So you have ITExampleCorp that has 500 legit copies of XP running on 1500 machines, or something to that effect.
Suing ExampleCorp in that instance is, in fact, suing your customer. Of course, what the BSA prefers to do is to instead demand that ExampleCorp buy licences from them to cover the other thousand boxes, using the threat of a lawsuit to make them comply.
Which, of course, often comes back to bad management.
IT guy: "Hey, we're running 1500 computers on 500 legit copies of XP. We need to fix this, immediately." Manager: "It's working, right?" IT guy: "Yes, but, it's illegal. We're going to need to plop down a significant chunk of change to become compliant." Manager: "There's no budget for that, and I'm not asking MY boss for extra funds for it. Just ignore it." IT guy: "Er, ok, but I want it officially noted I object to this." Manager: "Stupid un-manageable dork." BSA: "Boogity boogity boo!" Manager's Boss: "Why is your department running illegal copies of Windows XP?" Manager: "It's them damn nerds down in IT, you can't trust'm!" Manager's Boss: "Ah, good to hear. Here's your bonus. Mine's bigger." Manager: "About the um... YP thing the eggheads were complaining about? We need to budget some money to fix it, I guess." Manager's Boss: "... It's working, right?"
Is it really too much to ask the/. editors to quickly look around the page for the crud-free one-page "print" version link and post that for us all instead...
So you'd like Slashdot to intentionally screw PCMag out of ad revenue for the (not insignificant) amount of traffic/. brings to their website, making it likely that PCMag's web gurus will block such outside linking to the print version, disable the print version outright, put themselves behind a pay filter, or go out of business (something that plug-ins like AdBlock are already working on doing)?
Yes, no one likes ads. But to quote the snob -- "websites is expensive".
Can someone who isn't an American Citizen and has no ties to the USA be guilty of Treason?
Also: While we are rightfully mocking this uneducated, lower class wage slave's outrage that someone might dare point out flaws in his perfect government fantasy, lets not forget that several Republicans have openly called for Assange's assassination, unlawful imprisonment, and at this time there appears to be a conspiracy to ruin his life under trumped up false charges of having sex without a condom (which the US media is calling rape) which is a well known FUD tactic by the US Government.
While this trailer park plaintiff is obvious a whackjob, his only true crime is he's vocalizing what the GOP is fantasizing about right now.
How is this news? 90% of the Spyware I see comes from banner ads that redirect to malware.
Pick your poison:
1. Ad redirects upon load to Malware 2. Ad appears normal, redirects after X seconds to Malware 3. Ad appears normal, then redirects to Malware upon closure 4. Ad redirects to Malware upon specific click event (mouseover, clicking something in the page, etc)
Where Malware in this instance is 99% of the time a PDF exploit. And since Flash lacks basic security measures (such as, say, an option to refuse to run scripts in SWF files, or to refuse to open URLs without you clicking through, or...) well, you're screwed.
The solution is simple: Block Adobe products and cheap knockoffs (like Silverlight) from your machine outright.
Except as I said in my post, the concerts themselves, with all the special effects, have been going for over a year. I know it's a hassle, but do try to read before clicking "reply".
Actually, you mentioned "special-effects-heavy concerts". Which could describe anything, including Kiss, Gwar, Ramstein...
Yes, Slashdot is LTTP, very much so, but... Well. Yeah. PIE. It's still neat to see the tech reaching this level. Didn't Japan predict this years ago with some mecha anime? And is this on Kurzweil's list of predictions?
Considering the achievement system, they're not cheating only themselves.
Except the achievement system literally has no point, no benefit, and is the most blatant "e-peen" exhibitionism around. It's even less important than the 360 Achievements, which is saying something.
No, this is a rights grab. They're trying to convince a court that you have no right to do anything with the product you bought and paid for, whatsoever, because you're not buying it, you're borrowing it long term for a set fee. It's utter madness. If someone wanted to make the "Game Genie" nowadays, Nintendo would sue them into oblivion and prevent it from ever happening.
Assange has done a severe disservice to WL with his emphasis on injecting over the top editorial into the stories on the site.
