What we really need to do is cure cancer. We need to solve the cancer problem, because that very problem is what is affecting our world at a global level too. When we learn to cure that disease symptomatically identified as bloating of cancer cells, we will learn to stop the cycle of economic bloat, corruption and oligarchy.
Which "cancer problem"? There are over what, 200 different diseases all under the umbrella of "cancer," each requiring a different cure or preventative measure. Yeah, we need to figure out how some of the base line errors occur in cell replication et all, which will help prevent quite a few types of cancer, but there's never going to be a magic bullet -- a "cure" for "cancer."
1. Fast and Furious was made up. The entire thing was based on one right wing ATF source, who was discovered to be lying. It has been debunked so often that even the actual GOP doesn't mention it, only ultra-far right idiots in the Tea Party talk about it nowadays. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/20/irs-scandal-democratic-acorn_n_3785717.html
That link is to a completely unrelated story about the IRS. I was hoping you had some proof, because that was the first time I've heard that Fast and Furious was all bullshit. So I searched the same website for more info and didn't find anything to support your claim. What I did find was an article from july 2013 talking about two more deaths in mexico linked to those guns - not something I'd expect to see from "huffpo" if the scandal had been debunked.
It is really telling that the ATF gave over 2500 guns to Mexican drug cartels, and no one from the ATF, DOJ, or Obama Administration is sitting in jail. It is really telling that the IRS targeted political opponents during an election year, and no one from the IRS, DOT, or Obama Administration is sitting in jail. It is really telling that Obama campaign donors at Solyndra got $500,000,000 of tax payer money, promptly went bankrupt, and no one from the DOE is sitting in jail. It is really telling that the Fed prints $75,000,000,000 a month, totaling over $4,000,000,000,000 in the last 5 years, and no one from the fed is sitting in jail. It is really telling that the president himself breaks the PPACA on a daily basis by announcing parts he will be temporarily or permanently not enforcing, and he's not sitting in jail.
Wow, that's a fun list. I count 3... 4? outright lies, 4 completely made up scandals, 1 thing taken completely out of context, several words that don't mean what you think they mean, and a complete lack of understanding as to how civics works.
It's always fun to debunk these kinds of lists, because I always learn something new, usually something that makes me proud of what our country is doing.
The only sad thing is that it takes me hours and the people posting them will either blindly ad hominem them ("YOU LINKED DAILYKOS THAT MEANS YOU ACTIVATED MY TRAP CARD~!~!"), call me a "liberal commy fagg 'MERICA hater", or ignore me and go right back to posting about how Obama was raised by Karl Marx on the Socialist Moonbase on the dark side of Mars or something. Or go back to quoting from the sites those guys run. Same difference, really.
Anyway, lets go!
1. Fast and Furious was made up. The entire thing was based on one right wing ATF source, who was discovered to be lying. It has been debunked so often that even the actual GOP doesn't mention it, only ultra-far right idiots in the Tea Party talk about it nowadays. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/20/irs-scandal-democratic-acorn_n_3785717.html
2. Ditto for the IRS scandal, which was also made up. Darrel Issa asked the investigator to ignore the fact that the IRS was looking at all groups claiming to be charities, as they are REQUIRED TO DO BY LAW, and merely provide him talking points on Republican ones. The real scandal? The IRS failed to notice 10 out of 11 of the Koch brothers fake charities were fake charities. You'll note that Issa doesn't even bother talking about this one anymore, he's too busy trying to use Benghazi to kneecap President Hilary Clinton before her 2016 victory. http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/06/26/1219172/-Here-s-how-Darrell-Issa-manufactured-the-IRS-scandal
3. Solyndra's loan was one of Bush's projects, not Obama's, and there's a HUGE difference between George Kaiser (a billionaire who raised a whopping 50-100k for Obama) and the Kaiser Family Foundation (a charity he started). There's a whole boatload more of made up crap about Solyndra, it's a very transparent manufactured scandal to try and drive us away from Solar and Wind technologies -- because oil will never run out or anything. I'll just leave this link as an exercise to the reader: http://ourfuture.org/20120926/the-phony-solyndra-solar-scandal
4. Literally not true. The "Fed prints $75,000,000,000" is such a common meme that there are so many Tea Party sites shatting it out that it's hard to discover it's source. Took a while, but I found it - The fed is buying back a bunch of T-Bonds and Mortgage Bonds at the rate of 75 billion a month as part of the stimulus package, but that's not "printing money." The Feds have a FAQ entry up on it here, for those who don't roll
It wasn't to punish someone who wouldn't endorse him. That's just a flashpoint scandal, nothing big. I half suspect it to be one that's being sent out intentionally to exhaust the media's attention before the real scandal starts getting out.
