Also, isn't there black space between commercials as it it? They could just cross fade everything into everything else
Dunno about in the US, but we're seeing this in the UK: there are no gaps at all between anything on the big commercial cable channel, Sky1, during prime time shows (e.g. Buffy)
I mean, it used to be that you'd have a flicker between ads, a long pause at the end of the last ad, then an intro (even half a second) to the show, but now it's completely seamless, I assume just through tighter editing. Given the similarity of plastic advert people and plastic content people, it's getting hard to tell if you're watching an advert, a trailer, or the content that you're actually paying for.
sharply dividing a world scientific community [...] Experts contacted by Reuters were wary, citing the first law of thermodynamics which, in layman's terms, states that you can't get more energy out than you put in
The experts were anything but "wary"! Touting this 'invention' as a "red-hot controversy" and stating that the scientific world is "sharply divided" on the question of its legitimacy both strongly imply that scientists believe it might be true. Complete rubbish.
The rubbish here is the inference you choose to draw from what they actually wrote.
The issue is divisive. If you choose to read that as anything like an equal division, then more fool you. 99-1 is still a division.
Any genuine scientist will of course be wary when cold called for an opinion about any issue. How would you answer this: "I've seen a zero point energy machine. What's your opinion on what I saw?". Most people don't enjoy calling complete strangers (who have their phone number) gullible chumps. Most likely, they'll mutter something about zero point being all very well in theory and hang up. Thus, wary.
The Reuters article was factually correct. The sensationalism and misunderstanding is in Michael's reading of it. That Reuters understands the difference between a first law breaking energy-in system and a second law breaking zero-loss perpetual motion system - when Michael doesn't, and won't correct himself - speaks volumes. He's been caught out trying to be too smart for his own good, and now doesn't have the guts or maturity to admit it. Silly child.
No one cares about operating systems. People use applications, not operating systems.[...] Something like Lindows is the ONLY way you are going to get people to consider switching.
What? Stop contradicting yourself. No one cares about operating systems. Why would anyone "switch" their OS out from under a working set of applications, to an OS (an OS) that might not run many of them?
There is no, zero, zilch, nada, squat incentive to switch away from Windows if you only care about Windows applications.
Linux (X/GNU/Linux + applications) has to sell itself as being different from Windows. It can't win by emulating. We've already shown (and the US courts agree) that you can't compete directly with Windows even if you give the alternative away.
Hopefully, this will influence other marketers toward more responsible use of e-mail
In other news, US businesses agreed to stop savagely beating customers who are tardy in payment. Hopefully, this will influence organised crime towards more responsible collection policies.
At any rate, I can't figure out why these people think they'll get jobs
And an important difference is that typical generic spam is a no-risk proposition. If you send out a zillion spams and get one bite, you win. If you get zero bites, you don't lose anything, because these weren't your customers anyway.
But spamming for jobs is self destructive; you're actually closing off opportunities for yourself. Similarly, existing businesses who spam (though arrogance or more usually just stupidity) are cutting their own throats. You really have to wonder if it wouldn't be a better world if we took action to ensure that all spammers become, ahem, eligible for a Darwin Award.
Ultima never made me actually shout out loud: "What the...? Is one of my own party stabbing me in the back? He is! Stop it! Stop stabbing me in the back! Bad dwarf! Bad! Aaaaagh!".
What, you never recruited Saduj in Ultima V?
Read carefully. Ultima never made me shout out loud. To be honest, Baldur's Gate 2 only really made me exclaim "What the...?" to the world, but it did do that, and it does have to be said that pretty graphics and swooshy sounds do have more of an impact. If the content is there as well, which it is, in spades.
It's just you. The Baldur's Gate series is old school. There are several gating points, but you're more or less free to play it any way you like. Good, bad, indifferent, press on or seek out the sub-quests, chat to the NPC's, whatever. There's a lot in there, and the content is as important as the presentation.
Maybe you should give them a try. You should be able to get Baldurs Gate 1 and 2 on budget or in a multipack by now. If you're in any doubt about the depth or care put into them, ponder the pantaloons (spoiler).
Yes, Ultima was wonderful, but so is Baldur's Gate. And Ultima never made me actually shout out loud: "What the...? Is one of my own party stabbing me in the back? He is! Stop it! Stop stabbing me in the back! Bad dwarf! Bad! Aaaaagh!".
