But again, other than Enron or SCO, can you name a tech company with 30% criminals?... I didn't think so either.
We have over a 3% INMATE population in the US. I don't have the exact number handy, but
somewhere around 17% of the general population actually has a criminal record (remember having
the police haul you out of ol' man Jones' field, and your parents made you work off the fine?
Yeah - If so, you have a criminal record, my friend!).
And don't overlook the fact that the quoted 30% counts arrests, not just convictions. You or
I could get arrested tomorrow for doing absolutely nothing, on our way to deliver toys to sick
children. Perhaps the police would realize their error and not file any charges, or perhaps a judge
would laugh the case out of his courtroom, but the "arrest" would still exist. I'd further point
out that geeks tend toward a highly nonconformist mindset and "know their rights" from a young age...
Which translates into just about the fastest way to turn a "chat" with a bored cop into an arrest
on some bogus charges for not acting obsequiously toward the Man with an ego and a gun.
It amazes me how many people recognize how badly broken of a legal system w have, yet so
quickly defend the use of its records in damning people they've never met.
Gunther Beckstein is seeking jail time for violent game developers, publishers, and players.
Jack? Jack Thompson? Did you finally piss off and leave us alone,
only to change your name and harass another country?
Sad, really, seeing these pathetic little old men who don't understand
the modern world. At least "tubes" sounds harmless enough, but twits
with passion about their delusions really need to step down and
limit their ranting to yelling at kids to get off their lawns.
How does one point out the error/flaws in said system
without falling afoul of the law(s)?
Survey says - "Anonymously".
He could have written his boarding pass creator as a flash
app and uploaded it to Newgrounds. He could have posted a
JS version on any of a number of blogs without using his own
name. He could have even posted about it, with a link to an
anonymously hosted applet, and probably made the Slashdot FP.
He could even have gotten someone outside the US to host the
exact same content, with all occurrences of his name replaced
by "Mr. CheeseNips".
But no. He had to use his own name, and therein lies his biggest
mistake.
Anyone who says we don't need anonymity just doesn't fear the
government enough for their own good. And anyone who makes
the government look bad without at least trying to hide
their identity needs to study their history a tad more.
I, for one, THANK Soghoian for exposing a glaring
flaw in the farce we call the TSA. Not because it has made
us safer (as we can see, they chose to shoot the messenger
rather than, y'know, fix the goddamned problem), but
because it has slightly reduced the false sense of security
among the voting sheep.
To whatever extent complex numbers are "not fundamental"
neither are reals, nor integers. They are all inventions.
Mathematics describes "truth" in a way that transcends physical
existence. 1+2=3 (for B>=4) even without any humans to assert
it, even without a universe in which to assert it.
The same holds true for complex numbers just as well as for
integers. The problem comes with embedding those truths in
our physical universe. I can hand you four apples. You can't
hand me 3i+1 oranges in return.
I think I may have discovered a new author to try...
On a whim, I tried searching for some of the most unreadably
boring books possible - The business motivational/strategy genre.
Unsurprisingly, I kept seeing top-10 opposites that I really enjoy...
A lot of Gaiman, some Prachett, even Robert Graves (From which I
might hypothesize that the business world somehow forms the antithesis
of our collective mythic tradions). But I also saw someone named
Haruki Murakami consistantly appearing in the #1 or #2 slot.
Guess I'll have to give him a shot, although checking out a few
synopses of his more popular works, I don't see why he would fall
in among the afforementioned opposites.
IRL if you attend school full time and have a job
then you can't be taxed state or federal income.
I don't know who told you that, but if you fall into that
category, I'd run it by a tax attourney before you let April
15th pass...
I worked my way through college (and taking a average
load of 20 credits per semester, I'd say I qualified as
"full time"), I still had to pay both state and federal
income tax.
Perhaps your state has an exemption such as you describe, but
AFAIK the feds do not (though perhaps you refer to the
IRS allowing you to write off the interest on certain types
of student loans?).
Lets give him a legit reason for him to sue us. Yay.
Parody remains one of our few frequently-upheld forms of free speech. The more
over-the-top, the less grounds he has to sue.
As for the side effect of damaging a valuable source of information, well, I will
admit I have that as my sole reason for not editing quite a few entries on folks
like Scherf, McBride, or Thompson. I respect the truth, if not the men.
But when someone like Scherf throws down the gauntlet and takes away the factual
content aspect, well, not much point remains in exercising restraint, at least
until someone really does fix the entry. So as a placeholder, why not let
such asses suffer an entry on llama-buggery for a few weeks?
but the truth is why spend time playing through an old game when you have newer ones to dabble with?
I usually get modded down for saying this (presumeably by younger folks who never actually played an
Intellivision except as a novelty antique)..., but around the SNES to early PSX era, video games reached
a peak from which they've slowly fallen.
Why would I rather run a buggy and slow PSX emulator than play the latest and greatest PS3
game? Because "gameplay" and "plot" still meant something, while "rehashed with better 3d engine"
hadn't started dominating everything. Not to say I don't consider modern FPS games truly gorgeous...
But appearance now matters more than fun.
As for why Sony thinks I'd rather pay to re-buy games I already have to play in their buggy
emulator, rather than run my own discs in ePSXe, I'll admit you've got me there. I sure
as hell wouldn't. But as for why someone might want to play games from the "golden age" of gaming,
regardless of platform... Well, I suppose I can't give a meaningful answer unless you already understand
why Zork (the original 80x25 Infocom text game, not the bizarre crap Activision insulted the world with)
counts as one of the best games ever.