Basically he screwed over some Democratic Judge, and the Dems in his area announced they would be very critical of a Republican Judge that was coming up for reconfirmation in retaliation, so he pulled the same screwjob on that Republican Judge to prevent her from being questioned by the Dems. The next day he pulled the bridgegate crap in the home district of the head Democrat.
Just a reminder that Disney doesn't just shamelessly steal from American folklore and then try to lock it up forever; they are quite happy to steal from other cultures too.
Keep this in mind in a few years when Disney tries to find a way to loophole their way into retaining ownership of the original Steamboat Willie -- which, if I'm understanding this ruling, Disney can no longer keep perpetually copyrighted through bribing congress.
I appreciate what Snowden is saying, but perhaps fewer narcissistic platitudes and more documents on the front pages? Snowden isn't Jesus, the more he toots "It's not about me", the more it becomes about him
It IS all about him. Him and his agent, Greenwald.
Snowden doesn't give two squirts of piss about what he found, merely that it got him the attention he felt he deserved. In addition, there were only so many cases of Greenwald pulling the "The Goverment could (possibly in my deranged mind) wiretap all phonecalls! Now, without any evidence at all, lets talk about this newly established fact that the Government is somehow tapping all phone calls, everywhere."
Follow that up with Greenwald acting like an AOL troll circa 1990 to anyone who calls him out on his bullshit (seriously, watch his twitter feed, it's like watching an 8 year old playing Journalist) and his "newspaper," The Guardian editing articles without retractions when they realize just how full of shit he is, and, well...
In a few years we'll all realize Greenwald and Snowden are mostly full of shit, for the time being, they make interesting sock puppets for the InfoWar style conspiracy nuts amongst us.
Because he spent 10 seasons of TNG wearing a more advanced (and less stylish) Google Glass.
Dude, this is Slashdot. You're going to get crucified for that imprecision.
7 seasons of TNG + 4 movies. Generally accepted episode count: 178
Real fans get the precision down to the number of lines of dialogue, percentage of total screentime, or number of minutes (out to two decimal places), you insensitive clod!
Lets not forget a major part of this panic is due to old manufacturing companies starting to realize that if we can print something for 5 cents, then why would we pay $5 for it?
While we're not at that point yet, we certainly will be in 5 years. In 10-15 years, we'll be able to print iPods. Once that happens... why buy an iPod, when you can download a crowd-engineered alternative that's better and cheaper?
I expect some form of faux outrage to ramp up and 3D printing to be banned or seriously restricted soon. It's too disruptive for us us mere plebeians to be allowed to have.
Does Viz release these shows in DRM-free downloadable formats? I'd imagine not. So even that one falls under the convenience category.
Only very rarely is media released in DRM-free downloadable formats. Baen Ebooks, Tor/Forge, and Louis CK's shows are the most popular examples I know of, but it is very rare. I can think of no broadcasted or cable television show that allows it.
I was actually speaking of the comics, not the cartoons. The great unforgivable sin was that Viz wanted something like $0.25 a chapter and had a 2 week delay (which has since been lowered to same day) release lag. The "pro-piracy" arguments were hilarious, and stupid.
Anyway, DRM is no excuse. If a company wishes to sell you something with some restrictions, well, that's their right. It might be considered wrong, but oh well. That's where we're at as a culture right now -- casual theft has led to the point where companies have to put at least a token effort into protecting their goods.
It does not mean people have the right to steal it just to spite them.
The honour system. Bittorrent users would never pirate music from independent artists, they only go after labels' output where the economics don't favour the artist or the consumer.
Stop laughing.
You laugh, but to be fair, when things are readily available digitally, piracy does drop off quite a bit.
Yes, there's always going to be cuntrags that bitch -- the whining blubbering mass of entitled manchildren that cry every time Viz shuts down another Naruto / One Piece / Bleach piracy site being the example that immediately comes to mind -- but for the most part, people pirate not because they don't want to pay, it's because they want convenience.
A major problem with Pandora is you never hear, in theory, anything you dislike -- but also never hear anything NEW, you MIGHT like, either.
I remember about a year, maybe two, ago there was discussion about Google and Bing and the like "censoring" your search results -- tailoring them to news sources and (this is the big one) ideologies that it thought you were a part of, due to their data mining.
