So only fundamentalist Christians are made a bit uncomfortable with some of these new concepts of cloning, use of aborted embryos for research. I would find that a bit surprising. Perhaps this just looks like a good opportunity to insult some group of people that you disagree with, while adding nothing to the debate. Big surprise there.
Actually, as far as I can tell, Fundamentalist Christians have objections to the concept of Women's Lib.
Observe.
Originally, the argument was that Women should be subservient to men. This was added when King James re-wrote the bible as an "interpretation."
Next, the argument was that women should be at home, married, with children. They could run the household, sure, as long as the man didn't care.
Then, it was "Birth Control is for Harlots", and they ran around either harassing, firebombing, or in general making it very, very difficult to find for a rather long time. (The current "I'm sorry, I may be paid to fill your prescriptions, but I refuse because you're a whore." theme with some southern pharmacists is a throwback to this.)
After that sunk, the next argument was that Abortion is murder. The Embryo is sacred life, and aborting it before it becomes able to live on it's own is evil and wrong. (Important note: Fundamentalists, as a whole, don't care what happens after the kid is born, just beforehand.)
The current argument is that the mere PREVENTION of pregnancy is murder -- at least when the prevention comes from a purely chemical means. (Unless you're daring to try and make condoms available to poor people, that's apparently bad too.) This is the official reasoning for the objections to the Morning After pill. Of course, this intentionally (at least, I hope it's intentional misdirection and not unintentional ignorance) ignores the fact that the Morning After pill is not a "take a pill, your baby is dead" situation, but rather, "You take a pill, your womb prevents the egg from being fertilized".
There's only a few common themes here. If you take the most recent arguments, you get a trend that the real argument is "Women -- or people in general -- shouldn't be allowed to enjoy sex". If you take the arguments a bit further, you get a trend that says "Women do not have the right to make their own decisions" -- be it reproductive decisions, legal decisions, what have you.
But, anyway.
The Stem Cell research bit is wrapped up in this. You see, you can't really avoid being against Stem Cell research when you are still trying to put on a public face about being against abortion due to "honestly" believing that life begins at orgasm. (Not conception, since with the Morning After pill, there is no conception that takes place. Again, that's the entire point of the morning after pill.) (Nevermind that every time someone goes to a fertility clinic, the same stem cells get created at Fertility Clinics -- indeed, most stem cells for research COME from Fertility Clinics.
Of course, calling Fertility doctors "mass murders" and putting pictures of their faces, homes, and children up on websites (in a King Henry the 2nd, "Who will rid me of this troublesome Heretic" type situation) would probably get a bit of a backlash, considering that, well, who's going to complain about doctors being able to help infertile couples have children?
But hey, "genocidal, devil worshiping Nazi-doctor-like abortionists" like those evil stem cell researchers? Sure thing!
I find this quote interesting, since WOW has no official Linux client. Instead it uses WineX. What makes you think WAR will not work with WineX the same way?
No, they did the right thing by simply observing and recording.
Simply put, if they had interjected, the Police would have had a reason and opportunity to turn this into a riot, and flush it all down the memory hole. The guys with cameras? Arrested, and the "evidence" confiscated for the "investigation" of the "riot that evil Iranian Muslim terrorist" caused.
Instead they watched, recorded, and let the police do their bad things all on their own, and the cops will get theirs when the time comes.
Personally, if I was the UCLA students, I'd be carrying a camera everywhere I went from now on. Because if these cops are stupid enough to do this on camera and in front of a crowd, just what do you think they'd do in front of 1 or 2 witnesses in a more questionable situation?
Ok, so Sony makes a vastly insufficient amount of a product in order to hype said product and meet an arbitrary deadline that they are OBVIOUSLY not prepared for, a lot of people want it, some resort to unscrupulous tactics to resell them, and somehow that's Sony's fault?
All this Sony bashing is getting ri-goddamned-diculous.
I'll have to fill out some special paperwork if I do it myself, and failing that I might have to contact one of my friends at Dell UK to get them to do the actual dispatch, but one way or another I'll find someone who can get you fixed up.
(ObWarning: I work for Dell as a Gold Hardware Support Technician in Twin Falls Idaho.)
Email me your father's service tag, I'll be happy to look into it directly.
mark (underscore) cantrell (at) dell (dot) com
There's no reason if you ordered Windows that you shouldn't get a CoA and Windows XP CD -- UNLESS you ordered a machine with "image support", then those CDs are stored as ISOs on a partition on your drive, you just have to click the right button and the Dell software will burn you a WinXP CD and a Drivers CD.
