First off, I don't think anyone is really lamenting the loss of the Rio line. There are now plent of other high quality MP3 players available. In fact, the dying Rio line helped contribute to the failure of SONICBlue.
However, I think that there are reasons to be optimistic about the ReplayTV line.
SONICBlue was invloved in a major lawsuit with the MPAA, etc. over the commercial skip and sharing features of the ReplayTV, this is the same company (then know as Diamond Multimedia) that won the Rio lawsuit against the RIAA, etc. that legitimized MP3 players. During that lawsuit, one definitely got the sense that the the electronics manufacturers (Panasonic, Sony, Sanyo, etc.) were anxiously awaiting the results of the lawsuit so that THEY could get into the business. Ironically, the freedom of other players in the market is what led to the failure of the Rio line.
IMHO, SONICBlue was poised to WIN the ongoing lawsuit, and win decisively. I got the same sense as in the Rio lawsuit that the major electronics manufacturers were waiting for the results of the ReplayTV lawsuit before jumping into the market. Now that ReplayTV has been purchased by a significant electronics manufacturer (Denon/Maranz) we can expect the lawsuit to go forward and new ReplayTVs to sport even better units with innovative (and "contraversial") features.
OTOH, current ReplayTV owners (like me) might still be screwed.
Right now on the front page of the SonicBlue website under "Important message from ReplayTV." is the posting:
Dear ReplayTV customers,
This morning, we announced the proposed sale of ReplayTV. Rest assured that the ReplayTV service you have come to love will not be affected or interrupted in any way as a result of this process. In fact, we plan to continue to innovate, and believe that the ReplayTV service will only improve through this transition. So relax, enjoy ReplayTV, and rest assured that it will be business as usual.
We are very excited about our future, and we appreciate your continued support and business during this brief transition.
That is clearly completely false. Even without anywhere near the sales volume of Wintel machines, in the early 1990's, Sun was selling $2000 SPARC workstations, including high resolution monitors, without any Wintel components at all. That included a full 32bit operating system, a decent window system, and full networking.
You're high, especially in comparing 1995 CDE to Windows95. CDE, at that time (hell, TODAY!), was clearly inferior to Win95 in terms of usability, design, applications, etc. Sun was marketing WORKSTATIONS to COMPUTER PROFESSIONALS for use in CAD/CAM, software design, etc. They never seriously approached the home PC market in 1995 or at any other time.
The reality is that Microsoft/Intel came to dominate personal desktop computing (and eventually, professional) largely because everyone else dropped the ball.
IBM initially gave away the default OS (which became MS-DOS) to Bill in a stunning example of corporate incompetence. Despite this, MS-DOS had a number of healthy competitors including DR-DOS, 4DOS, and IBM's own PC-DOS. Then IBM failed to reach an agreement with Microsoft on the future of OS/2 with each company goign their own way. Then they failed to properly market and promote OS/2 Warp, which was in many ways superior to Win95. And it's not like IBM could not have accomplished this, Microsoft simply wasn't the all-powerful marketing goliath it is now in 1995. And unlike other companies (see below), IBM had the money to do it. IBM, flat out, failed due to sheer incompetence, much the same way Xerox failed to properly exploit the technologies developed at the (now legendary) Xerox PARC.
Apple at one time had a serious shot at dominating the desktop world (a world they essentially created with the Apple II) with the Apple Macintosh (released in 1984), but failed largely because of the expense of the Mac (I believe the launch price was $3500), which while comparable to Unix workstations at the time, was much more expensive than the IBM DOS-based machines which were seen as "good enough" in the corporate world and too expensive for the home computer market which was dominated by cheap systems like the Commodore 64. This became quickly evident to everyone in the industry and the problem began to be addressed by the opening of the Mac platform to clones (which were inevitably cheaper than Apple), but they were eventually killed off to protect Apple (which always saw itself as a hardware company). Had Apple transformed itself into an OS vendor (like Microsoft), the PC market might look much different today. While Apple still maintains a relatively large following for use in prepress graphics and audio editing, this pretty much sealed the fate of Apple as a "boutique" computer dealer.
Commodore, who had an enormous hit in the Commodore 64, released the Amiga in 1985 to much fanfare. Here was a 16bit multimedia color computer system which ran an excellent GUI operating system and was relatively inexpensive ($1500 launch price). Everyone who used the Amiga liked it and it was technologically nearly a decade ahead of other systems (including the Macintosh). Commodore had what looked to be a sure-fire hit on their hands. So what happened? Mainly it was the failure of Commodore to promote the Amiga, competition from other "similar" systems like the Atari ST and Macintosh, legal infighting between Atari and Commodore, and financial mismanagement. Contrary to what is often claimed, the Amiga actually had pretty good software support. Commodore, and the Amiga platform, are now dead.
Atari, see Commodore. Atari was purchased by a former Commodore executive who set out to "beat" Commodore with the Atari ST, and to some extent he succeeded, but Atari was unable to sustain this effort. Atari and Commodore shared the same fundamental problem that in 1985 both were relatively poor which meant they they were unable to successfully market their systems against Apple and (increasingly) Wintel systems. Atari didn't survive either.
First off, there is no "Pool of Radiance 2". The game you are reffering too is called "Pool of Radiance: The Ruins of Myth Drannor" and it's essentially a remake.
Second, you're bitching about the wrong people. UbiSoft is primarily a game publisher, which means they really don't have all that much to do with the development process aside from forking over money. Inevitably all large publishers that publish lots of games are going to publish a lot of crappy games (because 90% of everything is crap).
You should be paying a lot more attention to the designers. They're the ones who really make the games. The remake was made by Stormfront Studios. And was widely regarded as being genrally crappy, as least compared to the Baldur's Gate series (for which you should be thanking BLACK ISLE, figured it out yet?). Stormfront also made Blood Wake for the XBox and Lord of the Rings for the PS2.
Other examples of great games published by UbiSoft include: Grandia 2 (particularly on the Dreamcast), Rogue Spear, and the Settlers series.
Guilty Gear XX is a pretty good 2D fighting game, but it's not as good as either Capcom or SNK's best like Alpha 3 or KOF2K. All the "serious" 2D players are big Capcom or SNK fans, or often both.
Guilty Gear XX is pretty, no doubt about it. Better than either Capcom's or (especially) SNK's best. But the fighting system and gameplay are nowhere near as good as those on Alpha or KOF games simply because they don't have the decades of refinement (particularly in KOF) of the fighting system. It's still raw, so there are still balance problems, stiffness, etc. It's also too easy, IMHO.
I could also complain about the wonky character design (take a tip from Capcom people, less is more) but that's a highly subjective issue. But then again, I really hate Tekken, which millions of people seem to love. So what do I know?
In my experience, corporations believe thinkpads are good only because they are expensive, and they are expensive because you pay for three little letters. I, B, and M. I have seen Compaq, Dell, and HP laptops perform more reliably than IBM, as long as the business grade, and not the consumer grade gear is purchased. The only brand of Laptop I like less than IBM is Toshiba. Back in the '90s, the Portege 660 CDT was the worst hunk of crap ever slapped together. I haven't had to service Toshibas since that model, so they may have improved.
Oddly enough, my experience has been the exact opposite. While I wouldn't go so far as to call Compaq's laptops complete junk, I have always been unimpressed with the build quality and reliability of their laptops. Your battery dying doesn't matter if your system is constantly crashing. Ditto for Dell laptops (though they've vastly improved in recent years). HP has always been hit and miss, the worst laptop, bar none, that I ever worked on was an HP (it had a pop-out mouse that broke within 1 day of use) but some of the Omnibooks have been excellent.
Overall, I have always been impressed with the build quality, reliablity, and features of IBM and Toshiba laptops. They use trackpoints (or did until recently), which I like, and in addition they are quite stylish (Yes, this matters. A lot of these are going to be hauled around by sales staff.) sort of like the Sonys but more reliable (I know QA staff over at Viao and heard enough horror stories to drive me away).