This created a minor bubble, a lesser kind of the bubble you see Fox News (or god forbid, Infowars) followers stuck in. This is a disaster in the making when dealing with news, but it's also pretty darned bad when talking about entertainment.
For example, I use Pandora for stand up comedy. I have a station for each comedian, and the new shuffle thing at least mixes things up. But I never hear comedians other than the X number of stations I have +/- a few more, give or take a rare playing of some odd or new comedian.
Contrast this with playing a comedy radio station, an actual radio station, one where the music is all set by a DJ or a "impartial" randomization routine. Will I hear stuff I dislike? Probably. Will I hear new stuff I wouldn't have heard on Pandora? Absolutely.
I don't know how to fix that particular problem. Maybe Pandora should allow for an option where for an hour a day, or at random, it goes into "Pandora Power Hour" where it loosens up the algorithms and intentionally makes you listen to things you might not have known you liked? Not sure.
Hah, how sensationalist. No, they just added a third person camera like all the old Mechwarrior offline games and a bunch of tryhards who seem to know better than the developers -- and these sort ALWAYS think they know better than the developers -- are upset about it.
Hey, America, Are you proud of yourself yet? Proud of what you've become to yourself, your citizens and to the rest of the world? I can't imagine that this is what any of our founding fathers envisioned when they risked everything in order to found this country. And now look what you've made of it.
Ashamed, A Disappointed Citizen
Yes.
Proud but still concerned, A citizen that hasn't been nuked or given ebola from iron age religious psychopaths... yet.
Just curious, how exactly did that happen? I'm using Winamp Lite, which still looks and works just like the 2.x series of Winamp, even though it is the latest version. You have to scroll down a little on the Winamp download page to find it, but there it is. For me this is still the perfect interface, clean and simple.
Winamp Lite is an afterthought. Originally you had no choice but to stick with the increasingly "AOL-afied" Winamp releases they put out. They got really quite bad at the low point, I don't know if it ever recovered or not.
Heck I didn't even know about Winamp Lite until just now, heh.
Foobar2000 alternative for Linux would be deadbeef.
Simply incredible. They take a bad name and make it even worse.
It's probably a reference to DEADBEEF, the coding term. To quote Wikipedia:
"0xDEADBEEF ("dead beef") is frequently used to indicate a software crash or deadlock in embedded systems. DEADBEEF was originally used to mark newly allocated areas of memory that had not yet been initialized -- when scanning a memory dump, it is easy to see the DEADBEEF. It is used by IBM RS/6000 systems, Mac OS on 32-bit PowerPC processors and the Commodore Amiga as a magic debug value. On Sun Microsystems' Solaris, it marks freed kernel memory. On OpenVMS running on Alpha processors, DEAD_BEEF can be seen by pressing CTRL-T. The DEC Alpha SRM console has a background process that traps memory errors, identified by PS as "BeefEater waiting on 0xdeadbeef".[16]"
Basically it's one of those words you can write in HEX and has come to mean "This software has crashed in a way that we know is absolutely NOT hardware related."
Am I the only one who stuck with Foobar2000 back in the day, once Winamp self destructed?
I mean I have the rather... shoddy... Google Play Music on my Android Tablet, but on the PC, Foobar2000 does everything I thought I needed. Is there a compelling reason to try Clementine / Amarok?
The old Hostess officially went out of business because its union workers went on strike, with the specific goal to drive Hostess out of business. They did not wish to negotiate. Their goal was to drive the company into bankruptcy.
[citation needed] Indeed, the union wasn't willing to negotiate. The company had previously asked the workers to take a pay cut, supposedly to help the company, yet immediately afterwords the management got bonuses and the company had extra big profits that quarter. Seems like good cause to refuse negotiating pay cuts to me.
Unions in the US have done some less than wonderful things, but they've had to due to what corporations have done. Alas, most people in the US apparently learns about the bad things the unions have done, but never learn of (or forget about) the bad things corporations have done. I just hope the US doesn't get any more screwed up.
Exactly. The management was quite willing to bargain with the union for a pay cut, then gave themselves YET ANOTHER pay increase and bonus. The pay cut was supposedly because the company was dying, the pay increase and bonus was because it sure as hell wasn't management's fault that the company was going bad, and heck, they were so innovative in conning the union members into working for less than they were worth -- again.
