There was an economist on NPR recently who was discussing this very phenomenon.
He had two interesting points: First, the U.S. still produces an incredibly lopsided supply of the manufactured goods in the world (half?). We don't think of it as producing much because it's on the decline, and that's all we see: It's not as much as 10 years ago.
Second, the tricky part is that the type of goods we produce has changed. He offered a simple litmus test. Think of a manufactured good. Now imagine trying to explain the concept of this good to your great grandparents. If they would get it, it's probably not manufactured here in the U.S. If they don't, there's a good chance that it is.
It's an oversimplification to be sure, but he made a strong case for it. While there are counterexamples, when you think of the types of manufacturing that survives here, it is typically stuff that your great grandparents wouldn't get.
Trains run on near dead-level rights-of-way, paid for, incidentally, by the RRs themselves, not by government subsidies, as trucks get.
Bullshit on several levels.
1) Where are you talking about? If you're talking globally, it's patently incredibly false. If you're talking about the U.S., you have to pretend that history doesn't exist, and that the U.S. isn't lagging behind much of the rest of the world in rails. Conrail for instance, is certainly private. But they weren't privatized until they started to turn a profit. They were government owned and operated prior to that. This is just the most modern example I could think of, the further back you go, the tighter government integration goes. To say nothing of "fully private" rails that rely on government permits to acquire or acquire the use of public or private lands.
This idea also pretends that the past 150 years didn't happen, and the government didn't invest heavily in rail transport starting as far back as the 1800s.
2) The tone of this implies that government aid to vital infrastructure that serves all or most of us is a bad thing. I don't know how you can think that.
NPR's Planet Money did a great piece about Light Houses recently. The idea was to illustrate free markets vs government projects.
Everyone needs a light house to keep from smashing into rocks. But on the other hand, if you build a private light house, it's hard to charge certain people to use it, and tell other people to just not look at it.
So early light houses must have been government projects. There's no private incentive to build them.
No.
The earliest light houses of course pre-date the American government. While there were of course Colonial governments prior to that, they mostly were not involved in light houses. Instead, the very oldest light houses went something like this:
I'm a rich port owner in say, Salem, MA. I want to attract shipping to my port. I build a light house, and use it as a selling point. "Come to my port. We've got a light house. It's much safer than the other port further down the coast."
Free market wins, right?
Not exactly.
This did build the first few light houses, but there were only a few dozen in the country under this model. There were hundreds and hundreds of miles of coast that were unmarked, and still posed a shipping hazard in areas where there *was* no economic incentive to build light houses.
Then government got involved. Now thousands of markers are maintained in places where nobody would have paid to erect signals under private industry (read more).
Nothing against rail. It's good for us. Moving stuff with fewer resources is a good thing. But to pretend that it's without government intervention, or that this even matters in the first place is disingenuous.
I agree with this also, to a point. I think the question lies in where do you draw the line. To me, it's a question of if there's a large non-English speaking community in the region. Clearly Maine would be unlikely to offer Navajo, but there are folks who have spoken French there for hundreds of years (pre-U.S. era). Likewise New Mexico probably wouldn't offer Creole, but Louisiana would likely consider it in areas. And who would question offering Spanish on the ballot in Puerto Rico?
I don't know where you set the threshold for these things, but I do think that it's better to have one than ignore the problem or just say "that's the voter's problem".
I agree with most of what you say. Yes, English is the defacto standard on a National level. Jobs in government, debate and public policy, even commerce all rely on it being a common thread.
That said, there are isolated communities in the U.S. where they do have non-English tradition (The Amish in PA are an example near where I live. Many speak English, but many also speak only German.). To not do what is reasonable to allow them access to the democratic process is to not care about or trust the democratic process. Just because day to day interactions are difficult, and not learning English effectively bars these people from advanced participation in public policy and governance, does not mean that we should effectively deny them participation at the most basic, fundamental level. Majority rules, sure. But everyone deserves a voice.
This isn't about multiculturalism, it's about the fact that everyone has a right as a citizen to vote, but it's in everyone's best interest for people to be given every chance to understand who / what they are voting for.
Or would you rather non-English speakers be put into a voting booth with only English options? What if it's a state like California that has lots of ballot initiatives. They're wordy, and usually a paragraph or two long. What do non-English citizens do then? Randomly guess what button to press? How is that better than simply having a Spanish or French or Korean or Navajo option (when there are large communities in the region)? Which would you prefer?