My guess is that nethack, simple as it is, would be way ahead. Nethack is open source, which carries alot of weight with many Linux users, including me.
Look deep into your heart, and tell us honestly: how much would you pay for nethack-in-a-box? How much is that box worth to you?
Ok, so now I am not allowed to leave where I live and play my games where I travel to? I don't understand this. [...] Maybe I am just being dense, but could someone please show me where it says you aren't allowed to move somewhere and play your game?
It says so in the Copyright, Design and Patent Act 1988 in the UK, and the DMCA in the US. It's perfectly clear, we just didn't realise how badly we'd been buttfucked until recently. North American English speakers have been insulated slightly because they get region 1 English-only DVD's first with all the extra features, while everybody else has to wait and get a compromise. If regioning was really a language issue, as was originally claimed, why is the UK in Region 2 with Europe (so we'd get English language with all the extra features rather than several different European language versions) rather than in Region 1 with North America? And why do the many Canadian French or North American Spanish speakers have to mod their players (illegal for US citizens) and wait for and import Region 2 DVD's? North American English speakers probably don't even realise the importance of being able to change the region code on a DVD player easily and without restriction (mine varies between 0, 1 and 2). Regioning is a farce, it always has been, and it looks to be getting worse.
The one blessing in this case is that the judge ruled on active use of the content rather than just possession of the media. At the moment, it's OK to have non-Region 2 DVD's in the UK, it's just illegal to do anything with them or to traffic in or create a device modified to allow you to play them (hello DeCSS). It could be worse. AFAIK, there's no law or precedent that says we have to turn in our existing modified players or DVD's. Yet.
This, by the way, is a perfect example of why crap like the DMCA shouldn't be allowed to stay on the books, even if it's not used for a while. The CDPA has been around for thirteen years, lurking in stealth mode. It was always perfectly clear, it's just not been used to assrape anyone up until now (and by the way, to the poster who ripped into me for mentioning the CDPA six months ago because "it's never been used and never will be", a big fuck you, ostrich boy). Expect to see the copyright owners target DVD manufacturers next, to have region changing ability removed completely rather than just hidden away.
Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106, it is not an infringement for the owner of a copy of a computer program to make or authorize the making of another copy or adaptation of that computer program provided: that such a new copy or adaptation is created as an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine and that it is used in no other manner
Nice reference, but you should probably make it clearer that you're only talking about the technicality of making the copy. There's still the issue of infringing use for a US court to consider.
Still, infringing use is nicer than infringing possession. Owning unlicensed copied material is illegal by itself, but in this case, the ruling encompassed content bought legally and personally imported (i.e. by hand) from another region. Interpreted to its extreme, that would effectively make DVD's stolen property as soon as you took them out of their licensed region (e.g. in your laptop crossing the atlantic). Not a nice scenario.
This $50,000 price tag was just for the parts to actually build the satellite
Shut up! Everyone knows that engineers work on space stuff for free because it's so cool, and NASA shoots stuff up out of the goodness of its publically funded heart for the same reason. Limitless cheap space exploitatation is coming Real Soon Now, just as it has been for the past 10/20/30/40/50/60/70/80/90/100 (insert your own number) years.
Seriously, you're quite right. Much of the cost of a satellite goes into testing and redundancy to make sure that once you've added to the massive expense of shooting the thing up there, it damn well works. You can lose the entire cost of a project based on using a ten cent diode rather than a fifty cent diode. Cutting corners is rarely a good gamble.
By publishing something like this it gives it credibility
Oh purrrlease. Credibility only among those (like Michael) too ignorant to spot that it's a tongue in cheek rollerblading-dog piece. Admittedly, if this is a commercial scam, morons are the target market, so that might help with sales.
If, on the other hand, it's just a story about a crackpot publicity seeker, then the only sin is in publicising it in any shape, manner or form. Slashdot is as guilty as Reuters. But I don't think it's a sin, I think it's a bit of harmless fun, which is how Reuters has presented it, and how Michael would have read it if he wasn't so hot to trot out his badly remembered high school physics. (If this is a zero-point device, then it does indeed violate first and not second law)
Don't forget how many scientists/explorers were ridiculed in their day, unknown until years later, for thinking 'outside the box'. Gallileo, Columbus, yadda yadda
Spot the difference:
Here are my methods and results, please feel free to replicate or disprove them.