Like calling murder "murder", that kind of over the top editorializing? Or do you have a better example?
It's not Murder, it's Collateral Damage. Hey, cheap oil ain't free, ya know -- to keep up our proud American culture of excess and waste... well. Be it some poor civilians in the sand, some Chinese sweatshop workers making tube socks, or some poor schmucks who had the unfortunate luck to try and vote out our current puppet dictators selling us oil at rock bottom prices, it all has to come from somewhere. And it's not like anyone in the US cares, they're just brown people.
Er, crap, now you have me doing it. I mean, it's not like anyone in the US cares, they're just mooslim terr'ists.
Really, there is very little difference between "exhaustion penalty" and "rest bonus" other than perception.
In both cases, you get more XP when rested and less when not rested. Other than psychology there is no difference.
Actually, since the penalty hits 100%, there is a very BIG difference between the two.
In WOW, you run out of Rest XP, you can still progress. (From 200% to 100%.)
In FF14, you run out of Fatigue, you can't gain XP until the timer runs out. (From 100% to 0%.)
You can switch jobs, but good luck trying to explain to your regular party why you can't go out and do anything tonight as your melee class, but if they all want to switch to other jobs so you can level your ranged combat class that's 10 levels lower, that'd be cool. You know, instead of actually progressing at the game.
Which is the ultimate goal here. They don't want people hitting endgame immediately, so they're trying to slow people down.
Fortunately the Enix side appears to still be ran intelligently -- Dragon Quest 9 was pretty much spot on perfect, Dragon Quest Monsters Joker 2 has some missteps but is much better than Joker 1, etc etc. And the new Final Fantasy 4 Heroes of Light game is also pretty close to perfect as it stands, so there is hope for the franchise. Just not in the current path they're going down.
Those games are good probably because Square Enix only published them. Dragon Quest 9 was developed by Level 5, Dragon Quest Monsters Joker 2 by Tose and Final Fantasy The 4 Heroes of Light by Matrix Software.
Actually not exactly, at least for the DQ games. The same "dream team" -- Yuji Horii, Akira Toriyama, and Koichi Sugiyama headed the DQ9 and DQMJ2 projects. They did have other teams do the grunt work programming, but the executive decisions were all done by the same team that has done every Dragon Quest game since DQ1 on the MSX/NES. They've been using other teams for the "grunt work" for years now.
That's why they're all so traditionalist and, no coincidentally, why they're all so good.
Furthermore, Square-Enix needs to do some serious market research and learn what players actually want from a game.
Please elaborate.
Both FF13 and FF14 have been plagued by poor design decisions that represent management who are woefully out of touch with their target audience.
For example, FF13's dungeon design was vastly simplified, to the point that 99.99% of all dungeons in the game are single straight corridors, with no side paths nor possible ways to get lost. They're very pretty, but it's also very similar to playing "Final Fight: The RPG" -- walk forward, fight, walk forward, fight, walk forward, fight... This is indicative of a group of executives who have a very, very poor opinion of their target audience as a whole - "Today's gamers aren't smart enough to figure out a maze, make it a straight line." There's a reason that game was 98% off in stores a few weeks after release, it tanked, HARD. I would be pretty surprised if they made back the absurd development costs.
Final Fantasy 14, amongst other things, implements a "reverse rest EXP system" -- the more you play, the less you get out of playing. Not only that, when people openly started talking about this, Square Enix bold faced LIED about it to the player base -- claiming that it was all made up by "foreign websites trolling for hits." It took 2ch and the other Japanese fansites breaking NDA en mass and saying "no, that's all true" for them to own up and admit it publically. Blizzard specifically said they originally tried the same thing for WOW, but decided it was stupid and inverted it -- instead of punishing you with fatigue for playing too much, they gave you bonuses for taking breaks. Similar long cooldowns are implemented in the repeatable quest systems, the crafting system, the works.
These are symptoms of a company that knows their game isn't fleshed out enough to keep people busy, but is out of ideas on how to keep people from quitting before they can fix it.
