How far down will XP-64 thunk, anyway? Are the 16-bit and 32-bit layers at the same level? Or does 16-bit sit on top of 32-bit? So a 16-bit Windows app will be thunked through 2 layers now?
(Sorry -- I just had to make this post. I remember when all the rags had countless articles on "thunking" when Win95 came out. Will we have the same when the first mass-market 64-bit OS hit the streets? Not that I know of any good PC rags these days -- suggestions?)
I didn't know this. Is that written on the site somewhere, or did you find this out via a 3rd party (tech support, someone you know who works there, etc.)?
I suppose this is moderately fair, but it can be a little irritating.
The paranoid side of me sometimes suspects that they artificially throttle their shipping rate. I base this solely on observig how my queue gets processed. I can send in my entire batch, have all of them received in the same day, but the next batch gets dribbled out over the next 2-to-3 days, rather than all at once, even though the movies are all "available now" at the time my returns arrive.
Besides, I suspect the lack of a return means less foot traffic in the video store, and probably lower sales overall.
I suspect that the main target would be impulse buys in the checkout line at Wal Mart and grocery stores. If Little Timmy sees a Hulk DVD next to the gum and candy bars, he might nag Mom to get it for him.
Hell, for $2, this would have been a sweet deal, but seven bucks? No way!
Ditto the fanboy comment. I'm currently on the 8-DVD/month plan (~$42/month, includes taxes), to get my wife and I through the slow winter months.
It's awesome. We live in small rural town, and though I like to support local businesses, the 2 local video rental places suck. The first, a grocery store, has decent prices ($1 for old flicks, $2.50 for new releases, for 2 days), but nearly all of their movies are full-screen (eeewwww!), and their selection is pretty limited. The other store, charges $2-to-$4 for one day (!!!), though their selection is fairly eclectic.
Netflix beats them, hands down. The turn-around is pretty quick, so I can get movies in 2-to-3 days delivered, plus another 2-to-3 days to return. In batch mode, I can cycle through about 4 lots of 8 DVDs in a month ($42/32=$1.31 -- not bad per rental, eh?). Sending movies back at the rate I can watch them is roughly 1 movie per day, about the same prie per disc. When we get into "marathon mode" we can crank up the rate even more.
I always have a few TV series DVDs on-hand and a few movies for both my wife and and the kids. Right now we're cycling through the X-Files (just finished Season 2, DVD 7) and Battlestar Galactica (my kids -- 5 & 8 -- love this show).
The mix of available movies and genres is awesome. The kids enjoy anime (they have Castle in the Sky, right now), and my wife and I have gone on a foreign film binge: watched Open Your Eyes (the Spanish original to the US's Vanilla Sky) 2 days ago, watched the German film The Winter Sleepers last night, and will watch the French film Venus Beauty Institue tonight.
My only gripe is the sometimes-long wait for certain movies. I've been waiting for Disc 4 of the Bubblegum Crisis Tokyo 2040 series for months, and it looks like it's a long wait for the first season of Sex In the City and the new DVD release of Underworld. Also, the rate of shipping slowed down between Thanksgiving and New Year's, I assume due to the backlog of the US Postal service dealing with gifts and holiday deliveries.
But overall, the experience has been very worth-while. I encourage anyone to check it out.
Remember back in 96-97 there was a big rage in "lie detection software" which supposedly would analyze audio input of someone speaking and then match their voice stress level to either "True" or "False" indicators?
Anyone remember that horrible TV show "Lie Detector" from the early 80s? If I recall, it was in an afternoon time slot, sandwiched somewhere between "The People's Court" and another afternoon show. What a scream!
Linux was once the same way. People doing stuff like this (imho) is what pushes the computing world further.
I agree. Wasn't it this same kind of tinkering that advanced personal computers in the early 80s?
I mean seriously... if someone designs and builds their own version of an internal combustion engine and then publishes their work, they should be given some kudos. Not only is the exercise in itself impressive due to the skill involved, the fact that someone took the time to learn the process and share the results should be lauded. So what if the ICE is relatively ancient technology -- it's cool for cool's sake. And who knows -- a new design/technique may even be happened across.
I must second a previous poster's suggestion to use 3Ware cards. I admin several servers with 2 8-port cards and hot-swap IDE bays. Using hdparm, you should be able to spin down and power off the drive. Once that's done, you can use the 3ware manager to "remove" the device, then physically swap it out.
