Yes, because he has an innate knowledge of every single thing the government is doing at any given time...... and there's no possible way this was in the pipe from the chucklehead that just left and just now finally hit the light of day...
I believe eMule, for example, is set to open up a max of 800 or 1000 simultaneous connections out of the box.
No. It may allow a user/system to do that, but it uses far fewer connections out of the box, not counting KAD/DHT and such. Same goes for BitTorrent and many other p2p-apps. The problem usually lies the user setting insanely high settings for bandwidth and connections.
Here's a picture of eMule out of the box (fresh install as of 4/30/09) with a limit of 800 connections: http://i44.tinypic.com/mjveds.jpg
I did not change anything. I went through the wizard and answered the bandwidth connections as I would a normal home user -- honestly.
On top of that, you seem to be extremely oblivious about the default values for connection limits on p2p applications like eMule, or most bittorrent clients.
I just did a default install of eMule, the latest version from their website.
Here's my connection window. I changed no options, selecting the closest speed to my ISP's connection (1.5/768): http://i44.tinypic.com/mjveds.jpg
I did have 49b installed (but unused), and it was at something along the lines of 400/800 or 600/800 before doing an uninstall and reinstall.
Unless I'm confused, that says 800 connections max. The only other thing connection related I can find is under Extended, which has a "Max. New Connections / 5 secs.: 20".
So I'm not crazy. The default limit for an average DSL user is 800 connections at the same time.
On top of that, you seem to be extremely oblivious about the default values for connection limits on p2p applications like eMule, or most bittorrent clients.
Well, I will admit it's been a good while (3-4 years) since I installed eMule, and my memory is kinda hazy. Some would say starting to forget one's years as an ISP Tech Support grunt is progress towards a more healthy frame of mind.:)
You are right in the fact that ISPs are to blame. Somehow you are able to see that selling unlimited bandwith means that people can't be to blame for using as much bandwith as they want, but you can't see how that applies to connections. Unless you can claim that ISPs sell *limited* connections, people are still totally in the right of opening as many connections as they want, and network congestion derived from it means it's the ISP's responsibility to maintain the health of the network, and to improve the infrastructure if needed.
Yup, you're quite right. Customers do have the right to open up as many connections at a time. However, ISPs have a duty to throttle that back due to overhead causing problems on the backend.
And that's ultimately how we solved "The P2P Problem" on the network I worked for. (Last I heard. I left 3 years ago for greener pastures.)
The ISP didn't have the right tools to do QoS per tower (which really was a source of reoccurring grief) so instead we set a hard connections cap of something like 20 or 30 simultaneous connections at a time, depending on time of day (after the businesses shut down for the evening, around 8 or 9 PM, we usually threw open the floodgates -- they were paying a huuuge premium and thus we did our best to make them happy). Anything after that would just timeout.
Worked great to improve QoS for the rest of the network, 99% of the people didn't notice, and it auto-throttled most P2P apps to decent (but not insane) levels of bandwidth -- usually about 3-4 times what people were paying for.
For some reason, the line below kind of tells me where their loyalties lie:
Telephone companies want to recoup escalating costs by increasing prices for âoenet hogsâ who use more than their share of capacity.
I kind of think its just a justified precursor to metering.
I used to work at a small ISP in Central Washington, so I have an interesting point of view of what's going on.
First off, you can't be a "net hog" when you're paying for unlimited data transfer and a set connection. The two concepts do not mesh. But, as we've seen, the market has utterly rejected the idea of non-unlimited data transfer connections.
(As an aside, I eagerly await the first cellphone company to come out with an "unlimited minutes anytime anywhere to anyone" plan that doesn't suck, as it will fundamentally change the US cellphone market.)
If you are paying for a 3mb connection and using 3mb/sec 24x7, you aren't doing anything wrong at all. You're getting what you paid for.
Unfortunately, the Internet Service industry has hedged their entire business model on the idea that people will pay for a 3mb/sec connection and use it to check their email -- really really fast -- every 3-4 hours. We called these our "Email Grannies" back in the day, and we *loved* them, because they were an incredible return on investment.
They weren't paying for bandwidth, they were paying for their emails to load really, really fast. There's a big difference there, and once a person understands that, they can really start to succeed in service industries.