That was the breaking point, that caused the Union to strike. And of course, Fox News and the crony capitalist crowd did their aggressive projecting crap to turn it around on the Unions. They do the same thing all the time, particularly in political debates, it's honestly a brilliant (but dishonest) tactic.
I 100% support the right of unions to exist and collectively bargain. What I don't support are unions forcing the unwilling to pay dues. That is against the spirit of free association.
So you support Right to Mooch States, where the Unions fight for benefits that apply to all the workers, but the workers don't have to support the union to get them?
Or did you honestly think that a company would pay union members one wage and non-union another? The entire point of a union is to be collective.
We could do with doctors having some end of live training. I have watched too many elderly relatives treated with expensive and painful procedures that only managed to lengthen their suffering a very short amount of time. Often increasing their suffering for that time. Yeah, lets try chemo on an 85 year old who is more cancer than man! What the hell is wrong with these doctors?
It's the same reason you get an XRay every time you go into the Dentist. You don't need them (visual inspection will tell almost everything you need to know), but they are a very simple and easy procedure that will get the dentist a good amount of money from the Insurance company. In addition, like mechanics and the specialist equipment they have to buy, paying off that XRay machine they are forced to buy will probably take a few thousand XRays, so they have to do it in order to survive.
A lot of the medical decisions we make in this country are satisfied by this basic economic pressure: The exact point where they can bleed as much money from the Insurance companies (who bleed as much out of you).
This is why we should have went with single payer or Universal health care in the United States, instead of using the Affordable Care Act to prop up a diseased industry. Perhaps in another 10-20 years we'll be at that point in the US, it depends on how fast the current Ultraconservative Party collapses.
They are pound or sponge cake with a highly fat filled marshmallow creme filling. They are incredibly easy to make.
Todd Wilbur has a great video on how to duplicate them at home. He does the same for a lot of snack foods -- Does a great Oreo too.
Personally I'm not terribly excited for Twinkies' return. This most recent mess was the result of a bunch of Romney-style Capitalists trying to bust Hostess' Union for more profit, being helped along with assholes on Fox News blaming the victims of 10+ years of those assholes sucking Hostess dry.
The new Hostess is non-union and has lost most of it's talent -- and no American should ever support Union busting.
So if I wanted to make a PBS app for them, would PBS work with me? Give me access to their API? Their video streams? If not... why not? We're helping to pay for it, right?
They don't have time to make it "perfect" for everyone, but I can guarantee you enough of us nerds grew up on Mr. Rogers that we could find a sufficiently skilled team of volunteers to do it.
I know that you're posting AC so you probably won't see my reply, but here goes...
It's amazing that, in a day where we can accept people are born gay, that it isn't a choice, that we will mock and degrade people who feel that their external sex doesn't match their internal gender.
I see one big, important distinction between homosexuality and transsexuality in your example. Homosexuality doesn't require a third-party to participate to make you what you into what your feelings tell you that you should be. Someone who has sexual attraction to those of the same gender is a homosexual whether or not they ever fulfill their attractions. By contrast, it requires active participation to have gender reassignment surgery to "correct" the external body appearance and genitalia.
Let me just correct you right now.
Your argument is that homosexuality is an internal choice. You do not need someone else to recognize you as a homosexual, to be homosexual. It is entirely internal.
Your second argument appears to be that Transgenderism requires an external force -- that transgendered people require a second party to perform a surgery upon them to be transgendered.
This is incorrect. What you are describing is a process some transgendered people go through called "Transitioning." It is not something that is taken lightly (not "deciding one day to chop their dick off" as one particularly vile comment upstream said) -- but rather the result of years of therapy. I don't know the rate of transgendered people who do go through transitioning, but it's certainly not 100%.
Much like a Homosexual person "just knows" they are homosexual, a transgendered person "just knows" they are in the wrong body, that they are the wrong gender. They do not need recognition of this fact from an outside source for it to be true.
Slashdot Mirror
What we really need to do is cure cancer. We need to solve the cancer problem, because that very problem is what is affecting our world at a global level too. When we learn to cure that disease symptomatically identified as bloating of cancer cells, we will learn to stop the cycle of economic bloat, corruption and oligarchy.
Which "cancer problem"? There are over what, 200 different diseases all under the umbrella of "cancer," each requiring a different cure or preventative measure. Yeah, we need to figure out how some of the base line errors occur in cell replication et all, which will help prevent quite a few types of cancer, but there's never going to be a magic bullet -- a "cure" for "cancer."