NVIDIA can't count of "fanboy" support, 3Dfx learned this the hard way.
If you can remember way back to 1999 and the release of the Voodoo 3, you will remember that the Voodoo 3 was a major disappointment, barely outperforming a Voodoo 2 12MB SLI combo, which by then was over 2 YEARS old! This was especially harmful coming as it did after the release of the even more disappointing Banshee (which suffered from bugs and other problems). The key here is that 3Dfx gave the hard-core fanboys, who already had Voodoo 2 SLIs, very little reason to upgrade. And the TNT2 Ultra was already beginning to eat into 3Dfx's market share.
Then, a few months later, Nvidia released the GeForce and changed everything. The GeForce was obviously vastly superior to the Voodoo 3 and offered (in retrospect, critical) hardware T&L support. The GeForce was the first card that many Voodoo 2 SLI enthusiaists saw as a serious replacement. The GeForce DDR was just another nail in the coffin.
The fact that the Voodoo 4 and 5 were lousy products is largely irrelevant, by then 3Dfx had lost it's mojo among the fanboys and enthusiasts, it was all about Nvidia. 3Dfx was never able to release a product that compared favoably to current Nvidia offerings.
Now I don't think that the GeForce FX is a disaster on the scale of the Voodoo 3 (or, god forbid, the Banshee) but it's hardly a success story. What the Voodoo 3 taught us was that you can't count on the fanboys. 3Dfx was virtually worshipped by it's fans and the press, but they plummeted off their lofty perch in less than 6 months. Nvidia could very easily suffer the same fate.
1) Microsoft intentionally markets to consumers that they know are incapable of mildy difficult technical tasks.
So what you are saying is, and correct me if I'm wrong, is that people who aren't computer professionals (admins, programmers, etc.) should never own or use computers?
2) Microsoft patches are incredibly perverse in their installation procedures, often break other things, and sometimes don't work at all.
Please give numerous examples. Yes, Microsoft has released patches that created problems even as the solved others (notably, NT Service Pack 4) but in reality these are fiew and far between. I can think of many other companies that have released patches that caused problems (I'm thinking of some Solaris patches here). If you're an open source zealot, this has also happened with open source packages.
3) The sheer volume of Microsoft exploits means that a person would be compelled to spend the great majority of their waking hours applying the damn things, just to keep their head above water.
What a complete load of BS. Do you have a Microsoft box even? I recently installed a new XP box from scratch, and after installing it it only took 1 HOUR to update the system with SP1 and all the patches on windowsupdate.com (admittedly, I have broadband). Due to autoupdate, I suspect I spend less that 5 minutes a week dealing with parches. Even on servers that I admin acroos a whole entriprise patching didn't take that much time, I spent conisderably more time on the Sun boxes.
4) Microsoft hides news of their vulnerabilities in the Labyrinth of their website to the point that a person would be compelled to check a large list of other security websites just to remain aware of what the dangers were.
Let's say it altogether: Windowsupdate.com
All the major patches eventually show up there. Occasionally, patches linger for a while around Technet. Wow, 2 whole pages.
5) Many of these exploits are the end result of bad coding practices, bad design philosophies and ill-concieved architectures, and not just obtuse, hard-to-recognize bugs that slip through *anyone's* quality control.
And you can back this up with.... what exactly? Microsoft is widely recognized as having one of the best programming tems in the world. They make large, complicated, software applications. Bugs are inevitable, especially with software with as many eyes on it as Microsoft's.
As we speak, Mozilla, the major open source web browser, has 11 "major" security bugs open. So don't tell me that bugs are somehow magically confined to Microsoft.
Get a clue. Microsoft's software is very popular, widely deployed (all over the world), and often used by less technically adept users that competing products. Because of this, bugs in Microsoft's sofrware affect a much larger group of users that are less able to deal with them technically. This is not Microsoft's fault. I think Microsoft has acutally put a lot of effort into tring to educate consumers and making patches easy to install (windowsupdate.com, autoupdate). Could they be doing more? Probably. But this stuff costs money, with little return on investment, so I suspect it's difficult to sell to the bean counters at Microsoft. (one advantage of free software I suppose)
Lest someone bring up MacOS... I have little doubt that MacOS has nearly as many bugs as Microsoft or open source software, it simply has fewer users and therefore fewer eyes on the problem. That's why you don't see/. stories about MacOS bugs, not enough people care (harsh, but true).
What's a "legitimate video?" Pixar can make almost anything believable, nevermind a silly silver disc flying around in the sky (trivial to make on a home PC with 3dsmax.) What's a "verifiable record?" Many people from all different backgrounds claim to have seen these things. For every backwoods yokel, I can point to an army general or air force pilot.
Legitmate video is undoctored high-quality video of an objection that is clearly not a conventional aircraft but still cleraly an artifical object. This video does not exist, and the good "this is clearly an artifical object and not a point of light" video is invariably fake.
As many, many, many, people have pointed out, it seems that good photos and video are becoming LESS common despite the fact that high quality still cameras and video cameras are now vastly more common than they were in the past. Virtually every American has easy access to a still AND video camera, many at all hours of the day and night. There are now video a "webcams" broadcasting 24-7 over large ares.
All this leads one to believe that a lot of the earlier videos were the result of grainy video, defective equipment, and wishful thinking. Analysis tends to confirm the view. Like the widely-publisized radar hits in the 1950's over Washington DC which led to fighter squadrons scrambling. These are now understood to have been the result of radar anomalies that are lo longer a factor on more accurate modern radars. Hence, false radar "hits" have gone down.
As for witnesses, eyewitness accounts really aren't good evidence for anything (there are plenty of eyewitnesses that will tell you about bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster too), and even if they were eyewitness RARELY report something which is truly unambiguous.
The reality is that the evidence that there are alien spacecraft visiting the Earth on a regular basis is extremely scant, and it's getting worse as time goes on. And while I have no doubt that the US government is concealing all sorts of dirty secrets, I think that UFOs and secret alien technology isn't one of them.
Re:The proliferation of video cameras.
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SOHO Strikes Back
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UFO's allegedly don't hang out around large populations (at least not appear). This greatly reduces the chance that multiple cameras will capture anything without advanced notice.
Well, this really isn't true. Many UFO "flaps" (like the one in Gulf Breeze) have centered around populated areas.
Hemp is legal. The plant that makes you high and produced hemp is illegal.(in most states)
Hemp is de facto illegal on a federal level (for the reasons you specify), which means the critical CUSTOMS level.
". You can make any grade of paper with it. " Then why isn't the paper industry using it?
Two reasons:
1) Cost. The current wood pulp process is slightly cheaper due to mass production.
2) Legal issues. Due to a combination of harassment by law enforcement, and customs interferece, it's been difficult to get any sort of large-scale hemp industry off the ground. There is also the fact that the US gov't offer subsidies to 3rd world countries for bananas, coffee, etc. and not for hemp. That makes these crops much more profitable than hemp (and they might be for profitable anyway). Coca and opium are even MORE profitable, that's why we're doing such a poor job elimiating them.
And also, environmentalist factors play a part here. Even if producing hemp paper is more expensive than producting wood pulp paper, many "green" thinkers believe that it is much more envionmentally friendly (same thing with hemp vs. cotton, btw).
yes, but is it comfortable? easy to use? could you produce clothes to the mass market that are as good looking, durable, and comfortable as cotton? can you get the same volume of useable material per acre as you can cotton? If so, why are clothes(on a wide scale) made out of it?
For the first three questions, the answer is definitely YES. I own several pieces of hemp clothing, and aside from the expense (they are all handmade) I would consider them superior to cotton clothing. For example, I have a pair of help pants that are considerably more durable than cotton pants and look fine. Hemp is a perfect material for denim, or other "work" clothes. As for yields, I'm not sure. It is my understanding that hemp is considerably hardier than cotton, but I don't know how this translates to yields.
However, I suspect that the main reasons we don't see lots of hemp clothing is because of the legal and trade issues described above.
less harm full does not = harmless. Tobacco and alchohol is an open can of works. If Pot is legalized, it will be a pandoras box.