What we didn't love was the college kids and the computer geeks, using Bittorrent and eMule to pirate things 24x7. For the most part on our heavily restricted lines (DSL et all) this wasn't a problem -- but then again, we weren't irresponsibly overselling our DSL network.
One problem area was our Wifi Network. We sold Wireless Broadband -- our unique solution to the last mile problem -- by using Motorola Canopies on essentially telephone poles on hills. 10 mile range, we usually had the end users use a 1' tall grid antenna connected to a Cisco 350 card or an Engenius Network Bridge. Point the antenna to the tower, run the cable -- something reminiscent of triple-thick TV coax cable -- to the bridge, badda boom, you're online.
The problem there was the same problem the Cable Companies have. QoS. We had no way to stop a single user from getting on say Bittorrent or eMule, both of which are engineered to get around the traditional "throttle the connection" speed caps by just opening up thousands of connections. I believe eMule, for example, is set to open up a max of 800 or 1000 simultaneous connections out of the box.
Even if you throttle a user like that to what they're paying for, the sheer overhead of 800-1000 connections going at 0.001k a second destroys a network. Your ISP might only be sending you the packets at 0.001k, but they're hitting the ISP's gateway at whatever full upload speed the other user is sending it at. So the ISP can deny you your speed, but they still feel it.
For example, 1000 connections each going at 10k a second (not unreasonable numbers) = about 10,000k of transfer trying to come into the ISP. It doesn't matter if they're filtering it down to 128k/sec or whatever you're paying for -- that's still 80 megabit worth of bandwidth resources wasted on the ISP's side. And there are hundreds of thousands of users on these networks (spread out across the US) trying to do this at more or less the same time.
There's a reason those ISPs were trying packet drops and other sneaky methods to kill off P2P on their networks -- they have to, or else.
No doubt the cable companies are looking at their networks and seeing the same problem. Their networks are based on the same type of topology our wireless network was set up on -- each node (a wireless tower in our case) got a certain amount of bandwidth, and the leaf systems (the end users, aka customers) can c
Yet who is more likely to have old applications or hardware that will need XP? If you have the latest and greatest full bells and whistles OS, you probably have the latest version of your apps as well. Once again, MS misses the boat.
It seems that it's you who is missing the boat. This is a very good move on MS' part for companies that have custom apps that are known to run properly on XP. Rather than having to go through extensive testing to ensure they run properly on Windows 7, they can instead be run in this VM. It's a move to make companies feel more at-ease in their transitions to Windows 7.
Except that this is pure PHB-bait -- IT professionals are going to realize pretty quick that all their apps are going to require testing to ensure they can be run in this VM, just like if they were being tested for Windows 7.
The only ones who are going to go "hey, neat, free XP" are the C?Os that don't quite understand technology anymore and the consumers who don't really need this feature, anyway.
Great, of course at that point we would need actors for movies..why?
Because CGI constructs can't give in person interviews and the like. Extras will be replaced by CGI (and already are to a certain point), and "actors" will end up being multi-functional personalities (actor + musician, actor + author, actor + stuntman, etc etc).
There's no way TPB's lawyers were in the dark about this.
But now, they get to turn this into a(n even bigger) circus and it will be thrown out due to the judge being extremely biased and having worked with the plaintiff before.
Meanwhile, they just managed to get the support of the entire country against the corrupt Judge and local version of the RIAA, and the next Judge will be on best behavior -- and since they haven't done anything illegal, that means they'll get off scott free.
Doesn't this mean that they're voluntarily giving up common carrier status?
The old defense being that they were like phone companies, they had no responsibility in what their users did.
Well, BT just announced that they are, in some small way, taking responsibility for what their users look at.
So what happens when FOX releases yet another Summer Bomb in the theaters and decides to use Piracy on the Internet as an excuse? Well, BT banned TPB, that means since they DIDN'T ban the other sites this is partially their fault, right?
now, i don't really understand why they are forcing it to be an all-or-nothing decision.. but don't blame them for something they told you ahead of time about, and you had to opt into.
Microsoft is making them.
I don't have any insider information, but I am pretty sure that's what's going on. It makes NO SENSE at all to do it this way other than the "Microsoft wants to force people to use and install Silverlight."
