You do realize that far more people die from boating accidents than aircraft accidents, right? Never mind cars..
Then again, I guess if you take your safety tips from the movies, you probably already have an irrational fear of visiting Japan, DC, Los Angeles, New York, (insert Hollywood-destroyed city here):)
Actually, typically what you see in Canada is a multi-monopoly system, legacy of the days when damn-near everything was a Crown Corporation (government owned and run). The phone system just privitized in the last few years here, for example. Net result? No one bothers competing (and in many cases legally still CAN'T), and you have no options.
Long distance rates took years longer to drop than they should have, local service is getting progressively more expensive, and cable (as in TV) just generally stinks. Broadband connections however... you'd have to pay me about 4x what I'm making here to move to the US.
While this goes against everything I believe in, I'll still say it again and again and again: sometimes, LESS choice can mean BETTER service. Of course, this assumes that your #1 priority is your bandwidth. Like me:)
Is Smith & Wesson guilty because I decided to kill someone using a weapon manufactured by them?
Is RJ Reynolds guilty because I decided to kill myself using a product manufactured by them? Apparently so, if all these billions being paid out in the US are true.
Yeah, a bit trollish, so sue me:) Just never forget, legal systems don't have to make sense, they just have to garner headlines.
Secondly, it just involves thinking, I mean, there are hundreds or thousands of games that do so.
I don't see why the presence/absence of games in a particular category should preclude them. Physical games? Caps, pissing contests, propane tank hurling, bumper-shining, beer can skeet, etc, etc, etc. I can easily come up with a hundred games that I've actually played (grew up in rural Canada) that are physical, but aren't in the Olympics.
Oh, and for the record: you don't need to appease the non-athletic crowd. Most of us are smart enough to not waste our time with media-driven 'events' in the first place:)
Anyone else ever wonder about the little blurb when you try to download the 128-bit encryption for IE?
The Windows 2000 High Encryption Pack is eligible for export from the U.S. to all customers worldwide, except to US embargoed destinations. Please see http://www.microsoft.com/exporting/ for details. Other countries may exercise separate jurisdiction over the import, export or use of encryption products. Users who download this product should observe any local regulations that may apply to the distribution or use of encryption products.
I've always wondered just how they seem to think this is enforcable.. I guess the cuban tld is firewalled over at Redmond?:)
Perhaps someone can shed some light on this for me, or I'm just completely misunderstanding the issue here:
When a fully-grown human dies, they have the legal right to allow for their body to be used for medical research/treatment. When a child dies, the parents have the legal right to allow the child's body to be used for medical research/treatment.
If we have a microscopically small cluster of cells, not being used for anything, which is going to be literally flushed, but just so happens to be an embryo, the US government does not want research done on it. Sorry if I seem a bit shady on the details, CNN's recap at 2 am last night never really explained whether this is more of a funding issue or a legal one.
Am I completely missing the point here? Or is my life not considered as valid a form of 'human life' as a 5-day old embryo?
PONG was the first commercially sucessful arcade game. Spacewar, for all its charm, never really made it past the eyes of a few hundred geeks. PONG came out a decade after, and after a day or 2 in operation, the owner called in for repairs thinking it was broken - turns out the coin slot was jammed full of quarters:) If this doesn't indicate just how new arcade games were at the time, I don't know what will!
Incidentally, Spacewar is typically considered the first VIDEO game. As I'm sure lots of other people will point out, pinball had electronic components in it for a long time before 1961. And just for more useless trivia, the first HOME video game was the Oddyssey, built by Magnavox in 1972. So old, it didn't even have a microprocessor... just yards and yards of transistors and the like... those were the days all right!
mental horizon - A term I made up to describe how poor children tend to be unaware that there's a world outside their neighborhood.
Heh. While I agree with this statement, watch a movie like 'Clueless' some time, and tell me that this doesn't apply even more so to the really affluent:) People in general don't realize just how big and varied the world really is.
Any child who plays video games 18 hours a week probably owns a computer (or at least his family does). Thus his family is most likely to be upper-middle class or higher, socially speaking.
You know, I've seen this comment repeated many times throughout the various/. articles on kids and gaming recently, and I have to disagree. At least here (Canada), more affluent kids tend to play a lot LESS games, as their parents can more readily afford spending the hundreds (and thousands) of dollars necessary these days on things like sports equipment. Poor kids just don't play hockey any more, they can't afford it. Never mind when kids become teenagers, and the 'rich' ones have cars and seemingly unlimited allowances, while the poor ones get stuck with last year's Nintendo and a couple of games, grand total cost maybe $100.