I've thought about it, and I choose to make democracy as accessible as practical to as many citizens as possible. Sometimes that means the people will make choices that I think are wrong, or that I don't agree with. But that's democracy.
They didn't say that you needed to speak English to be a citizen. They said for immigrants to vote, they need to learn English to pass the citizenship test.
What you're talking about doesn't apply to immigrants. By being born here, you are by definition, not an immigrant. Like it or not.
That said, I agree with you. I understand and agree with the idea of ballots presented in other languages where they are regionally prominent. I don't see a lot of people clamoring to not let the Amish vote, and some of their communities speak German almost exclusively. Someone else pointed out Cajuns / Creole in Louisiana, and some of the few Native Americans still on reservation lands.
I may not enjoy trying to communicate with these people because of a language difference (not being able to understand each other is annoying, no doubt). But to imply that they are lesser people, or lesser citizens, because they speak a different language? That's absurd. Voting is too important a right in a democracy to trifle with over something trivial.
To me the only question becomes what's reasonable? Where do you draw a line? You can't have every ballot everywhere be offered in every language, because it's impractical. I live in New Jersey. There aren't a whole lot of Hawaiians here. But conceivably, there could be some! Should we offer Hawaiian on the ballot in New Jersey? My instinct is to say no, because there's no reason to expect significant numbers of Hawaiian-only speaking citizens living here, and those that do, know they have a lingual barrier problem in day-to-day life. However when there are significant communities of people who speak only one language, or are just much more comfortable in one language that's not English, then The Right Thing To Do(TM) is offer non-English ballots. It's better for democracy to make the system more accessible to a greater number of people.
Becoming a citizen is not the same as being a citizen. The majority of citizens never had to pass that exam. As others have pointed out, there are many large groups in this country that have existed relatively separate from the rest of the population. Many of them have different primary languages. But at the end of the day, they are still entitled to all the rights of citizenship that others are. German speaking Amish get to vote. Those with French ancestry in Maine get to vote, although some of the communities have been relatively isolated, and use French as a primary language.
I know dealing with multiple languages is a pain. I only speak English, and I've been frustrated trying to communicate in broken Spanish before, just like lots of people. But in a country built on a strong democratic tradition like the U.S., the needs of making democracy more accessible trump that. We should be making any and all reasonable efforts to lower the bar for voting in this country, and to ensure that people have all reasonable means of understanding who or what they are voting for. To do that right, sometimes takes different languages.
I didn't say that it did matter if you get achievements in a different way than I do. I wasn't making any statement on cheating and morality at all. Just responding to the freedumb2000's question "does anyone care about the achievement system?". They seemed to be asserting that nobody cared about these systems, and I was giving my point of view that I do.
But since you're bringing it up, Normally I don't care if you do things in a different way than I do.
But once you introduce an online ranking system, there is an incentive to cheat, and I agree that a disincentive is necessary to keep things fair. But I think a simple ban from the ranking system would be enough. I don't see why they need to ban you from playing the single player game. That just seems silly.
Actually it would be more accurate to say that the achievement system seems designed for the way I play games that I truly love.
When a game becomes one of my favorites, I want to not just beat it, but master it. Dominate it. I'm not much of one for online multiplayer games, but I do like to find every item, kill every bad guy, beat every level without warps, rescue every hostage, collect every giant coin, and figure out where every secret room is.
The achievement system is great because it gives me more play. I might not have though of trying to beat the level where the bad guy searches the data cores on hard before they search six buildings. But that's an achievement, and it's a nice little artificial benchmark for me to reach.
I beat the single player game in about a week with about 40% of the achievements. Since then I've been playing through the achievements to try and get to 100%. I'm at like 55% now, I think. It's extra fun for the completionist in me.
I got a cheap bargain "Dual" brand stereo that has this. They had models under $100 with this feature.
The quality is not great, and there are some features that I would have added if I were designing the thing. But for $110 or whatever I paid, (it also included Bluetooth which I was looking for) I can't complain.
However some avionics upgrades, and some safety upgrades after the Challenger and Columbia disasters hardly make it a state of the art design. The shuttle's being retired for reasons.
The interesting exception on that page, that I don't recall hearing about previously is:
If the NASA material is to be used for commercial purposes, especially including advertisements, it must not explicitly or implicitly convey NASA's endorsement of commercial goods or services. If a NASA image includes an identifiable person, using the image for commercial purposes may infringe that person's right of privacy or publicity, and permission should be obtained from the person.