Either way, you should have DEFINATELY gotten a COA label on the machine itself. Send me your tag, and I'll either fix it Friday when I get into the office, or I'll get ahold of someone (Dell Customer Care, which is in the same building as me, possibly) who can.
The Dems are On this, filing one of the only C&D letters I've actually supported. Kinda brilliant of the NeoCons, really -- they hire an impersonator to make a fake 5 minute message, robocall it at 11 PM till 4 AM, make it long enough that most people hang up long before they hear the "paid for by the Republicans" message at the end, and, well, it's just brilliant. Too bad the Democrats are too ethical to try something like this themselves.
Kinda a pity that the Republicans are so afraid of the United States Citizens voices being heard that they have to resort to such disgusting efforts to repress the vote. Of course, having seen this the last 3 elections in a row, this isn't a real surprise.
Obviously it serves as a reminder that we went into Iraq to oust a leader that is so bad he's worthy of hanging.
There are many, many world leaders that are so bad they're worthy of hanging -- depending on your sense of right and rong. Many of which we've comitted covert acts of war in an attempt to keep in power.
Not to mention there are quite a few people in the world who suspect (and rightly so) that Bush has authorized war crimes just as horrific if not worse than Saddam's. (Torture, Rape, Holding People without a Trial, [url=http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/444066 4.stm]Chemical Weapons[/url], etc.)
And that would just be WRONG WRONG WRONG! Clearly this news, that coincidently helps the Republicans case on the war of terror... (er... sort of) NEEDED to be out before an election that even the Republicans are now expecting to lose. And that news that would seriously harm the public's perceptions of Republicans? Clearly, that needs to wait until AFTER the election.
Your Liberal media at work, folks! (Please ignore the hard-line Republican parent companies behind the curtain.)
That the machines are just poorly-thought-out, poorly-engineered, poorly-constructed, poorly-maintained piles of shit, seems far more likely than such an obvious conspiracy.
I would agree, except there has been no confirmed reports of these machines messing up in the Democrat's favor.
Every single reported failure of these machines has swung towards the Republicans.
Actually, Alienware was purchased by Dell recently. (Important note: I work for Dell as a phone tech support grunt.)
While Alienware is being pretty much kept as a seperate entity, Dell doesn't put up with this kind of stuff. We don't need to try and force people to give us good reviews -- we EARN our good reviews, and if we don't get one, well, we examine it and use them as important guides for improvements. If someone is taking the time to complain it means they at least care enough to think that there's room for improvement -- you don't get anywhere by ignoring the complaints, or as in this case trying to supress them.
The first thing you're told when you start at Dell is that we win with Integrity -- we don't waste our time trying to flim flam customers when we can just build a good product that brings them to us with honesty, ethics, and integrity. (Not to mention good support.)
I would be very, very surprised if in a week the person who sent that email to that review site has a job or wasn't in some form of coaching. Heck, I'd frankly be somewhat surprised if someone very high up in Dell didn't send an apology to those affected review sites about this.
I'm guessing the De Beers Group isn't worried about these synthetic diamonds, either -- they have such a great relationship with most jewelers because the De Beers Group spends a LOT of money in how they market the diamonds: marketing that provides diamonds for the bling-bling rappers, the royal families, the Hollywood stars and whoever else needs something sparkling to wear in public. That's what the jewelers want: they don't care if it's cheap, they get a great marketing campaign and still make huge profit margins.
Actually, there was an article on/. about this a long time ago (3+ years?) when this tech first started really taking off. It mentioned two technologies, 1 which was basically putting carbon in a box and crushing the holy living out of it, another which was taking a slice of diamond and "growing" new diamond on top of it with essentially carbon "rain." -- then taking a slice of the new, artificial diamond and growing more diamond on that.
One of the guys reported getting repeated death threats by people he traced back to De Beers, attacked at Trade Shows, attempts at blackmailing them into selling or destroying the tech, etc. DeBeers was offering free devices for dealers to detect these diamonds (they're TOO perfect, chemically, some deformations that should be there are not), etc. At the end of it all there was a diamond dealer who examined the synth diamonds and basically said "eh, my customers wouldn't care that it's synthetic, they just want a diamond."
Basically DeBeers was freaking RIGHT out about the whole thing. Small wonder since they keep such a stranglehold on the diamond trade using whatever legal (and illegal) pracitices they can get away with.
What are they (legally at least) able to do if I refuse?
In the United States, I presume?
Well, the current law that Bush and his rubber stamps passed allow them to arrest you, hold you indefinately without a trial, rape you (injuries during torture up to but not including death are perfectly OK -- Rape is perfectly acceptabe under the word of the law and has already went on at Abu Ghraib), and prohibit you any contact with any outside sources.