This has actually been going on for a while, but these latest two have finally put it to the point that the detractors are louder than the fans. FF12, for example, had an atrocious plot, and they dropped the main character in lieu of a 14 year old metrosexual because "gamers can't associate with a middle aged (you know, 20) protagonist." But the rest of the game made up for it - the combat was aces, the open, near sandbox style map was great, the bonus fights were actually fun, etc etc.
FF11 was legendary for taking your characters hostage -- if you ever quit, they "deleted" (read: blocked you from using) your characters. Yes, they fixed it later, but only after the subscription numbers crashed. They still thought this was a good idea at the time. To say nothing about the design of the game as a whole -- the UI choices, especially on the PC, were downright criminal.
There have just been one bad design decision after another over there the past few years, and it's getting worse.
Fortunately the Enix side appears to still be ran intelligently -- Dragon Quest 9 was pretty much spot on perfect, Dragon Quest Monsters Joker 2 has some missteps but is much better than Joker 1, etc etc. And the new Final Fantasy 4 Heroes of Light game is also pretty close to perfect as it stands, so there is hope for the franchise. Just not in the current path they're going down.
HFCS-55 is 55% fructose. Cane sugar is sucrose, which is one quick reaction (which happens in the stomach before absorption of the sugar into the bloodstream) away from being 50% fructose. If the enemy is fructose, cane sugar is almost as bad as HFCS.
The enemy is our high-sugar diet in general. We should have switched over to Sweetleaf / Stevia 30 years ago, as it would have let us continue with our current taste in foods, only healthier.
But someone (corn or sugar lobby is the obvious culprit, but don't count out the artificial sugar guys, most of them are made by huge chem companies) had a friend in high places place a ban on the stuff back in the early 90s.
No doubt because you can replace sugar (and all artificial sugar) with processed Stevia at something like a 30 to 1 ratio -- I use 1/4th a teaspoon to make an entire pitcher of KoolAid, as opposed to a cup or whatnot of sugar. In other words, if we had switched to Stevia, all three of the HFCS, the Cane Sugar, and the cancer causing alternatives would have been rendered obsolete, incredibly rapidly. There's an interesting dynamic going on -- the sweetener industry uses something that's incredibly unhealthy but dirt cheap, and when that starts to go south they also sell us (equally if not worse) alternatives under the guise of "health food". All while ignoring an actual healthy alternative cause they can't control it.
The complaint was that "we just don't know if this Stevia thing is OK", and after banning they... promptly refused to study it to see if it WAS ok. It's a really common tactic, really.
Meanwhile, Japan's been using the stuff for 30 years with no ill effects. At all.
Oh, and they recently unbanned it (Maybe. They might have just "unbanned" the fake-but-patentable alternatives. See the Owndoc link above), but only after huge chemical company Cargil and artificial sweetener company Merisant -- aka the GM seed jerks and makers of Roundup, Monsanto -- found a way to make cancer-causing, but patentable, alternatives -- Truvia (Coke/Cargil) and Purvia (Pepsi/Monsanto).
Since Stevia's an incredibly easy to grow herb (you almost definitely can find a powdered or liquid version at your local store in the health food section, or a live plant the gardening section when it's that time of year), well, they couldn't compete with THAT.
Meanwhile, if you do grow it yourself, tossing a leaf or two in with one's tea sweetens it up quite perfectly. Enjoy.
I don't know how old you are, but I currently have less freedom of speech and other rights than I did 30 years ago. And that's mostly on account of people born to William Lashua's generation and their misuse of the US military.
Mr. Lashua's a hero and deserving of respect. Save your (justified, right, correct, and intelligent) scorn for the clowns screaming "Support Our Troops" while running the military into the ground.
Google's Evil? I'll believe that when I see a "We detected a cookie from MSN and/or Bing! Your browser may be infected by MSN specific viruses and trojans! Please download and run this Google Chrome + security scan now!" on random webpages with Google AdSense, a-la the Dr. DOS screwjob.
There are evil tech companies out there. Google's not even in the top 10.
I believe they go into a room and high five each other, cause they just conned HP into paying an absurd amount of money for something they didn't really need.
Also, any large enough festival like this is going to have some bits of drama, most of it brought on from people that haven't really been there or get the point. I also don't really agree with the photo policies at BM, but I do understand the need to protect privacy in events like this.