Are there any Slashdotters out there who know the facts about Gracenote -- its
history, its business practices, its lawsuits? Wikipedia needs your help.
Who needs facts? If Scherf wants to change history, let's damn well change it!
I think the new entry should start, "Gracenote founder Steve Scherf has come a long way
from his younder days of meth-fueled llama sodomizing. While once it looked like he'd
soon die in a gutter, that six months he spent in the federal pen for killing a bussload
of nuns while drunk (which he coyly refers to as "Happy happy shower butt fun time") cleaned
him up, allowing him to become the ruthless corporate asshat we know today."
Revisionist history works both ways, Steve. Don't fuck with the geek masses - We can "fix"
your entries MUCH faster than you can.
Chipping the kid with a 10M chip works - because they can detect
when the child is approaching an exit to the park
...Right up until a kidnapper takes the wrist band/dogtag off
the kid and leaves it in a bathroom.
And even that level of cicumvention presumes someone notices
the kid missing, finds the right person to notify, the problem goes
up the chain of command and back down to gate security, and by the
time gate security starts looking the kid hasn't already left the
state, nevermind just the park. And thanks to the false sense
of security provided by this tagging, the window on the first rung
of this chain will most likely widen from "the time it takes to go to
go to the bathroom" to "when mom wants to go home"
It also presumes that a kidnapper wants to remove the kid from the
park, rather than just molesting/killing/whatever it right there and
dumping the body in the minigolf castle.
Not everything is a conspiracy - I suggest you get back on your meds befor posting.
I didn't get that the GP considered this a conspiracy - Just that, much like the TSA,
it counts as feelgood but largely ineffective nuissance-security.
Look, all he wants is to be able to have the phone on vibrate so he
can see who is calling and leave to take the call. Is that really going
to interfere with your enjoyment of the movie?
You miss my point - Presuming he tells exactly the truth, then he does
not count as the problem. He also doesn't count as the majority of cell
users.
For every legitimate "NEED a phone, keep it on vibrate" user out there,
you have a few dozen people (mostly younger females) who consider hearing
all about what Bill and Stacey did last night, in great detail and with
much enthusiasm on both sides of the conversation, an "emergency".
These folks keep their ringtone set as high as possible so we can all
enjoy (and more importantly, know they enjoy) a polyphonic version
of their favorite boyband of the week's new single.
NO ONE, not even the worst of the Luddites, objects to doctors and parents of
sick kids having cellphones that quietly vibrate. But the vast preponderance
of far less considerate asshats means, IMO, that those who really could
benefit from such tech must suffer so the rest of us don't need to.
I'm sort of surprised none of us kids got mutilated by these things while we were growing up...
Yeah, yeah - And I used to ride my bike (gasp!) without a helmet! Even fell a few times,
going waaaaay too fast, and never got worse than a bloodied knee.;-)
It seems very odd to me that in order for me to get to the item I bought, I have
to create, and then dispose of, potentially hazzardous waste.
I in no way meant to defend this style of packaging - I'll join you at the
front of the line to condemn its creator to a death-of-a-thousand-cuts by tossing
him in a waste bin ful of the remains of such packaging and shaking it vigorously.
But you have to understand, stores view us not as potential customers, but as
potential criminals. They can't live without our patronage, but little would
make places like Wallyworld happier than banning all human visitors (including their
own employees).
But really, it doesn't take a surgeon (cue rimshot - a "plastic" surgeon! Thanks, I play
here all night, love you guys) to successfully open even the toughest of
packages safely and quickly. It just takes, as my subject says, "patience". Calmly
apply the scissors, and you will get to the prize in well under a minute. Freak out
and try to tear into it with hulk-fury-muscles, and you'll break the toy and probably
injure yourself, while taking well over a minute to get in.
If Dave Barry had written this, and the summary had the foot icon, I wouldn't have
said anything beyond my amused agreement. But to seriously present "strong packaging"
as some sort of life-threatening consumer menace... I had to take issue with that.
The anti-theft strips on most consumer goods (if not all) are in the packaging,
so they can be easily defeated by simply taking the product out and leaving the
packaging at the store.
You can also defeat those merely by running a strong magnet over them (that includes both
the long metal strips in white plastic (but NOT the square paper-and-metall spirals, which
actually contain an RFID tag) and the little ink-pack fobs they used in many clothing
stores. The 1cm^3 neodymium magnets work beautifully for this (and no, I don't know this
because I shoplift - When the deactivators have labels in a huge font saying "warning, may
erase credit and ATM cards", it doesn't take Einstein to put two and two together).
Theft-prevention devices offend everyone, without actually reducing theft.
The sooner stores learn that and stop pissing of the 99% of people that count as
their legitimate customers just for the sake of slowing down the 1% (usually employees!)
that would steal from them, the better.
using scissors CORRECTLY usually does the job...it's figuring out where to cut that's the hard part.
Fair enough, that does sometimes take a minute or two to decide. I usually start at a 90 degree corner and work
my way in a spiral (chopping off the razor-sharp tailings every few inches as I go) in to the center chamber
of the plastic (where the product actually hides). I find this usually requires going all the way around once
to work (though for perfectly rectangular packaging you can usually do it in only 270 degrees), then the
shell just pops right open.
but opening them can be difficult enough to cause injuries that land people in the emergency room.
Oh, gimme a break. A pair of scissors applied in the correct spot will open just about anything you can
fit on your lap (you may need something more heavy-duty for larger items, I will admit).