Forever.
According to current law, they could make you disappear, and you'd spend the next 50 years in solitary confinement, only being let out long enough to torture for your password. Of course, having given said password, they would just throw you back in and forget about you. You have no rights to a lawyer, no rights to contest your confinement (this is what Haebus Corpus is all about. It was one of the cornerstones of our society, and the founding fathers assumed that no one would be stupid enough to ever try to overturn it -- nor none of their decendants stupid enough to accept it).
Essentually, no rights at all, since they can simply lock you up and you CANNOT FIGHT IT if they do not want to let you. Want to use your 1st Amendment rights to free speech? Sorry, you can't because you're behind bars in some secret European prison. All other rights are trumped by the loss of the right to contest your imprisonment.
(BTW, think it only applies to "brown people" like Jose Padilla or random "Terrorists"? Think again -- the law SPECIFICALLY STATES that it applies to US Citizens.)
If your family protested, they'd either be arrested too, or simply ignored, or the government, when needing a political football, would make something up about you -- like what they did with Mr. Padilla, who they originally accused of having plans of blowing up a dirty bomb in the US. 4 years later, they've never bothered to charge him with that, only even bothering to charge him with anything when he got thiiiis close to getting the US ruled out of line for it. (He's currently being held, still without trial, for "conspiracy to murder, kidnap, and maim people overseas.")
Pardon me for waxing political, but... I felt this was important, since there's not NEARLY enough outrage going on about this.
So are you saying that Warhammer will offer a Genuine Treadmill(TM) instead of just a normal Treadmill?
Actually, last I heard, W.A.R. wasn't even going to have numeric levels, instead opting for a hidden system where your character's basic appearance evolves based on it's accomplishments. Orcs gain more and more metal bits and get bigger, Dwarves get longer beards, High Elves gain more and more Jewels on their armor, etc.
So, uh, well, we have a game with no levels. No idea on the treadmill bit, but they are at least deviating from the norm in that reguard. That's promising, isn't it?
It's by the DAOC team, so you could really think of it as DAoC 2 rebranded. Some of the stuff sounds pretty darned interesting, for example, raiding towns and cities with PCs defending the town (and NPCs filling in on both sides), and campaigns against small villages steamrolling into large "raids" against capital towns.
Not to mention that non-capital towns can change hands (and races) based on who controls them. That's something I haven't heard of before.
Put slightly more bluntly, tell me why I should chose Warhammer Online over World of Warcraft.
Why go for the cheap knockoff (WoW) when you can go directly to the game that they got their inspiration from?
You know how Orcs are green and go Waaaagh? You wouldn't, except that Warhammer did them that way decades before Warcraft. The only thing they're missing is a british soccer fan accent.
You know how Terran Marines have Power Armor that looks like platemail bellbottoms? Yeah, Space Marines from 40k first.
Zerg? Much scarier when they were called the Tyranids. Protoss? Wake me when they start calling theselves the Eldar -- and Dark Eldar -- again.
Pretty much everything in Warcraft/Starcraft up to Warcraft 3 (where it diverged) was inspired heavily from the original Warhammer/Warhammer 40k universes.
I know this is a bit of a harsh response, but for Warhammer fans this is a bit of a sore spot. 6 Mouths, and all that.
As a final note, I'm sorry if I sound bitchy. It sounds like the ISP you're working at honestly does have reasonable policies - gradual throttling, responding to customer issues to try and solve them, etc. The issue I (and others) seem to be having is the language. You can't redefine "unlimited" and pretend it's solely the customers fault that they're upset.
This is perfectly true, of course. The language we specifically use is that our wireless is a 128k connection that will go as fast as it can, and that we'll fix it if it drops under 128k. The Unlimited language is usually used in the Dialup (which auto-disconnects every 6 hours, causing some contention) and to talk about the gigs-per-month of the broadband -- i.e., we don't care how much you download, just that you can't break the tower doing it.
So if we throttle people to 300k and 60 connections a second to keep them from causing the 5 businesses and 10 consumers that are on the same tower as them to be unable to load pages, I still think they're getting a pretty good deal. They are, ultimately, getting almost 3 times what they pay for.
There seems to be a point of confusion -- we don't just randomly throttle the people who have 5 or 6 computers with AIM open or who are downloading on UseNet all day or whatever. Those people the standard QoS stuff makes sure they're getting at least 128k and as much bandwidth as we can give them while still ensuring *everyone* gets at least 128k.