If it is, the box was opened a long time ago. Hemp is arguably the very first cultivated crop in the world, our history with it dating back 10,000s of years. Recreational use goes back AT LEAST to the time of the Pharoahs all the way up till the late 30's when it was banned. And civilization did not collapse.
And what about Denmark, the Netherlands, or one fo the other nations where marijuana is legal or de facto legal? Even been there? Denmark is WAY nicer than the USA, it's difficult to imagine that marijuana has caused a collapse there.
"because pot is not chemically addictive. "but it is addictive all the same, very powerfully addictive. Just sk the doctors in San Francisco that see addicted 13 year olds every day.
I live in SF and I can tell you there are no armies of 13 year old "devil weed" smokers filling the streets. Marijuana is demonstrably not physically addictive in the sense that nicotine or heroin is. At worst, the addiction is similar to that of caffine addictions.
And competent doctors in SF will be telling you about the REAL problem, methamphedamine. There are lots of speed freaks runnind around here.
Still not buying it... I know plenty of people who are able to readily get hemp products without any legal problem. The only issue is that the hemp is imported. If companies wanted to use hemp in the manners you suggest they could easily do it as well (considering most of our oil is from other countries I know they have such methods availible).
You would be wrong. Shipments of LEGAL (in the USA) hemp products have been seized and seubsequently lost by customs and as we speak the Bush administration is trying to block the importation of all hemp products whatsoever. Also, because of the legal issues an threats from the US government, few nations are interested in producing hemp on a large scale. If you think about it, this makes sense: Why risk billion is foreign aid to only make millions on hemp production? Hemp *IS* produced around the world in third-world countries, but it is mostly used domestically.
Furthermore, I have found a source for the carcinogens information via George Washington University, I'm sure a number of other groups have achieved similar results:
This is not a "source", and your posting it as one shows that you don't understand what the previous poster was asking for. He was aking for an actual study that showed the methodology used for the results. I have often found that many studies (in general, not just drug studies) on contravsersial issues often have deeply flawed methodology. What you cited was a summary article, which itself summarized three books, none of which were collections of scientific studies, so they probably also cited studies, so you have at least 2 levels of abstraction here. Post a link to an actual scientific study, describing the experiments and methodology.
The "round-a-bout" 4x's number I gave previously was in reference to a recent commercial sponsored by the Ad Council.
Clearly a source of deep scientific knowledge.
I have nothing more to say on the matter in these forums.
Because like most drug warrior types, you can't back up your outrageous claims with any sort of facts
I think the psychology of the drug warrior is facinating. They are buying into what I call the "devil rum" fallacy, where they have become convinced that the great social problems of the world (poverty, crime, broken families, etc.) are to a large extent CAUSED by illegal drugs and if they could just eliminate the "evil" drugs (somehow believing that this is not an impossible task) the problems could be eliminated. I think it's much easier for them to deal with this fantasy than the reality that these social problems (poverty, crime, broken families, etc.) are far more deeply ingrained into society and are either extremely difficult to solve or insoluable, at least not without radical social changes. And the idea of radical socail changes is deeply disturbing to the drug warrior mentality, which tends to be conservative.
One good argument for this camcorder that I could see is that it strikes me that it would be significantly more reliable than a tape-based camcorder.
It seems that with every camcorder I have ever seen, the part that always breaks is the door and mechanics for loading/ejecting the tapes. And generally speaking, fewer mechanics = more reliable. This design would eliminate this (IMHO) major source of problems.
And even if the hard drives break down, it strikes me that would be easy to replace and likely user-servicable.
If my prediction turns out to be right, this alone is a good reason to buy these kinds of camcorders.
well, Hollywood sure don't like the Repubs because the Repubs want to regulate them out of business (Social Conservatism says: Titties=bad - Fiscal Conservatism says: Titties=$).
And if economics and morals come into conflict, economics wins. That's one of the big reasons why the influence of the "Moral Majority" and similar conservative groups has been plummeting.
Big, powerful, and important companies that the Republicans (and the Democrats for that matter) serve now make billions off of porn and "risque" entertainment (like General Motors). GM says, "Stop messing with porno. It makes us big money." and the Republicans stop.
The is only suprising to those who believe that the Repubs and Dems aren't complete whores who sell out to the highest bidder.
conservative media execs, like Ted Turner? Give me a break. All the big names in media ACCEPT from FOX are liberal as hell. Maybe they are to the right of your dad( him being a socialist) but they are still mostly to the far left of center.
I hear this all the time, and people who say this are on crack. The reality is that ever since the early 1970s the USA had been slowly leaning more and more to the Right where by now there is really only "Right-wing" and "Far right-wing" in the USA. How many Socialists won office in America last year, or even politicians promoting strong left agendas like expanding entitlement programs, socialized medicine, environmentalism, etc.? Not a whole lot. The range of debate in the USA over economic policy (for example) is really quite narrow, and the "center" is really in the middle of the Right. The Republicans and the Democrats have become so "centrist" that they are virtually indistinguishable (the Republicans are slightly more right-leaning, the Democrats slightly more left-leaning). Partisians on both sides try to exaggerate the trivial differences. Both parties are complete whores as well.
Now stop and take a look at Europe for a minute. There we find actual SOCIALIST nations, we find Socialist policiticans and even actual Communists holding office. The environmentalist Green party has a major influence in Europen politics. Europe has an actual Left wing, and even Far Left wing whereas these are all but non-existent in the USA.
And I should say that this is coming from a libertarian, which puts me in the "Right-wing" more or less. However it is fucking ludacrious to say that "the left" runs the government or media.
The media is most concerned with their bottom line and will support anyone who wants to maintain their bottom line, which means BOTH the Republicans and the Democrats.
The key is to hold those who crack systems accountable for their actions
We already do that, and have done so for years. It doesn't seem to be working, and the primary reason for this is because there are too many unsecured systems available to perpetuate these attacks.
Most posters have failed to grasp that what Tim Mullen is REALLY complaining about is that law enforcement has been ineffective in preventing worm and other kinds of hacker attacks. He's right, but the reason is not because the hackers are somehow "unassailable" by law enforcement. It's because law enforcement spends very little effort in enforcing "cybercrime" laws.
See, in the USA it's a popular pasttime among politicians to pass new laws against X without even thinking about how that law is to be enforced, let alone allocating resources to do it. Consequently a great many laws in the USA go virtually unenforced. There are numerous other exmaples besides "cybercrime".
What Tim should be doing is lobbying for a "Cybercrime Enforcement Agency" that spends significant resources tracking down Internet criminals.
Now clearly a lot of ad hoc vigilantes attacking "offending" systems would consitiute significant resources, but as many other posters have pointed out the solution is worse than the problem. Such authority (if legally enshrined) would be incredibly open to abuse, and everyone knows this. Other posters have pointed out that they have "struck back" against worms and other attacks even knowing that it was illegal to do so. But the subtext behinds this is that they were willing to "strike back" because they knew that there was little chance they would be caught and punished. This is literally the exact same thinking that led them to be attacked in the first place.
Tim Mullen shouldn't be suprised that the white hats are aligning against him because his solution and his thinking is exactly that of a black hat. He's justifying hacking into others computers by making the claim that he's "doing no harm" and that in fact he's actually helping them. Exactly the same arguments that many "grey hat" crackers make about breaking into systems but not damaging them. To most white hats, systems are "private" and there is no justification for vigilantes to break into them.
This contraversy remids be quite about of the blacklists of spam sites and open relays that are being propogated. The huge difference here is that the blacklists are voluntary limitations people put on thier OWN property and servers, and opposed to changes to other people's property and servers. And analogous situation to what Tim proposes would be hacking into other people's computers to shut down open relays or spam sites. The only difference is that creating and propogating worms is illegal and spam isn't (yet). However I fail to see why this should make any difference to a vigilante.