"We know you have a house in Ireland, but you're an American, and we demand you let us federal agents into your Irish estate."
Somehow, I imagine Ireland or the EU are not going to be enthused about this.
Anyway, here is a non-conservative site debunking your debunking http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2013/05/14/irs-tea-party-progressive-groups/2158831/
Except that's an older article that was parroting RWEC stories. I counter with this July article from USAToday:
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2013/07/12/irs-occupy-groups/2511541/
1. Fast and Furious was made up. The entire thing was based on one right wing ATF source, who was discovered to be lying. It has been debunked so often that even the actual GOP doesn't mention it, only ultra-far right idiots in the Tea Party talk about it nowadays.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/20/irs-scandal-democratic-acorn_n_3785717.html
That link is to a completely unrelated story about the IRS. I was hoping you had some proof, because that was the first time I've heard that Fast and Furious was all bullshit. So I searched the same website for more info and didn't find anything to support your claim. What I did find was an article from july 2013 talking about two more deaths in mexico linked to those guns - not something I'd expect to see from "huffpo" if the scandal had been debunked.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/06/fast-and-furious-gun_n_3554854.html
Sorry, too many links. Have some more appropriate links, and thank you for catching that:
http://features.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2012/06/27/fast-and-furious-truth/
http://fair.org/extra-online-articles/not-so-fast-on-fast-and-furious/
It is really telling that the ATF gave over 2500 guns to Mexican drug cartels, and no one from the ATF, DOJ, or Obama Administration is sitting in jail.
It is really telling that the IRS targeted political opponents during an election year, and no one from the IRS, DOT, or Obama Administration is sitting in jail.
It is really telling that Obama campaign donors at Solyndra got $500,000,000 of tax payer money, promptly went bankrupt, and no one from the DOE is sitting in jail.
It is really telling that the Fed prints $75,000,000,000 a month, totaling over $4,000,000,000,000 in the last 5 years, and no one from the fed is sitting in jail.
It is really telling that the president himself breaks the PPACA on a daily basis by announcing parts he will be temporarily or permanently not enforcing, and he's not sitting in jail.
Wow, that's a fun list. I count 3... 4? outright lies, 4 completely made up scandals, 1 thing taken completely out of context, several words that don't mean what you think they mean, and a complete lack of understanding as to how civics works.
It's always fun to debunk these kinds of lists, because I always learn something new, usually something that makes me proud of what our country is doing.
The only sad thing is that it takes me hours and the people posting them will either blindly ad hominem them ("YOU LINKED DAILYKOS THAT MEANS YOU ACTIVATED MY TRAP CARD~!~!"), call me a "liberal commy fagg 'MERICA hater", or ignore me and go right back to posting about how Obama was raised by Karl Marx on the Socialist Moonbase on the dark side of Mars or something. Or go back to quoting from the sites those guys run. Same difference, really.
Anyway, lets go!
1. Fast and Furious was made up. The entire thing was based on one right wing ATF source, who was discovered to be lying. It has been debunked so often that even the actual GOP doesn't mention it, only ultra-far right idiots in the Tea Party talk about it nowadays.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/20/irs-scandal-democratic-acorn_n_3785717.html
2. Ditto for the IRS scandal, which was also made up. Darrel Issa asked the investigator to ignore the fact that the IRS was looking at all groups claiming to be charities, as they are REQUIRED TO DO BY LAW, and merely provide him talking points on Republican ones. The real scandal? The IRS failed to notice 10 out of 11 of the Koch brothers fake charities were fake charities. You'll note that Issa doesn't even bother talking about this one anymore, he's too busy trying to use Benghazi to kneecap President Hilary Clinton before her 2016 victory.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/06/26/1219172/-Here-s-how-Darrell-Issa-manufactured-the-IRS-scandal
3. Solyndra's loan was one of Bush's projects, not Obama's, and there's a HUGE difference between George Kaiser (a billionaire who raised a whopping 50-100k for Obama) and the Kaiser Family Foundation (a charity he started). There's a whole boatload more of made up crap about Solyndra, it's a very transparent manufactured scandal to try and drive us away from Solar and Wind technologies -- because oil will never run out or anything. I'll just leave this link as an exercise to the reader:
http://ourfuture.org/20120926/the-phony-solyndra-solar-scandal
4. Literally not true. The "Fed prints $75,000,000,000" is such a common meme that there are so many Tea Party sites shatting it out that it's hard to discover it's source. Took a while, but I found it - The fed is buying back a bunch of T-Bonds and Mortgage Bonds at the rate of 75 billion a month as part of the stimulus package, but that's not "printing money." The Feds have a FAQ entry up on it here, for those who don't roll
It wasn't to punish someone who wouldn't endorse him. That's just a flashpoint scandal, nothing big. I half suspect it to be one that's being sent out intentionally to exhaust the media's attention before the real scandal starts getting out.
