It's totally time that we, the people, are empowered to tell them, those
other people (who don't count as much as we), what they can and can't do with
their property.
I consider myself rather cynical, but even I wouldn't call employees "property".
More importantly, though, "those other people" don't exist as people! Call me
crazy, but I strongly believe that real live humans should have far, far more rights
than fictional legal entities.
Why, you might ask?
Simple - You can't imprison a corporation (and only rarely do we imprison
the leaders thereof; lookup "hydra" on Wiki for an idea of the effectiveness
of that). You can't kill a corporation (well, you can,
but in 230 years of abuse by our corporate masters, the government has
only used it a very, very small number of times, and never for actual "crimes"
such as Bhopal - No, they've used it in reponse to manipulations of another
legal fiction, the economy). You can't meaningfully impose any punishment
on a corporation, beyond fines (which with very, very few exceptions amount to
nothing more than a nuissance, "just the cost of doing business").
So, that leaves us with entities with the rights of real live humans,
with absolutely no morals, a single-minded obsession with profit, and
no reason to fear serious punishment.
So yeah, I damned well do think we should have the right to tell
these legal fictions what they can and can't do with "their" property -
Starting with not allowing them to own property in the first place.
It's hardly a censorship issue. XM, as a private company can hire ad fire whoever they like
I hear this argument a lot - That doesn't make it any more accurate.
It very much still counts as censorship - Just not the "protected" kind that the
government can't do.
Yes, Sirius has the legal power to get rid of any of their employees, within the terms of
their employees' contracts and various antidiscrimination laws. But that doesn't
make it right, and we need to stop putting up with crap like this, much less justifying
it with "as a private company...".
I use that specific example to make as much as possible fit in the URL bar; If you changed
the font to a non-unicode one (Fixedsys, perhaps?), then annoying unicode domain names should
appear as garbage (and rightly so - What a stupid idea, allowing untypeable and/or
lookalike characters in domain names!).
I suppose the angle here is that "gee, it sucks that what
we Americans think is fine and dandy is illegal in Poland."
Pretty much, with one exception - We don't have that right in the
US, either. But we damned wellshould.
If so, here are two choices for remedy: lobby for a change of law
in Poland or convince Dub-ya to invade Poland and impose American law.
Presuming the Polish goverment, much like our own in the US, doesn't
give two shakes of a rat's ass about what the plebes want, you missed
the single most effective (and obvious, since it applies here) solution:
Civil disobedience.
Certain all-too-alienable rights, as humans,we should all
have, regardless of nationality. The US constitution enumerates a few
(but not all) of them. Saying what amounts to "they broke the law,
end of story" amounts to nothing less than passively accepting a tyranny
of legal fictions.
As for people saying things like "Goodbye iTunes"...
why do you think this is any different than what iTunes is doing?
Because many of us, myself included, will not, ever, intall iTunes
or use the iTMS.
Amazon, OTOH, as evil as we may all consider Bezos' 1-click patent,
has the right idea. When you buy digital media from them (or if you
buy physical items with a digital manual), it just goes into your
account's Media Library. Totally platform (as well as specific-machine)
agnostic; If you can run a web browser on any machine anywhere in the
world, you can log into your Amazon account and download what you have
in your account (and as many times as you want).
I have a hard time imagining that anything Amazon releases
could beat the integration and ease of use of iTunes and iTunes
Music Store... and from there, the iPod.
Exactly - And I don't want any of the three of those, much
less all three.
Not to mention the obvious Slashdot cry of protest,
"iTunes on Linux?"
It's only a matter of scale, folks [...]"That's cool. I shouldn't
have to pay for bits."
Yes, a matter of scale. And while a little digitalis can save lives,
a lot ends them rather quickly. A little alcohol makes for a good time,
a lot makes for worshipping the porcelain god, and a bit more leads to
death. A little ambergris makes for the finest perfumes, a lot smells
like, well, whale barf.