Um, to be absolutely fair to both sides the reality is that Microsoft got to be a monopoly partially through unethical behavior (many examples: QDOS, various other dirty tricks with MS-DOS, etc.) but MOSTLY by legitimately beating their competition, who often dropped the ball (Macs being too expensive, IBM's piss-poor handling of OS/2, Commodore's incompetence, etc.) beyond the fact that many Microsoft products (like Windows95 and Word) were regarded by many as superior to the competition. Microsoft also competes quite fairly in many markets to this day, like in hardware products like mice and with the XBox.
OTOH, once Microsoft aquired it's monopoly in desktop operating systems there is no doubt whatsoever that Microsoft engaged in illegal monopoly maintainance. Microsoft also engaged in "tying" to try to extend their monopoly into othe rmarkets (like they virtual monopoly in office suites). Through bribery, Microsoft recieved little more than a slap on the wrist for these trangressions.
Bill Gates' charitable contributions do not excuse the behavior of his company. And even if they did, Bill Gates is not the ONLY responsible party over at Microsoft, he just gets a lot of press.
The short answer is to buy a used Tivo or ReplayTV. You should be able to pick one up on EBay for around $150. Early (2000 series) ReplayTV units DO NOT REQUIRE a subscription of any sort, it's just that the functionality will be severely diminished (only manual recordings).
Assuming you're starting from scratch, there is simply no way you could build a PC with anything close to full PVR capabilities for $150. And make no mistake, any such solution will be kludgy. Assuming you already have a suitable PC I reccomend you go with the ALL IN WONDER RADEON 7500 which comes with pretty much everything you need (including the all-important remote) which I've seen on Pricewatch for as little as $115. Please note that the functionality of the ATI software is considered vastly inferior to that of Tivo or ReplayTV, but comparable to anything else you'd find on a PC. However ATI does have TV listings.
The big problem here is that for full PVR functionality you want the channel guide updates (the TV Guide-like listings) so you can simply click on a show name to record it. That costs money, anyway you slice it. I'm not sure, but I believe that Microsoft is currently picking up the tab for Media Center PCs, but EVERYONE ELSE will expect you to pay around $10 a month. For example, Snapstream currently doesn't have an automated channel guide but in the near future they will be offering a subscription service to get the guide.
There is simply no way out of this at present. In the future, you many be able to download "pirate" guides off the Internet using broadband ReplayTV units or possibly Media Center PCs (depending on how popular Media Center becomes).
I'm just wondering why they haven't just cancelled it. It's now over 5 years in development. And it's not a slavish labor of love like Battlecruiser 3000 was. I doubt that BC3K has made ANY profit for it's creator, it seems impossible that DNF could make up it's undoubtably huge development costs, no matter how big it is.
True, he allows for parental choice, but only as a "concession" of sorts. He says, "We should distinguish between preventing people from becoming disabled from preventing the existence of disabled people." Meaning, as a society, we should prevent "inferior" (tm) people from being born. It's 'mandatory' in the sense that he is saying it is the ethical thing to do to prevent disabled people from existing. I know plenty of disabled people who would disagree.
It's not a 'concession' in any sense. He very firmly says that such decisions should be SOLEY at the discrecion of the parents, which is pretty far from the "mandatory" that you claim. He addresses pretty much all the criticisms you make. The important thing to walk away with is that he believes that parents should have the CHOICE, and given that CHOICE, most parents would choose not to have disabled children. That's it.
Debateable. What is not debateable is many do take the stand I refered to, and cite Neitchze to back it up. Luke Woodham [courier-journal.com], who started the rash of school shootings in the late 1990s is an example:
By the same "reasoning" one could say the Catcher in the Rye is evil because it inspired at least one assassination. Luke sounds like yet another person that has misinterpreted Nietzsche. The fact that he mentioned Hitler and Nietzsche in the same sentence proves it. Never mind that Nietzsche himself wrote several clarifications of his philosophy that clearly ruled out this sort of nonsense.
And if you know anything about the study of ethics you'll know that EVERYONE "lives by their own laws". Including you. Objective morality is an illusion, everyone follows their own moral guidelines. The best we can hope for is a majority consensous.
I would respectfully disagree and say that the choice over whether another being should live is no other person's right, even if that person is dependent on the choice-maker for life. While the mother's interests are certainly relevant...
As abortion rights adovcates will point out, the issue is not wheter or not women will have access to abortion, but whether or not women will have access to safe and legal abortion. In the past, and in nations where abortion is currently outlawed, women can and do seek illegal abortions. There is no reason whatsoever why we should believe this would not happen in the USA again. Outlawing abortion would also lead to an increase in infant murders.
And, to be blunt, it is your attitude that causes all the anxiety about unplanned and unwanted preganacies (tough shit if you're pregnant, it's your fault). Social stigma about unwed and/or teenage pregnancies has long been a source of social strife. The same people that are against abortion tend to be against birth control and proper sex education, making unwanted pregnancy more likely. If you really want to get rid of abortion, you should strive to make it as uncommon as possible by promoting birth control, sex education, and responsible parenting.
Being able to control when and how one has children is clearly a fundamental women's rights issue, and just about every woman would agree.
Yesterday news also hit of bioethicist Dan Brock advocating mandatory abortion for disabled people such as blind and mentally ill.
This is simply not what he said. Read the damn article. What he said is that parents should have the OPTION to abort children who would be born blind, or with serious mental illness.
This is not a new concept, but is one that is growing in feasability and global support.
You stand as one of the many that completely misinterpret Nietzsche. He was basically advocating meritocracy, rather than being born into power and prestige. Aristocracy was a fact of life during the time he wrote.
Fast-forward now 10 or 20 years. Science has guaranteed a "perfect" child to anybody who can afford one. A minority of rich people get smarter, stronger, better-looking, and richer, in contrast to those who still suffer with gross things like blindness and the worst- mental inferiority. It wasn't enough to genetically engineer perfect children. The question now is "Why hold on to that last moral presupposition that we shouldn't kill scientifically inferior people?" You may think me an extremist, but it's happened before.
The Nazis are coming! The Nazis are coming! Get a grip.
Stem cell research will not lead to Atomic Zombie Supermen. Neither will human cloning. Stem cell research will be used to develop effective treatmets for serious diseases. Human cloning will join the ranks of obscure reproductive techniques, not long ago in vitro fertilization was highly contraversial, yet that tdidn't lead to the destruction of the world. Neither will human cloning.
The real objections to human cloning are based on the currently extremely low success rate. We are better off waiting until cloning can be done easily and routinely with higher order mammals before we begin with human cloning.
I imagine there are plenty of people who would limit stem cell research for non-religious reasons. After all, this quickly degenerates into an abortion debate.
Really, who? Pro-lifers are pretty uniformly conservative Christians. That implies a religious motivation to me. IOW, pro-lifers believe that embryos have souls. That's a religious belief.
Non-religious folk understand that many embryos spontaneously abort, so if they really are "ensouled" that's a lot of dying souls. They choose to use more reasonable critera, like fetal viablity. Or legal critera (property rights, etc.) Criteria that religious thinkers were happy with for centuries.
If you don't want to protect human life as an embryo, why should your human life be protected now? What is your argument that your life is intrinsically more valuable than a human embryo to be used in stem cell research, or the Jews experimented on by the Nazis? Where and how do you draw the line at where the value of human life begins?
This is called the "slippery slope" fallacy.
How about this similarly inane argument: Stem cell research offers the best hope for effective treatments or cures for cancer. By preventing stem cell research you are indirectly causing the deaths of millions of people. Therefore you, and all other pro-lifers, are mass murderers.
Maybe the term "rights" is not neutral, but it certainly reflects the position of the pro-choicers who fundamentally see abortion as "the right for women to do what they wish with their own bodies". Abortion always has been and always will be a women's rights issue.
Stem cell research is a very different because it's not tangled up in women's rights.
I'm pro-choice, for a vast number of reasons. The best being that abortion rights are good for society in the long term.
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First off, I don't think anyone is really lamenting the loss of the Rio line. There are now plent of other high quality MP3 players available. In fact, the dying Rio line helped contribute to the failure of SONICBlue.
