Internet Radio in the US is being MURDERED by the MafiAA.
Fortunately, what these bastards utterly don't understand is that the internet doesn't give jack squat about national boundaries. So fine, US internet radio producers will be driven out of business by the government at the behest of protective corporate interests. I'll listen to Swedish, Japanese, or German stations instead.
Or maybe, instead of immediately resorting to hyperbole, we could consider:
- Is it REALLY ok for children below 5 to watch graphic violence? - Is it likewise ok for them to watch graphic explicit sex?
And before you say "just turn off the TV, stupid" perhaps you could join us in the real world, where the TV is occasionally on and kids are in the room, or at friends where they don't have stringent TV attention from the parents, or recognize the fact that OCCASIONALLY parents have other things that need doing and their kids might just have the TV on during a Saturday morning cartoon hour without the parent present.
See, from my experience it's less about the PROGRAMS that are on - those you can easily avoid already - it's the ADVERTISEMENTS for those programs. One moment, a kid is watching an educational children's show about animals, and during the commercial break they show an implied execution-style gangland murder as a teaser about the evening's prime-time programming.
Ironically, it's often the same people claiming the oppressive Religious Right is trying to control our thoughts, who cheerfully demonstrate against "Big Tobacco", campaign against the 2nd Amendment, or tell us that driving SUVs is evil.
Freedom is freedom. You can't have yours and deny me mine. Personally, I'm either in favor of total libertarianism or a recognition that a SOCIETY agrees on certain boundaries; in which case we can discuss and set some like adults without this politically-tainted crying that one side is oppressing the other, Mr. HangingChad.
Kudos to your company for recognizing that employees are people
Read his post again. His company doesn't 'recognize' the employees are people, they concede that treating them like humans is the best way to get work out of the animals.
As he said - they'd rather totally lock everything down.
So I say to him: F*ck you, Mr SysAdmin. You have it totally backwards, and only have it "right" by accident. Maybe you should think of your employees as humans FIRST, instead of as trouble-causing drones? Perhaps you should be the advocate saying "gee, you know, happy people like to come to work, they like to be here, and they're probably spending too much of their life here ANYWAY - what's wrong with opening everything up as much as possible (within the limits of security) and letting people control themselves, only stepping in to discipline people that can't seem to keep their focus on work while they're here?"
No, it's SysNazis like you that make stupid ass DRACONIAN policies that are so much fun to break. The more you tighten your grip, the more systems will slip through your fingers.
Actually, I appreciate your sticking in here and responding. This is interesting.
So are you serious? I mean, really? You think that "desire for music" = compulsion in any real sense of the word?
Are you equally incensed about Gilette razor blades only fitting Gilette razors? Ford cars requiring Ford parts? DirecTV only offering certain stations that you can't get elsewhere?
This isn't like someone FORCING you to do something. I think most people would consider it a relatively trivial matter to choose another mp3 player.
Nobody is compelling anyone to buy itunes. Yes, companies are trying to dominate the market. They are also trying to out-compete their competition.
As long as the consumer is not somehow compelled or restricted from exercising their right to buy from one vendor or another, it's not anticompetitive.
The contention from USDoJ was, I understand, that MS OS had become so ubiquitous that it exercised unfair control of the majority of the market to EXCLUDE other vendors' products from working on MS OS (ie Netscape, IIRC). Personally it seemed like a witch hunt to me - even then you could buy OS/2, any number of a variety of Linuxen, etc.
But does iTunes command that much of the online music market? Not by a long shot.
People need to stop looking to the government for solutions.
Don't like iTunes? Have an 'issue' with iPod? BUY THE MUSIC ELSEWHERE. There are dozens of alternatives, from other online services all the way to 'burn yer own' cd stations at grocery stores.
If a supplier offers a product that is extremely good, but then starts to lock in proprietary components (including consumables that are necessary) why don't we let the MARKET decide whether the limitations exceed the value? Customers are fairly smart over time.