On the surface, this sounds reasonable. Though I'm not sure it's reasonable to apply it to this specific case. i.e., just because you know it's you in the space suit doesn't mean anyone else does. There's nothing identifiable, any more than if it were a picture of you driving a car with heavily tinted windows.
Also, this isn't just some soft policy that NASA has regarding copyright that they are likely to change at any time on a whim. NASA's Charter explicitly calls for them to:
provide for the widest practicable and appropriate dissemination of information concerning its activities and the results thereof;
There is some legalese in the charter to provide for protecting trade secrets (presumably of contractors who build NASA equipment, like Boeing, for instance), and National Security related info (NASA does participate in military and defense related missions), but for the most part, info is as free as you could ever reasonably expect from anywhere.
I've been using Comcast for the past four or five months since I moved. I only signed up for Comcast email yesterday, and then only due to a broken SMTP server. It's self service. Your first email account is created when you create a login for their online account management thing, and will be the same as your username there @comcast.net
From said account management site, you can create additional email addresses as well (up to five IIRC).
But if you never create an online account management login, you're never automatically assigned a Comcast email.
I suppose it's possible, that the system could automatically assign you youraccountnumber@comcast.net. But what would be the point of that? It's not visible in the account management site, and how would you use it if you didn't know about it?
I think the majority of people either use yahoo, hotmail, gmail, or a work provided account. So it makes sense that Comcast wouldn't create accounts for everyone automatically. If 90% of their customers won't use Comcast email, why bother?
But again, using your own words (all emphasis is mine):
Spam is illegal because in the vast majority of cases it is generated by stolen computers being used as zombies, and often times the content itself is fraudulent because a good deal of spam involves fraud by itself.
This implies to me that some minority of the time, is not fraudulent, nor is it generated by "stolen computers".
You go on to say that although the "the MAFIAA/ISP complex" would have us believe that torrents are illegal, their being used to sometimes convey illegal content should not exclude the medium from protection because "But there are enough exceptions (in my book even ONE is enough)".
"the MAFIAA/ISP complex" thinks that torrents should be illegal, because they dislike the majority of content in the medium. You think that spam should be illegal, because you dislike the majority of content in the medium.
I fail to see a meaningful difference.
If even one case is enough to protect the validity of torrents, why not spam? If I want to send unsolicited emails to 50,000 people saying how great I am for getting a high score on Guitar Hero, other than being obnoxious, where is the real distinction? How is this not "legit" traffic? Is being obnoxious and having no value your only argument to banning it? If so, I propose Farmville be next.
Clearly I am taking the argument to an absurd extreme, but I have never understood why people feel the need to regulate or legislate what is essentially just a nuisance. Spam is something you hit the delete key to get rid of. I've never understood why people act like it'll give you cancer, or burn down your house.
I don't like spam either, but what is the difference between an ISP that blocks "spams" and one that blocks "torrents and the like"? Either way is making a judgment on the content of the traffic.
We are talking about an industry that only really had a chance to take off in a practical way for about four years (since Sony introduced it's first e-ink reader). This four year old industry has already taken a 7% chunk out of an industry that is roughly 500 years old (depending on how you define it).
Is it as rapid as digital-only (i.e. no physical media) music overtook CD sales? No. But on it's own, this number is astonishing.
Find someone who is good at online Halo multiplayer on the XBox. This is obviously subjective, but you don't want to blame the results of this test on just having a poor player.
Take two PCs running Halo 1 or 2.
Get a wired XBox 360 controller.
Create a new game just 1v1. You take one PC and use KBM controls, while the XBox player uses a 360 controller on the other PC.
After you dominate the other player, go online on a public server and watch as he or she is dominated by virtually every player they encounter.
I did this test with Halo:CE 5 or 6 years ago, and I just felt sorry for the guy, really.
all they have to do is show up with a competent product that isn't markedly inferior and there's no reason it won't succeed in the market.
What you describe is exactly the scenario of iPod vs. Zune. Zune wasn't markedly inferior. In fact, some in this thread have called it superior. But Zune failed.
I'm not anti-Microsoft by any means. I have an HTC Tilt 2 with WinMo 6.5 and I love it. But I think their strategy is bone headed here. By abandoning backwards compatibility, they sever any advantage they have in the marketplace.
They are copying the leader, but why would I switch from the leader if there's no value add, and in fact, being a smaller ecosystem means there's less "stuff" (Apps, support, resources, accessories) available to me? There's no incentive, and in face, there's a disincentive to many.
Yes, different features are important to different people. And that's exactly why some of what's going on in the Android ecosystem (and Windows Mobile and iOS) are bad.