Using a desktop removable IDE drive bay, you should be able to accomplish what you want.
The only prboblem is the non-plug-n-play nature of these removable drive bays. What I want is a bay that acts almost like the an 8-track drive or the cart-style game consoles: pop out a drive, then pop in a new one -- no screws to mess with and no wires to plug in.
If you plan on a lot of travelling in remote locations, and you have the money, check out a satellite phone -- the price has gone down in price. Yeah, it's overkill -- but I thought I'd suggest it anyway.:)
Given the ever accelerating clockspeed of processors, is the raw performance of langauges that big an issue?
You bet it is. I work for a high performance comptig center at a good-sized US university. While I don't support our various cluster machines directly, I interact with those that do (the admins and, sometimes, the users).
On our Intel- and AMD-based clusters, the commercial compilers are often preferred to gcc (we provide both). While gcc's pure C performance is usually on par ("good enough" in some cases, where portability is a factor) to commmercial compilers, its FORTRAN speeds are regarded as pretty poor (especially on IRIX/MIPS). And since our users want to eek out every ounce of performance from their allocations, you can't blame them for using the best tool at their disposal.
Still, gcc (the over-all project itself) never ceases to amaze me. It runs on more OSs than I even know exist, and in the absence of funds, it will get the job done for just about anybody (albiet a little slower sometimes).
Another thing that pisses me off is how much doctors charge those that do not have insurance and who are willing to pay upfront.
This is not always the case. It may look like that on paper (sometimes), but doctors may play funny paperwork tricks to deal with the hell imposed by insurance companies.
For example, I recently started going to a chiropractor. It's a small business in a rural town: one doctor, one receptionist. I pay a $15 co-pay, and my insurance covers the rest. On paper, that visit costs close to $100. He gets about $40 back in reimbursement. I asked how much I would pay if I didn't have insurance (which may happen before too long). He said it would be about $40 per visit.
There's so much annoying paperwork in dealing with insurance companies, that the doctors would be better off if you paid cash for a lesser amount than what they billed your insurance. It never hurts to ask. I've heard this in various usenet forums, too.
Perhaps it took years for Stephen King to build his talents to a sufficient level, and to build his reputation to a sufficient level.
A little of both. I haven't picked up a King book in over 10 years, but I tore through a bunch the 10 years prior to that. Reading his collections (Skeleton Crew, Night Shift, etc.), there's often interesting and funny tidbits about how the stories were published. I think he even had some published in porn mags (hey, you gotta feed you wife and kids, right?).
I don't recall his entire journey to fame and glory, but King just kept plugging away at it. Many criticize his writing as pretty bad (can't write a believable female character to save his life, unelegant prose, etc.), but you gotta give the guy credit.
It seems to me that someone starting out will either become an overnight success (see Harry Potter) or someone who's walked a steady pace until his time had come (King).
(Am I the only one who was reminded of the old Joe Isuzu commercials by the parent to this post?)
The whole expatriation thing is a terrible idea. If you go through with it, have fun.
Do you have first-hand experience to back this up? Just curious. On the 1-year anniversary of the Twin Towers attacks, I submitted to "Ask Slashdot" the question "Best Country to Expatriate To?". While intentionally inflamatory (probably best for the audience of Plastic), I felt a forum of tech-heads, who knew what to look for while the feds were (and still are) eroding our rights with technology, was an appropriate venue. Of course, my post never made it out of the queue.
But, my curiosity still remains.
The original poster has a good idea.
Firstly, there are (or were, last time I was inquiring about such things) really high-paying jobs to be found if you're willing to make sacrifices. I knew a guy who worked for a few years doing menial tech support in Quwait (I think) for an American firm. He couldn't do much outside of "campus" (due to security, culture, etc.), but he sacked away gobs of money. There is a niche market for jobs in American companies overseas, where your average suburban yuppies fear to tread.
On the other extreme, we all know that the standard of living in less industrialized places is far lower than domestic standards. Making $12k/yr in a suburban environment in Mexico (just pulling a ficticious example out of my hat here), might very well land you a better standard of living than making $50k-to-$100k somewhere in California.
The philosophy (at least in my own mind) of this latter option is the fact that there are still some places in the world where you can earn enough to modestly survive without selling your soul. By that, I mean what's the point of making $80k in the US, when it's all pissed away in overbearing taxes, the SUV in the suburban yuppie neighborhood, and Shiny New Things? What do most middle-Americans have to show at the end of their careers? Not too much, in my opinion. Certainly not freedom and peace of mind.