On this same premise, when is the EU commissioner going to go after Schick and Gilette for having the AUDACITY to build their razor blades in such a proprietary fashion? I mean, you can't use a Gilette blade on a Schick handle - heavens! Or closer to the EU - how about Volkswagen for making it's f*cking windshield wiper blades with a unique mounting, so you can't just buy their blades off the shelf like every other car, but have to buy VW blades at $16-$18 EACH? Such monopolist behaviour MUST STOP! Someone call the government to regulate!
Or we could just let the market punish manufacturers that go too far?
Yes, and if if people on slashdot starting saying the earth was actually a giant cube, they owuld have the same results.
Hardly. Say something blatantly stupid, and people call you stupid. They don't (typically) - claim you're a fascist - attack your personal motivations - attack your religion...all of which I've seen on/., flung at people who dared to question the most-holy Global Warming. If you disagree with someone, fine. But why the vitriol? Ironically, Global Warmingists responses are much like I would expect from a glassy-eyed Christian questioned about the existence of God: anger, shock that someone would think such a thing, and then bitter attack.
Before throwing your hat in with this guy, you might want to research his motivations. Also, he is a geographer, not a climatologist. Has written zero papers on climatology, has no experience in climatology.
He has at least as much scientific training as Al Gore, no?
SUpposing he actually got death threats, it isn't suprising, because tere are stupid people in every 'group' an dit is a shame. it is wrong, and I hope they get the person who wrote them. That in know way is an arguement against or for global warming.
True, 100%
"Their science is sound, and after doing my due-diligence I agree with them. I will not be shouted down by eco-religious fanatics or ideological thugs, and neither will these scientists." actually it is not, and also MOST scientists agree that humans have impacted the enviroment and are a major contributer to global climate change.
Wrong. Most scientists (as far as I can tell, and leaving out the Al Gores and Michael Crichton's) seem to agree that the globe is warming. Many of them believe that humans are contributing, mainly to an acceleration of a natural increase. The $60 million question(s), and the ones that I can't seem to find reliable answers to are: is human contribution significant, and if so, is the cost of reducing it economically possible, and again, if so, what are the opportunity costs?
However, I offer some proof. China does not want there to be global warming, they want to have the same things the Western worlds has. With all ther political might, the best influance they had on the paper was some minor down grade in the language. This speaks volumes. If there was any strong scientific support against global warming China would have brought it up.
Um, that's not convincing. China couldn't give a SHIT about Kyoto, because it exempts them. In fact, the longer they get the west to willingly spend $billions$ chasing this while China ignores it, it's a competitive advantage for China. China doesn't really care about scientific evidence or external pressure. It hasn't for centuries.
You go ahead and bury your head in the sand; where you can make yourself believe the humans haven't impact their enviroment at all.
Strawman. If you really believe this, you need a logic check. Read the points again. NOBODY says that humans haven't impacted their environment at all. You can't argue persuasively against a point that you are misstating from the outset.
So all the people who regularly point out how much "better" a society Sweden is than the US, either have to: - entirely backtrack - agree that domestic surveillance really ISN'T that big a deal - just be hypocrites.
The keys being: - head lice and body lice have entirely different grasping systems. Non-interchangeable. - lice can't survive IIRC more than a few hours away from a host. So their lifespan is intimately connected with their host(s) - lice are species specific
Human body lice therefore are unlikely to have evolved their grasping mechanism (useless with body hair or wearing animal skins/furs) until shortly after textiles would have become common clothing for humans. So it doesn't give us precisely when humans STARTED wearing textiles. It does strongly suggest a start point of shortly after (the lice would have had time to evolve) textiles and humans became commonly associated.
IIRC the 9/11 hijackers lured the pilots to open the cockpit doors by slitting the throats of stewardesses.
To that point, hijackings had been about control, destination, $$, releasing some "freedom fighters" from jail, and/or all of the above. The cold-blooded, shocking brutality of the hijackers was calculated to play on the very human sympathies of the command cabin staff for their coworkers and friends.