I've noticed a STRONG correlation when I browse the local garage sales. The better areas of the city tend never to have classic games or consoles for sale, it's all much more expensive goods. The 'poorer' areas all seem to have a Nintendo/Playstation/etc. And it's NOT because they need the money - I've gotten in the habit of asking 'why are you selling this?'. Most common response? 'We just bought the newer version'.
Note: this of course assumes Earth-like chemistry and biology
Surface (or near-surface) dwelling beings would be exposed to a tremendous amount of 'visible' light. Most of the rest is either too long of a wavelength (infrared light just doesn't have the resolution of our visible wavelengths, never mind radio), or too short, and would either be filtered out by the atmosphere (UV and the higher wavelengths like Xray or gamma), or would kill anything with body chemistry similar to ours.
Someone did a paper on this a long while back, basically his conclusion was that the wavelengths that we call 'visible' light are just a natural result of our chemistry.
Besides, just imagine a primitive race that *could* see UV very well. It's not like they can just start a fire that produces copious amounts of UV radiation:)
Well, my point was that I already *have* what I'm looking for:) Until such time comes as I'm fluent enough in unix to run it as a desktop OS (yeah, I'm one of the 2 slashdot regulars who doesn't), and until it appears at my work, I have zero motivation to change. If it ain't broke, don't fix it, ya know?
Notepad is by design simple. If you want more, use Wordpad. Personally, I like the ability to launch a text editor for 'small' documents without waiting for 300 DLLs to load, or a splash screen, or 50 million freakin options that I'll never have a use for.
One of the biggest reasons I don't often use Word outside the office, is that it's basically gone from being a very useful word processor, to this incredibly huge, complex, 16-functions in one program.
So, any voting mechanism that makes it easier for some given type of people, who are likely to vote in a certain way, will have an "unfair" bias on the election's results
By that mode of thinking, what about people (like myself) who don't have a car, yet are forced to vote at a location well off of any major public transit route? What about disabled people? It's certainly no harder to hit the local internet cafe.
However, there are posters around for the favorite candidate of X's CEO and managers. The bosses clearly make it known who their favorite is. Do we have a fair election here?
I don't see how this would influence voters any more than our current system of 24 hour lies (err.. I mean endorsements and ads for candidates), or the incredible media bias on TV, in newspapers, on the radio....
Another common knock against electronic voting is that someone could radically alter the outcome of an election. I guess some people don't realize that votes that are counted by hand tend to be counted by people, people who tend to have opinions, just like all the evil l33t h4x0rz our there:) (Yes, I'm aware that there are strict controls on a hand count, but when professional athletes making millions are still tempted to throw matches for money, I can't imagine some civil servants making $20,000 a year being all that hard to persuade en masse).
I'm just about drooling thinking of playing Starcraft, or better yet (we hope) Warcraft 3 with something like this! No more one handed game play! Wonder if you can get carpel tunnel from touching your screen too often...
DigiScents has been working on this very thing for years now; I've talked to people who've tested it, and they claim it's damn spooky just how well it works.
Using anything other than averages and estimates would require detailed logging of a user's every online "move," in order to distinguish between downloading and other behavior. You can imagine how well *that* would fly.
Yeah, and just imagine the money that would made from all the downloading of the estimated 600 (in the first day alone) Slashdot articles in 'Your Rights Online' if this ever came to fruition:)
Where I live, in Oregon, we have no obscenity laws. That's right kids, anything goes.
No, I'm not planning on moving to Oregon to set up a server... however, I seriously doubt that it would be legal in any way, shape, or form to set up a kiddie pr0n archive server in Oregon. Maybe I'm just a little skeptic, but I've never heard of ANYWHERE on the planet that has *no* obscenity laws.
You can watch all nude dancers and drink liquor at the same time. Hard core porn? No problem.
Just a few miles north of you is this little country called Canada. For the most part, you can watch completely nude dancers and drink liquor, and rent hard core porn (subject still to some restrictions) anywhere. (/me dons flame retadant suit) Helps to not live in a country that seems irrevocably tied to its churches:)
Every time some audiophile spouts off about how crappy the mp3 format sounds on their $40,000 stereo, I can think of only one thing: where do people usually HEAR music anyway? Unless you either have very little social skills, or are over 60, most people *I* know don't tend to sit around the house for hours on end picking apart the quality of their music.
Let's face it, 200db in the clubs, and 30 year old speakers that many pubs/lounges use don't exactly make for high-fidelity sound. Nor do most car stereos (never mind the fact that the car running tends to distort this further), kitchen radios, dentist's offices, elevators, grocery stores, etc, etc, etc...