Of course, the US is the only country that I know of that requires its expatriates to still report non-domestic income to the IRS (and even pay taxes over a certain amount), so you see just how greedy the US really is. Anyone wanting to free themselves of the US will nearly be unable to if they desire to play by the rules.
There's hope for the original poster, if he's really serious. He just needs to dig in and do more serious research. My only lead for him is to search for forms of "expatriate" on Google, as there are many resources available.
Some of the eTrex models have a true magnetic compass capability. I have an old Garmin GPS III. My only real gripe is that while geocaching, it sucks to try and get a bearing while standing still (can't be done) or moving slowly (painful at best).
BTW, do any eTrex owners know if the mag compass funciton does automatic drift correction (or whatever it's called -- the magnetic bearing offset that's provided on topo maps)?
My, that was an awful movie. I thought the sex scenes, though sexy, were largely gratuitous. I got this from netflix as well, and I regreted.
To each their own, I guess. I'm certainly no student of fine film, but this seemed heads and shoulders above the majority of US films I've seen lately. Perhaps in comparison to the standard hollywood plot/storyline, anything different looks better.
As for the "gratuitous" comment... again, I'm not sure. I guess the story could have been told just as effectively without the sex scenes, but I think it was justified by the intensity of the film. I'd be hard pressed to name films where the sex scenes weren't gratuitous if you boiled it down far enough.
In any case, this is one of those films that stuck in my brain. Hell, I don't think I could even tell you the titles of the last 10 movies I've seen (except for maybe Revolutions and RotK), so that counts for something in my book.
America (and thus Hollywood) has a fucked up sense about sexuality.
Tired of the lack of decent domestic films, I've recently filled my Nexflix queue with foreign films. Apropos, just last night, my wife and I watched Sex and Lucia. We saw the unrated version, but had it been rated, I'm pretty sure it would have received a "X" rating in the US. I have no idea what rating it had in its country of origin (Spain?), but I imagine it would have been equivalent to the US's "R" rating. Having lived in Germany for a year in my youth, I know that Europeans have a much more balanced view of sexuality than most Americans.
The point is that while there was plenty of nudity and "graphic" sex (by US movie standards), it was presented so matter-of-factly, that it blended perfectly within the context of the film. Let's face it, people have sex, and they walk around naked (at times). In a US film, every furtive (or gratuitous) breast shot or sex scene is presented in such an eye-popping, oogling fashion, that you'd think such events were somehow not normal.
The filming was top-notch, and the story was quite the mind-bender. I highly recommend it. I just hope the rest of my non-domestic film rentals prove to be of such quality. BTW, can anyone recommend good films from Central and South America?
So what you're saying is that 1 death and 15 deaths are equally bad,
Pretty much, yes.
Can you seriously argue that the guy who kills a 7-Eleven clerk in a robbery is any less "bad" than Augusto Pinochet? Is murderig one somehow more forgiveable than murdering thousands? In my eyes, they both deserve the same penalty: death. Sadly, Pinochet, the former dictator of Chile, will likely never see as harsh a punishment as your typical armed 7-Eleven robber.
Even if you want to make sure that hunting stays legal, is it so unreasonable to make sure that it is hard to make the gun automatic, that the clip has fewer than 8 rounds in it?
Yeah, if that DC Sniper didn't have full-auto capability, he wouldn't have been able to take down so many people. Oh, wait a minute...
You see, if I walked into a random schoolyard and started shooting, does it fundamentally matter if I'm using a single-shot muzzle-loader rifle or a modified full-auto AR-15 with a 30-round clip? I'm still a monster, right?
Sure, in practical matters, there may be more dead bodies to clean up if I had a full- (or even semi-) auto, but the fact remains that I am a disturbed person who broke the law. If all guns vanished today, if I were that disturbed, I'd simply walk into the school yard with a 3-iron and start whackin' heads on the kindergarten jungle-gym. Are you going to argue that golf club makers should make their clubs less useful for clubbing someone to death?
And I don't buy the argument that guns are specifically designed to kill/injure people. They're designed to hurl small chunks of metal, accurately, for long distances, and at very high velocities. What people choose to do with them is their own business -- until they break the law.