To me (and many other people) a phone should be just a platform. Like a computer. There are some basic, minimum things I expect it to do stock, but if it's a good platform, it's extensible enough to let the user pick features that are important to them beyond the basic, and add them after the fact. For instance, I'm a runner. I track my runs with a GPS application called Marathon on my WinMo phone. I would not expect this to be built into any device, as it wouldn't appeal to 99% of the population. But it's nice to be able to add it.
What some Android vendors are doing, limits extensibility. By locking features, or preventing upgrades, or disallowing certain applications of features from being removed (MotoBlur). Likewise, Apple is guilty of this in a slightly different way, by locking down iOS so tightly, and restricting what software can run on it at all. And I fear WinMo, which has largely managed to stay away from such nonsense will go down this road when Windows Mobile 7 comes out.
The average user may not care, but some of them will suffer because of this. In the form of bloat, and the inability to customize their device. Almost all power users will suffer from this, because we're the ones that like to tinker the most.
The idea that I would pick one phone over another because it has a Facebook app, or GPS software is insane to me. Software can be changed, unless it's somehow locked by the vendor to make changing it more trouble than it's worth. Shopping for a phone should be about hardware (do I want a physical keyboard? What kind of camera? what processor, how much RAM? How is the screen?), and what OS it runs, not about individual applications that ship preinstalled.
100% out of curiosity, can you name without looking them up (assuming you are American):
Your current president Your current senators Your current U.S. representative Your current governor Your representative(s) and / or senator(s) in the state legislature (senate, house, legislature, etc) for the state you reside in. Your current county or parish sheriff Your current mayor Your current town or city council member(s) for your district? Your current elected members of your local board of education? Other current elected officials that you are eligible to vote for as applicable for your locality (Judges, coroner, dog catcher, etc.)
I'm sure I missed a few that exist in areas of the country I'm not familiar with as well.
Following this to it's logical conclusion would exclude a great many people from voting. I am not passing judgment on whether that is a good or a bad thing, but it would certainly reshape democracy in this country.
They didn't miss it. They covered it in a different analysis.
REALITY: 80% of self-identified bisexuals are only interested in one gender.
12% of women under 35 on OkCupid (and the internet in general, I'd wager) self-identify as bi. However, as you can see above, only about 1 in 4 of those women is actually into both guys and girls at the same time. I know this will come as a big letdown to the straight male browsing population: three-fourths of your fantasies are, in fact, fantasies of a fantasy. Like bi men, most bi women are, for whatever reason, not observably bi. The primacy of America's most popular threesome, two dudes and an Xbox, is safe.
I get it that lots of people don't like Harry Reid. That's fine. But angle is amazingly, dangerously, stupidly incompetent, and perhaps crazy.
She made a lot of noise about "second amendment remedies" if she doesn't get elected, and now has to back track that and either avoid questions, or blatantly state that she's not really advocating armed revolution. Always a good sign. http://www.lvrj.com/blogs/politics/Another_Angle_issue_emerges.html?ref=279
WNYC's Radiolab did a very similar story involved nuns donating their brains to Alzheimer's research. It was the University of Minnesota though, so it may also have been a different group of nuns.:
Basicly, you are right. They Nuns were a good choice because (as they put it):
Snowdon wanted to look at aging over time, and decided to focus on sisters because they all had fairly similar histories and backgrounds. Most of them joined the School Sisters of Notre Dame congregation when they were 18, and all had abstained from smoking or drinking. So Snowdon signed up 678 sisters, all over the age of 75, from the order. All of the sisters agreed to donate a small part of their brains to the study after they died.
The study looked at writing as an indicator of Alzheimer's risk. And they chanced upon a jackpot - all the sisters in the study had essays that they had written at 18 or 19, roughly 70 years earlier.
Do yourself a favor and listen to that episode, or at least read the transcript.
Construction of this facility began in 1976 (with German help). Over the years, various factors delayed it. eventually the Germans were replaced by the Russians. The reactors in their current form were originally supposed to come online over five years ago, but international concerns over weaponization delayed the project. It certainly wasn't *just* announced.
Eventually a compromise was reached in that the Russians would take responsibility for reclaiming the spent fuel rods to be transported back to Russia, and stored or processed there, rather than in Iran.
Yes, there is the risk that the Iranians could in theory kick Russian monitors out of the country and keep the spent material. But then they would likely not get any more fuel *from* the Russians. They could also try to smuggle spent rods out of the reactor to a different facility, but the problems with this are too numerous to list.