You just can't fairly compare try-before-you-buy illegally downloaded music
from Sony with ripping off a small-scale art student, however much Sony
might want us to make that comparison.
Spinning discs on a platter?! A thousand moving parts?! What
is this, the Stone Age?!
I know you meant that as a joke, but...
You should take a HDD apart some time. Though manufactured to incredibly small
tolerances, they only really have two moving parts - the platters, and the head
assembly (which despite having a lot of sub-parts, moves as a single unit).
And aside from them, you don't even have that much else that goes into a
HDD - usually two air filters (one for keeping internal air clean, and one
that balances external air pressure changes); the body itself (just a big
aluminum block with an airtight lid); A magnet assembly for moving the heads;
and the electronics on the visible external board. Sometimes you have one
more small mechanical bit that doesn't seem to do anything (perhaps it
parks the heads for shipping?); And that about covers it.
This story has had zero play in the US media; it's been being
carried on the BBC
Democracy Now
airs in the US on quite a few small local stations (I listen
to it on my ride home from work every day) as well as
a few satellite channels.
Of course, everyone seems to completely ignore it, even though
so far they have a pretty much spot-on record regarding the
evils of the current administration... They broke the "secret prisons"
story about two years before the mainstream media caught
on; Regularly discussed Abu Ghraib and detainee torture at least
six months before we all started "Doing the Lyndie"; Private jet
chartering for illegal renditions to have prisoners tortured by
third-party countries, 18 months before anyone cared (and still,
even now that everyone stopped caring despite the practice
continuing).
But then, ya just can't trust them tinfoil hat types, right?
What do you do when you think, speak out loud without any
thinking ahead of what you're going to say?
I don't claim that I don't think about things, or even daydream just
like everyone else. I just don't do it in English (or any language
that ever could exist outside my own head). I can even
think in words - You probably gave the best example, when I think about
how to phrase something, I do so "in" the language itself; Oddly,
although I only speak one natural language (English), I do the same
thing when coding - I "think" in an internal voice speaking C, for
example.
Let's say you shut your eyes...do you notice anything around you?
Yes, of course - I don't claim myself in a coma.;-)
But "conscious" doesn't mean "words". I meant more than I don't have,
hmm, a narrator, I guess? As I mentioned, I found it quite a surprise
when I first learned that most people do. As I understand it
(second hand of course), most people would internally "say" something
about almost all of the major things that pass into their awareness;
I don't do that.
I've never talked to anyone who was absent an internal monologue.
Think of the smell of a crayon. Do words suffice to describe it, or
did your first burst of thought contain a wave of sensory impressions
and memories that include kindergarten, wax, some little girl's hair,
pictures on a refridgerator, the sound of an ice-cream truck, and far,
far more than that, all in one burst? Just typing that, I tried to
touch on a few of the points of what the smell of crayons makes me
think about, and found it incredibly restrictive. Imagine
always thinking in terms of that initial burst, and you have
the idea.
What's intrinsically hellish about computer science?
Hellish to non-coders. And I use "coders" there instead of the
more generic "geek", because most people with a near-obsessive
interest in something can qualify as some form of geek, while
very few people can really code well.
You don't just need to know "the" language (sign #1 that coding
doesn't suit a person - They want to learn C or Java for a few
specific purposes, rather than "how to code" and "how it works"
- The language doesn't matter, within reason). You need a
particular type of personality (near obsessive). You need
a clear mind (I mean that in the Zen way - In my teens I tried
"meditating" a few times and always found it frustrating that the
guides made no sense, with phrasing like "stop your internal monologue";
I finally realized that while most people apparently can't shut the
voices in their head up, I have no internal monologue that needs
silencing, and consider that a BIG part of what makes me a decent coder).
You need the ability to think really, truly logically. The ability to
sit motionless for hours at a time really helps. Finally, and perhaps
most importantly, you need to break arbitrarily complex tasks down
into atomic actions (which goes along with thinking logically, in
the proof-theory sense).