... Privacy? Do people really have an expectation of privacy when they are walking around clothesfree or topfree, outside, in a crowd of thousands of people?
I've never been to Burning Man, I've been to other free-love-get-high-hippy-alt-fests so I "get" the point of it, but I don't understand how the Open Source community can stomach Burning Man's copyright claims.
On paper it sounds really good. "We have a bunch of nudists and hippies (and exhibitionsts) that show up and walk around naked for most of the event. We don't want voyeurs to be getting their rocks off on them."
Then they went after private photographers own galleries, and the Wiki Commons. Oh, and they sell their own DVDs. Complete coincidence, there.
Unfortunately Burning Man itself has kinda become mainstream. It's less about art and free love and the like, and more about college guys getting drunk/stoned and harassing girls, trying to get them to strip. I imagine there are other, better, alt-fests around, but the closest thing I get to Hippydome is reading Brad Warner's series of Zen books.
Your Rights Online: FCC Fights To Maintain Control over Culture "The FCC filed Thursday to appeal a recent court decision that struck down its policy of fining broadcasters for offending puritanical Christian moral majority groups such as Parents Television Council. The FCC's brief argues the court ruling would make it almost impossible to punish broadcasters that deviate from 1950s morality during hours when children are likely to be watching or listening."
Just as a reminder, most of these "complaints" are coming from dittohead idiots following form letter emails from the PTC and other such "watchdog" groups. It's not real outrage, it's manufactured in order to push a political agenda -- namely, the repression of sexuality in the US. If you want to try and influence and repress culture, a really good place to start is sexuality, after all.
No, it's more like let "the authorities" think about it.
The only thing that will come of able bodied, intelligent students thinking about flaws in the system is able bodied, intelligent students realizing that the system is flawed.
Which is bad, from the POV of someone who knows there are flaws, but keeps his/her job by making sure the general public is too stupid to realize / too fat to care.
I'll bet you'll shut up the next time something bad happens to your country and the U.S. parks a giant hospital ship off your shores and starts dispensing free medical care. Hopefully that won't happen, but if it does, you probably won't turn to Russia, or China, or North Korea, or any of the countries truly deserving of your ire. Nope, the world always expects the U.S. to do all the heavy lifting, and when we do, you still complain. Well you know what? For our part, we're tired of all the losers who have screwed their own societies into the ground and expect us to do something about it.
Well hell, I'm in the US, where do I sign up for this "Giant Hospital Ship" healthcare plan? Oh wait, we can't have that for our own citizens, because... well, I have never quite figured that out yet. I think it involves health insurance lobbyists giving Republicans money and lesbian BDSM stripper themed parties, or some-such.
Oh, and the rest of the world? They're tired of the US walking around doing the diplomatic variant of a 8 year old screeching "I'M FUCKING AWESOME AND YOU GUYS ARE IDIOTS, LOVE ME!!!!" every few days. Especially given how much we lean on *them*, in areas such as, oh, I dunno -- the economy? Seriously, have you looked into just how much money we're borrowing from China on credit? We're living very irresponsibly as a nation, and it will all come crashing down sooner or later.
I think we officially lost the moral high ground the day we started officially shoving flashlights in prisoner's asses over in Iraq, which leads me to this -- Best 1 liner on that twitter page:
Slashdot Mirror
Did anyone NOT see this coming? Maybe they'll have Zelda too!
Well, kinda obvious, but one of the major criticisms about the 3DS is that it doesn't have a Mario Launch title, so...
So you have ITExampleCorp that has 500 legit copies of XP running on 1500 machines, or something to that effect.
Suing ExampleCorp in that instance is, in fact, suing your customer. Of course, what the BSA prefers to do is to instead demand that ExampleCorp buy licences from them to cover the other thousand boxes, using the threat of a lawsuit to make them comply.
Which, of course, often comes back to bad management.
IT guy: "Hey, we're running 1500 computers on 500 legit copies of XP. We need to fix this, immediately."
Manager: "It's working, right?"
IT guy: "Yes, but, it's illegal. We're going to need to plop down a significant chunk of change to become compliant."