Yes, this is a rather morbib way to make my point, but I hate it when people still insist on blaming the instrument of crime, rather than the criminal.
The temp at which coffee is made surely must be hotter than which it is served. Maybe people are mixing "made" and "served" in this thread because they're in a hurry.
Sure, my wife makes my coffee with boiling water in the French press. If she ever served me boiling coffee, I'd have a few choice words for her.:)
Also, 180F really is way too dangerous to use for normal household use, nevermind the waste of heating power to maintain it. I set my water heater to 140F and I think I'm pushing it. 120F seems to be the accepted standard, and with good reason, I think. But you do have the right to use your water heater as you see fit, and GE should not be held responsible if you scald yourself using your 180F water from one of their water heaters.
Tell me about it. I have on my desk two checks from Citibank: $0.24 and $0.35. They are the results of some lawsuit against Citibank and AT&T Universal Card.
I don't know how much I really got screwed (hell, I didn't even know there was a lawsuit -- I wonder how they even found my current adddress!). The letter states it was "not practical to provide individual caculations" for the refunds. Yeah, right!
I know sure as shit that the lawyers got a hell of a lot more than two checks totalling less than a dollar!
At first glance, this argument is pretty compelling, in spite of laws to the contrary --we own our homes and surface land, not the earth and/or water/minerals below it (unless you buy that right), nor do we own the skies above it.
It just makes sense -- you, by your own actions, broadcast a small scrap of the EM spectrum into my back yard. I should be able to do what I damned well please with it. If I lived within earshot of a major baseball venue, I certainly can't be blamed for listening in on the game, can I?
However, can I grant my fellow man free reign to intercept signals on private property and yet deny the government or private industy from, say, intercepting cordless phone, PC monitor radiation, or even infra-red being cast from my own body (see SCOTUS case involving cops using IR tech to snoop homes) on public property?
I want it both ways, but the logical side of me can't reconcile the conflict. Maybe I'm missing a key fact which someone else can clue me in on?
Maybe. I haven't been able to find a way around the DVD-Audio copy protection discussed on the 'net. I don't know how long DVD-A has been out, but I'm not holding my breath for a crack. Given the fact that DeCSS was possible because of some vendor's goof (left the keys out in the open, pretty much), I'm not surprised that DVD-A has not been broken just yet (that we know of).
Of course, the "analog hole" will pretty much always be around. But the joy of ripping the raw bits off the disc may be a long way off.
I bought into VMWare at v2.x -- the hobbyist/non-profit price of $100. Since then, they're damned upgrades have cost that much. I paid for the 3.x upgrade, and I'm holding steady at the 3.2.0-2230 build. As long as someone maintains the patches to allow this version to run on newer kernels, I'll stay here.
As much as I really love VMWare (the software), I think the company's getting too high on the horse. Anybody remember that Accelerated-X package? Once the only x86 X version that would run more than one head? The one that everyone bitched about their prices? Well, I haven't even thought of them since XFree86 got dual-head running, and I imagine I'm not the only one (they were pretty arrogant on USENET, I recall).
When VMWare dropped the home pricing a couple of years ago, I had high hopes for bochs and plex86. Unfortunately, I don't have much hope these days, as development pace appears to be pretty glacial. Some Linux distros need to pitch in to fund the plex86 project. Emulation/virtualization has been commoditized enough that we shouldn't be paying $300/seat for it.
Slashdot Mirror
(Sorry -- I just had to make this post. I remember when all the rags had countless articles on "thunking" when Win95 came out. Will we have the same when the first mass-market 64-bit OS hit the streets? Not that I know of any good PC rags these days -- suggestions?)
I suppose this is moderately fair, but it can be a little irritating.
The paranoid side of me sometimes suspects that they artificially throttle their shipping rate. I base this solely on observig how my queue gets processed. I can send in my entire batch, have all of them received in the same day, but the next batch gets dribbled out over the next 2-to-3 days, rather than all at once, even though the movies are all "available now" at the time my returns arrive.
I suspect that the main target would be impulse buys in the checkout line at Wal Mart and grocery stores. If Little Timmy sees a Hulk DVD next to the gum and candy bars, he might nag Mom to get it for him.
Hell, for $2, this would have been a sweet deal, but seven bucks? No way!
They really screwed the pooch with thier pricing.