All of those, to most people, sound hellish. Thinking in terms of
formal proofs? Quieting your internal voice enough to think over it?
Sitting motionless at a computer for so long your SO/family needs to
remind you to eat ten hours later? Most people don't want that.
I hate how this topic usually boils down to the stereotypical
us-vs-them, "Real coders do/don't"... But sometimes, you
just can't escape the facts. Most people can't code, which
doesn't state a temporary lack of training but rather an
outright permanant inability.
I've learned the fine art of the two hour phone call
Uhhh... That doesn't count as a "fine art", it means you need to
learn the art of "brevity".
I don't care about my cellular minutes, I care about my time.
And if you can't get to the point in much, much less than 2 hours
(usually, I give people about 15 minutes before they'll start hearing
me go "uh-huh... yup... uh-huh" with the sound of typing in the
background), you'll find yourself mysteriously always going to my
voicemail.
I picked up the phone months later and found 911 did
work -- I hung on "911 emergency service...." No monthly
fee necessary. I hope they don't mind the check....
They allow you to check once every [some large period of time
that I don't know offhand, like six months] to verify that the
system shows the right address for you.
I think what you meant was, "You took a shitty, campy
70s show and made it worth watching."
I think you'll find that most fans of "classic" SciFi like
"campy". While modern SciFi has its strong points, you can
barely even call them the same genre.
So you watched it once and yet you still feel well-informed
enough to bitch about how much it sucks?
Yes, actually. I took it as a gutting of the original,
with updated special effects. Most of the attempts at
"drama" reminded me more of a soap opera than SciFi (and
yes, I know the term "space opera", but rarely does a
show make it so blatant).
Overall, I found it an insulting attempt to capitalize
on the original. YMMV (and judging from my previous post's
current rating of "-1 troll", apparently most people
disagree with my opinion on this).
I should hope so, what with it happening 27 years ago!
It is [a great show], but we don't have the viewership
that a great show should get.
Simple reason for that - You bastardized a classic SciFi/Western-in-space
TV show, keeping the same name and same mythology but changing just
enough (*cough* Starbuck *cough*) to annoy orignal fans.
The new BSG may well count as some of the greatest SciFi ever. Had
you called it something else and not recycled the same core characters
(with the afforementioned small annoying changes), I might well have
watched more than once and eventually turned into a loyal fan. But
no, you just had to try to get a "seed" audience of fans of
BSG:TOS, and that spelled your eventual undoing.
Fans will put up with a sequel "appending" history. Not rewriting it
for absolutely no reason except PC-ness. "Oh, boo hoo, we only had
pathetic female eye-candy and a zoomorphic black... I know, let's make
it look like a model UN! But we should also throw in a few strong - but still
eye-candy - women, as fan-service". Whatever.
That's supposed to be LESS confusing? My eye jumps to the
colored words first, which appear to be picked almost randomly.
(It looks like they are actually the verbs of the sentences.)
Yes, the verbs have the colors - I presume they do this because
our brains tend to prefer actions over concepts, so by making
"action" words more pronounced, we can more quickly grasp the meaning
of the text.
Personally, I normally hate ideas like this (and I've tried a few,
and found they all either caused massive eye strain after a few minutes,
or failed to make the text easier to read)... And this one, I have to
admit, I like.
I did notice on the first sentence the same problems you mention - But
for the rest, I caught on to how you should scan it - Scroll your eye
smoothly downward, with a once-per-sentence horizontal component going
from the upper left to lower right (so a sawtooth-like pattern). Once
I did that, I found I didn't even have to "try" to read the text, I
just understood it from the visual scan itself.
And the additional poem-like formatting is also confusing, as
special formatting usually -means- something.
With bulleted lists and some particularly annoying poetry, the
formatting means something. 99% of the the time, formatting
means "that many words fit between the margins before the
basically-arbitrary start of the next line". So reformatting
would only rarely lose info (in which context, you probably
wouldn't use the suggested flow pattern).