Basically he screwed over some Democratic Judge, and the Dems in his area announced they would be very critical of a Republican Judge that was coming up for reconfirmation in retaliation, so he pulled the same screwjob on that Republican Judge to prevent her from being questioned by the Dems. The next day he pulled the bridgegate crap in the home district of the head Democrat.
Rachel Maddow has done all the work and has an interview with said head Dem.
Or you could turn to Fox News, where somehow it was Obama's fault because Benghazi.
They also own their version of Nadia: Secret of the Blue Water and Kimba, the White Lion.
Just a reminder that Disney doesn't just shamelessly steal from American folklore and then try to lock it up forever; they are quite happy to steal from other cultures too.
Keep this in mind in a few years when Disney tries to find a way to loophole their way into retaining ownership of the original Steamboat Willie -- which, if I'm understanding this ruling, Disney can no longer keep perpetually copyrighted through bribing congress.
I appreciate what Snowden is saying, but perhaps fewer narcissistic platitudes and more documents on the front pages? Snowden isn't Jesus, the more he toots "It's not about me", the more it becomes about him
It IS all about him. Him and his agent, Greenwald.
Snowden doesn't give two squirts of piss about what he found, merely that it got him the attention he felt he deserved. In addition, there were only so many cases of Greenwald pulling the "The Goverment could (possibly in my deranged mind) wiretap all phonecalls! Now, without any evidence at all, lets talk about this newly established fact that the Government is somehow tapping all phone calls, everywhere."
Follow that up with Greenwald acting like an AOL troll circa 1990 to anyone who calls him out on his bullshit (seriously, watch his twitter feed, it's like watching an 8 year old playing Journalist) and his "newspaper," The Guardian editing articles without retractions when they realize just how full of shit he is, and, well...
In a few years we'll all realize Greenwald and Snowden are mostly full of shit, for the time being, they make interesting sock puppets for the InfoWar style conspiracy nuts amongst us.
Because he spent 10 seasons of TNG wearing a more advanced (and less stylish) Google Glass.
Dude, this is Slashdot. You're going to get crucified for that imprecision.
7 seasons of TNG + 4 movies.
Generally accepted episode count: 178
Real fans get the precision down to the number of lines of dialogue, percentage of total screentime, or number of minutes (out to two decimal places), you insensitive clod!
Lets not forget a major part of this panic is due to old manufacturing companies starting to realize that if we can print something for 5 cents, then why would we pay $5 for it?
While we're not at that point yet, we certainly will be in 5 years. In 10-15 years, we'll be able to print iPods. Once that happens... why buy an iPod, when you can download a crowd-engineered alternative that's better and cheaper?
I expect some form of faux outrage to ramp up and 3D printing to be banned or seriously restricted soon. It's too disruptive for us us mere plebeians to be allowed to have.
Does Viz release these shows in DRM-free downloadable formats? I'd imagine not. So even that one falls under the convenience category.
Only very rarely is media released in DRM-free downloadable formats. Baen Ebooks, Tor/Forge, and Louis CK's shows are the most popular examples I know of, but it is very rare. I can think of no broadcasted or cable television show that allows it.
I was actually speaking of the comics, not the cartoons. The great unforgivable sin was that Viz wanted something like $0.25 a chapter and had a 2 week delay (which has since been lowered to same day) release lag. The "pro-piracy" arguments were hilarious, and stupid.
Or as I said before -- blubbering, entitled Manchildren. Especially when you consider the company they're defending, NOEZ, has made a fortune ripping off Japanese and US IP for years now.
Anyway, DRM is no excuse. If a company wishes to sell you something with some restrictions, well, that's their right. It might be considered wrong, but oh well. That's where we're at as a culture right now -- casual theft has led to the point where companies have to put at least a token effort into protecting their goods.
It does not mean people have the right to steal it just to spite them.
The honour system. Bittorrent users would never pirate music from independent artists, they only go after labels' output where the economics don't favour the artist or the consumer.
Stop laughing.
You laugh, but to be fair, when things are readily available digitally, piracy does drop off quite a bit.