Silverlight was supposed to be the great Flash killer. I'm surprised it took them this long to make one -- Flash being multiplatform was something that probably had to absolutely drive Microsoft bonkers.
It's obviously not a Flash killer, it's far too late for that. A "flash killer is almost like calling something a HTML killer.
I can't think of a single website that uses it. It's going over like a lead balloon.
So, what to do? Well, a major thing that uses Flash online is streaming video. Youtube's not stupid enough to do it, and they're owned by Google, and they're being... Chair-throwingly annoying at not just falling over dead.
Hm... if only there was a company out there that streams video... that might want to get onto our Xbox system to increase their available customer base by a huge amount...
Someone we can sucker into entering into an exclusivity contract in exchange for permission to let them on our console...
Err, are you asking if all of these copypasta trolls come from the same person? Or are you asking if all Anonymous Coward posts come from the same person? I guess either one is pretty laughable. Welcome to the internet, my friend.
Does it matter? How hard would it be to set up an auto-rejection filter for this?
Where post text CONTAINS "Nigger" OR "GNAA" AND Anonymous Coward is TRUE then BAN, EXIT.
Does anyone actually believe that click-through licenses are valid?
Who gives a shit if it's valid? Is the no-monitoring part enforceable? They gonna install DRM on my machine that makes sure I'm not capturing packets? They gonna push that DRM out to my gateway to make sure I'm not capturing them there?
This is what happens when you let the lawyers draft the EULA without even consulting with the techies.....
What are you talking about? It seems pretty self explanatory.
1. They are using a Bittorrent type protocol for some reason or other. P2P. 2. They don't want to get sued when some twit on a pay as you go Internet connection runs up a huge bill, presumably after leaving the client open (perhaps even overnight). This is the same reason MMORPG boxes say an Internet Connection is required and that yes, you have to pay the ISP bill, not Turbine/Sony/Blizzard/etc. 3. They don't want you sniffing the IP addresses of every other person watching videos. There's probably some privacy law about that.
Are Americans really this prudish when it comes to TV advertising?
Yes.
For certain values of "Americans". Not all of us are screwed up beyond reason.
Ok, well, if the simple answer won't work...
Replace "Yes." above with the following:
No. However, the current prevalent culture in the United States emphasizes shame with regard to sexuality -- that is to say, sex is not something we talk about openly. It is considered uncouth at best to admit enjoying sexually charged materials, despite them being used to sell everything from soap to motor vehicles to French fries.
Us Americans as a whole are a very horny people -- being more sexually liberated than most other countries -- but pointing that out is a very uncomfortable thing to most people, as the 10% or so that object to this fact have brow-beat a certain level of shame into the rest of us.
More importantly current American culture is extremely vulnerable to "concern trolls" -- people who feign concern for an issue in order to promote an agenda. You will note, for example, that 99% of the comments about Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction" were laughing at the situation, the outrage was limited mostly to the far right. And that outrage was universally that Janet Jackson dared to show her breast on stage -- not that the young man was pantomiming sexual assault.
So what was the agenda? Keeping up the shame (see previous paragraph), as above, by sanitizing the airwaves. If this had gone unchallenged, imitations would have occurred, and we might have had an open discussion about why an inch of skin of a woman's chest is so scandalous. We might have even got over ourselves a tiny, tiny little bit.
Similar issues have occurred in our speech -- note how cursing is becoming infinitely easier to get away with on the air after "South Park?" The last thing the far right wants is something similar happening to breasts in the US -- this is because sexuality is such a useful wedge issue (mainly because no one wants to be "that guy" who argues in favor of sexuality) the far right does not want to give it up at any costs.
Something similar had already begun in recent years, which is why they pounced on this as an opportunity to rewind the tide -- remember when seeing a bare butt on NYPD Blue was considered shocking? Or when underwear in "Night Trap" was huge? Hell, in New York City it's perfectly legal for a woman to walk around without a shirt on in public, the "Evil commie hippy liberuls" have worked their evil so well that someone in NYC decided women should have the same freedom that men do to take their shirts off when it's uncomfortably hot. Last I heard, society has survived unscathed.
It's what I call the "Principle of Maximum Freedom" at work -- A free people, over time, become more free (and, I would point out, more liberal) unless outside forces cause a reversion.