* stand by your principles, reject censorship, and kiss off
about 1/4 of the world's population from using your service, or
* remember your bank account, your kids' college fund, your
retirement fund, swallow hard, and knuckle under
You left out option #3 - Stand by your principles, don't set up
a physical point of presence in oppressive countries, do everything
possible to help their citizens get to your service despite their
governments' best efforts, and tell the oppressive governments to
go pound sand.
Not quite as profitable as simply abandoning all principles,
but gives the best (possible) of both worlds.
How the hell...can you be arrested for 'threatening a religion' ?!
As a better question, to commit such a crime, wouldn't you need
to threaten, y'know, an actual religion rather than some
drivel made up 50 years ago by a second-rate hack of a scifi author?
Comes back to the use of personal anti-satalite weaponry, so
long as its not ballistic or laser you should be fine.
Why not laser? Sure, most of us can't get ahold of anything
even nearly powerful enough to destroy a satellite, but
you'd really only need to blind it to have the same results.
"Oops, looks like you decided to take a picture of my house
while I, uh, "calibrated my telescope" - You really should
warn me before doing flyovers, I come out here almost every
night".
Naturally, though, I agree with your final sentence, and plausible
deniability doesn't mean squat if they just throw you in Gitmo
forever without a trial.
VS2005 does not require you to run with admin privileges.
If attaching to a process to debug it doesn't require admin privileges,
Vista has a lot more wrong with it than the annoying UAC giving
false positives...
There are some scenarios that require this, but they're generally
the exception rather than the rule.
Debugging most certainly does not count as an exception to the norm.
If you need to work with someone else's code, walking through it a few times
with a debugger will teach you more in one day than weeks of reading the
code (not to say you shouldn't read the code as well). And if you can
write a bugless non-toy app, consider me in awe of your coding prowess.
You know, the ones that don't drive 20 over the speed limit
Sorry, but I don't like everyone on the road passing me. That creates a
far more dangerous condition than simply exceeding the artificially-low,
revenue-maximizing "posted" limits.
If you can't keep up with traffic, get off the road.
Burning fossil fuels in power plants is an extremely cheap
method of power. It can generate power at a cost of ~4cents/kwh.
Only if you completely ignore the environmental impact. Aside
from the power plants themselves making most superfund sites look
like nice places to take a picnic, what comes out of the smokestacks
eventually lands somewhere.
Currently in Northern New England we have a huge mercury problem - Not
because we put it there, nor even because our power plants made
it (we have one of the highest percentages of hydro and nuclear in the
country); Rather, because midwest power plants, with their nice big
smoke stacks, end up dumping most of the acids and metals in the smoke
on us as rain.
So if you want to include the cost of cleaning up each and every lake in
ME/NH, I suspect it would come out a hell of a lot higher than $0.04/KWh.
If tis is true, we may not need NAT each device be it a computer,
Wii, or Tivo could have it's own dedicated IP.
That works great - As long as your ISP gives you as many addresses as you want,
and for free. Oh yeah, and that you trust every machine out there that wants
to connect to you.
In theory, IPv6 exists in the first place to eliminat that
as a problem - Everyone can have thousands of addresses, with no risk of
ever running out (strange, did the echo of that come back "640k...40k...k"?)
However, given the greedy nature of most broadband providers, they
almost certainly will artificially re-create the same problem, either by
limiting addresses or charging on a per-address basis. And the second
they start pulling that crap, we'll see NAT suddenly mature for IPv6.
in this case it takes Apple's virtual monopoly in this space to fight the other monopolies (I know they are really a group of companies controlling everything, but you understand what I'm saying) in the media space.
You want the word "monopsony" rather than "monopoly", in the sense you
used it (a single buyer, or in this case broker, exerting pressure on
sellers).