As the bigger problem here, many stores balk at taking back defective goods if you've turned the
packaging into confetti. Given that we have packaging so sturdy that you can't remove
it without reducing it to a pile of ragged plastic strips, that makes it difficult to take back
most products (although in most states, they legally must take it back if defective,
and that includes software/dvds/cds - Look up "warrant of merchantability" and your
state's laws on the subject - "State law" trumps "store policy" every time).
Personally, I think every product should have a sort of magic pull-string... Just untape the
string and pull it, and the otherwise-invulnerable packaging neatly falls away in two or three
tidy chunks to reveal its contents (and which, with a bit of care, you could reassemble the
packaging enough to return it to the store without much fuss).
With my son and his medical condition it could be a major
problem if me or my wife could not get reached.
I have sympathy that your kid has a medical problem, really - That
sucks and I wouldn't wish it on anyone. But that doesn't make it
our problem. If you always need to stay in touch, YOU
need to sacrifice attending certain public events, rather than the
other 100-300 people in attendence getting to enjoy the half dozen
calls that inevitable occur during just about any performance.
Back before cellphones and pagers, people used to give the 'sitter
the number of the theater. In an emergency, the theater will
come get you and give you a message... Yet, amazingly enough, before
cell-phones, you only saw ushers interrupt movies perhaps one time
out of a hundred, rather than the five to ten "emergency" calls you
now get to overhear per movie.
There are no dSLRs, cell phones or Nintendo DSs out there which run on alkalines. And switching
from an iPod Nano to something AAA bulky is out of the question.
Then you have chosen your current problem, and voted with your wallet to perpetuate the
everything-has-its_own-wall-wart and $100-non-user-serviceable-battery-replacement scams.
You couldn't get by with a plain ol' GBA, which did take AAs? You couldn't pick any of
the literally dozens of non-Apple portable music players that take a single AAA (bulky?
C'mon, talkin' bout a device the size of a pack of gum, here). And as for a dSLR, if you
need that level of quality, you've already resigned yourself to lugging around a
bag full of lenses and filters (not to mention the increased size and weight of the camera
itself), a charger makes little difference; if you don't need quite that level of
quality, then as with the music player, you have literally dozens of rather high-quality-but-not-SLR
choices to pick from that will run on AAs.
I don't mean to put down your choices - No doubt you chose each of your toys, just as we all
do, for the features they offer that you found valuable. But if you don't (or didn't) consider
how it feeds itself as a purchasing criteria, then you have to live with the array of chargers.
Unfortunately, Li-ion batteries (usually built-ins use Li-ion) take fairly complex charging
circuitry. Although we may some day see standardized replaceables for it, at the moment, every
shape, size, and capacity has its own special requirements for how to safely charge it without
turning it into a little bomb.
I'd rather lug around the 5+ chargers than limit myself to a very small subset of each device
category based on its charging scheme alone.
I'd point out that, for the rare product that you really really want but can't get either a
version without its own wall-wart or with a car adapter (aka very forgiving 12-18VDC unregulated
input - very easy to provide), you can still buy it. You don't need to live a
spartan existance based around power sources. You just need to realize that every time you choose
"compactness" and single-charge battery-life over "standardized power input", you have also chosen
to lug around another custom noninterchangeable charger.
WTF... your phone runs on AA/AAA batteries? Is it made by Fisher Price?
WTF... your phone doesn't have a car charger?;-)
Sorry, couldn't resist.
My phone I will admit doesn't directly take AAs. But it lasts about four days
on a charge, and has a car charger (but even if not, you could get an I-go or Energi
for about $20) that works just fine on any 12VDC power source - Such as the one I mentioned
in my previous post.
Perhaps I should have phrased it as "get things that take AA, or 12VDC, or have a
cigarette lighter adapter (aka 12 to 18VDC, internally regulated)".
No. Seriously - I mean this as neither a troll nor flamebait - If you have started
sacrificing real life experiences for virtual ones that actually cost you money...
LEAVE THE FUCKING BASEMENT!
If you have nothing better to do, great, waste a few hours playing WoW. I'll admit,
I accidentally saw more than a few dawns like that in college, mudding away the night.
Amusing way to pass time. But when real entertainment comes along - DO IT!
You don't even need to think about which you prefer - reality wins, every time. Even
something like going bowling with your Aunt Sally and ther annoying hellbrood should
beat wasting your life in an online game.
A very, VERY, VERY standardized solution to your problem already exists... One
that will work in any device from any country on the planet, regardless of local voltage,
frequency, and even reliability of AC power availability:
Make sure to only buy devices that take AA/AAA batteries. Then you just need to carry a
few extra NiMH recharcheables, and a single charger will take care of all your portable
electricity needs every night while you sleep.
You can also get AA-to-12VDC converters, which will work with anything that can accept a car
cigarette-lighter plug (make sure to get one that works with rechargeables, though, which for
NiMH run at 1.2V rather than 1.5V... That doesn't matter much for up to four batteries, but at
8+ batteries, it can make some unprepared devices fail).
It amazes me that so many people put up with devices that have their own built-in non-replaceable
incompatible-with-everything batteries. Rechargeables do eventually die. In exchange for
five minutes of research up-front, you can save yourself a dozen different chargers and the need
to replace various portable products (*cough* early iPods *cough*) yearly for no better reason than
a dead battery.
Personally, I follow the above advice religiously. If my phone dies, I pop open my GPS and
bam, I can call for help. If my GPS dies in the middle of a long hike, my camera makes
the (temporary) ultimate sacrifice, and I can once again find my car. If my camera dies just as
a UFO full of Elvis impersonators lands in front of me, always have an 8-pack of spares
available, compatible with every device I carry. And when I get home or back to the car after
draining every battery I own, a single charger restores them all to life in just a few
hours.