Needless to say, control cabin doors have been substantially reinforced so that basically whatever it would take to smash it open would be something that could equally likely destroy the plane anyway. And the sympathy thing...well, that card won't work anymore. So what's your point again?
That said, I think this is a rather stupid idea. It doesn't significantly change anything (ok it gives decision makers slightly longer to vaccilate -woohoo). Today: terrorists take control of plane; if they appear to be headed for anything, the scrambled fighter shoots it down (assuming someone has the cajones to make the call) - plane destroyed, everyone dies. Tomorrow: terrorists take control of plane; they start killing people individually, brutally, over some media venue (cameraphone, live on radio, etc.) unless someone releases control of the plane. (assuming someone has the cajones to say no) result: everyone dies. But hey, we saved the plane!
You mean, pretty much the same strategy Apple has used for decades?
To whit: supply systems at ridiculous discounts to schools and students, so that their life-experience with computers when they start buying their own is entirely mac-based?*
* now with the added bonus of 'social cachet' - if you buy Apple products you "think different"! (just like EVERYONE ELSE who buys into the market-cred of being a cool, elite Mac user, not one of those tawdy, workaday galley slaves, ^H^H^H office clerks that have to slave away on "PeeCees", the poor helpless bastards)
Perhaps it could be stated more simply: a console (no matter what console) isn't a personal computer. It just ISN'T. It's a video-optimized, hard-coded processor with extremely limited inputs which usually uses the extraordinarily-shitty "standard TV" as display.
Duh?
And yes, products can be developed that will run on both, but the compromises required to make it a 'console-able' game are immediately obvious on any PC - look at Oblivion. The most popular (and one of the quickest-released) mods take advantage of the better resolution of a monitor to immediately make the bag/inventory system 100% more useable, with more data displayed, clearer/smaller text, etc.
So when he says "the WII is crap" what he's really saying is that "we're pissed that they optimized this for something other than controlling our game, because we're having to make ridiculous, possibly fatal compromises to try to sell into that market".
Is this a shock to anyone who's played a RTS on a PC and then on a console? No mouse = serious suckage. Spore = RTS strategy = (WII+no mouse) = suckage.* Brilliant insight, dude.
* yes, I know the WII has the point-click thing going, but watching people play at length, first their click targets are HUGE because it doesn't have nearly the precision of a mouse, the response-time of a mouse, nor (apparently) the sample rate of a mouse. WII controller is only a feeble mouse-emulation at best.
I'm not entirely sure I agree. I would have agreed with you that MMOs are inevitably 'tainted', but Disney's Toontown is an outstanding example of a fun MMO that is totally child-safe. I was amazed at the unobtrusive yet secure protections that they have in place, yet it remains a really quite a fun game.
So I wouldn't say it's impossible. Difficult? Especially if you hand them freeform construction tools, yes. But I would no longer say impossible.
Firstly, I believe any review of the literature will show convincingly that actual religiosity is generally passed own by/through the MOTHER, based on her beliefs, and much less so the father.
Further, this 'study' drawing conclusions about all of humanity was based on data derived from Americans only, a definitely skewed population compared to the rest of the world in terms of belief.
Not surprising at all, IMO. Considering the number of people that waste their time at work on the internet, it's a reasonable precaution that they avoid words which would, if the sysadmin is paying some attention to what they're doing, JUMP out as "non work related" for everyone besides Ron Jeremy.
I'm more curious about the quality. I have a gianormous HDTV-capable antenna on my house, and we live in a usually-good-occasionally crappy reception area, probably 35 mi from the broadcast antennas. I would very much like to know if I plunk down $300 for an HDTV tuner, am I going to get decent quality, or am I going to get crap (particulary if, as I understand, analog signals that occasionally have a sparkle of static will completely CUT OUT if they are instead being picked up as digital broadcasts...).
Would very much like to hear people's comments on the quality of OTA HDTV, particularly in margin/fringe areas.
What I'd like to see is an explanation for why the Muslim Arab cultures were at the cutting edge of technology and science until what, the 11th, 12th century? And then for some reason, they have subsequently failed to advance technologically or culturally since then.