Slashdot Mirror
It's totally time that we, the people, are empowered to tell them, those other people (who don't count as much as we), what they can and can't do with their property.
I consider myself rather cynical, but even I wouldn't call employees "property".
More importantly, though, "those other people" don't exist as people! Call me crazy, but I strongly believe that real live humans should have far, far more rights than fictional legal entities.
Why, you might ask?
Simple - You can't imprison a corporation (and only rarely do we imprison the leaders thereof; lookup "hydra" on Wiki for an idea of the effectiveness of that). You can't kill a corporation (well, you can, but in 230 years of abuse by our corporate masters, the government has only used it a very, very small number of times, and never for actual "crimes" such as Bhopal - No, they've used it in reponse to manipulations of another legal fiction, the economy). You can't meaningfully impose any punishment on a corporation, beyond fines (which with very, very few exceptions amount to nothing more than a nuissance, "just the cost of doing business").
So, that leaves us with entities with the rights of real live humans, with absolutely no morals, a single-minded obsession with profit, and no reason to fear serious punishment.
So yeah, I damned well do think we should have the right to tell these legal fictions what they can and can't do with "their" property - Starting with not allowing them to own property in the first place.
Now why can't people start to protest Microsoft on a similar scale?
Offhand, I'd guess that most people's employers don't force them to listen to XM at work...
It's hardly a censorship issue. XM, as a private company can hire ad fire whoever they like
I hear this argument a lot - That doesn't make it any more accurate.
It very much still counts as censorship - Just not the "protected" kind that the government can't do.
Yes, Sirius has the legal power to get rid of any of their employees, within the terms of their employees' contracts and various antidiscrimination laws. But that doesn't make it right, and we need to stop putting up with crap like this, much less justifying it with "as a private company...".
I don't see why the browser can't just recode names for your language anyway. However, apparently that is a no-no.
Perhaps not quite what you meant, but you can force an arbitrary style for the URL bar, in UserChrome.css:
#urlbar {font-family: "Arial" !important; font-size: 8pt !important; }
I use that specific example to make as much as possible fit in the URL bar; If you changed the font to a non-unicode one (Fixedsys, perhaps?), then annoying unicode domain names should appear as garbage (and rightly so - What a stupid idea, allowing untypeable and/or lookalike characters in domain names!).
I suppose the angle here is that "gee, it sucks that what we Americans think is fine and dandy is illegal in Poland."
Pretty much, with one exception - We don't have that right in the US, either. But we damned wellshould.
If so, here are two choices for remedy: lobby for a change of law in Poland or convince Dub-ya to invade Poland and impose American law.
Presuming the Polish goverment, much like our own in the US, doesn't give two shakes of a rat's ass about what the plebes want, you missed the single most effective (and obvious, since it applies here) solution: Civil disobedience.
Certain all-too-alienable rights, as humans,we should all have, regardless of nationality. The US constitution enumerates a few (but not all) of them. Saying what amounts to "they broke the law, end of story" amounts to nothing less than passively accepting a tyranny of legal fictions.
As for people saying things like "Goodbye iTunes"... why do you think this is any different than what iTunes is doing?
Because many of us, myself included, will not, ever, intall iTunes or use the iTMS.
Amazon, OTOH, as evil as we may all consider Bezos' 1-click patent, has the right idea. When you buy digital media from them (or if you buy physical items with a digital manual), it just goes into your account's Media Library. Totally platform (as well as specific-machine) agnostic; If you can run a web browser on any machine anywhere in the world, you can log into your Amazon account and download what you have in your account (and as many times as you want).
I have a hard time imagining that anything Amazon releases could beat the integration and ease of use of iTunes and iTunes Music Store... and from there, the iPod.
Exactly - And I don't want any of the three of those, much less all three.
Not to mention the obvious Slashdot cry of protest, "iTunes on Linux?"
It's only a matter of scale, folks [...]"That's cool. I shouldn't have to pay for bits."