Truth be told, while we and those in the region should be concerned, I don't think it's a stupid move on their part. This is a conventional weapon system, and the timing with the reactor is demonstrably coincidental.
Slashdot Mirror
There was an economist on NPR recently who was discussing this very phenomenon.
He had two interesting points: First, the U.S. still produces an incredibly lopsided supply of the manufactured goods in the world (half?). We don't think of it as producing much because it's on the decline, and that's all we see: It's not as much as 10 years ago.
Second, the tricky part is that the type of goods we produce has changed. He offered a simple litmus test. Think of a manufactured good. Now imagine trying to explain the concept of this good to your great grandparents. If they would get it, it's probably not manufactured here in the U.S. If they don't, there's a good chance that it is.
It's an oversimplification to be sure, but he made a strong case for it. While there are counterexamples, when you think of the types of manufacturing that survives here, it is typically stuff that your great grandparents wouldn't get.
Bullshit on several levels.
1) Where are you talking about? If you're talking globally, it's patently incredibly false. If you're talking about the U.S., you have to pretend that history doesn't exist, and that the U.S. isn't lagging behind much of the rest of the world in rails. Conrail for instance, is certainly private. But they weren't privatized until they started to turn a profit. They were government owned and operated prior to that. This is just the most modern example I could think of, the further back you go, the tighter government integration goes. To say nothing of "fully private" rails that rely on government permits to acquire or acquire the use of public or private lands.
This idea also pretends that the past 150 years didn't happen, and the government didn't invest heavily in rail transport starting as far back as the 1800s.
2) The tone of this implies that government aid to vital infrastructure that serves all or most of us is a bad thing. I don't know how you can think that.
NPR's Planet Money did a great piece about Light Houses recently. The idea was to illustrate free markets vs government projects.
Everyone needs a light house to keep from smashing into rocks. But on the other hand, if you build a private light house, it's hard to charge certain people to use it, and tell other people to just not look at it.
So early light houses must have been government projects. There's no private incentive to build them.
No.
The earliest light houses of course pre-date the American government. While there were of course Colonial governments prior to that, they mostly were not involved in light houses. Instead, the very oldest light houses went something like this:
I'm a rich port owner in say, Salem, MA. I want to attract shipping to my port. I build a light house, and use it as a selling point. "Come to my port. We've got a light house. It's much safer than the other port further down the coast."
Free market wins, right?
Not exactly.
This did build the first few light houses, but there were only a few dozen in the country under this model. There were hundreds and hundreds of miles of coast that were unmarked, and still posed a shipping hazard in areas where there *was* no economic incentive to build light houses.
Then government got involved. Now thousands of markers are maintained in places where nobody would have paid to erect signals under private industry (read more).
Nothing against rail. It's good for us. Moving stuff with fewer resources is a good thing. But to pretend that it's without government intervention, or that this even matters in the first place is disingenuous.
I agree with this also, to a point. I think the question lies in where do you draw the line. To me, it's a question of if there's a large non-English speaking community in the region. Clearly Maine would be unlikely to offer Navajo, but there are folks who have spoken French there for hundreds of years (pre-U.S. era). Likewise New Mexico probably wouldn't offer Creole, but Louisiana would likely consider it in areas. And who would question offering Spanish on the ballot in Puerto Rico?
I don't know where you set the threshold for these things, but I do think that it's better to have one than ignore the problem or just say "that's the voter's problem".
I agree with most of what you say. Yes, English is the defacto standard on a National level. Jobs in government, debate and public policy, even commerce all rely on it being a common thread.
That said, there are isolated communities in the U.S. where they do have non-English tradition (The Amish in PA are an example near where I live. Many speak English, but many also speak only German.). To not do what is reasonable to allow them access to the democratic process is to not care about or trust the democratic process. Just because day to day interactions are difficult, and not learning English effectively bars these people from advanced participation in public policy and governance, does not mean that we should effectively deny them participation at the most basic, fundamental level. Majority rules, sure. But everyone deserves a voice.
This isn't about multiculturalism, it's about the fact that everyone has a right as a citizen to vote, but it's in everyone's best interest for people to be given every chance to understand who / what they are voting for.
Or would you rather non-English speakers be put into a voting booth with only English options? What if it's a state like California that has lots of ballot initiatives. They're wordy, and usually a paragraph or two long. What do non-English citizens do then? Randomly guess what button to press? How is that better than simply having a Spanish or French or Korean or Navajo option (when there are large communities in the region)? Which would you prefer?