Manager: "There's no budget for that, and I'm not asking MY boss for extra funds for it. Just ignore it."
IT guy: "Er, ok, but I want it officially noted I object to this."
Manager: "Stupid un-manageable dork."
BSA: "Boogity boogity boo!"
Manager's Boss: "Why is your department running illegal copies of Windows XP?"
Manager: "It's them damn nerds down in IT, you can't trust'm!"
Manager's Boss: "Ah, good to hear. Here's your bonus. Mine's bigger."
Manager: "About the um... YP thing the eggheads were complaining about? We need to budget some money to fix it, I guess."
Manager's Boss: "... It's working, right?"
Repeat ad nauseum.
Is it really too much to ask the /. editors to quickly look around the page for the crud-free one-page "print" version link and post that for us all instead...
http://www.pcmag.com/print_article2/0,1217,a=259387,00.asp?hidPrint=true
So you'd like Slashdot to intentionally screw PCMag out of ad revenue for the (not insignificant) amount of traffic /. brings to their website, making it likely that PCMag's web gurus will block such outside linking to the print version, disable the print version outright, put themselves behind a pay filter, or go out of business (something that plug-ins like AdBlock are already working on doing)?
Yes, no one likes ads. But to quote the snob -- "websites is expensive".
Can someone who isn't an American Citizen and has no ties to the USA be guilty of Treason?
Also: While we are rightfully mocking this uneducated, lower class wage slave's outrage that someone might dare point out flaws in his perfect government fantasy, lets not forget that several Republicans have openly called for Assange's assassination, unlawful imprisonment, and at this time there appears to be a conspiracy to ruin his life under trumped up false charges of having sex without a condom (which the US media is calling rape) which is a well known FUD tactic by the US Government.
While this trailer park plaintiff is obvious a whackjob, his only true crime is he's vocalizing what the GOP is fantasizing about right now.
How is this news? 90% of the Spyware I see comes from banner ads that redirect to malware.
Pick your poison:
1. Ad redirects upon load to Malware
2. Ad appears normal, redirects after X seconds to Malware
3. Ad appears normal, then redirects to Malware upon closure
4. Ad redirects to Malware upon specific click event (mouseover, clicking something in the page, etc)
Where Malware in this instance is 99% of the time a PDF exploit. And since Flash lacks basic security measures (such as, say, an option to refuse to run scripts in SWF files, or to refuse to open URLs without you clicking through, or...) well, you're screwed.
The solution is simple: Block Adobe products and cheap knockoffs (like Silverlight) from your machine outright.
Seriously, people would copy a game playing Michael Jackson? Seems like the vuvuzelas are redundant.
They will now, just to see the Vuvuzela meme -- thus giving them a great piracy figure to justify even worse things down the line.
The newpaper's site (http://www.northcountrygazette.org/) is now throwing up a 403 error. Fastest slashdotting ever?
It's loading here, but every single post after 8 AM this morning is marked:
This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:
Not the best way to bring people to look at your site, I think.
Except as I said in my post, the concerts themselves, with all the special effects, have been going for over a year. I know it's a hassle, but do try to read before clicking "reply".
Actually, you mentioned "special-effects-heavy concerts". Which could describe anything, including Kiss, Gwar, Ramstein...
Yes, Slashdot is LTTP, very much so, but... Well. Yeah. PIE. It's still neat to see the tech reaching this level. Didn't Japan predict this years ago with some mecha anime? And is this on Kurzweil's list of predictions?
Here's my favorite Vocaloid video. Just in time for Halloween:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2RFcrreoE8
Considering the achievement system, they're not cheating only themselves.
Except the achievement system literally has no point, no benefit, and is the most blatant "e-peen" exhibitionism around. It's even less important than the 360 Achievements, which is saying something.
No, this is a rights grab. They're trying to convince a court that you have no right to do anything with the product you bought and paid for, whatsoever, because you're not buying it, you're borrowing it long term for a set fee. It's utter madness. If someone wanted to make the "Game Genie" nowadays, Nintendo would sue them into oblivion and prevent it from ever happening.
Assange has done a severe disservice to WL with his emphasis on injecting over the top editorial into the stories on the site.