Yes, a matter of scale. And while a little digitalis can save lives, a lot ends them rather quickly. A little alcohol makes for a good time, a lot makes for worshipping the porcelain god, and a bit more leads to death. A little ambergris makes for the finest perfumes, a lot smells like, well, whale barf.
You just can't fairly compare try-before-you-buy illegally downloaded music from Sony with ripping off a small-scale art student, however much Sony might want us to make that comparison.
Spinning discs on a platter?! A thousand moving parts?! What is this, the Stone Age?!
I know you meant that as a joke, but...
You should take a HDD apart some time. Though manufactured to incredibly small tolerances, they only really have two moving parts - the platters, and the head assembly (which despite having a lot of sub-parts, moves as a single unit).
And aside from them, you don't even have that much else that goes into a HDD - usually two air filters (one for keeping internal air clean, and one that balances external air pressure changes); the body itself (just a big aluminum block with an airtight lid); A magnet assembly for moving the heads; and the electronics on the visible external board. Sometimes you have one more small mechanical bit that doesn't seem to do anything (perhaps it parks the heads for shipping?); And that about covers it.
This story has had zero play in the US media; it's been being carried on the BBC
Democracy Now airs in the US on quite a few small local stations (I listen to it on my ride home from work every day) as well as a few satellite channels.
Of course, everyone seems to completely ignore it, even though so far they have a pretty much spot-on record regarding the evils of the current administration... They broke the "secret prisons" story about two years before the mainstream media caught on; Regularly discussed Abu Ghraib and detainee torture at least six months before we all started "Doing the Lyndie"; Private jet chartering for illegal renditions to have prisoners tortured by third-party countries, 18 months before anyone cared (and still, even now that everyone stopped caring despite the practice continuing).
But then, ya just can't trust them tinfoil hat types, right?
What do you do when you think, speak out loud without any thinking ahead of what you're going to say?
;-)
I don't claim that I don't think about things, or even daydream just like everyone else. I just don't do it in English (or any language that ever could exist outside my own head). I can even think in words - You probably gave the best example, when I think about how to phrase something, I do so "in" the language itself; Oddly, although I only speak one natural language (English), I do the same thing when coding - I "think" in an internal voice speaking C, for example.
Let's say you shut your eyes...do you notice anything around you?
Yes, of course - I don't claim myself in a coma.
But "conscious" doesn't mean "words". I meant more than I don't have, hmm, a narrator, I guess? As I mentioned, I found it quite a surprise when I first learned that most people do. As I understand it (second hand of course), most people would internally "say" something about almost all of the major things that pass into their awareness; I don't do that.
I've never talked to anyone who was absent an internal monologue.
Think of the smell of a crayon. Do words suffice to describe it, or did your first burst of thought contain a wave of sensory impressions and memories that include kindergarten, wax, some little girl's hair, pictures on a refridgerator, the sound of an ice-cream truck, and far, far more than that, all in one burst? Just typing that, I tried to touch on a few of the points of what the smell of crayons makes me think about, and found it incredibly restrictive. Imagine always thinking in terms of that initial burst, and you have the idea.
What's intrinsically hellish about computer science?
Hellish to non-coders. And I use "coders" there instead of the more generic "geek", because most people with a near-obsessive interest in something can qualify as some form of geek, while very few people can really code well.
You don't just need to know "the" language (sign #1 that coding doesn't suit a person - They want to learn C or Java for a few specific purposes, rather than "how to code" and "how it works" - The language doesn't matter, within reason). You need a particular type of personality (near obsessive). You need a clear mind (I mean that in the Zen way - In my teens I tried "meditating" a few times and always found it frustrating that the guides made no sense, with phrasing like "stop your internal monologue"; I finally realized that while most people apparently can't shut the voices in their head up, I have no internal monologue that needs silencing, and consider that a BIG part of what makes me a decent coder). You need the ability to think really, truly logically. The ability to sit motionless for hours at a time really helps. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, you need to break arbitrarily complex tasks down into atomic actions (which goes along with thinking logically, in the proof-theory sense).