Yes, there's always going to be cuntrags that bitch -- the whining blubbering mass of entitled manchildren that cry every time Viz shuts down another Naruto / One Piece / Bleach piracy site being the example that immediately comes to mind -- but for the most part, people pirate not because they don't want to pay, it's because they want convenience.
Relevant Oatmeal link.
They've reinvented demoware.
You're forgetting the magic words that summon Venture Capitalists:
"It's Demoware... IN THE CLOUD"
A major problem with Pandora is you never hear, in theory, anything you dislike -- but also never hear anything NEW, you MIGHT like, either.
I remember about a year, maybe two, ago there was discussion about Google and Bing and the like "censoring" your search results -- tailoring them to news sources and (this is the big one) ideologies that it thought you were a part of, due to their data mining.
This created a minor bubble, a lesser kind of the bubble you see Fox News (or god forbid, Infowars) followers stuck in. This is a disaster in the making when dealing with news, but it's also pretty darned bad when talking about entertainment.
For example, I use Pandora for stand up comedy. I have a station for each comedian, and the new shuffle thing at least mixes things up. But I never hear comedians other than the X number of stations I have +/- a few more, give or take a rare playing of some odd or new comedian.
Contrast this with playing a comedy radio station, an actual radio station, one where the music is all set by a DJ or a "impartial" randomization routine. Will I hear stuff I dislike? Probably. Will I hear new stuff I wouldn't have heard on Pandora? Absolutely.
I don't know how to fix that particular problem. Maybe Pandora should allow for an option where for an hour a day, or at random, it goes into "Pandora Power Hour" where it loosens up the algorithms and intentionally makes you listen to things you might not have known you liked? Not sure.
Hah, how sensationalist. No, they just added a third person camera like all the old Mechwarrior offline games and a bunch of tryhards who seem to know better than the developers -- and these sort ALWAYS think they know better than the developers -- are upset about it.
Hey, America,
Are you proud of yourself yet? Proud of what you've become to yourself, your citizens and to the rest of the world? I can't imagine that this is what any of our founding fathers envisioned when they risked everything in order to found this country. And now look what you've made of it.
Ashamed,
A Disappointed Citizen
Yes.
Proud but still concerned,
A citizen that hasn't been nuked or given ebola from iron age religious psychopaths... yet.
once Winamp self destructed
Just curious, how exactly did that happen? I'm using Winamp Lite, which still looks and works just like the 2.x series of Winamp, even though it is the latest version. You have to scroll down a little on the Winamp download page to find it, but there it is. For me this is still the perfect interface, clean and simple.
Winamp Lite is an afterthought. Originally you had no choice but to stick with the increasingly "AOL-afied" Winamp releases they put out. They got really quite bad at the low point, I don't know if it ever recovered or not.
Heck I didn't even know about Winamp Lite until just now, heh.
Foobar2000 alternative for Linux would be deadbeef.
Simply incredible. They take a bad name and make it even worse.
It's probably a reference to DEADBEEF, the coding term. To quote Wikipedia:
"0xDEADBEEF ("dead beef") is frequently used to indicate a software crash or deadlock in embedded systems. DEADBEEF was originally used to mark newly allocated areas of memory that had not yet been initialized -- when scanning a memory dump, it is easy to see the DEADBEEF. It is used by IBM RS/6000 systems, Mac OS on 32-bit PowerPC processors and the Commodore Amiga as a magic debug value. On Sun Microsystems' Solaris, it marks freed kernel memory. On OpenVMS running on Alpha processors, DEAD_BEEF can be seen by pressing CTRL-T. The DEC Alpha SRM console has a background process that traps memory errors, identified by PS as "BeefEater waiting on 0xdeadbeef".[16]"
Basically it's one of those words you can write in HEX and has come to mean "This software has crashed in a way that we know is absolutely NOT hardware related."
Am I the only one who stuck with Foobar2000 back in the day, once Winamp self destructed?
I mean I have the rather... shoddy... Google Play Music on my Android Tablet, but on the PC, Foobar2000 does everything I thought I needed. Is there a compelling reason to try Clementine / Amarok?
The old Hostess officially went out of business because its union workers went on strike, with the specific goal to drive Hostess out of business. They did not wish to negotiate. Their goal was to drive the company into bankruptcy.
[citation needed] Indeed, the union wasn't willing to negotiate. The company had previously asked the workers to take a pay cut, supposedly to help the company, yet immediately afterwords the management got bonuses and the company had extra big profits that quarter. Seems like good cause to refuse negotiating pay cuts to me.