However, I think that there are reasons to be optimistic about the ReplayTV line.
SONICBlue was invloved in a major lawsuit with the MPAA, etc. over the commercial skip and sharing features of the ReplayTV, this is the same company (then know as Diamond Multimedia) that won the Rio lawsuit against the RIAA, etc. that legitimized MP3 players. During that lawsuit, one definitely got the sense that the the electronics manufacturers (Panasonic, Sony, Sanyo, etc.) were anxiously awaiting the results of the lawsuit so that THEY could get into the business. Ironically, the freedom of other players in the market is what led to the failure of the Rio line.
IMHO, SONICBlue was poised to WIN the ongoing lawsuit, and win decisively. I got the same sense as in the Rio lawsuit that the major electronics manufacturers were waiting for the results of the ReplayTV lawsuit before jumping into the market. Now that ReplayTV has been purchased by a significant electronics manufacturer (Denon/Maranz) we can expect the lawsuit to go forward and new ReplayTVs to sport even better units with innovative (and "contraversial") features.
OTOH, current ReplayTV owners (like me) might still be screwed.
Right now on the front page of the SonicBlue website under "Important message from ReplayTV." is the posting:
Dear ReplayTV customers,
This morning, we announced the proposed sale of ReplayTV. Rest assured that the ReplayTV service you have come to love will not be affected or interrupted in any way as a result of this process. In fact, we plan to continue to innovate, and believe that the ReplayTV service will only improve through this transition. So relax, enjoy ReplayTV, and rest assured that it will be business as usual.
We are very excited about our future, and we appreciate your continued support and business during this brief transition.
Thank you,
The ReplayTV Team
That is clearly completely false. Even without anywhere near the sales volume of Wintel machines, in the early 1990's, Sun was selling $2000 SPARC workstations, including high resolution monitors, without any Wintel components at all. That included a full 32bit operating system, a decent window system, and full networking.
You're high, especially in comparing 1995 CDE to Windows95. CDE, at that time (hell, TODAY!), was clearly inferior to Win95 in terms of usability, design, applications, etc. Sun was marketing WORKSTATIONS to COMPUTER PROFESSIONALS for use in CAD/CAM, software design, etc. They never seriously approached the home PC market in 1995 or at any other time.
The reality is that Microsoft/Intel came to dominate personal desktop computing (and eventually, professional) largely because everyone else dropped the ball.
IBM initially gave away the default OS (which became MS-DOS) to Bill in a stunning example of corporate incompetence. Despite this, MS-DOS had a number of healthy competitors including DR-DOS, 4DOS, and IBM's own PC-DOS. Then IBM failed to reach an agreement with Microsoft on the future of OS/2 with each company goign their own way. Then they failed to properly market and promote OS/2 Warp, which was in many ways superior to Win95. And it's not like IBM could not have accomplished this, Microsoft simply wasn't the all-powerful marketing goliath it is now in 1995. And unlike other companies (see below), IBM had the money to do it. IBM, flat out, failed due to sheer incompetence, much the same way Xerox failed to properly exploit the technologies developed at the (now legendary) Xerox PARC.
Apple at one time had a serious shot at dominating the desktop world (a world they essentially created with the Apple II) with the Apple Macintosh (released in 1984), but failed largely because of the expense of the Mac (I believe the launch price was $3500), which while comparable to Unix workstations at the time, was much more expensive than the IBM DOS-based machines which were seen as "good enough" in the corporate world and too expensive for the home computer market which was dominated by cheap systems like the Commodore 64. This became quickly evident to everyone in the industry and the problem began to be addressed by the opening of the Mac platform to clones (which were inevitably cheaper than Apple), but they were eventually killed off to protect Apple (which always saw itself as a hardware company). Had Apple transformed itself into an OS vendor (like Microsoft), the PC market might look much different today. While Apple still maintains a relatively large following for use in prepress graphics and audio editing, this pretty much sealed the fate of Apple as a "boutique" computer dealer.
Commodore, who had an enormous hit in the Commodore 64, released the Amiga in 1985 to much fanfare. Here was a 16bit multimedia color computer system which ran an excellent GUI operating system and was relatively inexpensive ($1500 launch price). Everyone who used the Amiga liked it and it was technologically nearly a decade ahead of other systems (including the Macintosh). Commodore had what looked to be a sure-fire hit on their hands. So what happened? Mainly it was the failure of Commodore to promote the Amiga, competition from other "similar" systems like the Atari ST and Macintosh, legal infighting between Atari and Commodore, and financial mismanagement. Contrary to what is often claimed, the Amiga actually had pretty good software support. Commodore, and the Amiga platform, are now dead.
Atari, see Commodore. Atari was purchased by a former Commodore executive who set out to "beat" Commodore with the Atari ST, and to some extent he succeeded, but Atari was unable to sustain this effort. Atari and Commodore shared the same fundamental problem that in 1985 both were relatively poor which meant they they were unable to successfully market their systems against Apple and (increasingly) Wintel systems. Atari didn't survive either.
Apple, Atari, and Commodore
First off, there is no "Pool of Radiance 2". The game you are reffering too is called "Pool of Radiance: The Ruins of Myth Drannor" and it's essentially a remake.
Second, you're bitching about the wrong people. UbiSoft is primarily a game publisher, which means they really don't have all that much to do with the development process aside from forking over money. Inevitably all large publishers that publish lots of games are going to publish a lot of crappy games (because 90% of everything is crap).
You should be paying a lot more attention to the designers. They're the ones who really make the games. The remake was made by Stormfront Studios. And was widely regarded as being genrally crappy, as least compared to the Baldur's Gate series (for which you should be thanking BLACK ISLE, figured it out yet?). Stormfront also made Blood Wake for the XBox and Lord of the Rings for the PS2.
Other examples of great games published by UbiSoft include: Grandia 2 (particularly on the Dreamcast), Rogue Spear, and the Settlers series.
Guilty Gear XX is a pretty good 2D fighting game, but it's not as good as either Capcom or SNK's best like Alpha 3 or KOF2K. All the "serious" 2D players are big Capcom or SNK fans, or often both.
Guilty Gear XX is pretty, no doubt about it. Better than either Capcom's or (especially) SNK's best. But the fighting system and gameplay are nowhere near as good as those on Alpha or KOF games simply because they don't have the decades of refinement (particularly in KOF) of the fighting system. It's still raw, so there are still balance problems, stiffness, etc. It's also too easy, IMHO.
I could also complain about the wonky character design (take a tip from Capcom people, less is more) but that's a highly subjective issue. But then again, I really hate Tekken, which millions of people seem to love. So what do I know?
In my experience, corporations believe thinkpads are good only because they are expensive, and they are expensive because you pay for three little letters. I, B, and M. I have seen Compaq, Dell, and HP laptops perform more reliably than IBM, as long as the business grade, and not the consumer grade gear is purchased. The only brand of Laptop I like less than IBM is Toshiba. Back in the '90s, the Portege 660 CDT was the worst hunk of crap ever slapped together. I haven't had to service Toshibas since that model, so they may have improved.
Oddly enough, my experience has been the exact opposite. While I wouldn't go so far as to call Compaq's laptops complete junk, I have always been unimpressed with the build quality and reliability of their laptops. Your battery dying doesn't matter if your system is constantly crashing. Ditto for Dell laptops (though they've vastly improved in recent years). HP has always been hit and miss, the worst laptop, bar none, that I ever worked on was an HP (it had a pop-out mouse that broke within 1 day of use) but some of the Omnibooks have been excellent.
Overall, I have always been impressed with the build quality, reliablity, and features of IBM and Toshiba laptops. They use trackpoints (or did until recently), which I like, and in addition they are quite stylish (Yes, this matters. A lot of these are going to be hauled around by sales staff.) sort of like the Sonys but more reliable (I know QA staff over at Viao and heard enough horror stories to drive me away).
NVIDIA can't count of "fanboy" support, 3Dfx learned this the hard way.