I've thought about it, and I choose to make democracy as accessible as practical to as many citizens as possible. Sometimes that means the people will make choices that I think are wrong, or that I don't agree with. But that's democracy.
They didn't say that you needed to speak English to be a citizen. They said for immigrants to vote, they need to learn English to pass the citizenship test.
What you're talking about doesn't apply to immigrants. By being born here, you are by definition, not an immigrant. Like it or not.
That said, I agree with you. I understand and agree with the idea of ballots presented in other languages where they are regionally prominent. I don't see a lot of people clamoring to not let the Amish vote, and some of their communities speak German almost exclusively. Someone else pointed out Cajuns / Creole in Louisiana, and some of the few Native Americans still on reservation lands.
I may not enjoy trying to communicate with these people because of a language difference (not being able to understand each other is annoying, no doubt). But to imply that they are lesser people, or lesser citizens, because they speak a different language? That's absurd. Voting is too important a right in a democracy to trifle with over something trivial.
To me the only question becomes what's reasonable? Where do you draw a line? You can't have every ballot everywhere be offered in every language, because it's impractical. I live in New Jersey. There aren't a whole lot of Hawaiians here. But conceivably, there could be some! Should we offer Hawaiian on the ballot in New Jersey? My instinct is to say no, because there's no reason to expect significant numbers of Hawaiian-only speaking citizens living here, and those that do, know they have a lingual barrier problem in day-to-day life. However when there are significant communities of people who speak only one language, or are just much more comfortable in one language that's not English, then The Right Thing To Do(TM) is offer non-English ballots. It's better for democracy to make the system more accessible to a greater number of people.
Becoming a citizen is not the same as being a citizen. The majority of citizens never had to pass that exam. As others have pointed out, there are many large groups in this country that have existed relatively separate from the rest of the population. Many of them have different primary languages. But at the end of the day, they are still entitled to all the rights of citizenship that others are. German speaking Amish get to vote. Those with French ancestry in Maine get to vote, although some of the communities have been relatively isolated, and use French as a primary language.
I know dealing with multiple languages is a pain. I only speak English, and I've been frustrated trying to communicate in broken Spanish before, just like lots of people. But in a country built on a strong democratic tradition like the U.S., the needs of making democracy more accessible trump that. We should be making any and all reasonable efforts to lower the bar for voting in this country, and to ensure that people have all reasonable means of understanding who or what they are voting for. To do that right, sometimes takes different languages.
I didn't say that it did matter if you get achievements in a different way than I do. I wasn't making any statement on cheating and morality at all. Just responding to the freedumb2000's question "does anyone care about the achievement system?". They seemed to be asserting that nobody cared about these systems, and I was giving my point of view that I do.
But since you're bringing it up, Normally I don't care if you do things in a different way than I do.
But once you introduce an online ranking system, there is an incentive to cheat, and I agree that a disincentive is necessary to keep things fair. But I think a simple ban from the ranking system would be enough. I don't see why they need to ban you from playing the single player game. That just seems silly.
I care about the achievement system.
Actually it would be more accurate to say that the achievement system seems designed for the way I play games that I truly love.
When a game becomes one of my favorites, I want to not just beat it, but master it. Dominate it. I'm not much of one for online multiplayer games, but I do like to find every item, kill every bad guy, beat every level without warps, rescue every hostage, collect every giant coin, and figure out where every secret room is.
The achievement system is great because it gives me more play. I might not have though of trying to beat the level where the bad guy searches the data cores on hard before they search six buildings. But that's an achievement, and it's a nice little artificial benchmark for me to reach.
I beat the single player game in about a week with about 40% of the achievements. Since then I've been playing through the achievements to try and get to 100%. I'm at like 55% now, I think. It's extra fun for the completionist in me.
Many companies make this.
http://www.crutchfield.com/g_300/Car-Receivers.html?tp=5684&nvpair=FFUSB_Input|Front
I got a cheap bargain "Dual" brand stereo that has this. They had models under $100 with this feature.
The quality is not great, and there are some features that I would have added if I were designing the thing. But for $110 or whatever I paid, (it also included Bluetooth which I was looking for) I can't complain.
Not 100% no.
However some avionics upgrades, and some safety upgrades after the Challenger and Columbia disasters hardly make it a state of the art design. The shuttle's being retired for reasons.