All of those, to most people, sound hellish. Thinking in terms of formal proofs? Quieting your internal voice enough to think over it? Sitting motionless at a computer for so long your SO/family needs to remind you to eat ten hours later? Most people don't want that.
I hate how this topic usually boils down to the stereotypical us-vs-them, "Real coders do/don't"... But sometimes, you just can't escape the facts. Most people can't code, which doesn't state a temporary lack of training but rather an outright permanant inability.
I don't know why Congress doesn't just stop fucking around and ban thoughtcrime.
One thought at a time, Citizen. One thought at a time.
I've learned the fine art of the two hour phone call
Uhhh... That doesn't count as a "fine art", it means you need to learn the art of "brevity".
I don't care about my cellular minutes, I care about my time. And if you can't get to the point in much, much less than 2 hours (usually, I give people about 15 minutes before they'll start hearing me go "uh-huh... yup... uh-huh" with the sound of typing in the background), you'll find yourself mysteriously always going to my voicemail.
I picked up the phone months later and found 911 did work -- I hung on "911 emergency service...." No monthly fee necessary. I hope they don't mind the check....
:)
They allow you to check once every [some large period of time that I don't know offhand, like six months] to verify that the system shows the right address for you.
Though that doesn't mean hanging up on them...
I think what you meant was, "You took a shitty, campy 70s show and made it worth watching."
I think you'll find that most fans of "classic" SciFi like "campy". While modern SciFi has its strong points, you can barely even call them the same genre.
So you watched it once and yet you still feel well-informed enough to bitch about how much it sucks?
Yes, actually. I took it as a gutting of the original, with updated special effects. Most of the attempts at "drama" reminded me more of a soap opera than SciFi (and yes, I know the term "space opera", but rarely does a show make it so blatant).
Overall, I found it an insulting attempt to capitalize on the original. YMMV (and judging from my previous post's current rating of "-1 troll", apparently most people disagree with my opinion on this).
Final Season of Battlestar Galactica Confirmed
I should hope so, what with it happening 27 years ago!
It is [a great show], but we don't have the viewership that a great show should get.
Simple reason for that - You bastardized a classic SciFi/Western-in-space TV show, keeping the same name and same mythology but changing just enough (*cough* Starbuck *cough*) to annoy orignal fans.
The new BSG may well count as some of the greatest SciFi ever. Had you called it something else and not recycled the same core characters (with the afforementioned small annoying changes), I might well have watched more than once and eventually turned into a loyal fan. But no, you just had to try to get a "seed" audience of fans of BSG:TOS, and that spelled your eventual undoing.
Fans will put up with a sequel "appending" history. Not rewriting it for absolutely no reason except PC-ness. "Oh, boo hoo, we only had pathetic female eye-candy and a zoomorphic black... I know, let's make it look like a model UN! But we should also throw in a few strong - but still eye-candy - women, as fan-service". Whatever.
That's supposed to be LESS confusing? My eye jumps to the colored words first, which appear to be picked almost randomly. (It looks like they are actually the verbs of the sentences.)
Yes, the verbs have the colors - I presume they do this because our brains tend to prefer actions over concepts, so by making "action" words more pronounced, we can more quickly grasp the meaning of the text.
Personally, I normally hate ideas like this (and I've tried a few, and found they all either caused massive eye strain after a few minutes, or failed to make the text easier to read)... And this one, I have to admit, I like.
I did notice on the first sentence the same problems you mention - But for the rest, I caught on to how you should scan it - Scroll your eye smoothly downward, with a once-per-sentence horizontal component going from the upper left to lower right (so a sawtooth-like pattern). Once I did that, I found I didn't even have to "try" to read the text, I just understood it from the visual scan itself.
And the additional poem-like formatting is also confusing, as special formatting usually -means- something.