Funny game to play with your friends: take their favorite music that they hear all the time, and play a CD of it on a very expensive system. 9 times out of 10, they'll tell you that it 'sounds wrong', because they've probably never even really HEARD it before!
Then again, I'm the type of person who actually reads his books, opens his limited edition action figures, and thinks cars are designed to take you from point A to point B. Maybe I'm just an un-vain cynic:)
Funny you post this, as I just spent an hour yesterday patiently explaining to an employee that our acceptable use policy DOES in fact cover 'don't give your address out to moronic friends'. We rarely get spam in the office, as use of our company email addresses outside of work-related purposes is strictly prohibited (and so far, this works well). However, there's nothing like the day the mail server becomes completely unresponsive because someone thought that emailing 27 jpgs to each of us would be a good idea.
It's not just friends either. I've had people who are otherwise respectable businesspersons send me emails with literally 200 recipients (gee, thanks Outlook) and the subject line reading Fw:Fw:Fw:Fw:Fw:Fw:Fw:Fw:some joke or another. Do the math; logarithmic functions are downright SCARY. Unfortunately, we just can't block these addresses, as legit business does get transacted with these people.
I for one would gladly volunteer my time to give email ettiquitte training, even to complete strangers. I've had to go as far as to block close friends from being able to email me entirely; they don't seem to understand how to remove me from their (group/buddylist/whatever) on their own.
Slashdot Mirror
Then again, I guess if you take your safety tips from the movies, you probably already have an irrational fear of visiting Japan, DC, Los Angeles, New York, (insert Hollywood-destroyed city here) :)
Long distance rates took years longer to drop than they should have, local service is getting progressively more expensive, and cable (as in TV) just generally stinks. Broadband connections however... you'd have to pay me about 4x what I'm making here to move to the US.
While this goes against everything I believe in, I'll still say it again and again and again: sometimes, LESS choice can mean BETTER service. Of course, this assumes that your #1 priority is your bandwidth. Like me :)
Is RJ Reynolds guilty because I decided to kill myself using a product manufactured by them? Apparently so, if all these billions being paid out in the US are true.
Yeah, a bit trollish, so sue me :) Just never forget, legal systems don't have to make sense, they just have to garner headlines.
I don't see why the presence/absence of games in a particular category should preclude them. Physical games? Caps, pissing contests, propane tank hurling, bumper-shining, beer can skeet, etc, etc, etc. I can easily come up with a hundred games that I've actually played (grew up in rural Canada) that are physical, but aren't in the Olympics.
Oh, and for the record: you don't need to appease the non-athletic crowd. Most of us are smart enough to not waste our time with media-driven 'events' in the first place :)
Yeah, and the Gold for First-Posting could join Golf as only the second contest in which a NEGATIVE score is a good thing! :)
(I'm sure there are plently of contests in which a negative score is desirable, but please don't ruin my lame little joke with logic.)
I've always wondered just how they seem to think this is enforcable .. I guess the cuban tld is firewalled over at Redmond? :)
When a fully-grown human dies, they have the legal right to allow for their body to be used for medical research/treatment. When a child dies, the parents have the legal right to allow the child's body to be used for medical research/treatment.
If we have a microscopically small cluster of cells, not being used for anything, which is going to be literally flushed, but just so happens to be an embryo, the US government does not want research done on it. Sorry if I seem a bit shady on the details, CNN's recap at 2 am last night never really explained whether this is more of a funding issue or a legal one.
Am I completely missing the point here? Or is my life not considered as valid a form of 'human life' as a 5-day old embryo?
Incidentally, Spacewar is typically considered the first VIDEO game. As I'm sure lots of other people will point out, pinball had electronic components in it for a long time before 1961. And just for more useless trivia, the first HOME video game was the Oddyssey, built by Magnavox in 1972. So old, it didn't even have a microprocessor... just yards and yards of transistors and the like... those were the days all right!
Mmmmm... floor pi
Heh. While I agree with this statement, watch a movie like 'Clueless' some time, and tell me that this doesn't apply even more so to the really affluent :) People in general don't realize just how big and varied the world really is.
You know, I've seen this comment repeated many times throughout the various /. articles on kids and gaming recently, and I have to disagree. At least here (Canada), more affluent kids tend to play a lot LESS games, as their parents can more readily afford spending the hundreds (and thousands) of dollars necessary these days on things like sports equipment. Poor kids just don't play hockey any more, they can't afford it. Never mind when kids become teenagers, and the 'rich' ones have cars and seemingly unlimited allowances, while the poor ones get stuck with last year's Nintendo and a couple of games, grand total cost maybe $100.