The combination of the two -- a group of people who are unwilling to say that "sex sells", or rather "sexy ads work for me" or even "wow, you know, I really like blondes"; and a second group of people who are too willing to defame sexual content -- or even art they think is "too naughty", debase women as little more than uppity brood mares, or outright abuse people of alternate sexualities to promote an agenda leads to an interesting situation, where 90%+ people simply do not care about a sexy ad or two or a half second of nipple on TV, but the remaining 5-10% who object object so loudly that it creates an echo chamber of sorts -- with people who do not care that much being afraid to appear as "perverts" and thus go along with the crowd.
In short, but admittedly not as short as "Yes.", we Americans are horny, horny sheep, and the shepherds are drunk closeted perverts with an axe to grind.
Really? I sat in a bar and watched Superbowl. I didn't see anything that I'd consider particularly raunchy or inappropriate, and I didn't hear any complaints from the people around me either. Are Americans really this prudish when it comes to TV advertising?
The religious will argue that a soul is something unique to mankind, embued by whichever creator their faith believes in, making it impossible for machines to ever have soul.
The athiests will argue that there's no such thing as a "soul", only sentience and/or self-awareness.
Others will meander aimlessly between the two.
And if we're jumping into religious stereotypes...
The Zen Buddhists will argue that this is a kinda silly argument, it's a rather nice day outside, and a cup of hot chocolate would really hit the spot.
ObPseudoFunnyButReallyInsightfulAnswer: The Buddhists would argue Mu.
Mu. Mu Mu. Muuuuu~.
(Read: "Does a dog -- er, I mean sapient computer -- have a soul? Answer: You're asking the wrong question!")
Now it still concerns me to stand by and watch just how much more damage the Lame Duck can do before the clean-up crew moves in.
I have this image in my mind of Dubya, on January 19th, starting "police actions" in about 20 countries, and saying, "Let's see him fix this!"
I'm more worried about him deregulating EVERYTHING right before he leaves and leaving a few political time bombs for Palin and Fox News to rally the base on.
Now...honestly, what do you think is really going to change?
Everything. For one, in a few months we will no longer have a functionally retarded president.
Do you think he'll get the Dems to undo the Patriot Act?
Probably not all at once, but yes, I have no doubt at all the Patriot Act will be dismantled.
Do you think he'll get to the bottom of and stop the Wiretaps on US Citizens?
No doubt at all in my mind that this nonsense ends with the Bush Nightmare.
Do you think he'll have us 100% out of Iraq in the next week? Month? Year? Decade?
He's always been for a withdrawl, but he's not going to risk American lives (or Iraqi lives) for it. Given that Iraq wants us OUT before the start of the year, and given that Iraq has used us as an excuse to not do the things they need to do, I am fairly certain our time in Iraq will be over sooner than the Republicans would like. (Read: While they still have oil.)
Will he magically fix the economy? If so, how long? What exactly is he going to do?
Regulation, Regulation, Regulation. The age of faux conservatism and market speculation is over. If we're REALLY lucky we'll also get to see some frog marched wall street execs.
Slashdot Mirror
Apparently the colour E-Ink they've seen demoed isn't up to par yet. It's coming though, I'm sure.
Regardless, Amazon is going to make an absolute killing with these things.
And a second killing when the color eInk is out and working well.
And a third when the eInk is updated enough to support video streaming without making one's eyes bleed.
And a fourth when they add a dynamic homepage system with up to date news, webmail, etc. Basically a portal at your fingertips.
Amazon's got a really great product here. Looking 10-20 years down the line this is going to be pure gold for them.
>>>The USA bully another country? Never..
New face in the highest office.
Same old shit.
Yes, because he has an innate knowledge of every single thing the government is doing at any given time... ... and there's no possible way this was in the pipe from the chucklehead that just left and just now finally hit the light of day...
I believe eMule, for example, is set to open up a max of 800 or 1000 simultaneous connections out of the box.
No. It may allow a user/system to do that, but it uses far fewer connections out of the box, not counting KAD/DHT and such. Same goes for BitTorrent and many other p2p-apps. The problem usually lies the user setting insanely high settings for bandwidth and connections.