Find a manual for one of them. The previous user most likely had
them set to only respond to a very specific symbology, to avoid
having the morons they hire accidentally confuse the system by
trying to check-in things like Pepsi cans and bags of Cheetos.
You want to reset them to factory defaults, then enable all symbologies
(or if you can't find an "enable all", just turn on the ones you need...
Code128 works pretty well for general-purpose custom barcodes; if you want
to use the existing ones, you'll need EAN and EAN+5 - And of course the
various UPCs never hurt). And especially on older scanners with possibly
less than pristine lenses, enable check-digit processing or you'll
end up with a huge misscan rate.
MySpace and Facebook are hugely popular with the general population
No. Popular with angsty kids who still consider their favorite
band-of-the-week as a defining characteristic of their very existence. Most of us grow out of that.
But what social networks do folks here use?
The question makes no sense. What "social networks"? Hello?
Turn off the computer, go outside, and introduce yourself to
the damn neighbors!!!
Is there a good one that offers the benefits of a Facebook or
Myspace, while being less superficial and spammy?
Mutually exclusive goals. "Social networking" sites exist
to feed superficiality - What gives the benefits of superficiality
without the superficiality? Meaningless. Letting people buy
"friends" just epitomizes that idea (as you correctly point out),
thus making it perfectly "normal" in context, but no less shallow.
In the real world, people don't count their "friends" by the
thousands. Personally, I have three "real" friends, with another
dozen or so for whom I'd lightly use the term. And I consider
that just a fine state of affairs. Many more, and I
couldn't live up to the social obligations implicit in the concept
of friendship. What pass as friends on Myspace and similar sites,
I wouldn'teven count as mere acquaintances in the real world.
If you've never met someone, never talked to them, and know nothing
about them other than the fiction they choose to put on an ego-stroking
web-page, where the hell do you get off calling them "friends"?
I'm sorry, but I think all the hype about this game is ridiculous. Everyone I know who's
actually played the game did so for maximum half an hour never to play it again after.
I'd have to agree with you, and I will admit that I did enjoy it for that half-hour.
As the biggest problem I see with turning it into a "real" game, it lacked any conceptual hooks
whereby you could flesh it out into something that would take significantly longer than that
half hour to finish.
I suppose they could add bigger, meaner enemies (though by the lowest depths, the enemies had
already gotten absurdly complex - More than once, I found myself chasing a fast enemy in tight
circles, slowly wearing it down by eating 10 of its energy pellets for every 9 it nabbed from
me). They could stick in artificial "quests" such as the old standby of find-the-keys and
save-the-princess-slash-hostage. They could break it into more expansive worlds for each depth
(though then how do you prevent the player from killing 27,416,318 bunnies at the first level
by locking the controller in a tight turn for a week, then breezing through the rest?), but
just about anything you tack onto it would detract from the original intuitive UI design.
Oh well, good luck to Sony with that. Perhaps they will make something good out of
it - I suppose, with a lot of artificiality tacked on, they could manage something as
playable as E.V.O. for the SNES. And in five years, when the PS3 goes for $50 and its
games for $10 on the used market, I might even pick it up and give it a try.
Russia has agreed to close down AllofMP3.com, and any sites that
'permit illegal distribution of music and other copyright works.'
One of the most significant contributions to human rights in all of human
history came from Hammurabi - The concept of a written code of laws, which
everyone could know and which applied equally to all people, thus
making "justice" less subject to the biases of the king / emperor / caliph / whatever.
He may not have quite lived up to that ideal, but as a basis for all modern
reasonably-fair legal systems, it forms a cornerstone on which we've built everything
since.
AllOfMP3, whether the RIAA like it or not, operated within Russian law
(or at least, they did so
until this past September). Whether or not the new law closes the "loophole"
(if you can call strong fair-use rights and lax copyright enforcement by-design
a "loophole") will have to wait for the Russian authorities to make a case against
someone.
Either way, to announce the closing of AllOfMP3 as practically the basis of an
international trade agreement strikes me as the most capricious undermining of
the concept of modern jurisprudence imagineable. This announcement effectively
says "The rule of law does not apply to the king's friends, and its protections
do not extend to the king's friends' enemies".
Buildings do not remain standing very long if you undermine their foundations.
This should chill us all for a much, MUCH deeper reason than merely the loss
of a way to get cheap music. I personally never even used AllOfMP3, and this
scares the hell out of me. Imagine the same precedent applied, 20 years or so
from now, to the US trying to get some economic favor from China...
Something tells me he was more than aware he couldn't make money while there.
Not having a work visa does not equal "can't make money".
If he owned a business back home that made him money every week,
I don't think that would have caused any problems.
If he negotiated the purchase of his home and car in China, while
in Japan, I doubt that would have caused him any trouble either.
In this situation, since the income came purely from online
sources, did he "work" in Japan? Or did he oversee the operation
of a home business from abroad? I suspect a good lawyer
could successfully argue the latter if this involved criminal
charges, but when it comes to matters of control over imaginary
lines on a map, most countries paranoidly shoot first and don't
even bother to ask questions later.
When you spend the money to photograph and map the surface of the Earth
One problem there - In this case, you have used the correct pronoun in the above quote... "you".
I paid to have the surface of the Earth mapped. You probably did as well.
Any taxpaying American has, and I expect this also applies to many non-Americans.
The vast majority of Google's data comes from the USGS, which our tax dollars funded.