When you argue that people are "born bad" or otherwise don't have free will, you're arguing that all these people are wasting their time. That they will never overcome their difficulties and they should either give up an committ a crime, cause trouble, go insane or just kill themselves. That is a flawed assumption. We all have the power to change our own lifes, and to alter the course of our lives. That's what seperates humans from animals.
In a sense, that's irrelevant to society, however. Philosophically it's all well and good, and well worth debating into the long, dark hours of the night.
Society as a whole is (or should be) unconcerned. If a human CHOOSES to act like a wild animal - in fact, worse than one if you concede free will - he should be treated as one: caged, cared for to a minimal standard of care, and ultimately if not able to behave within norms that society sets - euthanized.
For example, I know that Alfonso Rodruiguez was someobody's little boy, once. But now (after his rape and murder of Dru Sjodin) he is simply a human-shaped dangerous nuisance that it is in the public interest to remove.
As far as the OP's lad, he's not stupid. He knows that society will give him chance after chance after chance, in the vain hope that he will develop something analogous to a conscience. Why should we bother? Because of "Human compassion"? Pull the other one - I have more pre-emptive compassion for his next victim than I ever would for him.
Hear hear. There are so many games that I wish I could run on what would effectively be a command-line XP system.
If I'm playing a game, I don't want it to keep track of time, the weather, incoming messages, a pretty picture on my desktop, the state of the dvd drive, and whether I've got the latest update. I don't multitask while gaming. I don't play EU3 and edit spreadsheets at the same time.
I want every erg of horsepower and CPU bandwidth chewing through game data.
*Occasionally* (about 5% of the time) I *might* run an mp3 player in the background. But if I had something that would screw multitasking, I would forego that in a heartbeat.
I don't suppose anyone here has what amounts to "XP as DOS", do they?
Slashdot Mirror
"Morality got started when we finally figured out that it isn't nice to throw poop at one another."
And the Internet got started when we figured out we could do it semi-anonymously with 1s and 0s and even get mod points for it!
Extinction is such a nice, nondescript word.
Internet Radio in the US is being MURDERED by the MafiAA.
Fortunately, what these bastards utterly don't understand is that the internet doesn't give jack squat about national boundaries. So fine, US internet radio producers will be driven out of business by the government at the behest of protective corporate interests. I'll listen to Swedish, Japanese, or German stations instead.
Or maybe, instead of immediately resorting to hyperbole, we could consider:
- Is it REALLY ok for children below 5 to watch graphic violence?
- Is it likewise ok for them to watch graphic explicit sex?
And before you say "just turn off the TV, stupid" perhaps you could join us in the real world, where the TV is occasionally on and kids are in the room, or at friends where they don't have stringent TV attention from the parents, or recognize the fact that OCCASIONALLY parents have other things that need doing and their kids might just have the TV on during a Saturday morning cartoon hour without the parent present.
See, from my experience it's less about the PROGRAMS that are on - those you can easily avoid already - it's the ADVERTISEMENTS for those programs. One moment, a kid is watching an educational children's show about animals, and during the commercial break they show an implied execution-style gangland murder as a teaser about the evening's prime-time programming.
Ironically, it's often the same people claiming the oppressive Religious Right is trying to control our thoughts, who cheerfully demonstrate against "Big Tobacco", campaign against the 2nd Amendment, or tell us that driving SUVs is evil.
Freedom is freedom. You can't have yours and deny me mine. Personally, I'm either in favor of total libertarianism or a recognition that a SOCIETY agrees on certain boundaries; in which case we can discuss and set some like adults without this politically-tainted crying that one side is oppressing the other, Mr. HangingChad.
Kudos to your company for recognizing that employees are people
Read his post again. His company doesn't 'recognize' the employees are people, they concede that treating them like humans is the best way to get work out of the animals.
As he said - they'd rather totally lock everything down.