I'm not going to tell you who I am, where I live, or how it works, but if you give me money, I'll sell you one.
It occurs to me that if AOL/TW do actually want ship a Linux OS that can actually wean AOLusers off of Windows entirely, then they could do a lot worse than to use some pocket lint to buy Loki and help make Linux a viable games platform.
Picture the difference:
Hello, nVidia, this is Joe from Loki calling about your shitty Linux drivers, if you've got a minute, sir, please, please god, don't hang up on me again...
THE AOL/TW COLLECTIVE DEMANDS BETTER SUPPORT FOR AOLINUX. RESISTANCE IS FUTILE.
Heck, if AOL/TW are actually interested in shipping a Linux OS at some point, they should buy them and make it a viable alternative to Windoze for Joe AOLuser.
I'm also having trouble imagining the demanding weenies you describe. The Baton Rouge LUG is small, but most of the people there were NOT like this.
Take the blinkers off. Most users of any given system aren't dedicated and civic minded. They just want to use it.
An example. When I was at university, my computer science class got bitten by the Netrek bug. We had at least a dozen dedicated (league) players, plus hangers on from other classes, playing it in DEC workstations. Of that group (say 20), only one of us (me) had even compiled the client, let alone developed it and fed back into the community. Out of a computer science class, putting in countless hours playing a game competitively, not one other person could be bothered even trying to tweak the client. They just wanted to play.
Games players - players - are not typical hackers (in the good sense, a lot of them are script kiddies). That's the point under discussion here, not your cozy ivory towered LUG.
And while we're at it, he's also blatantly in breach of the T&C's by linking to a site that attemps to sell the car outside of eBay, rather than just providing more information on it.
Links from the eBay Item page to pages that promote off eBay sales in any way are forbidden [...] Users may not use systems or techniques to circumvent eBay fees. Some examples include... Offering in a listing the opportunity to purchase the item or other merchandise outside of eBay.
And last but not least:
[Banned:] Listings with an e-mail address or domain name in the title
A buddy of mine [worked for] Ferrari for three years [and] had his illusions taken away . [...] People who use their Ferrari on a regular basis buy a Ferrari exactly ONCE
Sounds like your buddy should have done his research. Ferrari's have always been (practically) "sold as seen" even when new, and Enzo was notorious for the contempt he showed for customers who brought theirs back with a problem. Ferraris were and always have been sold as ongoing projects, not finished vehicles. Heck, maybe the $100k Romero blew on this folly was just to keep it running.
What bugs me as weird though, is the fact that the car had a new angine at a little more than 33000 miles
Various.plans down the years indicate that Romero's use of his toy was tooling about at 25mph blipping the throttle to attract attention, intersperced with bouts of frenzied drag racing (you know, like real car racing, but modified for a ten second attention span). It's a wonder it's lasted as long as it has, to be honest.
By the way, I'm not criticising Romero's essential childishness, as I own an equally impractical Lotus 7 replica, I'm just narked because I had to build my folly lovingly by hand from bits of old Fords, while Romero blew $200k of our and venture capital money for his toy, and is still trying to promote it as "cool" (not cool enough for him any more though) rather than having the panache to market it as what it is: a hugely useless, stupid and self indulgent penis extension. Come on John, show a little self awareness. Your cred went in the trash at the same time as all those copies of Daikatana.
A man is stabbed in an internet cafe. The response: put a moratorium on opening new cafes, but not on selling more knives. Knives don't kill people, people don't kill people, internet cafes kill people. God help us all.
This is where it gets really funny:
minors not accompanied by a parent or legal guardian may only stay at the cafes until 8 p.m. Sundays through Thursdays.
Simpsons "Squeeky Voiced Acne Kid" Shift Supervisor: Sirs, you all appear to be a minors, and it's after 8pm. I'm required to instruct you to leave the premises.
Horde of knife toting adreneline junkies: [seeing Terminator red overlays] Scanning possible responses...
The blond kid with the goatee down the end is our legal guardian. We're all orphans, he's thirty six, he's called Mrs Conchita Aguillerra, and he has the ID to prove it.
I'm chatting to my mom on ICQ and she says I can stay until 2am. Look, that's her on the webcam. Yeah, she has a thing for whips and rubber. She's real strict, OK?