Where this breaks down is when you're opening 500-5000 connections at a time, which is what eMule (defaults to 600 iirc) and most Bittorrent clients (100-"infinate" depending on client) do. While these basically guarentee that you are going to be getting as much speed as your connection can pull, they're extremely inefficient as far as backbone services go.
Simply put, each connection has a little overhead and requires a bit of cpu to process -- and while they're only getting 128k, 300k, 2000k, whatever, they're using up a lot more resources than that. Often they'll be getting 300k of bandwidth but the connections going to us are trying to use something along the lines of 2 or 3 megs -- which starts to clog our pipes. Routers also start to do some odd things when they hit those kind of loads, too -- most people on the tower, the customer with eMule/Bittorrent/whatever, etc also start to see severe packet loss, random and frequent timeouts when they go to load pages, etc.
That's the real issue, to be honest. We have plenty of customers who were pulling down gigs and gigs of stuff a month. They just weren't doing it by creating a few hundred connections at a time 24x7, causing the entire network to fall apart just so they can get "Ella Enchanted" and the latest Weird Al album.
Unlimited service means that you can access any website you wish. We do not limit what websites you can visit.
I disagree with that definition as well, but, that's what it says in the TOS. I have only thrown that in ONE person's face in 3 years of ISP service -- and it was a college twit who had already canceled his service. It also says that if your connection is causing a "network issue", we have the right (and, in truth, the duty) to correct the issue.
And, please. Do not give me the whole "My $30 is good so I can get my 750 gigs of porn and warez every month and YOU can't do anything about it" line. I heard it quite enough, thanks. (Literally, I had someone say nearly that exact line to me when I let him know the reason his eMule wasn't working is because the server wasn't letting it keep connected after a while.)
There are two situations where the average (99.99%) of customers would have more than 100 connections open at a time.
1a. They are using a p2p program that is designed to break past college dorm (rate-per-connection) throttling. eMule is the #1 culprit here. (Alternately, there is 1b. They are using a p2p program that is incorrectly configured to create thousands of connections at a time. Gnutella and 90% of Bittorrent clients are like this. Fortunately, we can walk customers through fixing these, usually. Also pretty much related to #1a, although they're not really specifically designed to do so. You can fix Bittorrent so it doesn't kill a network. You can't fix eMule.) 2. They are infected with a trojan, bot, or virus.
We certainly don't support #2, and stamp it out every time we can -- people getting infected with a SMTP host virus tend to get entire ISPs put on SpamCop and SORBS lists temporarily, which is a nightmare.
#1 we also have issues with. For the most part, our customers were cool with letting us walk them through cleaning up their clients (setting them to 50-150 global connections, setting speed throttles to about 5-10 times their advertised speed - we run uncapped for 99% of users, installing Netlimiter, etc). But every so often we had the jerks, usually near the college dorms, who would open eMule and queue up 50 gigs of granny porn, open Bittorrent and set it to download about 500 torrents at a time, etc.
You have to understand that these protocols are deisgned to get through throttles by simply overloading -- purposefully breaking -- the network. Even if the ISP is throttling each connection to 1k a second, if they're making 1000 connections, they're going to get some serious bandwidth. The problem is, that also causes SERIOUS overhead. With our network (a series of Wireless APs on towers), overhead due to connections can affect a large number of customers at a time.
As customers and responsible netizens, you are required to do hold yourself up to a certain standard. That means no sending George Bush death threats nor offers to buy him remedial reading books, no trolling slashdot, no getting infected with trojans, etc. This, of course, also includes not causing the locally owned and operated ISP to implode because you want to steal the latest Eminem album and are setting up 1000 connections at 0.01k a second to do it.
As a responsible ISP, we are required to keep everyone running as smoothly as possible. That includes, unfortunately, throttling some customers who are unwilling or unable to throttle themselves. That includes turning people off who have bad NICs and are causing system errors. That includes locking our towers down so that random Wireless NICs can't connect.
And yes, that includes disabling customers who are sending out 500,000 copies of the Sasser worm an hour, or bringing our network to it's knees with P2P.
Typically customers don't even notice when we throttle them. We advertise the connection that we do our throttles on as a 128k+ connection -- it's rated at 128k, we'll come out and fix it if it drops below that, but the service will go as fast as it can to the tower
We just find a nice comfortable spot where you can use the service with normal use, but can't be flooding the network with your illegal P2P crap. Works great for all concerned.
Well, except for the people trying to do illegal P2P downloads. They hate it. But we don't want them as customers anyway.
And, it's not just small time ISPs that do it. I recently moved to Idaho, and the ISP here (Qwest with MSN in a rural area) does the exact same thing.