It's awesome. We live in small rural town, and though I like to support local businesses, the 2 local video rental places suck. The first, a grocery store, has decent prices ($1 for old flicks, $2.50 for new releases, for 2 days), but nearly all of their movies are full-screen (eeewwww!), and their selection is pretty limited. The other store, charges $2-to-$4 for one day (!!!), though their selection is fairly eclectic.
Netflix beats them, hands down. The turn-around is pretty quick, so I can get movies in 2-to-3 days delivered, plus another 2-to-3 days to return. In batch mode, I can cycle through about 4 lots of 8 DVDs in a month ($42/32=$1.31 -- not bad per rental, eh?). Sending movies back at the rate I can watch them is roughly 1 movie per day, about the same prie per disc. When we get into "marathon mode" we can crank up the rate even more.
I always have a few TV series DVDs on-hand and a few movies for both my wife and and the kids. Right now we're cycling through the X-Files (just finished Season 2, DVD 7) and Battlestar Galactica (my kids -- 5 & 8 -- love this show).
The mix of available movies and genres is awesome. The kids enjoy anime (they have Castle in the Sky, right now), and my wife and I have gone on a foreign film binge: watched Open Your Eyes (the Spanish original to the US's Vanilla Sky) 2 days ago, watched the German film The Winter Sleepers last night, and will watch the French film Venus Beauty Institue tonight.
My only gripe is the sometimes-long wait for certain movies. I've been waiting for Disc 4 of the Bubblegum Crisis Tokyo 2040 series for months, and it looks like it's a long wait for the first season of Sex In the City and the new DVD release of Underworld. Also, the rate of shipping slowed down between Thanksgiving and New Year's, I assume due to the backlog of the US Postal service dealing with gifts and holiday deliveries.
But overall, the experience has been very worth-while. I encourage anyone to check it out.
Perfect! Have it run in real-time, with Isuzu Joe style commentary at the bottom of the screen:
"... and Saddam Hussein will stand a fair trial for his crimes against humanity..."
(He's lying)
"... and no matter how long it takes, justice will be served."
(As long as "justice" means that Hussein will be hanged sometime before the 2004 Election, upping Bush's approval ratings.)
Anyone remember that horrible TV show "Lie Detector" from the early 80s? If I recall, it was in an afternoon time slot, sandwiched somewhere between "The People's Court" and another afternoon show. What a scream!
Yeah, none of the other Trek series premiers had a decon-gel scene with a half-naked Vulcan. ;)
I agree. Wasn't it this same kind of tinkering that advanced personal computers in the early 80s?
I mean seriously... if someone designs and builds their own version of an internal combustion engine and then publishes their work, they should be given some kudos. Not only is the exercise in itself impressive due to the skill involved, the fact that someone took the time to learn the process and share the results should be lauded. So what if the ICE is relatively ancient technology -- it's cool for cool's sake. And who knows -- a new design/technique may even be happened across.
Using a desktop removable IDE drive bay, you should be able to accomplish what you want.
The only prboblem is the non-plug-n-play nature of these removable drive bays. What I want is a bay that acts almost like the an 8-track drive or the cart-style game consoles: pop out a drive, then pop in a new one -- no screws to mess with and no wires to plug in.
http://markson.net/cell_prepaid_compare.htm
If you plan on a lot of travelling in remote locations, and you have the money, check out a satellite phone -- the price has gone down in price. Yeah, it's overkill -- but I thought I'd suggest it anyway. :)
You bet it is. I work for a high performance comptig center at a good-sized US university. While I don't support our various cluster machines directly, I interact with those that do (the admins and, sometimes, the users).
On our Intel- and AMD-based clusters, the commercial compilers are often preferred to gcc (we provide both). While gcc's pure C performance is usually on par ("good enough" in some cases, where portability is a factor) to commmercial compilers, its FORTRAN speeds are regarded as pretty poor (especially on IRIX/MIPS). And since our users want to eek out every ounce of performance from their allocations, you can't blame them for using the best tool at their disposal.
Still, gcc (the over-all project itself) never ceases to amaze me. It runs on more OSs than I even know exist, and in the absence of funds, it will get the job done for just about anybody (albiet a little slower sometimes).
This is not always the case. It may look like that on paper (sometimes), but doctors may play funny paperwork tricks to deal with the hell imposed by insurance companies.