Like calling murder "murder", that kind of over the top editorializing? Or do you have a better example?
It's not Murder, it's Collateral Damage. Hey, cheap oil ain't free, ya know -- to keep up our proud American culture of excess and waste... well. Be it some poor civilians in the sand, some Chinese sweatshop workers making tube socks, or some poor schmucks who had the unfortunate luck to try and vote out our current puppet dictators selling us oil at rock bottom prices, it all has to come from somewhere. And it's not like anyone in the US cares, they're just brown people.
Er, crap, now you have me doing it. I mean, it's not like anyone in the US cares, they're just mooslim terr'ists.
Really, there is very little difference between "exhaustion penalty" and "rest bonus" other than perception.
In both cases, you get more XP when rested and less when not rested. Other than psychology there is no difference.
Actually, since the penalty hits 100%, there is a very BIG difference between the two.
In WOW, you run out of Rest XP, you can still progress. (From 200% to 100%.)
In FF14, you run out of Fatigue, you can't gain XP until the timer runs out. (From 100% to 0%.)
You can switch jobs, but good luck trying to explain to your regular party why you can't go out and do anything tonight as your melee class, but if they all want to switch to other jobs so you can level your ranged combat class that's 10 levels lower, that'd be cool. You know, instead of actually progressing at the game.
Which is the ultimate goal here. They don't want people hitting endgame immediately, so they're trying to slow people down.
Fortunately the Enix side appears to still be ran intelligently -- Dragon Quest 9 was pretty much spot on perfect, Dragon Quest Monsters Joker 2 has some missteps but is much better than Joker 1, etc etc. And the new Final Fantasy 4 Heroes of Light game is also pretty close to perfect as it stands, so there is hope for the franchise. Just not in the current path they're going down.
Those games are good probably because Square Enix only published them.
Dragon Quest 9 was developed by Level 5, Dragon Quest Monsters Joker 2 by Tose and Final Fantasy The 4 Heroes of Light by Matrix Software.
Actually not exactly, at least for the DQ games. The same "dream team" -- Yuji Horii, Akira Toriyama, and Koichi Sugiyama headed the DQ9 and DQMJ2 projects. They did have other teams do the grunt work programming, but the executive decisions were all done by the same team that has done every Dragon Quest game since DQ1 on the MSX/NES. They've been using other teams for the "grunt work" for years now.
That's why they're all so traditionalist and, no coincidentally, why they're all so good.
Furthermore, Square-Enix needs to do some serious market research and learn what players actually want from a game.
Please elaborate.
Both FF13 and FF14 have been plagued by poor design decisions that represent management who are woefully out of touch with their target audience.
For example, FF13's dungeon design was vastly simplified, to the point that 99.99% of all dungeons in the game are single straight corridors, with no side paths nor possible ways to get lost. They're very pretty, but it's also very similar to playing "Final Fight: The RPG" -- walk forward, fight, walk forward, fight, walk forward, fight... This is indicative of a group of executives who have a very, very poor opinion of their target audience as a whole - "Today's gamers aren't smart enough to figure out a maze, make it a straight line." There's a reason that game was 98% off in stores a few weeks after release, it tanked, HARD. I would be pretty surprised if they made back the absurd development costs.
Final Fantasy 14, amongst other things, implements a "reverse rest EXP system" -- the more you play, the less you get out of playing. Not only that, when people openly started talking about this, Square Enix bold faced LIED about it to the player base -- claiming that it was all made up by "foreign websites trolling for hits." It took 2ch and the other Japanese fansites breaking NDA en mass and saying "no, that's all true" for them to own up and admit it publically. Blizzard specifically said they originally tried the same thing for WOW, but decided it was stupid and inverted it -- instead of punishing you with fatigue for playing too much, they gave you bonuses for taking breaks. Similar long cooldowns are implemented in the repeatable quest systems, the crafting system, the works.
These are symptoms of a company that knows their game isn't fleshed out enough to keep people busy, but is out of ideas on how to keep people from quitting before they can fix it.