So I say to him: F*ck you, Mr SysAdmin. You have it totally backwards, and only have it "right" by accident. Maybe you should think of your employees as humans FIRST, instead of as trouble-causing drones? Perhaps you should be the advocate saying "gee, you know, happy people like to come to work, they like to be here, and they're probably spending too much of their life here ANYWAY - what's wrong with opening everything up as much as possible (within the limits of security) and letting people control themselves, only stepping in to discipline people that can't seem to keep their focus on work while they're here?"
No, it's SysNazis like you that make stupid ass DRACONIAN policies that are so much fun to break. The more you tighten your grip, the more systems will slip through your fingers.
Actually, I appreciate your sticking in here and responding. This is interesting.
So are you serious? I mean, really? You think that "desire for music" = compulsion in any real sense of the word?
Are you equally incensed about Gilette razor blades only fitting Gilette razors?
Ford cars requiring Ford parts?
DirecTV only offering certain stations that you can't get elsewhere?
This isn't like someone FORCING you to do something. I think most people would consider it a relatively trivial matter to choose another mp3 player.
I'm genuinely amazed.
The free market....is not free.
I'm sorry, but that's total bullshit.
Nobody is compelling anyone to buy itunes. Yes, companies are trying to dominate the market. They are also trying to out-compete their competition.
As long as the consumer is not somehow compelled or restricted from exercising their right to buy from one vendor or another, it's not anticompetitive.
The contention from USDoJ was, I understand, that MS OS had become so ubiquitous that it exercised unfair control of the majority of the market to EXCLUDE other vendors' products from working on MS OS (ie Netscape, IIRC). Personally it seemed like a witch hunt to me - even then you could buy OS/2, any number of a variety of Linuxen, etc.
But does iTunes command that much of the online music market? Not by a long shot.
People need to stop looking to the government for solutions.
Don't like iTunes? Have an 'issue' with iPod? BUY THE MUSIC ELSEWHERE.
There are dozens of alternatives, from other online services all the way to 'burn yer own' cd stations at grocery stores.
If a supplier offers a product that is extremely good, but then starts to lock in proprietary components (including consumables that are necessary) why don't we let the MARKET decide whether the limitations exceed the value? Customers are fairly smart over time.
On this same premise, when is the EU commissioner going to go after Schick and Gilette for having the AUDACITY to build their razor blades in such a proprietary fashion? I mean, you can't use a Gilette blade on a Schick handle - heavens!
Or closer to the EU - how about Volkswagen for making it's f*cking windshield wiper blades with a unique mounting, so you can't just buy their blades off the shelf like every other car, but have to buy VW blades at $16-$18 EACH?
Such monopolist behaviour MUST STOP! Someone call the government to regulate!
Or we could just let the market punish manufacturers that go too far?
I'm a big fan of Greg Bear's books, they tend to have interesting stories with a hard-sf basis in fact.
But really, there are a lot of authors listed at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_science_fiction that I would recommend.
Hardly. Say something blatantly stupid, and people call you stupid. They don't (typically)
- claim you're a fascist
- attack your personal motivations
- attack your religion
If you disagree with someone, fine. But why the vitriol? Ironically, Global Warmingists responses are much like I would expect from a glassy-eyed Christian questioned about the existence of God: anger, shock that someone would think such a thing, and then bitter attack.
He has at least as much scientific training as Al Gore, no?
True, 100%
Wrong.
Most scientists (as far as I can tell, and leaving out the Al Gores and Michael Crichton's) seem to agree that the globe is warming.
Many of them believe that humans are contributing, mainly to an acceleration of a natural increase.
The $60 million question(s), and the ones that I can't seem to find reliable answers to are: is human contribution significant, and if so, is the cost of reducing it economically possible, and again, if so, what are the opportunity costs?
Um, that's not convincing.
China couldn't give a SHIT about Kyoto, because it exempts them. In fact, the longer they get the west to willingly spend $billions$ chasing this while China ignores it, it's a competitive advantage for China. China doesn't really care about scientific evidence or external pressure. It hasn't for centuries.
Strawman. If you really believe this, you need a logic check.
