on whether this lawsuit would expand to include the many people who are burned with electricity when sticking their fingers in light sockets.
Now, my understanding of the vacuum command was that it effectively took the DB offline (not good with the hit-rate I have), and my understanding of 'auto-vacuum' was that it would negate that effective downtime. It appears that that is not the case.
Normal VACUUM commands do not lock tables as of 7.3. Only the full vacuum command does this, which you probably only need to use when permanently retiring a client, rather than just rotating out their data, as the lock is used to actually repack the database on the filesystem to reduce the filesize.
For your needs the normal vacuum provided by auto-vacuum should be sufficient, as you're going to fill up the empty filespace with the next period's data anyway.