If you can remember way back to 1999 and the release of the Voodoo 3, you will remember that the Voodoo 3 was a major disappointment, barely outperforming a Voodoo 2 12MB SLI combo, which by then was over 2 YEARS old! This was especially harmful coming as it did after the release of the even more disappointing Banshee (which suffered from bugs and other problems). The key here is that 3Dfx gave the hard-core fanboys, who already had Voodoo 2 SLIs, very little reason to upgrade. And the TNT2 Ultra was already beginning to eat into 3Dfx's market share.
Then, a few months later, Nvidia released the GeForce and changed everything. The GeForce was obviously vastly superior to the Voodoo 3 and offered (in retrospect, critical) hardware T&L support. The GeForce was the first card that many Voodoo 2 SLI enthusiaists saw as a serious replacement. The GeForce DDR was just another nail in the coffin.
The fact that the Voodoo 4 and 5 were lousy products is largely irrelevant, by then 3Dfx had lost it's mojo among the fanboys and enthusiasts, it was all about Nvidia. 3Dfx was never able to release a product that compared favoably to current Nvidia offerings.
Now I don't think that the GeForce FX is a disaster on the scale of the Voodoo 3 (or, god forbid, the Banshee) but it's hardly a success story. What the Voodoo 3 taught us was that you can't count on the fanboys. 3Dfx was virtually worshipped by it's fans and the press, but they plummeted off their lofty perch in less than 6 months. Nvidia could very easily suffer the same fate.
What a bunch of FUD...
/. stories about MacOS bugs, not enough people care (harsh, but true).
1) Microsoft intentionally markets to consumers that they know are incapable of mildy difficult technical tasks.
So what you are saying is, and correct me if I'm wrong, is that people who aren't computer professionals (admins, programmers, etc.) should never own or use computers?
2) Microsoft patches are incredibly perverse in their installation procedures, often break other things, and sometimes don't work at all.
Please give numerous examples. Yes, Microsoft has released patches that created problems even as the solved others (notably, NT Service Pack 4) but in reality these are fiew and far between. I can think of many other companies that have released patches that caused problems (I'm thinking of some Solaris patches here). If you're an open source zealot, this has also happened with open source packages.
3) The sheer volume of Microsoft exploits means that a person would be compelled to spend the great majority of their waking hours applying the damn things, just to keep their head above water.
What a complete load of BS. Do you have a Microsoft box even? I recently installed a new XP box from scratch, and after installing it it only took 1 HOUR to update the system with SP1 and all the patches on windowsupdate.com (admittedly, I have broadband). Due to autoupdate, I suspect I spend less that 5 minutes a week dealing with parches. Even on servers that I admin acroos a whole entriprise patching didn't take that much time, I spent conisderably more time on the Sun boxes.
4) Microsoft hides news of their vulnerabilities in the Labyrinth of their website to the point that a person would be compelled to check a large list of other security websites just to remain aware of what the dangers were.
Let's say it altogether: Windowsupdate.com
All the major patches eventually show up there. Occasionally, patches linger for a while around Technet. Wow, 2 whole pages.
5) Many of these exploits are the end result of bad coding practices, bad design philosophies and ill-concieved architectures, and not just obtuse, hard-to-recognize bugs that slip through *anyone's* quality control.
And you can back this up with.... what exactly? Microsoft is widely recognized as having one of the best programming tems in the world. They make large, complicated, software applications. Bugs are inevitable, especially with software with as many eyes on it as Microsoft's.
As we speak, Mozilla, the major open source web browser, has 11 "major" security bugs open. So don't tell me that bugs are somehow magically confined to Microsoft.
Get a clue. Microsoft's software is very popular, widely deployed (all over the world), and often used by less technically adept users that competing products. Because of this, bugs in Microsoft's sofrware affect a much larger group of users that are less able to deal with them technically. This is not Microsoft's fault. I think Microsoft has acutally put a lot of effort into tring to educate consumers and making patches easy to install (windowsupdate.com, autoupdate). Could they be doing more? Probably. But this stuff costs money, with little return on investment, so I suspect it's difficult to sell to the bean counters at Microsoft. (one advantage of free software I suppose)
Lest someone bring up MacOS... I have little doubt that MacOS has nearly as many bugs as Microsoft or open source software, it simply has fewer users and therefore fewer eyes on the problem. That's why you don't see
What's a "legitimate video?" Pixar can make almost anything believable, nevermind a silly silver disc flying around in the sky (trivial to make on a home PC with 3dsmax.) What's a "verifiable record?" Many people from all different backgrounds claim to have seen these things. For every backwoods yokel, I can point to an army general or air force pilot.
Legitmate video is undoctored high-quality video of an objection that is clearly not a conventional aircraft but still cleraly an artifical object. This video does not exist, and the good "this is clearly an artifical object and not a point of light" video is invariably fake.
As many, many, many, people have pointed out, it seems that good photos and video are becoming LESS common despite the fact that high quality still cameras and video cameras are now vastly more common than they were in the past. Virtually every American has easy access to a still AND video camera, many at all hours of the day and night. There are now video a "webcams" broadcasting 24-7 over large ares.
All this leads one to believe that a lot of the earlier videos were the result of grainy video, defective equipment, and wishful thinking. Analysis tends to confirm the view. Like the widely-publisized radar hits in the 1950's over Washington DC which led to fighter squadrons scrambling. These are now understood to have been the result of radar anomalies that are lo longer a factor on more accurate modern radars. Hence, false radar "hits" have gone down.
As for witnesses, eyewitness accounts really aren't good evidence for anything (there are plenty of eyewitnesses that will tell you about bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster too), and even if they were eyewitness RARELY report something which is truly unambiguous.
The reality is that the evidence that there are alien spacecraft visiting the Earth on a regular basis is extremely scant, and it's getting worse as time goes on. And while I have no doubt that the US government is concealing all sorts of dirty secrets, I think that UFOs and secret alien technology isn't one of them.
UFO's allegedly don't hang out around large populations (at least not appear). This greatly reduces the chance that multiple cameras will capture anything without advanced notice.
Well, this really isn't true. Many UFO "flaps" (like the one in Gulf Breeze) have centered around populated areas.
Hemp is legal. The plant that makes you high and produced hemp is illegal.(in most states)
Hemp is de facto illegal on a federal level (for the reasons you specify), which means the critical CUSTOMS level.
". You can make any grade of paper with it. "
Then why isn't the paper industry using it?
Two reasons:
1) Cost. The current wood pulp process is slightly cheaper due to mass production.
2) Legal issues. Due to a combination of harassment by law enforcement, and customs interferece, it's been difficult to get any sort of large-scale hemp industry off the ground. There is also the fact that the US gov't offer subsidies to 3rd world countries for bananas, coffee, etc. and not for hemp. That makes these crops much more profitable than hemp (and they might be for profitable anyway). Coca and opium are even MORE profitable, that's why we're doing such a poor job elimiating them.
And also, environmentalist factors play a part here. Even if producing hemp paper is more expensive than producting wood pulp paper, many "green" thinkers believe that it is much more envionmentally friendly (same thing with hemp vs. cotton, btw).
yes, but is it comfortable? easy to use? could you produce clothes to the mass market that are as good looking, durable, and comfortable as cotton? can you get the same volume of useable material per acre as you can cotton? If so, why are clothes(on a wide scale) made out of it?
For the first three questions, the answer is definitely YES. I own several pieces of hemp clothing, and aside from the expense (they are all handmade) I would consider them superior to cotton clothing. For example, I have a pair of help pants that are considerably more durable than cotton pants and look fine. Hemp is a perfect material for denim, or other "work" clothes. As for yields, I'm not sure. It is my understanding that hemp is considerably hardier than cotton, but I don't know how this translates to yields.
However, I suspect that the main reasons we don't see lots of hemp clothing is because of the legal and trade issues described above.
less harm full does not = harmless. Tobacco and alchohol is an open can of works. If Pot is legalized, it will be a pandoras box.