For example, I recently started going to a chiropractor. It's a small business in a rural town: one doctor, one receptionist. I pay a $15 co-pay, and my insurance covers the rest. On paper, that visit costs close to $100. He gets about $40 back in reimbursement. I asked how much I would pay if I didn't have insurance (which may happen before too long). He said it would be about $40 per visit.
There's so much annoying paperwork in dealing with insurance companies, that the doctors would be better off if you paid cash for a lesser amount than what they billed your insurance. It never hurts to ask. I've heard this in various usenet forums, too.
A little of both. I haven't picked up a King book in over 10 years, but I tore through a bunch the 10 years prior to that. Reading his collections (Skeleton Crew, Night Shift, etc.), there's often interesting and funny tidbits about how the stories were published. I think he even had some published in porn mags (hey, you gotta feed you wife and kids, right?).
I don't recall his entire journey to fame and glory, but King just kept plugging away at it. Many criticize his writing as pretty bad (can't write a believable female character to save his life, unelegant prose, etc.), but you gotta give the guy credit.
It seems to me that someone starting out will either become an overnight success (see Harry Potter) or someone who's walked a steady pace until his time had come (King).
The whole expatriation thing is a terrible idea. If you go through with it, have fun.
Do you have first-hand experience to back this up? Just curious. On the 1-year anniversary of the Twin Towers attacks, I submitted to "Ask Slashdot" the question "Best Country to Expatriate To?". While intentionally inflamatory (probably best for the audience of Plastic), I felt a forum of tech-heads, who knew what to look for while the feds were (and still are) eroding our rights with technology, was an appropriate venue. Of course, my post never made it out of the queue.
But, my curiosity still remains.
The original poster has a good idea.
Firstly, there are (or were, last time I was inquiring about such things) really high-paying jobs to be found if you're willing to make sacrifices. I knew a guy who worked for a few years doing menial tech support in Quwait (I think) for an American firm. He couldn't do much outside of "campus" (due to security, culture, etc.), but he sacked away gobs of money. There is a niche market for jobs in American companies overseas, where your average suburban yuppies fear to tread.
On the other extreme, we all know that the standard of living in less industrialized places is far lower than domestic standards. Making $12k/yr in a suburban environment in Mexico (just pulling a ficticious example out of my hat here), might very well land you a better standard of living than making $50k-to-$100k somewhere in California.
The philosophy (at least in my own mind) of this latter option is the fact that there are still some places in the world where you can earn enough to modestly survive without selling your soul. By that, I mean what's the point of making $80k in the US, when it's all pissed away in overbearing taxes, the SUV in the suburban yuppie neighborhood, and Shiny New Things? What do most middle-Americans have to show at the end of their careers? Not too much, in my opinion. Certainly not freedom and peace of mind.
Of course, the US is the only country that I know of that requires its expatriates to still report non-domestic income to the IRS (and even pay taxes over a certain amount), so you see just how greedy the US really is. Anyone wanting to free themselves of the US will nearly be unable to if they desire to play by the rules.
There's hope for the original poster, if he's really serious. He just needs to dig in and do more serious research. My only lead for him is to search for forms of "expatriate" on Google, as there are many resources available.
BTW, do any eTrex owners know if the mag compass funciton does automatic drift correction (or whatever it's called -- the magnetic bearing offset that's provided on topo maps)?
To each their own, I guess. I'm certainly no student of fine film, but this seemed heads and shoulders above the majority of US films I've seen lately. Perhaps in comparison to the standard hollywood plot/storyline, anything different looks better.
As for the "gratuitous" comment... again, I'm not sure. I guess the story could have been told just as effectively without the sex scenes, but I think it was justified by the intensity of the film. I'd be hard pressed to name films where the sex scenes weren't gratuitous if you boiled it down far enough.
In any case, this is one of those films that stuck in my brain. Hell, I don't think I could even tell you the titles of the last 10 movies I've seen (except for maybe Revolutions and RotK), so that counts for something in my book.
Shouldn't that be, "Whenever Darl McBride speaks, God kills a kitten. Think of the kittens."
Tired of the lack of decent domestic films, I've recently filled my Nexflix queue with foreign films. Apropos, just last night, my wife and I watched Sex and Lucia . We saw the unrated version, but had it been rated, I'm pretty sure it would have received a "X" rating in the US. I have no idea what rating it had in its country of origin (Spain?), but I imagine it would have been equivalent to the US's "R" rating. Having lived in Germany for a year in my youth, I know that Europeans have a much more balanced view of sexuality than most Americans.