Most of the closer-in data comes from city or county funded (again, with out tax dollars)
aerial surveys. Why the fuck shouldn't all that data fall under the public domain,
totally FREE to everyone, since we paid for it in the first place?
This has nothing to do with fair use, and everything to do with the government
giving us what we paid for. Google has certainly made it easier to get to that
data, but it still counts as our data in the first place!
Slashdot Mirror
But again, other than Enron or SCO, can you name a tech company with 30% criminals? ... I didn't think so either.
We have over a 3% INMATE population in the US. I don't have the exact number handy, but somewhere around 17% of the general population actually has a criminal record (remember having the police haul you out of ol' man Jones' field, and your parents made you work off the fine? Yeah - If so, you have a criminal record, my friend!).
And don't overlook the fact that the quoted 30% counts arrests, not just convictions. You or I could get arrested tomorrow for doing absolutely nothing, on our way to deliver toys to sick children. Perhaps the police would realize their error and not file any charges, or perhaps a judge would laugh the case out of his courtroom, but the "arrest" would still exist. I'd further point out that geeks tend toward a highly nonconformist mindset and "know their rights" from a young age... Which translates into just about the fastest way to turn a "chat" with a bored cop into an arrest on some bogus charges for not acting obsequiously toward the Man with an ego and a gun.
It amazes me how many people recognize how badly broken of a legal system w have, yet so quickly defend the use of its records in damning people they've never met.
Gunther Beckstein is seeking jail time for violent game developers, publishers, and players.
Jack? Jack Thompson? Did you finally piss off and leave us alone, only to change your name and harass another country?
Sad, really, seeing these pathetic little old men who don't understand the modern world. At least "tubes" sounds harmless enough, but twits with passion about their delusions really need to step down and limit their ranting to yelling at kids to get off their lawns.
How does one point out the error/flaws in said system without falling afoul of the law(s)?
Survey says - "Anonymously".
He could have written his boarding pass creator as a flash app and uploaded it to Newgrounds. He could have posted a JS version on any of a number of blogs without using his own name. He could have even posted about it, with a link to an anonymously hosted applet, and probably made the Slashdot FP. He could even have gotten someone outside the US to host the exact same content, with all occurrences of his name replaced by "Mr. CheeseNips".
But no. He had to use his own name, and therein lies his biggest mistake.
Anyone who says we don't need anonymity just doesn't fear the government enough for their own good. And anyone who makes the government look bad without at least trying to hide their identity needs to study their history a tad more.
I, for one, THANK Soghoian for exposing a glaring flaw in the farce we call the TSA. Not because it has made us safer (as we can see, they chose to shoot the messenger rather than, y'know, fix the goddamned problem), but because it has slightly reduced the false sense of security among the voting sheep.
To whatever extent complex numbers are "not fundamental" neither are reals, nor integers. They are all inventions.
Mathematics describes "truth" in a way that transcends physical existence. 1+2=3 (for B>=4) even without any humans to assert it, even without a universe in which to assert it.
The same holds true for complex numbers just as well as for integers. The problem comes with embedding those truths in our physical universe. I can hand you four apples. You can't hand me 3i+1 oranges in return.
I think I may have discovered a new author to try...
On a whim, I tried searching for some of the most unreadably boring books possible - The business motivational/strategy genre.
Unsurprisingly, I kept seeing top-10 opposites that I really enjoy... A lot of Gaiman, some Prachett, even Robert Graves (From which I might hypothesize that the business world somehow forms the antithesis of our collective mythic tradions). But I also saw someone named Haruki Murakami consistantly appearing in the #1 or #2 slot.
Guess I'll have to give him a shot, although checking out a few synopses of his more popular works, I don't see why he would fall in among the afforementioned opposites.
IRL if you attend school full time and have a job then you can't be taxed state or federal income.
I don't know who told you that, but if you fall into that category, I'd run it by a tax attourney before you let April 15th pass...
I worked my way through college (and taking a average load of 20 credits per semester, I'd say I qualified as "full time"), I still had to pay both state and federal income tax.
Perhaps your state has an exemption such as you describe, but AFAIK the feds do not (though perhaps you refer to the IRS allowing you to write off the interest on certain types of student loans?).
Lets give him a legit reason for him to sue us. Yay.
Parody remains one of our few frequently-upheld forms of free speech. The more over-the-top, the less grounds he has to sue.
As for the side effect of damaging a valuable source of information, well, I will admit I have that as my sole reason for not editing quite a few entries on folks like Scherf, McBride, or Thompson. I respect the truth, if not the men.
But when someone like Scherf throws down the gauntlet and takes away the factual content aspect, well, not much point remains in exercising restraint, at least until someone really does fix the entry. So as a placeholder, why not let such asses suffer an entry on llama-buggery for a few weeks?
but the truth is why spend time playing through an old game when you have newer ones to dabble with?
I usually get modded down for saying this (presumeably by younger folks who never actually played an Intellivision except as a novelty antique)..., but around the SNES to early PSX era, video games reached a peak from which they've slowly fallen.
Why would I rather run a buggy and slow PSX emulator than play the latest and greatest PS3 game? Because "gameplay" and "plot" still meant something, while "rehashed with better 3d engine" hadn't started dominating everything. Not to say I don't consider modern FPS games truly gorgeous... But appearance now matters more than fun.
As for why Sony thinks I'd rather pay to re-buy games I already have to play in their buggy emulator, rather than run my own discs in ePSXe, I'll admit you've got me there. I sure as hell wouldn't. But as for why someone might want to play games from the "golden age" of gaming, regardless of platform... Well, I suppose I can't give a meaningful answer unless you already understand why Zork (the original 80x25 Infocom text game, not the bizarre crap Activision insulted the world with) counts as one of the best games ever.