NASA has always claimed that any photographic works produced by them or those acting as NASA employees are in the public domain.
http://www.nasa.gov/audience/formedia/features/MP_Photo_Guidelines.html
The interesting exception on that page, that I don't recall hearing about previously is:
On the surface, this sounds reasonable. Though I'm not sure it's reasonable to apply it to this specific case. i.e., just because you know it's you in the space suit doesn't mean anyone else does. There's nothing identifiable, any more than if it were a picture of you driving a car with heavily tinted windows.
Also, this isn't just some soft policy that NASA has regarding copyright that they are likely to change at any time on a whim. NASA's Charter explicitly calls for them to:
There is some legalese in the charter to provide for protecting trade secrets (presumably of contractors who build NASA equipment, like Boeing, for instance), and National Security related info (NASA does participate in military and defense related missions), but for the most part, info is as free as you could ever reasonably expect from anywhere.
More info:
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/multimedia/gtv_copyright.html
I've been using Comcast for the past four or five months since I moved. I only signed up for Comcast email yesterday, and then only due to a broken SMTP server. It's self service. Your first email account is created when you create a login for their online account management thing, and will be the same as your username there @comcast.net
From said account management site, you can create additional email addresses as well (up to five IIRC).
But if you never create an online account management login, you're never automatically assigned a Comcast email.
I suppose it's possible, that the system could automatically assign you youraccountnumber@comcast.net. But what would be the point of that? It's not visible in the account management site, and how would you use it if you didn't know about it?
I think the majority of people either use yahoo, hotmail, gmail, or a work provided account. So it makes sense that Comcast wouldn't create accounts for everyone automatically. If 90% of their customers won't use Comcast email, why bother?
But again, using your own words (all emphasis is mine):
This implies to me that some minority of the time, is not fraudulent, nor is it generated by "stolen computers".
You go on to say that although the "the MAFIAA/ISP complex" would have us believe that torrents are illegal, their being used to sometimes convey illegal content should not exclude the medium from protection because "But there are enough exceptions (in my book even ONE is enough)".
"the MAFIAA/ISP complex" thinks that torrents should be illegal, because they dislike the majority of content in the medium.
You think that spam should be illegal, because you dislike the majority of content in the medium.
I fail to see a meaningful difference.
If even one case is enough to protect the validity of torrents, why not spam? If I want to send unsolicited emails to 50,000 people saying how great I am for getting a high score on Guitar Hero, other than being obnoxious, where is the real distinction? How is this not "legit" traffic? Is being obnoxious and having no value your only argument to banning it? If so, I propose Farmville be next.
Clearly I am taking the argument to an absurd extreme, but I have never understood why people feel the need to regulate or legislate what is essentially just a nuisance. Spam is something you hit the delete key to get rid of. I've never understood why people act like it'll give you cancer, or burn down your house.
I don't like spam either, but what is the difference between an ISP that blocks "spams" and one that blocks "torrents and the like"? Either way is making a judgment on the content of the traffic.
Seriously? "Only"?!? "Only 6%"?
We are talking about an industry that only really had a chance to take off in a practical way for about four years (since Sony introduced it's first e-ink reader). This four year old industry has already taken a 7% chunk out of an industry that is roughly 500 years old (depending on how you define it).
Is it as rapid as digital-only (i.e. no physical media) music overtook CD sales? No. But on it's own, this number is astonishing.
With Halo, this is easy to prove.
Find someone who is good at online Halo multiplayer on the XBox. This is obviously subjective, but you don't want to blame the results of this test on just having a poor player.
Take two PCs running Halo 1 or 2.
Get a wired XBox 360 controller.
Create a new game just 1v1. You take one PC and use KBM controls, while the XBox player uses a 360 controller on the other PC.
After you dominate the other player, go online on a public server and watch as he or she is dominated by virtually every player they encounter.
I did this test with Halo:CE 5 or 6 years ago, and I just felt sorry for the guy, really.
I'm playing through Halo 2 for the first time on the PC right now. Why is it a worthless game because? Because it's no longer brand new? Please.
What you describe is exactly the scenario of iPod vs. Zune. Zune wasn't markedly inferior. In fact, some in this thread have called it superior. But Zune failed.
I'm not anti-Microsoft by any means. I have an HTC Tilt 2 with WinMo 6.5 and I love it. But I think their strategy is bone headed here. By abandoning backwards compatibility, they sever any advantage they have in the marketplace.
They are copying the leader, but why would I switch from the leader if there's no value add, and in fact, being a smaller ecosystem means there's less "stuff" (Apps, support, resources, accessories) available to me? There's no incentive, and in face, there's a disincentive to many.