Slashdot Mirror
So only fundamentalist Christians are made a bit uncomfortable with some of these new concepts of cloning, use of aborted embryos for research. I would find that a bit surprising. Perhaps this just looks like a good opportunity to insult some group of people that you disagree with, while adding nothing to the debate. Big surprise there.
Actually, as far as I can tell, Fundamentalist Christians have objections to the concept of Women's Lib.
Observe.
Originally, the argument was that Women should be subservient to men. This was added when King James re-wrote the bible as an "interpretation."
Next, the argument was that women should be at home, married, with children. They could run the household, sure, as long as the man didn't care.
Then, it was "Birth Control is for Harlots", and they ran around either harassing, firebombing, or in general making it very, very difficult to find for a rather long time. (The current "I'm sorry, I may be paid to fill your prescriptions, but I refuse because you're a whore." theme with some southern pharmacists is a throwback to this.)
After that sunk, the next argument was that Abortion is murder. The Embryo is sacred life, and aborting it before it becomes able to live on it's own is evil and wrong. (Important note: Fundamentalists, as a whole, don't care what happens after the kid is born, just beforehand.)
The current argument is that the mere PREVENTION of pregnancy is murder -- at least when the prevention comes from a purely chemical means. (Unless you're daring to try and make condoms available to poor people, that's apparently bad too.) This is the official reasoning for the objections to the Morning After pill. Of course, this intentionally (at least, I hope it's intentional misdirection and not unintentional ignorance) ignores the fact that the Morning After pill is not a "take a pill, your baby is dead" situation, but rather, "You take a pill, your womb prevents the egg from being fertilized".
There's only a few common themes here. If you take the most recent arguments, you get a trend that the real argument is "Women -- or people in general -- shouldn't be allowed to enjoy sex". If you take the arguments a bit further, you get a trend that says "Women do not have the right to make their own decisions" -- be it reproductive decisions, legal decisions, what have you.
But, anyway.
The Stem Cell research bit is wrapped up in this. You see, you can't really avoid being against Stem Cell research when you are still trying to put on a public face about being against abortion due to "honestly" believing that life begins at orgasm. (Not conception, since with the Morning After pill, there is no conception that takes place. Again, that's the entire point of the morning after pill.) (Nevermind that every time someone goes to a fertility clinic, the same stem cells get created at Fertility Clinics -- indeed, most stem cells for research COME from Fertility Clinics.
Of course, calling Fertility doctors "mass murders" and putting pictures of their faces, homes, and children up on websites (in a King Henry the 2nd, "Who will rid me of this troublesome Heretic" type situation) would probably get a bit of a backlash, considering that, well, who's going to complain about doctors being able to help infertile couples have children?
But hey, "genocidal, devil worshiping Nazi-doctor-like abortionists" like those evil stem cell researchers? Sure thing!
I find this quote interesting, since WOW has no official Linux client. Instead it uses WineX. What makes you think WAR will not work with WineX the same way?
I could see some other, dumber, companies doing this, but Ryzom is a niche game, there's no way they'd waste money to but it just to shut it down.
I find it interesting to note that Saga of Ryzom's parent company already GPLed the engine -- but offers a non-GPLed version for a fee:
http://www.nevrax.org/tikiwiki/tiki-index.php
So it should be trivial to get the end product.
(As long as it's black.)
No, they did the right thing by simply observing and recording.
Simply put, if they had interjected, the Police would have had a reason and opportunity to turn this into a riot, and flush it all down the memory hole. The guys with cameras? Arrested, and the "evidence" confiscated for the "investigation" of the "riot that evil Iranian Muslim terrorist" caused.
Instead they watched, recorded, and let the police do their bad things all on their own, and the cops will get theirs when the time comes.
Personally, if I was the UCLA students, I'd be carrying a camera everywhere I went from now on. Because if these cops are stupid enough to do this on camera and in front of a crowd, just what do you think they'd do in front of 1 or 2 witnesses in a more questionable situation?
I fixed your typos.
Off and on, when I can. I am dumbfounded as to just how many people want to jump off a perfectly nice bridge like that, though! :)
I'll have to fill out some special paperwork if I do it myself, and failing that I might have to contact one of my friends at Dell UK to get them to do the actual dispatch, but one way or another I'll find someone who can get you fixed up.
(ObWarning: I work for Dell as a Gold Hardware Support Technician in Twin Falls Idaho.)