Fuck you, asshole.
Let's suppose that they could magically enforce this. Do they know nothing about the history of trying to control demand by stifling supply? Heard of a little thing called Amendment 18? "Hey, I know of a great little Clickeasy behind the funeral parlour... I wannanother cuppa Java..."
Semi-seriously, I'm reminded of a curfew in Paisley in Scotland, when all of the nightclubs were instructed to kick everyone out at 2am on the dot. The result? The emergency services quickly learned to dispatch units at about 1:50am to arrive in time for the stabbing frenzy. If gang violence is really an issue here, I don't in all honesty see how this situation would be any different.
people outside the US ought to have some scope to feed comments into the process
What's the big deal? I've been pretending to be a US citizen ever since the heady days of the RSA export embargo. Ticking the "Yes, I am a loyal US peon, and not some godless foreign evil super genius with an indeterminate accent, a fluffy white cat, and access to a might BBC 'B' Microcomputer" is no harder now than it was then - and is still about as effective in determining intention and eligibility.
If you truly believe (as I do, and as Jon Johansson and Dmiti Sklyrov might agree) that US tech law has de facto jurisdiction in most of Europe, and that Microsoft clearly dictates the market (except perhaps in Germany), then it shouldn't bother you even on moral grounds to contribute in this case. What happens to Microsoft in the US has a great deal of relevance to me, serving as I do on "USS Great Britain".
In case anyone is in any doubt about this, consider one of the causes of the American Revolution (Mel Gibson's Patriot shennanigans aside): taxation without representation*. And consider that in my life as a computer professional, private citizen, and taxpayer (to a government that gets out its chequebook and spreads its ass cheeks every time Bill drops his arrestor hook and stops over while the MicroJet is refuelled), the illegal Microsoft monopoly in the US amounts to taxation for me in Britain. Is that putting it too strongly?
* Despite saying "one of the causes", I'm sure someone will start on about how it was all about "Love the Kingdom, Hate the King" (which is was), or about "all equal, inalienable rights" or such (which it wasn't, white male slave owning landowners only club, government by lawyers for lawyers, hereditary political class, last legal slavery transaction in 1995, yadda yadda yadda).
Could that picture be more of a pitch for a cheesy cop show? "U.S. Postal Inspection Service", starring Chuck Studley as Inspector Bulge Gently, with Mary Clogg as Special Inspector Katy Aryan and Jane Smith as tenuously Hispanic Undercover Investigator Jennifer Aquilera. Plus other ethnic minority people! In the background! Doing the filing, or something!
If you read his page, you'd see that was not the case. He's got a turbo (625HP!!!!), a new clutch/trans., computer controlled EFI, and a new engine (500 miles), among other things.
So, we're basically agreeing that he talked a good game about how amazing and genre redefining it was going to be when it finally matched his supreme vision, turned on the money hose, gave vague instructions to some minions to "make it cool" without any consideration for the usability, then when it eventually matched his bonkers specification, he gave it a token test drive then lost interest and wandered off to rave about another project-of-the-nanosecond? Sounds about right.
Harrison said that if he did another one he'd like to play an Indy of his own age [...] given the popularity of episodes I and III vs II, I would look for the key artifact to be something in the Judaeo-Christian tradition again
Indiana Jones and... the Zimmer Frame of Joseph of Aramathea?...Noah's Colostomy Bag?...Mary Magdalene's Incontinence Pants?
Man, this is a perfect time to buy stock in that Lawyers Mutual Fund.
This might be just the beers talking, but I've just been playing Dungeon Keeper II, and reading this has put an image in my head that won't go away: it's a training room full chock full of nothing but vampires going "Ah ah ah!" punctuated by "ching!" as they level up.
And we wonder why we have more lawyers than gas pumps.
Slashdot Mirror
Dunno about in the US, but we're seeing this in the UK: there are no gaps at all between anything on the big commercial cable channel, Sky1, during prime time shows (e.g. Buffy)
I mean, it used to be that you'd have a flicker between ads, a long pause at the end of the last ad, then an intro (even half a second) to the show, but now it's completely seamless, I assume just through tighter editing. Given the similarity of plastic advert people and plastic content people, it's getting hard to tell if you're watching an advert, a trailer, or the content that you're actually paying for.