This has actually been going on for a while, but these latest two have finally put it to the point that the detractors are louder than the fans. FF12, for example, had an atrocious plot, and they dropped the main character in lieu of a 14 year old metrosexual because "gamers can't associate with a middle aged (you know, 20) protagonist." But the rest of the game made up for it - the combat was aces, the open, near sandbox style map was great, the bonus fights were actually fun, etc etc.
FF11 was legendary for taking your characters hostage -- if you ever quit, they "deleted" (read: blocked you from using) your characters. Yes, they fixed it later, but only after the subscription numbers crashed. They still thought this was a good idea at the time. To say nothing about the design of the game as a whole -- the UI choices, especially on the PC, were downright criminal.
There have just been one bad design decision after another over there the past few years, and it's getting worse.
Fortunately the Enix side appears to still be ran intelligently -- Dragon Quest 9 was pretty much spot on perfect, Dragon Quest Monsters Joker 2 has some missteps but is much better than Joker 1, etc etc. And the new Final Fantasy 4 Heroes of Light game is also pretty close to perfect as it stands, so there is hope for the franchise. Just not in the current path they're going down.
Loads just fine for me here. Has all day.
HFCS-55 is 55% fructose. Cane sugar is sucrose, which is one quick reaction (which happens in the stomach before absorption of the sugar into the bloodstream) away from being 50% fructose. If the enemy is fructose, cane sugar is almost as bad as HFCS.
The enemy is our high-sugar diet in general. We should have switched over to Sweetleaf / Stevia 30 years ago, as it would have let us continue with our current taste in foods, only healthier.
But someone (corn or sugar lobby is the obvious culprit, but don't count out the artificial sugar guys, most of them are made by huge chem companies) had a friend in high places place a ban on the stuff back in the early 90s.
No doubt because you can replace sugar (and all artificial sugar) with processed Stevia at something like a 30 to 1 ratio -- I use 1/4th a teaspoon to make an entire pitcher of KoolAid, as opposed to a cup or whatnot of sugar. In other words, if we had switched to Stevia, all three of the HFCS, the Cane Sugar, and the cancer causing alternatives would have been rendered obsolete, incredibly rapidly. There's an interesting dynamic going on -- the sweetener industry uses something that's incredibly unhealthy but dirt cheap, and when that starts to go south they also sell us (equally if not worse) alternatives under the guise of "health food". All while ignoring an actual healthy alternative cause they can't control it.
The complaint was that "we just don't know if this Stevia thing is OK", and after banning they... promptly refused to study it to see if it WAS ok. It's a really common tactic, really.
Meanwhile, Japan's been using the stuff for 30 years with no ill effects. At all.
Oh, and they recently unbanned it (Maybe. They might have just "unbanned" the fake-but-patentable alternatives. See the Owndoc link above), but only after huge chemical company Cargil and artificial sweetener company Merisant -- aka the GM seed jerks and makers of Roundup, Monsanto -- found a way to make cancer-causing, but patentable, alternatives -- Truvia (Coke/Cargil) and Purvia (Pepsi/Monsanto).
Since Stevia's an incredibly easy to grow herb (you almost definitely can find a powdered or liquid version at your local store in the health food section, or a live plant the gardening section when it's that time of year), well, they couldn't compete with THAT.
Meanwhile, if you do grow it yourself, tossing a leaf or two in with one's tea sweetens it up quite perfectly. Enjoy.
I don't know how old you are, but I currently have less freedom of speech and other rights than I did 30 years ago. And that's mostly on account of people born to William Lashua's generation and their misuse of the US military.
Ah, but you also forget that most of these people who have misused the military either "had other priorities" than serving their country and used their connections to get repeated deferments, claimed they had a boil on their asses that prevented them from serving, or got a cushy air force position and then went AWOL when even that was too hard.
Mr. Lashua's a hero and deserving of respect. Save your (justified, right, correct, and intelligent) scorn for the clowns screaming "Support Our Troops" while running the military into the ground.
Google's Evil? I'll believe that when I see a "We detected a cookie from MSN and/or Bing! Your browser may be infected by MSN specific viruses and trojans! Please download and run this Google Chrome + security scan now!" on random webpages with Google AdSense, a-la the Dr. DOS screwjob.