Unions in the US have done some less than wonderful things, but they've had to due to what corporations have done. Alas, most people in the US apparently learns about the bad things the unions have done, but never learn of (or forget about) the bad things corporations have done. I just hope the US doesn't get any more screwed up.
Exactly. The management was quite willing to bargain with the union for a pay cut, then gave themselves YET ANOTHER pay increase and bonus. The pay cut was supposedly because the company was dying, the pay increase and bonus was because it sure as hell wasn't management's fault that the company was going bad, and heck, they were so innovative in conning the union members into working for less than they were worth -- again.
That was the breaking point, that caused the Union to strike. And of course, Fox News and the crony capitalist crowd did their aggressive projecting crap to turn it around on the Unions. They do the same thing all the time, particularly in political debates, it's honestly a brilliant (but dishonest) tactic.
I 100% support the right of unions to exist and collectively bargain. What I don't support are unions forcing the unwilling to pay dues. That is against the spirit of free association.
So you support Right to Mooch States, where the Unions fight for benefits that apply to all the workers, but the workers don't have to support the union to get them?
Or did you honestly think that a company would pay union members one wage and non-union another? The entire point of a union is to be collective.
We could do with doctors having some end of live training. I have watched too many elderly relatives treated with expensive and painful procedures that only managed to lengthen their suffering a very short amount of time. Often increasing their suffering for that time. Yeah, lets try chemo on an 85 year old who is more cancer than man! What the hell is wrong with these doctors?
It's the same reason you get an XRay every time you go into the Dentist. You don't need them (visual inspection will tell almost everything you need to know), but they are a very simple and easy procedure that will get the dentist a good amount of money from the Insurance company. In addition, like mechanics and the specialist equipment they have to buy, paying off that XRay machine they are forced to buy will probably take a few thousand XRays, so they have to do it in order to survive.
A lot of the medical decisions we make in this country are satisfied by this basic economic pressure: The exact point where they can bleed as much money from the Insurance companies (who bleed as much out of you).
This is why we should have went with single payer or Universal health care in the United States, instead of using the Affordable Care Act to prop up a diseased industry. Perhaps in another 10-20 years we'll be at that point in the US, it depends on how fast the current Ultraconservative Party collapses.
They are pound or sponge cake with a highly fat filled marshmallow creme filling. They are incredibly easy to make.
Todd Wilbur has a great video on how to duplicate them at home. He does the same for a lot of snack foods -- Does a great Oreo too.
Personally I'm not terribly excited for Twinkies' return. This most recent mess was the result of a bunch of Romney-style Capitalists trying to bust Hostess' Union for more profit, being helped along with assholes on Fox News blaming the victims of 10+ years of those assholes sucking Hostess dry.
The new Hostess is non-union and has lost most of it's talent -- and no American should ever support Union busting.
So if I wanted to make a PBS app for them, would PBS work with me? Give me access to their API? Their video streams? If not... why not? We're helping to pay for it, right?
They don't have time to make it "perfect" for everyone, but I can guarantee you enough of us nerds grew up on Mr. Rogers that we could find a sufficiently skilled team of volunteers to do it.
I know that you're posting AC so you probably won't see my reply, but here goes...
I see one big, important distinction between homosexuality and transsexuality in your example. Homosexuality doesn't require a third-party to participate to make you what you into what your feelings tell you that you should be. Someone who has sexual attraction to those of the same gender is a homosexual whether or not they ever fulfill their attractions. By contrast, it requires active participation to have gender reassignment surgery to "correct" the external body appearance and genitalia.
Let me just correct you right now.
Your argument is that homosexuality is an internal choice. You do not need someone else to recognize you as a homosexual, to be homosexual. It is entirely internal.
Your second argument appears to be that Transgenderism requires an external force -- that transgendered people require a second party to perform a surgery upon them to be transgendered.
This is incorrect. What you are describing is a process some transgendered people go through called "Transitioning." It is not something that is taken lightly (not "deciding one day to chop their dick off" as one particularly vile comment upstream said) -- but rather the result of years of therapy. I don't know the rate of transgendered people who do go through transitioning, but it's certainly not 100%.
Much like a Homosexual person "just knows" they are homosexual, a transgendered person "just knows" they are in the wrong body, that they are the wrong gender. They do not need recognition of this fact from an outside source for it to be true.