Here's a picture of eMule out of the box (fresh install as of 4/30/09) with a limit of 800 connections:
http://i44.tinypic.com/mjveds.jpg
I did not change anything. I went through the wizard and answered the bandwidth connections as I would a normal home user -- honestly.
On top of that, you seem to be extremely oblivious about the default values for connection limits on p2p applications like eMule, or most bittorrent clients.
I just did a default install of eMule, the latest version from their website.
Here's my connection window. I changed no options, selecting the closest speed to my ISP's connection (1.5/768):
http://i44.tinypic.com/mjveds.jpg
I did have 49b installed (but unused), and it was at something along the lines of 400/800 or 600/800 before doing an uninstall and reinstall.
Unless I'm confused, that says 800 connections max. The only other thing connection related I can find is under Extended, which has a "Max. New Connections / 5 secs.: 20".
So I'm not crazy. The default limit for an average DSL user is 800 connections at the same time.
On top of that, you seem to be extremely oblivious about the default values for connection limits on p2p applications like eMule, or most bittorrent clients.
Well, I will admit it's been a good while (3-4 years) since I installed eMule, and my memory is kinda hazy. Some would say starting to forget one's years as an ISP Tech Support grunt is progress towards a more healthy frame of mind. :)
You are right in the fact that ISPs are to blame. Somehow you are able to see that selling unlimited bandwith means that people can't be to blame for using as much bandwith as they want, but you can't see how that applies to connections. Unless you can claim that ISPs sell *limited* connections, people are still totally in the right of opening as many connections as they want, and network congestion derived from it means it's the ISP's responsibility to maintain the health of the network, and to improve the infrastructure if needed.
Yup, you're quite right. Customers do have the right to open up as many connections at a time. However, ISPs have a duty to throttle that back due to overhead causing problems on the backend.
And that's ultimately how we solved "The P2P Problem" on the network I worked for. (Last I heard. I left 3 years ago for greener pastures.)
The ISP didn't have the right tools to do QoS per tower (which really was a source of reoccurring grief) so instead we set a hard connections cap of something like 20 or 30 simultaneous connections at a time, depending on time of day (after the businesses shut down for the evening, around 8 or 9 PM, we usually threw open the floodgates -- they were paying a huuuge premium and thus we did our best to make them happy). Anything after that would just timeout.
Worked great to improve QoS for the rest of the network, 99% of the people didn't notice, and it auto-throttled most P2P apps to decent (but not insane) levels of bandwidth -- usually about 3-4 times what people were paying for.
For some reason, the line below kind of tells me where their loyalties lie:
Telephone companies want to recoup escalating costs by increasing prices for âoenet hogsâ who use more than their share of capacity.
I kind of think its just a justified precursor to metering.
I used to work at a small ISP in Central Washington, so I have an interesting point of view of what's going on.
First off, you can't be a "net hog" when you're paying for unlimited data transfer and a set connection. The two concepts do not mesh. But, as we've seen, the market has utterly rejected the idea of non-unlimited data transfer connections.
(As an aside, I eagerly await the first cellphone company to come out with an "unlimited minutes anytime anywhere to anyone" plan that doesn't suck, as it will fundamentally change the US cellphone market.)
If you are paying for a 3mb connection and using 3mb/sec 24x7, you aren't doing anything wrong at all. You're getting what you paid for.
Unfortunately, the Internet Service industry has hedged their entire business model on the idea that people will pay for a 3mb/sec connection and use it to check their email -- really really fast -- every 3-4 hours. We called these our "Email Grannies" back in the day, and we *loved* them, because they were an incredible return on investment.
They weren't paying for bandwidth, they were paying for their emails to load really, really fast. There's a big difference there, and once a person understands that, they can really start to succeed in service industries.
What we didn't love was the college kids and the computer geeks, using Bittorrent and eMule to pirate things 24x7. For the most part on our heavily restricted lines (DSL et all) this wasn't a problem -- but then again, we weren't irresponsibly overselling our DSL network.
One problem area was our Wifi Network. We sold Wireless Broadband -- our unique solution to the last mile problem -- by using Motorola Canopies on essentially telephone poles on hills. 10 mile range, we usually had the end users use a 1' tall grid antenna connected to a Cisco 350 card or an Engenius Network Bridge. Point the antenna to the tower, run the cable -- something reminiscent of triple-thick TV coax cable -- to the bridge, badda boom, you're online.