I've noticed a STRONG correlation when I browse the local garage sales. The better areas of the city tend never to have classic games or consoles for sale, it's all much more expensive goods. The 'poorer' areas all seem to have a Nintendo/Playstation/etc. And it's NOT because they need the money - I've gotten in the habit of asking 'why are you selling this?'. Most common response? 'We just bought the newer version'.
Surface (or near-surface) dwelling beings would be exposed to a tremendous amount of 'visible' light. Most of the rest is either too long of a wavelength (infrared light just doesn't have the resolution of our visible wavelengths, never mind radio), or too short, and would either be filtered out by the atmosphere (UV and the higher wavelengths like Xray or gamma), or would kill anything with body chemistry similar to ours.
Someone did a paper on this a long while back, basically his conclusion was that the wavelengths that we call 'visible' light are just a natural result of our chemistry.
Besides, just imagine a primitive race that *could* see UV very well. It's not like they can just start a fire that produces copious amounts of UV radiation :)
One of the biggest reasons I don't often use Word outside the office, is that it's basically gone from being a very useful word processor, to this incredibly huge, complex, 16-functions in one program.
Then again, I still miss edit.com :)
Yeah, living in China must be a real treat. Must be even better to be in the 'minority'.
By that mode of thinking, what about people (like myself) who don't have a car, yet are forced to vote at a location well off of any major public transit route? What about disabled people? It's certainly no harder to hit the local internet cafe.
However, there are posters around for the favorite candidate of X's CEO and managers. The bosses clearly make it known who their favorite is. Do we have a fair election here?
I don't see how this would influence voters any more than our current system of 24 hour lies (err.. I mean endorsements and ads for candidates), or the incredible media bias on TV, in newspapers, on the radio....
Another common knock against electronic voting is that someone could radically alter the outcome of an election. I guess some people don't realize that votes that are counted by hand tend to be counted by people, people who tend to have opinions, just like all the evil l33t h4x0rz our there :) (Yes, I'm aware that there are strict controls on a hand count, but when professional athletes making millions are still tempted to throw matches for money, I can't imagine some civil servants making $20,000 a year being all that hard to persuade en masse).
DigiScents has been working on this very thing for years now; I've talked to people who've tested it, and they claim it's damn spooky just how well it works.
Yeah, and just imagine the money that would made from all the downloading of the estimated 600 (in the first day alone) Slashdot articles in 'Your Rights Online' if this ever came to fruition :)
No, I'm not planning on moving to Oregon to set up a server... however, I seriously doubt that it would be legal in any way, shape, or form to set up a kiddie pr0n archive server in Oregon. Maybe I'm just a little skeptic, but I've never heard of ANYWHERE on the planet that has *no* obscenity laws.
You can watch all nude dancers and drink liquor at the same time. Hard core porn? No problem.
Just a few miles north of you is this little country called Canada. For the most part, you can watch completely nude dancers and drink liquor, and rent hard core porn (subject still to some restrictions) anywhere. (/me dons flame retadant suit) Helps to not live in a country that seems irrevocably tied to its churches :)
Let's face it, 200db in the clubs, and 30 year old speakers that many pubs/lounges use don't exactly make for high-fidelity sound. Nor do most car stereos (never mind the fact that the car running tends to distort this further), kitchen radios, dentist's offices, elevators, grocery stores, etc, etc, etc...
Funny game to play with your friends: take their favorite music that they hear all the time, and play a CD of it on a very expensive system. 9 times out of 10, they'll tell you that it 'sounds wrong', because they've probably never even really HEARD it before!
Then again, I'm the type of person who actually reads his books, opens his limited edition action figures, and thinks cars are designed to take you from point A to point B. Maybe I'm just an un-vain cynic :)
It's not just friends either. I've had people who are otherwise respectable businesspersons send me emails with literally 200 recipients (gee, thanks Outlook) and the subject line reading Fw:Fw:Fw:Fw:Fw:Fw:Fw:Fw:some joke or another. Do the math; logarithmic functions are downright SCARY. Unfortunately, we just can't block these addresses, as legit business does get transacted with these people.
I for one would gladly volunteer my time to give email ettiquitte training, even to complete strangers. I've had to go as far as to block close friends from being able to email me entirely; they don't seem to understand how to remove me from their (group/buddylist/whatever) on their own.