Email me your father's service tag, I'll be happy to look into it directly.
mark (underscore) cantrell (at) dell (dot) com
There's no reason if you ordered Windows that you shouldn't get a CoA and Windows XP CD -- UNLESS you ordered a machine with "image support", then those CDs are stored as ISOs on a partition on your drive, you just have to click the right button and the Dell software will burn you a WinXP CD and a Drivers CD.
Either way, you should have DEFINATELY gotten a COA label on the machine itself. Send me your tag, and I'll either fix it Friday when I get into the office, or I'll get ahold of someone (Dell Customer Care, which is in the same building as me, possibly) who can.
Dell does offer laptops without Windows. They package in FreeDOS and do not offer Software Support on those laptops, but they do offer them.
Kinda curious as to why this guy just didn't... you know... ask his sales rep for the nSeries version of his laptop?
Conveniently, that will come about right about when the Liberals take over again. Dad'gumed Tax and Spend Liberals!
First off:
The Dems are On this, filing one of the only C&D letters I've actually supported. Kinda brilliant of the NeoCons, really -- they hire an impersonator to make a fake 5 minute message, robocall it at 11 PM till 4 AM, make it long enough that most people hang up long before they hear the "paid for by the Republicans" message at the end, and, well, it's just brilliant. Too bad the Democrats are too ethical to try something like this themselves.
Jim Webb's campaign is also being specifically targeted by this, in what is probably a "test run" by Karl Rove. Robo calls are reporting that people will get arrested if they vote, that their locations have changed, pamphlets are being handed out telling black people not to bother voting, and the Voting Machines are set up to "accidently" mess Mr. Webb's name up. Even the Board of Elections are saying these efforts are Widespread and Deliberate (and, oh yeah, ILLEGAL).
Kinda a pity that the Republicans are so afraid of the United States Citizens voices being heard that they have to resort to such disgusting efforts to repress the vote. Of course, having seen this the last 3 elections in a row, this isn't a real surprise.
And I fail at HTML! haha.
m
Proper link:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4440664.st
There are many, many world leaders that are so bad they're worthy of hanging -- depending on your sense of right and rong. Many of which we've comitted covert acts of war in an attempt to keep in power.
Not to mention there are quite a few people in the world who suspect (and rightly so) that Bush has authorized war crimes just as horrific if not worse than Saddam's. (Torture, Rape, Holding People without a Trial, [url=http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/44406
But, but, opting to delay until after the elections would be wrong! The people NEED this news NOW!
I mean, opting to delay so it wouldn't affect the elections would be like The IRS delaying any tax actions until after the elections or The department of justice delaying the hearing of a corrupt lobbiest with ties all the way up to Rove, Cheney and Bush until after the elections.
And that would just be WRONG WRONG WRONG! Clearly this news, that coincidently helps the Republicans case on the war of terror... (er... sort of) NEEDED to be out before an election that even the Republicans are now expecting to lose. And that news that would seriously harm the public's perceptions of Republicans? Clearly, that needs to wait until AFTER the election.
Your Liberal media at work, folks! (Please ignore the hard-line Republican parent companies behind the curtain.)
I would agree, except there has been no confirmed reports of these machines messing up in the Democrat's favor.
Every single reported failure of these machines has swung towards the Republicans.
Every. Single. One.
Nah, they have plenty of them, just the smoke really messes up the boxes and ticks off the retailers.
Actually, Alienware was purchased by Dell recently. (Important note: I work for Dell as a phone tech support grunt.)
While Alienware is being pretty much kept as a seperate entity, Dell doesn't put up with this kind of stuff. We don't need to try and force people to give us good reviews -- we EARN our good reviews, and if we don't get one, well, we examine it and use them as important guides for improvements. If someone is taking the time to complain it means they at least care enough to think that there's room for improvement -- you don't get anywhere by ignoring the complaints, or as in this case trying to supress them.
The first thing you're told when you start at Dell is that we win with Integrity -- we don't waste our time trying to flim flam customers when we can just build a good product that brings them to us with honesty, ethics, and integrity. (Not to mention good support.)
I would be very, very surprised if in a week the person who sent that email to that review site has a job or wasn't in some form of coaching. Heck, I'd frankly be somewhat surprised if someone very high up in Dell didn't send an apology to those affected review sites about this.
Actually, there was an article on
One of the guys reported getting repeated death threats by people he traced back to De Beers, attacked at Trade Shows, attempts at blackmailing them into selling or destroying the tech, etc. DeBeers was offering free devices for dealers to detect these diamonds (they're TOO perfect, chemically, some deformations that should be there are not), etc. At the end of it all there was a diamond dealer who examined the synth diamonds and basically said "eh, my customers wouldn't care that it's synthetic, they just want a diamond."