The problem there was the same problem the Cable Companies have. QoS. We had no way to stop a single user from getting on say Bittorrent or eMule, both of which are engineered to get around the traditional "throttle the connection" speed caps by just opening up thousands of connections. I believe eMule, for example, is set to open up a max of 800 or 1000 simultaneous connections out of the box.
Even if you throttle a user like that to what they're paying for, the sheer overhead of 800-1000 connections going at 0.001k a second destroys a network. Your ISP might only be sending you the packets at 0.001k, but they're hitting the ISP's gateway at whatever full upload speed the other user is sending it at. So the ISP can deny you your speed, but they still feel it.
For example, 1000 connections each going at 10k a second (not unreasonable numbers) = about 10,000k of transfer trying to come into the ISP. It doesn't matter if they're filtering it down to 128k/sec or whatever you're paying for -- that's still 80 megabit worth of bandwidth resources wasted on the ISP's side. And there are hundreds of thousands of users on these networks (spread out across the US) trying to do this at more or less the same time.
There's a reason those ISPs were trying packet drops and other sneaky methods to kill off P2P on their networks -- they have to, or else.
No doubt the cable companies are looking at their networks and seeing the same problem. Their networks are based on the same type of topology our wireless network was set up on -- each node (a wireless tower in our case) got a certain amount of bandwidth, and the leaf systems (the end users, aka customers) can c
Yet who is more likely to have old applications or hardware that will need XP? If you have the latest and greatest full bells and whistles OS, you probably have the latest version of your apps as well. Once again, MS misses the boat.
It seems that it's you who is missing the boat. This is a very good move on MS' part for companies that have custom apps that are known to run properly on XP. Rather than having to go through extensive testing to ensure they run properly on Windows 7, they can instead be run in this VM. It's a move to make companies feel more at-ease in their transitions to Windows 7.
Except that this is pure PHB-bait -- IT professionals are going to realize pretty quick that all their apps are going to require testing to ensure they can be run in this VM, just like if they were being tested for Windows 7.
The only ones who are going to go "hey, neat, free XP" are the C?Os that don't quite understand technology anymore and the consumers who don't really need this feature, anyway.
You kill or surgically remove parasites - you don't develop antibodies to fight them.
So what? Are we looking at another grape blight? Are we going to have to kill off 99% of the commercial bee population and start over?
We're probably in some deep trouble if so. But maybe we should infect killer bees before we wipe this parasite out?
Great, of course at that point we would need actors for movies..why?
Because CGI constructs can't give in person interviews and the like. Extras will be replaced by CGI (and already are to a certain point), and "actors" will end up being multi-functional personalities (actor + musician, actor + author, actor + stuntman, etc etc).
So in 10 years when we have the hardware to do this kinda thing on the average home PC... how scary is THAT going to be?
Poser pr0n is already bad enough now, can you imagine when it's a) Photorealistic and b) Based on real people?
I can see the scandals now.
"IL&M Apologizes for accidental leak of 3d Model Data"
"Jamie Lynn Spears / JFK sex tape confirmed fake"
"George Washington Punk Rock Show a surprise hit on new Youtube 5.0"
"'Jesus' starring in new Talk show on UPN, Neo-Christian groups object."
There's no way TPB's lawyers were in the dark about this.
But now, they get to turn this into a(n even bigger) circus and it will be thrown out due to the judge being extremely biased and having worked with the plaintiff before.
Meanwhile, they just managed to get the support of the entire country against the corrupt Judge and local version of the RIAA, and the next Judge will be on best behavior -- and since they haven't done anything illegal, that means they'll get off scott free.
Brilliantly played, Pirates. Brilliantly played.
Doesn't this mean that they're voluntarily giving up common carrier status?
The old defense being that they were like phone companies, they had no responsibility in what their users did.
Well, BT just announced that they are, in some small way, taking responsibility for what their users look at.
So what happens when FOX releases yet another Summer Bomb in the theaters and decides to use Piracy on the Internet as an excuse? Well, BT banned TPB, that means since they DIDN'T ban the other sites this is partially their fault, right?