If it is, the box was opened a long time ago. Hemp is arguably the very first cultivated crop in the world, our history with it dating back 10,000s of years. Recreational use goes back AT LEAST to the time of the Pharoahs all the way up till the late 30's when it was banned. And civilization did not collapse.
And what about Denmark, the Netherlands, or one fo the other nations where marijuana is legal or de facto legal? Even been there? Denmark is WAY nicer than the USA, it's difficult to imagine that marijuana has caused a collapse there.
"because pot is not chemically addictive. "but it is addictive all the same, very powerfully addictive. Just sk the doctors in San Francisco that see addicted 13 year olds every day.
I live in SF and I can tell you there are no armies of 13 year old "devil weed" smokers filling the streets. Marijuana is demonstrably not physically addictive in the sense that nicotine or heroin is. At worst, the addiction is similar to that of caffine addictions.
And competent doctors in SF will be telling you about the REAL problem, methamphedamine. There are lots of speed freaks runnind around here.
Still not buying it... I know plenty of people who are able to readily get hemp products without any legal problem. The only issue is that the hemp is imported. If companies wanted to use hemp in the manners you suggest they could easily do it as well (considering most of our oil is from other countries I know they have such methods availible).
You would be wrong. Shipments of LEGAL (in the USA) hemp products have been seized and seubsequently lost by customs and as we speak the Bush administration is trying to block the importation of all hemp products whatsoever. Also, because of the legal issues an threats from the US government, few nations are interested in producing hemp on a large scale. If you think about it, this makes sense: Why risk billion is foreign aid to only make millions on hemp production? Hemp *IS* produced around the world in third-world countries, but it is mostly used domestically.
Furthermore, I have found a source for the carcinogens information via George Washington University, I'm sure a number of other groups have achieved similar results:
This is not a "source", and your posting it as one shows that you don't understand what the previous poster was asking for. He was aking for an actual study that showed the methodology used for the results. I have often found that many studies (in general, not just drug studies) on contravsersial issues often have deeply flawed methodology. What you cited was a summary article, which itself summarized three books, none of which were collections of scientific studies, so they probably also cited studies, so you have at least 2 levels of abstraction here. Post a link to an actual scientific study, describing the experiments and methodology.
The "round-a-bout" 4x's number I gave previously was in reference to a recent commercial sponsored by the Ad Council.
Clearly a source of deep scientific knowledge.
I have nothing more to say on the matter in these forums.
Because like most drug warrior types, you can't back up your outrageous claims with any sort of facts
I think the psychology of the drug warrior is facinating. They are buying into what I call the "devil rum" fallacy, where they have become convinced that the great social problems of the world (poverty, crime, broken families, etc.) are to a large extent CAUSED by illegal drugs and if they could just eliminate the "evil" drugs (somehow believing that this is not an impossible task) the problems could be eliminated. I think it's much easier for them to deal with this fantasy than the reality that these social problems (poverty, crime, broken families, etc.) are far more deeply ingrained into society and are either extremely difficult to solve or insoluable, at least not without radical social changes. And the idea of radical socail changes is deeply disturbing to the drug warrior mentality, which tends to be conservative.
One good argument for this camcorder that I could see is that it strikes me that it would be significantly more reliable than a tape-based camcorder.
It seems that with every camcorder I have ever seen, the part that always breaks is the door and mechanics for loading/ejecting the tapes. And generally speaking, fewer mechanics = more reliable. This design would eliminate this (IMHO) major source of problems.
And even if the hard drives break down, it strikes me that would be easy to replace and likely user-servicable.
If my prediction turns out to be right, this alone is a good reason to buy these kinds of camcorders.
well, Hollywood sure don't like the Repubs because the Repubs want to regulate them out of business (Social Conservatism says: Titties=bad - Fiscal Conservatism says: Titties=$).
And if economics and morals come into conflict, economics wins. That's one of the big reasons why the influence of the "Moral Majority" and similar conservative groups has been plummeting.
Big, powerful, and important companies that the Republicans (and the Democrats for that matter) serve now make billions off of porn and "risque" entertainment (like General Motors). GM says, "Stop messing with porno. It makes us big money." and the Republicans stop.
The is only suprising to those who believe that the Repubs and Dems aren't complete whores who sell out to the highest bidder.
conservative media execs, like Ted Turner? Give me a break. All the big names in media ACCEPT from FOX are liberal as hell. Maybe they are to the right of your dad( him being a socialist) but they are still mostly to the far left of center.
I hear this all the time, and people who say this are on crack. The reality is that ever since the early 1970s the USA had been slowly leaning more and more to the Right where by now there is really only "Right-wing" and "Far right-wing" in the USA. How many Socialists won office in America last year, or even politicians promoting strong left agendas like expanding entitlement programs, socialized medicine, environmentalism, etc.? Not a whole lot. The range of debate in the USA over economic policy (for example) is really quite narrow, and the "center" is really in the middle of the Right. The Republicans and the Democrats have become so "centrist" that they are virtually indistinguishable (the Republicans are slightly more right-leaning, the Democrats slightly more left-leaning). Partisians on both sides try to exaggerate the trivial differences. Both parties are complete whores as well.
Now stop and take a look at Europe for a minute. There we find actual SOCIALIST nations, we find Socialist policiticans and even actual Communists holding office. The environmentalist Green party has a major influence in Europen politics. Europe has an actual Left wing, and even Far Left wing whereas these are all but non-existent in the USA.
And I should say that this is coming from a libertarian, which puts me in the "Right-wing" more or less. However it is fucking ludacrious to say that "the left" runs the government or media.
The media is most concerned with their bottom line and will support anyone who wants to maintain their bottom line, which means BOTH the Republicans and the Democrats.
The key is to hold those who crack systems accountable for their actions
We already do that, and have done so for years. It doesn't seem to be working, and the primary reason for this is because there are too many unsecured systems available to perpetuate these attacks.
Most posters have failed to grasp that what Tim Mullen is REALLY complaining about is that law enforcement has been ineffective in preventing worm and other kinds of hacker attacks. He's right, but the reason is not because the hackers are somehow "unassailable" by law enforcement. It's because law enforcement spends very little effort in enforcing "cybercrime" laws.
See, in the USA it's a popular pasttime among politicians to pass new laws against X without even thinking about how that law is to be enforced, let alone allocating resources to do it. Consequently a great many laws in the USA go virtually unenforced. There are numerous other exmaples besides "cybercrime".
What Tim should be doing is lobbying for a "Cybercrime Enforcement Agency" that spends significant resources tracking down Internet criminals.
Now clearly a lot of ad hoc vigilantes attacking "offending" systems would consitiute significant resources, but as many other posters have pointed out the solution is worse than the problem. Such authority (if legally enshrined) would be incredibly open to abuse, and everyone knows this. Other posters have pointed out that they have "struck back" against worms and other attacks even knowing that it was illegal to do so. But the subtext behinds this is that they were willing to "strike back" because they knew that there was little chance they would be caught and punished. This is literally the exact same thinking that led them to be attacked in the first place.
Tim Mullen shouldn't be suprised that the white hats are aligning against him because his solution and his thinking is exactly that of a black hat. He's justifying hacking into others computers by making the claim that he's "doing no harm" and that in fact he's actually helping them. Exactly the same arguments that many "grey hat" crackers make about breaking into systems but not damaging them. To most white hats, systems are "private" and there is no justification for vigilantes to break into them.
This contraversy remids be quite about of the blacklists of spam sites and open relays that are being propogated. The huge difference here is that the blacklists are voluntary limitations people put on thier OWN property and servers, and opposed to changes to other people's property and servers. And analogous situation to what Tim proposes would be hacking into other people's computers to shut down open relays or spam sites. The only difference is that creating and propogating worms is illegal and spam isn't (yet). However I fail to see why this should make any difference to a vigilante.