There are evil tech companies out there. Google's not even in the top 10.
I believe they go into a room and high five each other, cause they just conned HP into paying an absurd amount of money for something they didn't really need.
Also, any large enough festival like this is going to have some bits of drama, most of it brought on from people that haven't really been there or get the point. I also don't really agree with the photo policies at BM, but I do understand the need to protect privacy in events like this.
... Privacy? Do people really have an expectation of privacy when they are walking around clothesfree or topfree, outside, in a crowd of thousands of people?
I've never been to Burning Man, I've been to other free-love-get-high-hippy-alt-fests so I "get" the point of it, but I don't understand how the Open Source community can stomach Burning Man's copyright claims.
On paper it sounds really good. "We have a bunch of nudists and hippies (and exhibitionsts) that show up and walk around naked for most of the event. We don't want voyeurs to be getting their rocks off on them."
Then they went after private photographers own galleries, and the Wiki Commons. Oh, and they sell their own DVDs. Complete coincidence, there.
Unfortunately Burning Man itself has kinda become mainstream. It's less about art and free love and the like, and more about college guys getting drunk/stoned and harassing girls, trying to get them to strip. I imagine there are other, better, alt-fests around, but the closest thing I get to Hippydome is reading Brad Warner's series of Zen books.
Is this the same Burning Man that claims copyright on any PRIVATE photos taken at their events?
PASS. Horrible IP grab + single Open Source project is still a negative, methinks.
Your Rights Online: FCC Fights To Maintain Control over Culture
"The FCC filed Thursday to appeal a recent court decision that struck down its policy of fining broadcasters for offending puritanical Christian moral majority groups such as Parents Television Council. The FCC's brief argues the court ruling would make it almost impossible to punish broadcasters that deviate from 1950s morality during hours when children are likely to be watching or listening."
Just as a reminder, most of these "complaints" are coming from dittohead idiots following form letter emails from the PTC and other such "watchdog" groups. It's not real outrage, it's manufactured in order to push a political agenda -- namely, the repression of sexuality in the US. If you want to try and influence and repress culture, a really good place to start is sexuality, after all.
No, it's more like let "the authorities" think about it.
The only thing that will come of able bodied, intelligent students thinking about flaws in the system is able bodied, intelligent students realizing that the system is flawed.
Which is bad, from the POV of someone who knows there are flaws, but keeps his/her job by making sure the general public is too stupid to realize / too fat to care.
how do you like them apples?
Considering Apple charges $99 in comparison to Chrome's $5? Pretty darn good, actually.
Any enemy of the US is our friend.
I'll bet you'll shut up the next time something bad happens to your country and the U.S. parks a giant hospital ship off your shores and starts dispensing free medical care. Hopefully that won't happen, but if it does, you probably won't turn to Russia, or China, or North Korea, or any of the countries truly deserving of your ire. Nope, the world always expects the U.S. to do all the heavy lifting, and when we do, you still complain. Well you know what? For our part, we're tired of all the losers who have screwed their own societies into the ground and expect us to do something about it.
Well hell, I'm in the US, where do I sign up for this "Giant Hospital Ship" healthcare plan? Oh wait, we can't have that for our own citizens, because... well, I have never quite figured that out yet. I think it involves health insurance lobbyists giving Republicans money and lesbian BDSM stripper themed parties, or some-such.
Oh, and the rest of the world? They're tired of the US walking around doing the diplomatic variant of a 8 year old screeching "I'M FUCKING AWESOME AND YOU GUYS ARE IDIOTS, LOVE ME!!!!" every few days. Especially given how much we lean on *them*, in areas such as, oh, I dunno -- the economy? Seriously, have you looked into just how much money we're borrowing from China on credit? We're living very irresponsibly as a nation, and it will all come crashing down sooner or later.
I think we officially lost the moral high ground the day we started officially shoving flashlights in prisoner's asses over in Iraq, which leads me to this -- Best 1 liner on that twitter page:
"Are Pentagon lawyers who believe WikiLeaks acted illegally same ones who were OK with torture of prisoners?"
https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/21706258324
Answer: Probably.