But they can't get rid of all the crap quizzes?
I call shenanigans.
The crap quizzes bring in advertisement dollars. There's a reason you can't filter those stupid things out.
now, i don't really understand why they are forcing it to be an all-or-nothing decision.. but don't blame them for something they told you ahead of time about, and you had to opt into.
Microsoft is making them.
I don't have any insider information, but I am pretty sure that's what's going on. It makes NO SENSE at all to do it this way other than the "Microsoft wants to force people to use and install Silverlight."
Silverlight was supposed to be the great Flash killer. I'm surprised it took them this long to make one -- Flash being multiplatform was something that probably had to absolutely drive Microsoft bonkers.
It's obviously not a Flash killer, it's far too late for that. A "flash killer is almost like calling something a HTML killer.
I can't think of a single website that uses it. It's going over like a lead balloon.
So, what to do? Well, a major thing that uses Flash online is streaming video. Youtube's not stupid enough to do it, and they're owned by Google, and they're being... Chair-throwingly annoying at not just falling over dead.
Hm... if only there was a company out there that streams video... that might want to get onto our Xbox system to increase their available customer base by a huge amount...
Someone we can sucker into entering into an exclusivity contract in exchange for permission to let them on our console...
Err, are you asking if all of these copypasta trolls come from the same person? Or are you asking if all Anonymous Coward posts come from the same person? I guess either one is pretty laughable. Welcome to the internet, my friend.
Does it matter? How hard would it be to set up an auto-rejection filter for this?
Where post text CONTAINS "Nigger" OR "GNAA" AND Anonymous Coward is TRUE then BAN, EXIT.
Does anyone actually believe that click-through licenses are valid?
Who gives a shit if it's valid? Is the no-monitoring part enforceable? They gonna install DRM on my machine that makes sure I'm not capturing packets? They gonna push that DRM out to my gateway to make sure I'm not capturing them there?
This is what happens when you let the lawyers draft the EULA without even consulting with the techies.....
What are you talking about? It seems pretty self explanatory.
1. They are using a Bittorrent type protocol for some reason or other. P2P.
2. They don't want to get sued when some twit on a pay as you go Internet connection runs up a huge bill, presumably after leaving the client open (perhaps even overnight). This is the same reason MMORPG boxes say an Internet Connection is required and that yes, you have to pay the ISP bill, not Turbine/Sony/Blizzard/etc.
3. They don't want you sniffing the IP addresses of every other person watching videos. There's probably some privacy law about that.
For certain values of "Americans". Not all of us are screwed up beyond reason.
Ok, well, if the simple answer won't work...
Replace "Yes." above with the following:
No. However, the current prevalent culture in the United States emphasizes shame with regard to sexuality -- that is to say, sex is not something we talk about openly. It is considered uncouth at best to admit enjoying sexually charged materials, despite them being used to sell everything from soap to motor vehicles to French fries.
Us Americans as a whole are a very horny people -- being more sexually liberated than most other countries -- but pointing that out is a very uncomfortable thing to most people, as the 10% or so that object to this fact have brow-beat a certain level of shame into the rest of us.
More importantly current American culture is extremely vulnerable to "concern trolls" -- people who feign concern for an issue in order to promote an agenda. You will note, for example, that 99% of the comments about Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction" were laughing at the situation, the outrage was limited mostly to the far right. And that outrage was universally that Janet Jackson dared to show her breast on stage -- not that the young man was pantomiming sexual assault.
So what was the agenda? Keeping up the shame (see previous paragraph), as above, by sanitizing the airwaves. If this had gone unchallenged, imitations would have occurred, and we might have had an open discussion about why an inch of skin of a woman's chest is so scandalous. We might have even got over ourselves a tiny, tiny little bit.
Similar issues have occurred in our speech -- note how cursing is becoming infinitely easier to get away with on the air after "South Park?" The last thing the far right wants is something similar happening to breasts in the US -- this is because sexuality is such a useful wedge issue (mainly because no one wants to be "that guy" who argues in favor of sexuality) the far right does not want to give it up at any costs.