Read the points again. NOBODY says that humans haven't impacted their environment at all. You can't argue persuasively against a point that you are misstating from the outset.
So all the people who regularly point out how much "better" a society Sweden is than the US, either have to:
- entirely backtrack
- agree that domestic surveillance really ISN'T that big a deal
- just be hypocrites.
(grabs some popcorn)
OK, let's start discussing!
The keys being:
n quiry.asp?z=y&EAN=9781594200793&itm=1
- head lice and body lice have entirely different grasping systems. Non-interchangeable.
- lice can't survive IIRC more than a few hours away from a host. So their lifespan is intimately connected with their host(s)
- lice are species specific
Human body lice therefore are unlikely to have evolved their grasping mechanism (useless with body hair or wearing animal skins/furs) until shortly after textiles would have become common clothing for humans. So it doesn't give us precisely when humans STARTED wearing textiles. It does strongly suggest a start point of shortly after (the lice would have had time to evolve) textiles and humans became commonly associated.
- All taken as best I can recall from an outstanding book on the subject: Before the Dawn: Recovering The Lost History of Our Ancestors
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnI
IIRC the 9/11 hijackers lured the pilots to open the cockpit doors by slitting the throats of stewardesses.
To that point, hijackings had been about control, destination, $$, releasing some "freedom fighters" from jail, and/or all of the above. The cold-blooded, shocking brutality of the hijackers was calculated to play on the very human sympathies of the command cabin staff for their coworkers and friends.
Needless to say, control cabin doors have been substantially reinforced so that basically whatever it would take to smash it open would be something that could equally likely destroy the plane anyway. And the sympathy thing...well, that card won't work anymore. So what's your point again?
That said, I think this is a rather stupid idea. It doesn't significantly change anything (ok it gives decision makers slightly longer to vaccilate -woohoo).
Today: terrorists take control of plane; if they appear to be headed for anything, the scrambled fighter shoots it down (assuming someone has the cajones to make the call) - plane destroyed, everyone dies.
Tomorrow: terrorists take control of plane; they start killing people individually, brutally, over some media venue (cameraphone, live on radio, etc.) unless someone releases control of the plane. (assuming someone has the cajones to say no) result: everyone dies. But hey, we saved the plane!
You mean, pretty much the same strategy Apple has used for decades?
To whit: supply systems at ridiculous discounts to schools and students, so that their life-experience with computers when they start buying their own is entirely mac-based?*
* now with the added bonus of 'social cachet' - if you buy Apple products you "think different"! (just like EVERYONE ELSE who buys into the market-cred of being a cool, elite Mac user, not one of those tawdy, workaday galley slaves, ^H^H^H office clerks that have to slave away on "PeeCees", the poor helpless bastards)
Perhaps it could be stated more simply: a console (no matter what console) isn't a personal computer. It just ISN'T. It's a video-optimized, hard-coded processor with extremely limited inputs which usually uses the extraordinarily-shitty "standard TV" as display.
Duh?
And yes, products can be developed that will run on both, but the compromises required to make it a 'console-able' game are immediately obvious on any PC - look at Oblivion. The most popular (and one of the quickest-released) mods take advantage of the better resolution of a monitor to immediately make the bag/inventory system 100% more useable, with more data displayed, clearer/smaller text, etc.
So when he says "the WII is crap" what he's really saying is that "we're pissed that they optimized this for something other than controlling our game, because we're having to make ridiculous, possibly fatal compromises to try to sell into that market".
Is this a shock to anyone who's played a RTS on a PC and then on a console? No mouse = serious suckage. Spore = RTS strategy = (WII+no mouse) = suckage.* Brilliant insight, dude.
* yes, I know the WII has the point-click thing going, but watching people play at length, first their click targets are HUGE because it doesn't have nearly the precision of a mouse, the response-time of a mouse, nor (apparently) the sample rate of a mouse. WII controller is only a feeble mouse-emulation at best.
I'm not entirely sure I agree.