The point is that while there was plenty of nudity and "graphic" sex (by US movie standards), it was presented so matter-of-factly, that it blended perfectly within the context of the film. Let's face it, people have sex, and they walk around naked (at times). In a US film, every furtive (or gratuitous) breast shot or sex scene is presented in such an eye-popping, oogling fashion, that you'd think such events were somehow not normal.
The filming was top-notch, and the story was quite the mind-bender. I highly recommend it. I just hope the rest of my non-domestic film rentals prove to be of such quality. BTW, can anyone recommend good films from Central and South America?
Pretty much, yes.
Can you seriously argue that the guy who kills a 7-Eleven clerk in a robbery is any less "bad" than Augusto Pinochet? Is murderig one somehow more forgiveable than murdering thousands? In my eyes, they both deserve the same penalty: death. Sadly, Pinochet, the former dictator of Chile, will likely never see as harsh a punishment as your typical armed 7-Eleven robber.
Yeah, if that DC Sniper didn't have full-auto capability, he wouldn't have been able to take down so many people. Oh, wait a minute...
You see, if I walked into a random schoolyard and started shooting, does it fundamentally matter if I'm using a single-shot muzzle-loader rifle or a modified full-auto AR-15 with a 30-round clip? I'm still a monster, right?
Sure, in practical matters, there may be more dead bodies to clean up if I had a full- (or even semi-) auto, but the fact remains that I am a disturbed person who broke the law. If all guns vanished today, if I were that disturbed, I'd simply walk into the school yard with a 3-iron and start whackin' heads on the kindergarten jungle-gym. Are you going to argue that golf club makers should make their clubs less useful for clubbing someone to death?
And I don't buy the argument that guns are specifically designed to kill/injure people. They're designed to hurl small chunks of metal, accurately, for long distances, and at very high velocities. What people choose to do with them is their own business -- until they break the law.
Yes, this is a rather morbib way to make my point, but I hate it when people still insist on blaming the instrument of crime, rather than the criminal.
The temp at which coffee is made surely must be hotter than which it is served. Maybe people are mixing "made" and "served" in this thread because they're in a hurry.
Sure, my wife makes my coffee with boiling water in the French press. If she ever served me boiling coffee, I'd have a few choice words for her. :)
Also, 180F really is way too dangerous to use for normal household use, nevermind the waste of heating power to maintain it. I set my water heater to 140F and I think I'm pushing it. 120F seems to be the accepted standard, and with good reason, I think. But you do have the right to use your water heater as you see fit, and GE should not be held responsible if you scald yourself using your 180F water from one of their water heaters.
But still... 180F?!?
I don't know how much I really got screwed (hell, I didn't even know there was a lawsuit -- I wonder how they even found my current adddress!). The letter states it was "not practical to provide individual caculations" for the refunds. Yeah, right!
I know sure as shit that the lawyers got a hell of a lot more than two checks totalling less than a dollar!
It just makes sense -- you, by your own actions, broadcast a small scrap of the EM spectrum into my back yard. I should be able to do what I damned well please with it. If I lived within earshot of a major baseball venue, I certainly can't be blamed for listening in on the game, can I?
However, can I grant my fellow man free reign to intercept signals on private property and yet deny the government or private industy from, say, intercepting cordless phone, PC monitor radiation, or even infra-red being cast from my own body (see SCOTUS case involving cops using IR tech to snoop homes) on public property?
I want it both ways, but the logical side of me can't reconcile the conflict. Maybe I'm missing a key fact which someone else can clue me in on?
Of course, the "analog hole" will pretty much always be around. But the joy of ripping the raw bits off the disc may be a long way off.
As much as I really love VMWare (the software), I think the company's getting too high on the horse. Anybody remember that Accelerated-X package? Once the only x86 X version that would run more than one head? The one that everyone bitched about their prices? Well, I haven't even thought of them since XFree86 got dual-head running, and I imagine I'm not the only one (they were pretty arrogant on USENET, I recall).
When VMWare dropped the home pricing a couple of years ago, I had high hopes for bochs and plex86. Unfortunately, I don't have much hope these days, as development pace appears to be pretty glacial. Some Linux distros need to pitch in to fund the plex86 project. Emulation/virtualization has been commoditized enough that we shouldn't be paying $300/seat for it.