Are there any Slashdotters out there who know the facts about Gracenote -- its history, its business practices, its lawsuits? Wikipedia needs your help.
Who needs facts? If Scherf wants to change history, let's damn well change it!
I think the new entry should start, "Gracenote founder Steve Scherf has come a long way from his younder days of meth-fueled llama sodomizing. While once it looked like he'd soon die in a gutter, that six months he spent in the federal pen for killing a bussload of nuns while drunk (which he coyly refers to as "Happy happy shower butt fun time") cleaned him up, allowing him to become the ruthless corporate asshat we know today."
Revisionist history works both ways, Steve. Don't fuck with the geek masses - We can "fix" your entries MUCH faster than you can.
Chipping the kid with a 10M chip works - because they can detect when the child is approaching an exit to the park
...Right up until a kidnapper takes the wrist band/dogtag off
the kid and leaves it in a bathroom.
And even that level of cicumvention presumes someone notices the kid missing, finds the right person to notify, the problem goes up the chain of command and back down to gate security, and by the time gate security starts looking the kid hasn't already left the state, nevermind just the park. And thanks to the false sense of security provided by this tagging, the window on the first rung of this chain will most likely widen from "the time it takes to go to go to the bathroom" to "when mom wants to go home"
It also presumes that a kidnapper wants to remove the kid from the park, rather than just molesting/killing/whatever it right there and dumping the body in the minigolf castle.
Not everything is a conspiracy - I suggest you get back on your meds befor posting.
I didn't get that the GP considered this a conspiracy - Just that, much like the TSA, it counts as feelgood but largely ineffective nuissance-security.
Look, all he wants is to be able to have the phone on vibrate so he can see who is calling and leave to take the call. Is that really going to interfere with your enjoyment of the movie?
You miss my point - Presuming he tells exactly the truth, then he does not count as the problem. He also doesn't count as the majority of cell users.
For every legitimate "NEED a phone, keep it on vibrate" user out there, you have a few dozen people (mostly younger females) who consider hearing all about what Bill and Stacey did last night, in great detail and with much enthusiasm on both sides of the conversation, an "emergency". These folks keep their ringtone set as high as possible so we can all enjoy (and more importantly, know they enjoy) a polyphonic version of their favorite boyband of the week's new single.
NO ONE, not even the worst of the Luddites, objects to doctors and parents of sick kids having cellphones that quietly vibrate. But the vast preponderance of far less considerate asshats means, IMO, that those who really could benefit from such tech must suffer so the rest of us don't need to.
I'm sort of surprised none of us kids got mutilated by these things while we were growing up...
;-)
Yeah, yeah - And I used to ride my bike (gasp!) without a helmet! Even fell a few times, going waaaaay too fast, and never got worse than a bloodied knee.
It seems very odd to me that in order for me to get to the item I bought, I have to create, and then dispose of, potentially hazzardous waste.
I in no way meant to defend this style of packaging - I'll join you at the front of the line to condemn its creator to a death-of-a-thousand-cuts by tossing him in a waste bin ful of the remains of such packaging and shaking it vigorously. But you have to understand, stores view us not as potential customers, but as potential criminals. They can't live without our patronage, but little would make places like Wallyworld happier than banning all human visitors (including their own employees).
But really, it doesn't take a surgeon (cue rimshot - a "plastic" surgeon! Thanks, I play here all night, love you guys) to successfully open even the toughest of packages safely and quickly. It just takes, as my subject says, "patience". Calmly apply the scissors, and you will get to the prize in well under a minute. Freak out and try to tear into it with hulk-fury-muscles, and you'll break the toy and probably injure yourself, while taking well over a minute to get in.
If Dave Barry had written this, and the summary had the foot icon, I wouldn't have said anything beyond my amused agreement. But to seriously present "strong packaging" as some sort of life-threatening consumer menace... I had to take issue with that.
The anti-theft strips on most consumer goods (if not all) are in the packaging, so they can be easily defeated by simply taking the product out and leaving the packaging at the store.
You can also defeat those merely by running a strong magnet over them (that includes both the long metal strips in white plastic (but NOT the square paper-and-metall spirals, which actually contain an RFID tag) and the little ink-pack fobs they used in many clothing stores. The 1cm^3 neodymium magnets work beautifully for this (and no, I don't know this because I shoplift - When the deactivators have labels in a huge font saying "warning, may erase credit and ATM cards", it doesn't take Einstein to put two and two together).
Theft-prevention devices offend everyone, without actually reducing theft. The sooner stores learn that and stop pissing of the 99% of people that count as their legitimate customers just for the sake of slowing down the 1% (usually employees!) that would steal from them, the better.
using scissors CORRECTLY usually does the job...it's figuring out where to cut that's the hard part.
Fair enough, that does sometimes take a minute or two to decide. I usually start at a 90 degree corner and work my way in a spiral (chopping off the razor-sharp tailings every few inches as I go) in to the center chamber of the plastic (where the product actually hides). I find this usually requires going all the way around once to work (though for perfectly rectangular packaging you can usually do it in only 270 degrees), then the shell just pops right open.
but opening them can be difficult enough to cause injuries that land people in the emergency room.
Oh, gimme a break. A pair of scissors applied in the correct spot will open just about anything you can fit on your lap (you may need something more heavy-duty for larger items, I will admit).