Um, to be absolutely fair to both sides the reality is that Microsoft got to be a monopoly partially through unethical behavior (many examples: QDOS, various other dirty tricks with MS-DOS, etc.) but MOSTLY by legitimately beating their competition, who often dropped the ball (Macs being too expensive, IBM's piss-poor handling of OS/2, Commodore's incompetence, etc.) beyond the fact that many Microsoft products (like Windows95 and Word) were regarded by many as superior to the competition. Microsoft also competes quite fairly in many markets to this day, like in hardware products like mice and with the XBox.
OTOH, once Microsoft aquired it's monopoly in desktop operating systems there is no doubt whatsoever that Microsoft engaged in illegal monopoly maintainance. Microsoft also engaged in "tying" to try to extend their monopoly into othe rmarkets (like they virtual monopoly in office suites). Through bribery, Microsoft recieved little more than a slap on the wrist for these trangressions.
Bill Gates' charitable contributions do not excuse the behavior of his company. And even if they did, Bill Gates is not the ONLY responsible party over at Microsoft, he just gets a lot of press.
The short answer is to buy a used Tivo or ReplayTV. You should be able to pick one up on EBay for around $150. Early (2000 series) ReplayTV units DO NOT REQUIRE a subscription of any sort, it's just that the functionality will be severely diminished (only manual recordings).
Assuming you're starting from scratch, there is simply no way you could build a PC with anything close to full PVR capabilities for $150. And make no mistake, any such solution will be kludgy. Assuming you already have a suitable PC I reccomend you go with the ALL IN WONDER RADEON 7500 which comes with pretty much everything you need (including the all-important remote) which I've seen on Pricewatch for as little as $115. Please note that the functionality of the ATI software is considered vastly inferior to that of Tivo or ReplayTV, but comparable to anything else you'd find on a PC. However ATI does have TV listings.
The big problem here is that for full PVR functionality you want the channel guide updates (the TV Guide-like listings) so you can simply click on a show name to record it. That costs money, anyway you slice it. I'm not sure, but I believe that Microsoft is currently picking up the tab for Media Center PCs, but EVERYONE ELSE will expect you to pay around $10 a month. For example, Snapstream currently doesn't have an automated channel guide but in the near future they will be offering a subscription service to get the guide.
There is simply no way out of this at present. In the future, you many be able to download "pirate" guides off the Internet using broadband ReplayTV units or possibly Media Center PCs (depending on how popular Media Center becomes).
I'm just wondering why they haven't just cancelled it. It's now over 5 years in development. And it's not a slavish labor of love like Battlecruiser 3000 was. I doubt that BC3K has made ANY profit for it's creator, it seems impossible that DNF could make up it's undoubtably huge development costs, no matter how big it is.
You mean that the Tivo 2 will possibly have the same features sometime in the future that the ReplayTV 5000 and 4000 series ALREADY has?
I'm underwhelmed. No broadband. No sharing. No commercial skip.
True, he allows for parental choice, but only as a "concession" of sorts. He says, "We should distinguish between preventing people from becoming disabled from preventing the existence of disabled people." Meaning, as a society, we should prevent "inferior" (tm) people from being born. It's 'mandatory' in the sense that he is saying it is the ethical thing to do to prevent disabled people from existing. I know plenty of disabled people who would disagree.
It's not a 'concession' in any sense. He very firmly says that such decisions should be SOLEY at the discrecion of the parents, which is pretty far from the "mandatory" that you claim. He addresses pretty much all the criticisms you make. The important thing to walk away with is that he believes that parents should have the CHOICE, and given that CHOICE, most parents would choose not to have disabled children. That's it.
Debateable. What is not debateable is many do take the stand I refered to, and cite Neitchze to back it up. Luke Woodham [courier-journal.com], who started the rash of school shootings in the late 1990s is an example:
By the same "reasoning" one could say the Catcher in the Rye is evil because it inspired at least one assassination. Luke sounds like yet another person that has misinterpreted Nietzsche. The fact that he mentioned Hitler and Nietzsche in the same sentence proves it. Never mind that Nietzsche himself wrote several clarifications of his philosophy that clearly ruled out this sort of nonsense.
And if you know anything about the study of ethics you'll know that EVERYONE "lives by their own laws". Including you. Objective morality is an illusion, everyone follows their own moral guidelines. The best we can hope for is a majority consensous.
I would respectfully disagree and say that the choice over whether another being should live is no other person's right, even if that person is dependent on the choice-maker for life. While the mother's interests are certainly relevant...
As abortion rights adovcates will point out, the issue is not wheter or not women will have access to abortion, but whether or not women will have access to safe and legal abortion. In the past, and in nations where abortion is currently outlawed, women can and do seek illegal abortions. There is no reason whatsoever why we should believe this would not happen in the USA again. Outlawing abortion would also lead to an increase in infant murders.
And, to be blunt, it is your attitude that causes all the anxiety about unplanned and unwanted preganacies (tough shit if you're pregnant, it's your fault). Social stigma about unwed and/or teenage pregnancies has long been a source of social strife. The same people that are against abortion tend to be against birth control and proper sex education, making unwanted pregnancy more likely. If you really want to get rid of abortion, you should strive to make it as uncommon as possible by promoting birth control, sex education, and responsible parenting.
Being able to control when and how one has children is clearly a fundamental women's rights issue, and just about every woman would agree.
In order...
Yesterday news also hit of bioethicist Dan Brock advocating mandatory abortion for disabled people such as blind and mentally ill.
This is simply not what he said. Read the damn article. What he said is that parents should have the OPTION to abort children who would be born blind, or with serious mental illness.
This is not a new concept, but is one that is growing in feasability and global support.
You stand as one of the many that completely misinterpret Nietzsche. He was basically advocating meritocracy, rather than being born into power and prestige. Aristocracy was a fact of life during the time he wrote.
Fast-forward now 10 or 20 years. Science has guaranteed a "perfect" child to anybody who can afford one. A minority of rich people get smarter, stronger, better-looking, and richer, in contrast to those who still suffer with gross things like blindness and the worst- mental inferiority. It wasn't enough to genetically engineer perfect children. The question now is "Why hold on to that last moral presupposition that we shouldn't kill scientifically inferior people?" You may think me an extremist, but it's happened before.
The Nazis are coming! The Nazis are coming! Get a grip.
Stem cell research will not lead to Atomic Zombie Supermen. Neither will human cloning. Stem cell research will be used to develop effective treatmets for serious diseases. Human cloning will join the ranks of obscure reproductive techniques, not long ago in vitro fertilization was highly contraversial, yet that tdidn't lead to the destruction of the world. Neither will human cloning.
The real objections to human cloning are based on the currently extremely low success rate. We are better off waiting until cloning can be done easily and routinely with higher order mammals before we begin with human cloning.
I imagine there are plenty of people who would limit stem cell research for non-religious reasons. After all, this quickly degenerates into an abortion debate.
Really, who? Pro-lifers are pretty uniformly conservative Christians. That implies a religious motivation to me. IOW, pro-lifers believe that embryos have souls. That's a religious belief.
Non-religious folk understand that many embryos spontaneously abort, so if they really are "ensouled" that's a lot of dying souls. They choose to use more reasonable critera, like fetal viablity. Or legal critera (property rights, etc.) Criteria that religious thinkers were happy with for centuries.
If you don't want to protect human life as an embryo, why should your human life be protected now? What is your argument that your life is intrinsically more valuable than a human embryo to be used in stem cell research, or the Jews experimented on by the Nazis? Where and how do you draw the line at where the value of human life begins?
This is called the "slippery slope" fallacy.
How about this similarly inane argument: Stem cell research offers the best hope for effective treatments or cures for cancer. By preventing stem cell research you are indirectly causing the deaths of millions of people. Therefore you, and all other pro-lifers, are mass murderers.
Maybe the term "rights" is not neutral, but it certainly reflects the position of the pro-choicers who fundamentally see abortion as "the right for women to do what they wish with their own bodies". Abortion always has been and always will be a women's rights issue.
Stem cell research is a very different because it's not tangled up in women's rights.
I'm pro-choice, for a vast number of reasons. The best being that abortion rights are good for society in the long term.