- sharply dividing a world scientific community [...] Experts contacted by Reuters were wary, citing the first law of thermodynamics which, in layman's terms, states that you can't get more energy out than you put in
The experts were anything but "wary"! Touting this 'invention' as a "red-hot controversy" and stating that the scientific world is "sharply divided" on the question of its legitimacy both strongly imply that scientists believe it might be true. Complete rubbish.The rubbish here is the inference you choose to draw from what they actually wrote.
The issue is divisive. If you choose to read that as anything like an equal division, then more fool you. 99-1 is still a division.
Any genuine scientist will of course be wary when cold called for an opinion about any issue. How would you answer this: "I've seen a zero point energy machine. What's your opinion on what I saw?". Most people don't enjoy calling complete strangers (who have their phone number) gullible chumps. Most likely, they'll mutter something about zero point being all very well in theory and hang up. Thus, wary.
The Reuters article was factually correct. The sensationalism and misunderstanding is in Michael's reading of it. That Reuters understands the difference between a first law breaking energy-in system and a second law breaking zero-loss perpetual motion system - when Michael doesn't, and won't correct himself - speaks volumes. He's been caught out trying to be too smart for his own good, and now doesn't have the guts or maturity to admit it. Silly child.
What? Stop contradicting yourself. No one cares about operating systems. Why would anyone "switch" their OS out from under a working set of applications, to an OS (an OS) that might not run many of them?
There is no, zero, zilch, nada, squat incentive to switch away from Windows if you only care about Windows applications.
Linux (X/GNU/Linux + applications) has to sell itself as being different from Windows. It can't win by emulating. We've already shown (and the US courts agree) that you can't compete directly with Windows even if you give the alternative away.
In other news, US businesses agreed to stop savagely beating customers who are tardy in payment. Hopefully, this will influence organised crime towards more responsible collection policies.
And an important difference is that typical generic spam is a no-risk proposition. If you send out a zillion spams and get one bite, you win. If you get zero bites, you don't lose anything, because these weren't your customers anyway.
But spamming for jobs is self destructive; you're actually closing off opportunities for yourself. Similarly, existing businesses who spam (though arrogance or more usually just stupidity) are cutting their own throats. You really have to wonder if it wouldn't be a better world if we took action to ensure that all spammers become, ahem, eligible for a Darwin Award.
- Ultima never made me actually shout out loud: "What the...? Is one of my own party stabbing me in the back? He is! Stop it! Stop stabbing me in the back! Bad dwarf! Bad! Aaaaagh!".
What, you never recruited Saduj in Ultima V?Read carefully. Ultima never made me shout out loud. To be honest, Baldur's Gate 2 only really made me exclaim "What the...?" to the world, but it did do that, and it does have to be said that pretty graphics and swooshy sounds do have more of an impact. If the content is there as well, which it is, in spades.
It's just you. The Baldur's Gate series is old school. There are several gating points, but you're more or less free to play it any way you like. Good, bad, indifferent, press on or seek out the sub-quests, chat to the NPC's, whatever. There's a lot in there, and the content is as important as the presentation.
Maybe you should give them a try. You should be able to get Baldurs Gate 1 and 2 on budget or in a multipack by now. If you're in any doubt about the depth or care put into them, ponder the pantaloons (spoiler).
Yes, Ultima was wonderful, but so is Baldur's Gate. And Ultima never made me actually shout out loud: "What the...? Is one of my own party stabbing me in the back? He is! Stop it! Stop stabbing me in the back! Bad dwarf! Bad! Aaaaagh!".
Look deep into your heart, and tell us honestly: how much would you pay for nethack-in-a-box? How much is that box worth to you?
It says so in the Copyright, Design and Patent Act 1988 in the UK, and the DMCA in the US. It's perfectly clear, we just didn't realise how badly we'd been buttfucked until recently. North American English speakers have been insulated slightly because they get region 1 English-only DVD's first with all the extra features, while everybody else has to wait and get a compromise. If regioning was really a language issue, as was originally claimed, why is the UK in Region 2 with Europe (so we'd get English language with all the extra features rather than several different European language versions) rather than in Region 1 with North America? And why do the many Canadian French or North American Spanish speakers have to mod their players (illegal for US citizens) and wait for and import Region 2 DVD's? North American English speakers probably don't even realise the importance of being able to change the region code on a DVD player easily and without restriction (mine varies between 0, 1 and 2). Regioning is a farce, it always has been, and it looks to be getting worse.