With bulleted lists and some particularly annoying poetry, the formatting means something. 99% of the the time, formatting means "that many words fit between the margins before the basically-arbitrary start of the next line". So reformatting would only rarely lose info (in which context, you probably wouldn't use the suggested flow pattern).
* stand by your principles, reject censorship, and kiss off about 1/4 of the world's population from using your service, or
* remember your bank account, your kids' college fund, your retirement fund, swallow hard, and knuckle under
You left out option #3 - Stand by your principles, don't set up a physical point of presence in oppressive countries, do everything possible to help their citizens get to your service despite their governments' best efforts, and tell the oppressive governments to go pound sand.
Not quite as profitable as simply abandoning all principles, but gives the best (possible) of both worlds.
How the hell...can you be arrested for 'threatening a religion' ?!
As a better question, to commit such a crime, wouldn't you need to threaten, y'know, an actual religion rather than some drivel made up 50 years ago by a second-rate hack of a scifi author?
Comes back to the use of personal anti-satalite weaponry, so long as its not ballistic or laser you should be fine.
Why not laser? Sure, most of us can't get ahold of anything even nearly powerful enough to destroy a satellite, but you'd really only need to blind it to have the same results. "Oops, looks like you decided to take a picture of my house while I, uh, "calibrated my telescope" - You really should warn me before doing flyovers, I come out here almost every night".
Naturally, though, I agree with your final sentence, and plausible deniability doesn't mean squat if they just throw you in Gitmo forever without a trial.
VS2005 does not require you to run with admin privileges.
If attaching to a process to debug it doesn't require admin privileges, Vista has a lot more wrong with it than the annoying UAC giving false positives...
There are some scenarios that require this, but they're generally the exception rather than the rule.
Debugging most certainly does not count as an exception to the norm. If you need to work with someone else's code, walking through it a few times with a debugger will teach you more in one day than weeks of reading the code (not to say you shouldn't read the code as well). And if you can write a bugless non-toy app, consider me in awe of your coding prowess.
You know, the ones that don't drive 20 over the speed limit
Sorry, but I don't like everyone on the road passing me. That creates a far more dangerous condition than simply exceeding the artificially-low, revenue-maximizing "posted" limits.
If you can't keep up with traffic, get off the road.
Burning fossil fuels in power plants is an extremely cheap method of power. It can generate power at a cost of ~4cents/kwh.
Only if you completely ignore the environmental impact. Aside from the power plants themselves making most superfund sites look like nice places to take a picnic, what comes out of the smokestacks eventually lands somewhere.
Currently in Northern New England we have a huge mercury problem - Not because we put it there, nor even because our power plants made it (we have one of the highest percentages of hydro and nuclear in the country); Rather, because midwest power plants, with their nice big smoke stacks, end up dumping most of the acids and metals in the smoke on us as rain.
So if you want to include the cost of cleaning up each and every lake in ME/NH, I suspect it would come out a hell of a lot higher than $0.04/KWh.
If tis is true, we may not need NAT each device be it a computer, Wii, or Tivo could have it's own dedicated IP.
That works great - As long as your ISP gives you as many addresses as you want, and for free. Oh yeah, and that you trust every machine out there that wants to connect to you.
In theory, IPv6 exists in the first place to eliminat that as a problem - Everyone can have thousands of addresses, with no risk of ever running out (strange, did the echo of that come back "640k...40k...k"?)
However, given the greedy nature of most broadband providers, they almost certainly will artificially re-create the same problem, either by limiting addresses or charging on a per-address basis. And the second they start pulling that crap, we'll see NAT suddenly mature for IPv6.
in this case it takes Apple's virtual monopoly in this space to fight the other monopolies (I know they are really a group of companies controlling everything, but you understand what I'm saying) in the media space.
You want the word "monopsony" rather than "monopoly", in the sense you used it (a single buyer, or in this case broker, exerting pressure on sellers).