Something similar had already begun in recent years, which is why they pounced on this as an opportunity to rewind the tide -- remember when seeing a bare butt on NYPD Blue was considered shocking? Or when underwear in "Night Trap" was huge? Hell, in New York City it's perfectly legal for a woman to walk around without a shirt on in public, the "Evil commie hippy liberuls" have worked their evil so well that someone in NYC decided women should have the same freedom that men do to take their shirts off when it's uncomfortably hot. Last I heard, society has survived unscathed.
It's what I call the "Principle of Maximum Freedom" at work -- A free people, over time, become more free (and, I would point out, more liberal) unless outside forces cause a reversion.
The combination of the two -- a group of people who are unwilling to say that "sex sells", or rather "sexy ads work for me" or even "wow, you know, I really like blondes"; and a second group of people who are too willing to defame sexual content -- or even art they think is "too naughty", debase women as little more than uppity brood mares, or outright abuse people of alternate sexualities to promote an agenda leads to an interesting situation, where 90%+ people simply do not care about a sexy ad or two or a half second of nipple on TV, but the remaining 5-10% who object object so loudly that it creates an echo chamber of sorts -- with people who do not care that much being afraid to appear as "perverts" and thus go along with the crowd.
In short, but admittedly not as short as "Yes.", we Americans are horny, horny sheep, and the shepherds are drunk closeted perverts with an axe to grind.
Really? I sat in a bar and watched Superbowl. I didn't see anything that I'd consider particularly raunchy or inappropriate, and I didn't hear any complaints from the people around me either. Are Americans really this prudish when it comes to TV advertising?
Yes.
No, it's an unladen swallow.
I'm not sure if it's an African or European swallow, but that shouldn't mattaaaaaugh!!!
%#$$0-6 NO CARRIER
If anything Blizzard is completely catering to the casual player.
Really? Catering to 95% of their player base? What crazy rebels!
The religious will argue that a soul is something unique to mankind, embued by whichever creator their faith believes in, making it impossible for machines to ever have soul.
The athiests will argue that there's no such thing as a "soul", only sentience and/or self-awareness.
Others will meander aimlessly between the two.
And if we're jumping into religious stereotypes...
The Zen Buddhists will argue that this is a kinda silly argument, it's a rather nice day outside, and a cup of hot chocolate would really hit the spot.
ObPseudoFunnyButReallyInsightfulAnswer: The Buddhists would argue Mu.
Mu. Mu Mu. Muuuuu~.
(Read: "Does a dog -- er, I mean sapient computer -- have a soul? Answer: You're asking the wrong question!")
Now it still concerns me to stand by and watch just how much more damage the Lame Duck can do before the clean-up crew moves in.
I have this image in my mind of Dubya, on January 19th, starting "police actions" in about 20 countries, and saying, "Let's see him fix this!"
I'm more worried about him deregulating EVERYTHING right before he leaves and leaving a few political time bombs for Palin and Fox News to rally the base on.
You could argue that a lot of the white voters voted for McCain because he's white.
GASP! How dare you play the race card! Only Republicans are allowed to do that!
Now...honestly, what do you think is really going to change?
Everything. For one, in a few months we will no longer have a functionally retarded president.
Do you think he'll get the Dems to undo the Patriot Act?
Probably not all at once, but yes, I have no doubt at all the Patriot Act will be dismantled.
Do you think he'll get to the bottom of and stop the Wiretaps on US Citizens?
No doubt at all in my mind that this nonsense ends with the Bush Nightmare.
Do you think he'll have us 100% out of Iraq in the next week? Month? Year? Decade?
He's always been for a withdrawl, but he's not going to risk American lives (or Iraqi lives) for it. Given that Iraq wants us OUT before the start of the year, and given that Iraq has used us as an excuse to not do the things they need to do, I am fairly certain our time in Iraq will be over sooner than the Republicans would like. (Read: While they still have oil.)
Will he magically fix the economy? If so, how long? What exactly is he going to do?
Regulation, Regulation, Regulation. The age of faux conservatism and market speculation is over. If we're REALLY lucky we'll also get to see some frog marched wall street execs.
Advertising + Blogs = continuance of our current model.
He just doesn't get that some people do things not for the money.
And he'd no doubt say that you don't get that people doing things for other things than money won't have the luxury of spare time in a 3rd Bush term.