The one blessing in this case is that the judge ruled on active use of the content rather than just possession of the media. At the moment, it's OK to have non-Region 2 DVD's in the UK, it's just illegal to do anything with them or to traffic in or create a device modified to allow you to play them (hello DeCSS). It could be worse. AFAIK, there's no law or precedent that says we have to turn in our existing modified players or DVD's. Yet.
This, by the way, is a perfect example of why crap like the DMCA shouldn't be allowed to stay on the books, even if it's not used for a while. The CDPA has been around for thirteen years, lurking in stealth mode. It was always perfectly clear, it's just not been used to assrape anyone up until now (and by the way, to the poster who ripped into me for mentioning the CDPA six months ago because "it's never been used and never will be", a big fuck you, ostrich boy). Expect to see the copyright owners target DVD manufacturers next, to have region changing ability removed completely rather than just hidden away.
Nice reference, but you should probably make it clearer that you're only talking about the technicality of making the copy. There's still the issue of infringing use for a US court to consider.
Still, infringing use is nicer than infringing possession. Owning unlicensed copied material is illegal by itself, but in this case, the ruling encompassed content bought legally and personally imported (i.e. by hand) from another region. Interpreted to its extreme, that would effectively make DVD's stolen property as soon as you took them out of their licensed region (e.g. in your laptop crossing the atlantic). Not a nice scenario.
Shut up! Everyone knows that engineers work on space stuff for free because it's so cool, and NASA shoots stuff up out of the goodness of its publically funded heart for the same reason. Limitless cheap space exploitatation is coming Real Soon Now, just as it has been for the past 10/20/30/40/50/60/70/80/90/100 (insert your own number) years.
Seriously, you're quite right. Much of the cost of a satellite goes into testing and redundancy to make sure that once you've added to the massive expense of shooting the thing up there, it damn well works. You can lose the entire cost of a project based on using a ten cent diode rather than a fifty cent diode. Cutting corners is rarely a good gamble.
Oh purrrlease. Credibility only among those (like Michael) too ignorant to spot that it's a tongue in cheek rollerblading-dog piece. Admittedly, if this is a commercial scam, morons are the target market, so that might help with sales.
If, on the other hand, it's just a story about a crackpot publicity seeker, then the only sin is in publicising it in any shape, manner or form. Slashdot is as guilty as Reuters. But I don't think it's a sin, I think it's a bit of harmless fun, which is how Reuters has presented it, and how Michael would have read it if he wasn't so hot to trot out his badly remembered high school physics. (If this is a zero-point device, then it does indeed violate first and not second law)
Spot the difference:
It occurs to me that if AOL/TW do actually want ship a Linux OS that can actually wean AOLusers off of Windows entirely, then they could do a lot worse than to use some pocket lint to buy Loki and help make Linux a viable games platform.
Picture the difference:
Heck, if AOL/TW are actually interested in shipping a Linux OS at some point, they should buy them and make it a viable alternative to Windoze for Joe AOLuser.
Take the blinkers off. Most users of any given system aren't dedicated and civic minded. They just want to use it.
An example. When I was at university, my computer science class got bitten by the Netrek bug. We had at least a dozen dedicated (league) players, plus hangers on from other classes, playing it in DEC workstations. Of that group (say 20), only one of us (me) had even compiled the client, let alone developed it and fed back into the community. Out of a computer science class, putting in countless hours playing a game competitively, not one other person could be bothered even trying to tweak the client. They just wanted to play.
Games players - players - are not typical hackers (in the good sense, a lot of them are script kiddies). That's the point under discussion here, not your cozy ivory towered LUG.
And while we're at it, he's also blatantly in breach of the T&C's by linking to a site that attemps to sell the car outside of eBay, rather than just providing more information on it.
And last but not least:
Seller is John rome.ro, right? ;-)
Sounds like your buddy should have done his research. Ferrari's have always been (practically) "sold as seen" even when new, and Enzo was notorious for the contempt he showed for customers who brought theirs back with a problem. Ferraris were and always have been sold as ongoing projects, not finished vehicles. Heck, maybe the $100k Romero blew on this folly was just to keep it running.