I would have agreed with you that MMOs are inevitably 'tainted', but Disney's Toontown is an outstanding example of a fun MMO that is totally child-safe. I was amazed at the unobtrusive yet secure protections that they have in place, yet it remains a really quite a fun game.
So I wouldn't say it's impossible. Difficult? Especially if you hand them freeform construction tools, yes. But I would no longer say impossible.
H.G. Wells' martians are laughing their asses off over that one.
Firstly, I believe any review of the literature will show convincingly that actual religiosity is generally passed own by/through the MOTHER, based on her beliefs, and much less so the father.
Further, this 'study' drawing conclusions about all of humanity was based on data derived from Americans only, a definitely skewed population compared to the rest of the world in terms of belief.
Never hung out much with an athiest, I see.
Geez, 96 bytes of RAM? Who would ever need more than 64 for anything?
I notice you have the ability to actively work in 4 text documents at once. I'm sure you'll be hearing from Microsoft's attorneys shortly.
Kidding aside, that's really an amazing accomplishment: congratulations!
Another interesting thing is that searches including 'fuck' increase during weekends: http://www.google.com/trends?q=fuck&ctab=0&geo=all &date=2006-10 [google.com]
Not surprising at all, IMO.
Considering the number of people that waste their time at work on the internet, it's a reasonable precaution that they avoid words which would, if the sysadmin is paying some attention to what they're doing, JUMP out as "non work related" for everyone besides Ron Jeremy.
I'm more curious about the quality.
I have a gianormous HDTV-capable antenna on my house, and we live in a usually-good-occasionally crappy reception area, probably 35 mi from the broadcast antennas. I would very much like to know if I plunk down $300 for an HDTV tuner, am I going to get decent quality, or am I going to get crap (particulary if, as I understand, analog signals that occasionally have a sparkle of static will completely CUT OUT if they are instead being picked up as digital broadcasts...).
Would very much like to hear people's comments on the quality of OTA HDTV, particularly in margin/fringe areas.
That this story was posted RIGHT ABOVE "Recovering a Wrecked RAID"?
Aren't they all?
What I'd like to see is an explanation for why the Muslim Arab cultures were at the cutting edge of technology and science until what, the 11th, 12th century? And then for some reason, they have subsequently failed to advance technologically or culturally since then.
When you argue that people are "born bad" or otherwise don't have free will, you're arguing that all these people are wasting their time. That they will never overcome their difficulties and they should either give up an committ a crime, cause trouble, go insane or just kill themselves. That is a flawed assumption. We all have the power to change our own lifes, and to alter the course of our lives. That's what seperates humans from animals.
In a sense, that's irrelevant to society, however. Philosophically it's all well and good, and well worth debating into the long, dark hours of the night.
Society as a whole is (or should be) unconcerned. If a human CHOOSES to act like a wild animal - in fact, worse than one if you concede free will - he should be treated as one: caged, cared for to a minimal standard of care, and ultimately if not able to behave within norms that society sets - euthanized.
For example, I know that Alfonso Rodruiguez was someobody's little boy, once. But now (after his rape and murder of Dru Sjodin) he is simply a human-shaped dangerous nuisance that it is in the public interest to remove.
As far as the OP's lad, he's not stupid. He knows that society will give him chance after chance after chance, in the vain hope that he will develop something analogous to a conscience. Why should we bother? Because of "Human compassion"? Pull the other one - I have more pre-emptive compassion for his next victim than I ever would for him.
Hear hear.
There are so many games that I wish I could run on what would effectively be a command-line XP system.
If I'm playing a game, I don't want it to keep track of time, the weather, incoming messages, a pretty picture on my desktop, the state of the dvd drive, and whether I've got the latest update. I don't multitask while gaming. I don't play EU3 and edit spreadsheets at the same time.
I want every erg of horsepower and CPU bandwidth chewing through game data.
*Occasionally* (about 5% of the time) I *might* run an mp3 player in the background. But if I had something that would screw multitasking, I would forego that in a heartbeat.
I don't suppose anyone here has what amounts to "XP as DOS", do they?