Yes, different features are important to different people. And that's exactly why some of what's going on in the Android ecosystem (and Windows Mobile and iOS) are bad.
To me (and many other people) a phone should be just a platform. Like a computer. There are some basic, minimum things I expect it to do stock, but if it's a good platform, it's extensible enough to let the user pick features that are important to them beyond the basic, and add them after the fact. For instance, I'm a runner. I track my runs with a GPS application called Marathon on my WinMo phone. I would not expect this to be built into any device, as it wouldn't appeal to 99% of the population. But it's nice to be able to add it.
What some Android vendors are doing, limits extensibility. By locking features, or preventing upgrades, or disallowing certain applications of features from being removed (MotoBlur). Likewise, Apple is guilty of this in a slightly different way, by locking down iOS so tightly, and restricting what software can run on it at all. And I fear WinMo, which has largely managed to stay away from such nonsense will go down this road when Windows Mobile 7 comes out.
The average user may not care, but some of them will suffer because of this. In the form of bloat, and the inability to customize their device. Almost all power users will suffer from this, because we're the ones that like to tinker the most.
The idea that I would pick one phone over another because it has a Facebook app, or GPS software is insane to me. Software can be changed, unless it's somehow locked by the vendor to make changing it more trouble than it's worth. Shopping for a phone should be about hardware (do I want a physical keyboard? What kind of camera? what processor, how much RAM? How is the screen?), and what OS it runs, not about individual applications that ship preinstalled.
100% out of curiosity, can you name without looking them up (assuming you are American):
Your current president
Your current senators
Your current U.S. representative
Your current governor
Your representative(s) and / or senator(s) in the state legislature (senate, house, legislature, etc) for the state you reside in.
Your current county or parish sheriff
Your current mayor
Your current town or city council member(s) for your district?
Your current elected members of your local board of education?
Other current elected officials that you are eligible to vote for as applicable for your locality (Judges, coroner, dog catcher, etc.)
I'm sure I missed a few that exist in areas of the country I'm not familiar with as well.
Following this to it's logical conclusion would exclude a great many people from voting. I am not passing judgment on whether that is a good or a bad thing, but it would certainly reshape democracy in this country.
They didn't miss it. They covered it in a different analysis.
The full analysis is here (scroll down a bit):
http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/the-biggest-lies-in-online-dating/
It's not always wrong. There are things worth fighting for. There are things worth dieing for.
Turning to "Second Amendment Remedies" if she happens to loose a democratic election is not one of them.
I get it that lots of people don't like Harry Reid. That's fine. But angle is amazingly, dangerously, stupidly incompetent, and perhaps crazy.
She made a lot of noise about "second amendment remedies" if she doesn't get elected, and now has to back track that and either avoid questions, or blatantly state that she's not really advocating armed revolution. Always a good sign.
http://www.lvrj.com/blogs/politics/Another_Angle_issue_emerges.html?ref=279
This one is golden. The idea that she should be "friends" with the media and they should report what *she* wants? HILARIOUS!
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20012559-503544.html
Or just take your pick. She wants most of the federal government abolished, and is more or less anti-science:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharron_Angle
WNYC's Radiolab did a very similar story involved nuns donating their brains to Alzheimer's research. It was the University of Minnesota though, so it may also have been a different group of nuns.:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127211884
Basicly, you are right. They Nuns were a good choice because (as they put it):
The study looked at writing as an indicator of Alzheimer's risk. And they chanced upon a jackpot - all the sisters in the study had essays that they had written at 18 or 19, roughly 70 years earlier.
Do yourself a favor and listen to that episode, or at least read the transcript.
Construction of this facility began in 1976 (with German help). Over the years, various factors delayed it. eventually the Germans were replaced by the Russians. The reactors in their current form were originally supposed to come online over five years ago, but international concerns over weaponization delayed the project. It certainly wasn't *just* announced.
Eventually a compromise was reached in that the Russians would take responsibility for reclaiming the spent fuel rods to be transported back to Russia, and stored or processed there, rather than in Iran.
Yes, there is the risk that the Iranians could in theory kick Russian monitors out of the country and keep the spent material. But then they would likely not get any more fuel *from* the Russians. They could also try to smuggle spent rods out of the reactor to a different facility, but the problems with this are too numerous to list.
Truth be told, while we and those in the region should be concerned, I don't think it's a stupid move on their part. This is a conventional weapon system, and the timing with the reactor is demonstrably coincidental.