Various .plans down the years indicate that Romero's use of his toy was tooling about at 25mph blipping the throttle to attract attention, intersperced with bouts of frenzied drag racing (you know, like real car racing, but modified for a ten second attention span). It's a wonder it's lasted as long as it has, to be honest.
By the way, I'm not criticising Romero's essential childishness, as I own an equally impractical Lotus 7 replica, I'm just narked because I had to build my folly lovingly by hand from bits of old Fords, while Romero blew $200k of our and venture capital money for his toy, and is still trying to promote it as "cool" (not cool enough for him any more though) rather than having the panache to market it as what it is: a hugely useless, stupid and self indulgent penis extension. Come on John, show a little self awareness. Your cred went in the trash at the same time as all those copies of Daikatana.
A man is stabbed in an internet cafe. The response: put a moratorium on opening new cafes, but not on selling more knives. Knives don't kill people, people don't kill people, internet cafes kill people. God help us all.
This is where it gets really funny:
Let's suppose that they could magically enforce this. Do they know nothing about the history of trying to control demand by stifling supply? Heard of a little thing called Amendment 18? "Hey, I know of a great little Clickeasy behind the funeral parlour... I wannanother cuppa Java..."
Semi-seriously, I'm reminded of a curfew in Paisley in Scotland, when all of the nightclubs were instructed to kick everyone out at 2am on the dot. The result? The emergency services quickly learned to dispatch units at about 1:50am to arrive in time for the stabbing frenzy. If gang violence is really an issue here, I don't in all honesty see how this situation would be any different.
What's the big deal? I've been pretending to be a US citizen ever since the heady days of the RSA export embargo. Ticking the "Yes, I am a loyal US peon, and not some godless foreign evil super genius with an indeterminate accent, a fluffy white cat, and access to a might BBC 'B' Microcomputer" is no harder now than it was then - and is still about as effective in determining intention and eligibility.
If you truly believe (as I do, and as Jon Johansson and Dmiti Sklyrov might agree) that US tech law has de facto jurisdiction in most of Europe, and that Microsoft clearly dictates the market (except perhaps in Germany), then it shouldn't bother you even on moral grounds to contribute in this case. What happens to Microsoft in the US has a great deal of relevance to me, serving as I do on "USS Great Britain".
In case anyone is in any doubt about this, consider one of the causes of the American Revolution (Mel Gibson's Patriot shennanigans aside): taxation without representation*. And consider that in my life as a computer professional, private citizen, and taxpayer (to a government that gets out its chequebook and spreads its ass cheeks every time Bill drops his arrestor hook and stops over while the MicroJet is refuelled), the illegal Microsoft monopoly in the US amounts to taxation for me in Britain. Is that putting it too strongly?
* Despite saying "one of the causes", I'm sure someone will start on about how it was all about "Love the Kingdom, Hate the King" (which is was), or about "all equal, inalienable rights" or such (which it wasn't, white male slave owning landowners only club, government by lawyers for lawyers, hereditary political class, last legal slavery transaction in 1995, yadda yadda yadda).
Should we expect to see some !!!MAKE $$$ FAST!!! in the register then? Quite seriously. It's either all comments, or it's edited.
Could that picture be more of a pitch for a cheesy cop show? "U.S. Postal Inspection Service", starring Chuck Studley as Inspector Bulge Gently, with Mary Clogg as Special Inspector Katy Aryan and Jane Smith as tenuously Hispanic Undercover Investigator Jennifer Aquilera. Plus other ethnic minority people! In the background! Doing the filing, or something!
Episode #1: This Time It's Federal...
So, we're basically agreeing that he talked a good game about how amazing and genre redefining it was going to be when it finally matched his supreme vision, turned on the money hose, gave vague instructions to some minions to "make it cool" without any consideration for the usability, then when it eventually matched his bonkers specification, he gave it a token test drive then lost interest and wandered off to rave about another project-of-the-nanosecond? Sounds about right.
Indiana Jones and... the Zimmer Frame of Joseph of Aramathea? ...Noah's Colostomy Bag? ...Mary Magdalene's Incontinence Pants?
This might be just the beers talking, but I've just been playing Dungeon Keeper II, and reading this has put an image in my head that won't go away: it's a training room full chock full of nothing but vampires going "Ah ah ah!" punctuated by "ching!" as they level up.
And we wonder why we have more lawyers than gas pumps.