Basically DeBeers was freaking RIGHT out about the whole thing. Small wonder since they keep such a stranglehold on the diamond trade using whatever legal (and illegal) pracitices they can get away with.
In the United States, I presume?
Well, the current law that Bush and his rubber stamps passed allow them to arrest you, hold you indefinately without a trial, rape you (injuries during torture up to but not including death are perfectly OK -- Rape is perfectly acceptabe under the word of the law and has already went on at Abu Ghraib), and prohibit you any contact with any outside sources.
Forever.
According to current law, they could make you disappear, and you'd spend the next 50 years in solitary confinement, only being let out long enough to torture for your password. Of course, having given said password, they would just throw you back in and forget about you. You have no rights to a lawyer, no rights to contest your confinement (this is what Haebus Corpus is all about. It was one of the cornerstones of our society, and the founding fathers assumed that no one would be stupid enough to ever try to overturn it -- nor none of their decendants stupid enough to accept it).
Essentually, no rights at all, since they can simply lock you up and you CANNOT FIGHT IT if they do not want to let you. Want to use your 1st Amendment rights to free speech? Sorry, you can't because you're behind bars in some secret European prison. All other rights are trumped by the loss of the right to contest your imprisonment.
(BTW, think it only applies to "brown people" like Jose Padilla or random "Terrorists"? Think again -- the law SPECIFICALLY STATES that it applies to US Citizens.)
If your family protested, they'd either be arrested too, or simply ignored, or the government, when needing a political football, would make something up about you -- like what they did with Mr. Padilla, who they originally accused of having plans of blowing up a dirty bomb in the US. 4 years later, they've never bothered to charge him with that, only even bothering to charge him with anything when he got thiiiis close to getting the US ruled out of line for it. (He's currently being held, still without trial, for "conspiracy to murder, kidnap, and maim people overseas.")
Pardon me for waxing political, but... I felt this was important, since there's not NEARLY enough outrage going on about this.
Actually, last I heard, W.A.R. wasn't even going to have numeric levels, instead opting for a hidden system where your character's basic appearance evolves based on it's accomplishments. Orcs gain more and more metal bits and get bigger, Dwarves get longer beards, High Elves gain more and more Jewels on their armor, etc.
So, uh, well, we have a game with no levels. No idea on the treadmill bit, but they are at least deviating from the norm in that reguard. That's promising, isn't it?
It's by the DAOC team, so you could really think of it as DAoC 2 rebranded. Some of the stuff sounds pretty darned interesting, for example, raiding towns and cities with PCs defending the town (and NPCs filling in on both sides), and campaigns against small villages steamrolling into large "raids" against capital towns.
Not to mention that non-capital towns can change hands (and races) based on who controls them. That's something I haven't heard of before.
Why go for the cheap knockoff (WoW) when you can go directly to the game that they got their inspiration from?
You know how Orcs are green and go Waaaagh? You wouldn't, except that Warhammer did them that way decades before Warcraft. The only thing they're missing is a british soccer fan accent.
You know how Terran Marines have Power Armor that looks like platemail bellbottoms? Yeah, Space Marines from 40k first.
Zerg? Much scarier when they were called the Tyranids. Protoss? Wake me when they start calling theselves the Eldar -- and Dark Eldar -- again.
Pretty much everything in Warcraft/Starcraft up to Warcraft 3 (where it diverged) was inspired heavily from the original Warhammer/Warhammer 40k universes.
I know this is a bit of a harsh response, but for Warhammer fans this is a bit of a sore spot. 6 Mouths, and all that.
This is perfectly true, of course. The language we specifically use is that our wireless is a 128k connection that will go as fast as it can, and that we'll fix it if it drops under 128k. The Unlimited language is usually used in the Dialup (which auto-disconnects every 6 hours, causing some contention) and to talk about the gigs-per-month of the broadband -- i.e., we don't care how much you download, just that you can't break the tower doing it.
So if we throttle people to 300k and 60 connections a second to keep them from causing the 5 businesses and 10 consumers that are on the same tower as them to be unable to load pages, I still think they're getting a pretty good deal. They are, ultimately, getting almost 3 times what they pay for.
There seems to be a point of confusion -- we don't just randomly throttle the people who have 5 or 6 computers with AIM open or who are downloading on UseNet all day or whatever. Those people the standard QoS stuff makes sure they're getting at least 128k and as much bandwidth as we can give them while still ensuring *everyone* gets at least 128k.