As the bigger problem here, many stores balk at taking back defective goods if you've turned the packaging into confetti. Given that we have packaging so sturdy that you can't remove it without reducing it to a pile of ragged plastic strips, that makes it difficult to take back most products (although in most states, they legally must take it back if defective, and that includes software/dvds/cds - Look up "warrant of merchantability" and your state's laws on the subject - "State law" trumps "store policy" every time).
Personally, I think every product should have a sort of magic pull-string... Just untape the string and pull it, and the otherwise-invulnerable packaging neatly falls away in two or three tidy chunks to reveal its contents (and which, with a bit of care, you could reassemble the packaging enough to return it to the store without much fuss).
With my son and his medical condition it could be a major problem if me or my wife could not get reached.
I have sympathy that your kid has a medical problem, really - That sucks and I wouldn't wish it on anyone. But that doesn't make it our problem. If you always need to stay in touch, YOU need to sacrifice attending certain public events, rather than the other 100-300 people in attendence getting to enjoy the half dozen calls that inevitable occur during just about any performance.
Back before cellphones and pagers, people used to give the 'sitter the number of the theater. In an emergency, the theater will come get you and give you a message... Yet, amazingly enough, before cell-phones, you only saw ushers interrupt movies perhaps one time out of a hundred, rather than the five to ten "emergency" calls you now get to overhear per movie.
There are no dSLRs, cell phones or Nintendo DSs out there which run on alkalines. And switching from an iPod Nano to something AAA bulky is out of the question.
Then you have chosen your current problem, and voted with your wallet to perpetuate the everything-has-its_own-wall-wart and $100-non-user-serviceable-battery-replacement scams.
You couldn't get by with a plain ol' GBA, which did take AAs? You couldn't pick any of the literally dozens of non-Apple portable music players that take a single AAA (bulky? C'mon, talkin' bout a device the size of a pack of gum, here). And as for a dSLR, if you need that level of quality, you've already resigned yourself to lugging around a bag full of lenses and filters (not to mention the increased size and weight of the camera itself), a charger makes little difference; if you don't need quite that level of quality, then as with the music player, you have literally dozens of rather high-quality-but-not-SLR choices to pick from that will run on AAs.
I don't mean to put down your choices - No doubt you chose each of your toys, just as we all do, for the features they offer that you found valuable. But if you don't (or didn't) consider how it feeds itself as a purchasing criteria, then you have to live with the array of chargers.
Unfortunately, Li-ion batteries (usually built-ins use Li-ion) take fairly complex charging circuitry. Although we may some day see standardized replaceables for it, at the moment, every shape, size, and capacity has its own special requirements for how to safely charge it without turning it into a little bomb.
I'd rather lug around the 5+ chargers than limit myself to a very small subset of each device category based on its charging scheme alone.
I'd point out that, for the rare product that you really really want but can't get either a version without its own wall-wart or with a car adapter (aka very forgiving 12-18VDC unregulated input - very easy to provide), you can still buy it. You don't need to live a spartan existance based around power sources. You just need to realize that every time you choose "compactness" and single-charge battery-life over "standardized power input", you have also chosen to lug around another custom noninterchangeable charger.
WTF ... your phone runs on AA/AAA batteries? Is it made by Fisher Price?
... your phone doesn't have a car charger? ;-)
WTF
Sorry, couldn't resist.
My phone I will admit doesn't directly take AAs. But it lasts about four days on a charge, and has a car charger (but even if not, you could get an I-go or Energi for about $20) that works just fine on any 12VDC power source - Such as the one I mentioned in my previous post.
Perhaps I should have phrased it as "get things that take AA, or 12VDC, or have a cigarette lighter adapter (aka 12 to 18VDC, internally regulated)".
No. Seriously - I mean this as neither a troll nor flamebait - If you have started sacrificing real life experiences for virtual ones that actually cost you money...
LEAVE THE FUCKING BASEMENT!
If you have nothing better to do, great, waste a few hours playing WoW. I'll admit, I accidentally saw more than a few dawns like that in college, mudding away the night. Amusing way to pass time. But when real entertainment comes along - DO IT! You don't even need to think about which you prefer - reality wins, every time. Even something like going bowling with your Aunt Sally and ther annoying hellbrood should beat wasting your life in an online game.
A very, VERY, VERY standardized solution to your problem already exists... One that will work in any device from any country on the planet, regardless of local voltage, frequency, and even reliability of AC power availability:
Make sure to only buy devices that take AA/AAA batteries. Then you just need to carry a few extra NiMH recharcheables, and a single charger will take care of all your portable electricity needs every night while you sleep.
You can also get AA-to-12VDC converters, which will work with anything that can accept a car cigarette-lighter plug (make sure to get one that works with rechargeables, though, which for NiMH run at 1.2V rather than 1.5V... That doesn't matter much for up to four batteries, but at 8+ batteries, it can make some unprepared devices fail).
It amazes me that so many people put up with devices that have their own built-in non-replaceable incompatible-with-everything batteries. Rechargeables do eventually die. In exchange for five minutes of research up-front, you can save yourself a dozen different chargers and the need to replace various portable products (*cough* early iPods *cough*) yearly for no better reason than a dead battery.
Personally, I follow the above advice religiously. If my phone dies, I pop open my GPS and bam, I can call for help. If my GPS dies in the middle of a long hike, my camera makes the (temporary) ultimate sacrifice, and I can once again find my car. If my camera dies just as a UFO full of Elvis impersonators lands in front of me, always have an 8-pack of spares available, compatible with every device I carry. And when I get home or back to the car after draining every battery I own, a single charger restores them all to life in just a few hours.
To my dismay, they can't read standard bar codes.