Where this breaks down is when you're opening 500-5000 connections at a time, which is what eMule (defaults to 600 iirc) and most Bittorrent clients (100-"infinate" depending on client) do. While these basically guarentee that you are going to be getting as much speed as your connection can pull, they're extremely inefficient as far as backbone services go.
Simply put, each connection has a little overhead and requires a bit of cpu to process -- and while they're only getting 128k, 300k, 2000k, whatever, they're using up a lot more resources than that. Often they'll be getting 300k of bandwidth but the connections going to us are trying to use something along the lines of 2 or 3 megs -- which starts to clog our pipes. Routers also start to do some odd things when they hit those kind of loads, too -- most people on the tower, the customer with eMule/Bittorrent/whatever, etc also start to see severe packet loss, random and frequent timeouts when they go to load pages, etc.
That's the real issue, to be honest. We have plenty of customers who were pulling down gigs and gigs of stuff a month. They just weren't doing it by creating a few hundred connections at a time 24x7, causing the entire network to fall apart just so they can get "Ella Enchanted" and the latest Weird Al album.
Unlimited service means that you can access any website you wish. We do not limit what websites you can visit.
I disagree with that definition as well, but, that's what it says in the TOS. I have only thrown that in ONE person's face in 3 years of ISP service -- and it was a college twit who had already canceled his service. It also says that if your connection is causing a "network issue", we have the right (and, in truth, the duty) to correct the issue.
And, please. Do not give me the whole "My $30 is good so I can get my 750 gigs of porn and warez every month and YOU can't do anything about it" line. I heard it quite enough, thanks. (Literally, I had someone say nearly that exact line to me when I let him know the reason his eMule wasn't working is because the server wasn't letting it keep connected after a while.)
There are two situations where the average (99.99%) of customers would have more than 100 connections open at a time.
1a. They are using a p2p program that is designed to break past college dorm (rate-per-connection) throttling. eMule is the #1 culprit here.
(Alternately, there is 1b. They are using a p2p program that is incorrectly configured to create thousands of connections at a time. Gnutella and 90% of Bittorrent clients are like this. Fortunately, we can walk customers through fixing these, usually. Also pretty much related to #1a, although they're not really specifically designed to do so. You can fix Bittorrent so it doesn't kill a network. You can't fix eMule.)
2. They are infected with a trojan, bot, or virus.
We certainly don't support #2, and stamp it out every time we can -- people getting infected with a SMTP host virus tend to get entire ISPs put on SpamCop and SORBS lists temporarily, which is a nightmare.
#1 we also have issues with. For the most part, our customers were cool with letting us walk them through cleaning up their clients (setting them to 50-150 global connections, setting speed throttles to about 5-10 times their advertised speed - we run uncapped for 99% of users, installing Netlimiter, etc). But every so often we had the jerks, usually near the college dorms, who would open eMule and queue up 50 gigs of granny porn, open Bittorrent and set it to download about 500 torrents at a time, etc.
You have to understand that these protocols are deisgned to get through throttles by simply overloading -- purposefully breaking -- the network. Even if the ISP is throttling each connection to 1k a second, if they're making 1000 connections, they're going to get some serious bandwidth. The problem is, that also causes SERIOUS overhead. With our network (a series of Wireless APs on towers), overhead due to connections can affect a large number of customers at a time.
As customers and responsible netizens, you are required to do hold yourself up to a certain standard. That means no sending George Bush death threats nor offers to buy him remedial reading books, no trolling slashdot, no getting infected with trojans, etc. This, of course, also includes not causing the locally owned and operated ISP to implode because you want to steal the latest Eminem album and are setting up 1000 connections at 0.01k a second to do it.
As a responsible ISP, we are required to keep everyone running as smoothly as possible. That includes, unfortunately, throttling some customers who are unwilling or unable to throttle themselves. That includes turning people off who have bad NICs and are causing system errors. That includes locking our towers down so that random Wireless NICs can't connect.
And yes, that includes disabling customers who are sending out 500,000 copies of the Sasser worm an hour, or bringing our network to it's knees with P2P.
Typically customers don't even notice when we throttle them. We advertise the connection that we do our throttles on as a 128k+ connection -- it's rated at 128k, we'll come out and fix it if it drops below that, but the service will go as fast as it can to the tower
*shrug*
It's not a hard and fast rule.
We just find a nice comfortable spot where you can use the service with normal use, but can't be flooding the network with your illegal P2P crap. Works great for all concerned.
Well, except for the people trying to do illegal P2P downloads. They hate it. But we don't want them as customers anyway.
And, it's not just small time ISPs that do it. I recently moved to Idaho, and the ISP here (Qwest with MSN in a rural area) does the exact same thing.