Find a manual for one of them. The previous user most likely had them set to only respond to a very specific symbology, to avoid having the morons they hire accidentally confuse the system by trying to check-in things like Pepsi cans and bags of Cheetos.
You want to reset them to factory defaults, then enable all symbologies (or if you can't find an "enable all", just turn on the ones you need... Code128 works pretty well for general-purpose custom barcodes; if you want to use the existing ones, you'll need EAN and EAN+5 - And of course the various UPCs never hurt). And especially on older scanners with possibly less than pristine lenses, enable check-digit processing or you'll end up with a huge misscan rate.
MySpace and Facebook are hugely popular with the general population
No. Popular with angsty kids who still consider their favorite band-of-the-week as a defining characteristic of their very existence.
Most of us grow out of that.
But what social networks do folks here use?
The question makes no sense. What "social networks"? Hello? Turn off the computer, go outside, and introduce yourself to the damn neighbors!!!
Is there a good one that offers the benefits of a Facebook or Myspace, while being less superficial and spammy?
Mutually exclusive goals. "Social networking" sites exist to feed superficiality - What gives the benefits of superficiality without the superficiality? Meaningless. Letting people buy "friends" just epitomizes that idea (as you correctly point out), thus making it perfectly "normal" in context, but no less shallow.
In the real world, people don't count their "friends" by the thousands. Personally, I have three "real" friends, with another dozen or so for whom I'd lightly use the term. And I consider that just a fine state of affairs. Many more, and I couldn't live up to the social obligations implicit in the concept of friendship. What pass as friends on Myspace and similar sites, I wouldn'teven count as mere acquaintances in the real world.
If you've never met someone, never talked to them, and know nothing about them other than the fiction they choose to put on an ego-stroking web-page, where the hell do you get off calling them "friends"?
I'm sorry, but I think all the hype about this game is ridiculous. Everyone I know who's actually played the game did so for maximum half an hour never to play it again after.
I'd have to agree with you, and I will admit that I did enjoy it for that half-hour.
As the biggest problem I see with turning it into a "real" game, it lacked any conceptual hooks whereby you could flesh it out into something that would take significantly longer than that half hour to finish.
I suppose they could add bigger, meaner enemies (though by the lowest depths, the enemies had already gotten absurdly complex - More than once, I found myself chasing a fast enemy in tight circles, slowly wearing it down by eating 10 of its energy pellets for every 9 it nabbed from me). They could stick in artificial "quests" such as the old standby of find-the-keys and save-the-princess-slash-hostage. They could break it into more expansive worlds for each depth (though then how do you prevent the player from killing 27,416,318 bunnies at the first level by locking the controller in a tight turn for a week, then breezing through the rest?), but just about anything you tack onto it would detract from the original intuitive UI design.
Oh well, good luck to Sony with that. Perhaps they will make something good out of it - I suppose, with a lot of artificiality tacked on, they could manage something as playable as E.V.O. for the SNES. And in five years, when the PS3 goes for $50 and its games for $10 on the used market, I might even pick it up and give it a try.
Russia has agreed to close down AllofMP3.com, and any sites that 'permit illegal distribution of music and other copyright works.'
One of the most significant contributions to human rights in all of human history came from Hammurabi - The concept of a written code of laws, which everyone could know and which applied equally to all people, thus making "justice" less subject to the biases of the king / emperor / caliph / whatever. He may not have quite lived up to that ideal, but as a basis for all modern reasonably-fair legal systems, it forms a cornerstone on which we've built everything since.
AllOfMP3, whether the RIAA like it or not, operated within Russian law (or at least, they did so until this past September). Whether or not the new law closes the "loophole" (if you can call strong fair-use rights and lax copyright enforcement by-design a "loophole") will have to wait for the Russian authorities to make a case against someone.
Either way, to announce the closing of AllOfMP3 as practically the basis of an international trade agreement strikes me as the most capricious undermining of the concept of modern jurisprudence imagineable. This announcement effectively says "The rule of law does not apply to the king's friends, and its protections do not extend to the king's friends' enemies".
Buildings do not remain standing very long if you undermine their foundations. This should chill us all for a much, MUCH deeper reason than merely the loss of a way to get cheap music. I personally never even used AllOfMP3, and this scares the hell out of me. Imagine the same precedent applied, 20 years or so from now, to the US trying to get some economic favor from China...
Something tells me he was more than aware he couldn't make money while there.
Not having a work visa does not equal "can't make money".
If he owned a business back home that made him money every week, I don't think that would have caused any problems.
If he negotiated the purchase of his home and car in China, while in Japan, I doubt that would have caused him any trouble either.
In this situation, since the income came purely from online sources, did he "work" in Japan? Or did he oversee the operation of a home business from abroad? I suspect a good lawyer could successfully argue the latter if this involved criminal charges, but when it comes to matters of control over imaginary lines on a map, most countries paranoidly shoot first and don't even bother to ask questions later.
When you spend the money to photograph and map the surface of the Earth
One problem there - In this case, you have used the correct pronoun in the above quote... "you".
I paid to have the surface of the Earth mapped. You probably did as well. Any taxpaying American has, and I expect this also applies to many non-Americans.
The vast majority of Google's data comes from the USGS, which our tax dollars funded. Most of the closer-in data comes from city or county funded (again, with out tax dollars) aerial surveys. Why the fuck shouldn't all that data fall under the public domain, totally FREE to everyone, since we paid for it in the first place?
This has nothing to do with fair use, and everything to do with the government giving us what we paid for. Google has certainly made it easier to get to that data, but it still counts as our data in the first place!