Assuming the lawsuit is successful, they'll just roll the $7 fee into the base price for ALL of their plans. So my $20/mo plan will become a $26.95/mo plan. Big whoop.
In my opinion, it is a big whoop. It means that that their pricing mechanism would no longer be misleading. Right now they're saying "Our prices are great! Look, we only charge $20 a month (plus a couple of fees that are out of our control)." They hide some of the real cost in the sidelines behind a bogus "fee" just to make the cost of the plan look smaller. Ticketmaster does this too (with ridiculously high "service fees"), and I think it's very dishonest.
No, I don't think it's too late at all. If it's a decent operating system and has certain advantages over Linux (regardless as to whether or not Linux in turn has certain other advantages over it), then it will eventually catch on. In the world of software, it's never too late to introduce competing technologies.
CBC also provides most (if not all?) of its online audio content in Ogg Vorbis format.
They even provide live Ogg Vorbis streams of their radio stations (See http://www.cbc.ca/listen/ogg.html). CBC is very open-source friendly.
I have lots of experience with all sorts of times when actually knowing what was in a contract I'd signed was useful, even when simply looking up and reading the VA state law online that pertained to a specific company health insurance provision and pointing it out to HR made their lawyers drop all their demands and sent a letter of profuse apology once they figured out that technically they owed me 3x the amount of a $25K claim they had illegally refused to pay until I signed a subordination agreement that I refused to sign (having read it and recognized it as obligating me to things that they had no right to get out of me), but since you don't read things you probably aren't still reading this anyway.
Give me a break. You're stretching things a bit, don't you think? You're original point is that this regulation is an act of censorship. My statement was an attempt to indicate that this regulation isn't censorship because it doesn't censor anything. It doesn't say in any way, shape or form that certain information must not be distributed. All it does is regulate how it's distributed to give people the power to choose what they wish to see and not to see. Yes, of course this regulation forces somebody to do something. But all it amounts to is legally requiring content providers to serve certain types of information on port xx as apposed to port 80. What's the net effect for the web surfer who doesn't care? Nothing. He still gets to browse all the porn he wants, and just as legally. The only difference is that there's a port number encoded in the URL. He probably wouldn't even notice. Tell me, how is this censorship?
Your comments makes it sound like you're saying regulation = forcing something = censorship = bad. Surely you don't believe that.
If some people don't want to see pornography, they should block it. They shouldn't have the government force everyone to act in a certain way.
Regulating certain types of content to certain ports isn't forcing people to do anything. What it does is allow people to block pornography should they not wish to see it (or not wish their children to see it). Right now this is a very difficult thing to do, and the proposed regulation would (in theory) make it a bit easier.
(That being said, I disagree with the proposed regulation; it would never work in practice.)
[quote]
The real fix is that we start living sustainably.
[/quote]
Very few people who say this actually understand what the implications of that statement are.
Very few people seem to understand the long-term implications of not finding a sustainable way of life. Sustainability certainly isn't something that we as a species can achieve in a single generation, but it's something that we must aim for as a long-term goal, even if it's just one baby step at a time. The alternative to living sustainably is to eventually run out of the resources required to maintain a first-world lifestle, plunging humanity back into a survival mode of existance. What's worse, a lot of the damage done to the ecosystem will be irreversable, as we will have lost a lot of the biodiversity that's essential for a healthy ecosystem. (Yes, the earth and the ecosystem will adapt; there have been many mass extinctions in the past that the ecosystem has rebounded from; but we're not talking about whether or not the earth will be fine in the long run; we're talking about whether or not humanity will be fine in the long run.) What we're talking about here might not seriously start affecting humanity for several hundred years, but by the time it does, it'll probably be too late to do much; the damage will already have been done. However, we humans are intelligent creatures (or at least claim to be), and have the advantage of some foresight here. We can see this coming, and it would be very irresponsible of us not to take actions to at least attempt to avoid such a future.
(To anyone with the attitude of "we don't know for sure that we're causing irreversable environmental damage, so we shouldn't take any effort to do anything about it" or "we don't know for sure that the environmental damage that we're causing will actually affect us as a species negatively in the future..." - smarten up! No, we don't know for sure. But the stakes, the long term survivability and quality of living of humanity itself, are about the biggest stakes there are. If there's even a reasonable chance that humanity's current way of managing the world's resources are unsustainable, we'd be fools of a species to not correct this!)
(To anyone with the attitude of "I don't care, I won't be alive when this really becomes an issue" - go away, I don't want to talk to you.)
A standard compiler (albeit one for defining fields and definitions) would have no issues with pluton being defined twice. The only time you get an issue is when a geo-astronomer tries to inherit both parent fields....
Yeah, but that's the problem. Inheriting both of these parent fields, so to speak, is very common. In fact, astronomy is in many ways a subfield of geology. Pick up any textbook on astronomy, and you'll find that the sections on planets and planetary formation are full of geology terms.
So in other words,
field geology {
definition pluton = "A specific type of rock formation";//etc
}
field physics { //etc
}
field astronomy inherits geology, physics {
definition pluton = "A specific type of planetoid under a specific mass";//etc // WARNING: namespace clash!
}
Regardless of the specifics, I do not like this at all. I play CDs in the car and in my stereo in my bedroom. What good are disks that do not play in either place?
Then don't buy this format. Warner Brothers isn't attempting to replace the CD with this format. They're simply trying to give consumers another option for those who dig the thought of listening to their albums in higher-quality surround sound.
Your statement is akin to saying "what good are CDs if I can't play them in my VCR?".
Since do-everything DVD players are literally $40 each now, the age of the home CD player (which can only play CDs) is pretty much over for the average consumer. Why would someone buy a CD player when for the same price they can buy a CD/VCD/SVCD/DiVX/MP3/WMA/WMV/AVI/DVD/JPEG player? My point is that soon (if not already) the average home CD player will be able to play these DVD albums. I'm personally looking forward to being able to buy higher-quality audio versions of some of my favourite albums.
Yes, car stereos are (for now) an exception. But a growing number of people are moving beyond the standard CD in this arena too, instead popping in MP3 CDs to play. And the DVD album format that Warner Brothers is proposing will include pre-ripped CD-quality tracks, making it easy to create MP3s of the music for situations like this.
It's interesting, but wouldn't it be better to just use two of these chips at room temperature, rather than spend time/money/space on cooling the chip to 4.5 Kelvins?
Yeah, but now they can operate two of these chips at 4.5 Kelvins. Blammo! One terahertz!
If you've never played pitfall, especially with the original "controllers" (paddles - basically a knob and a button on a brick, if you've never used one)... that game is HARD.
To the best of my knowledge, Pitfall was never a paddle-based game. It used a joystick like most other games of that era. There was no variable-speed motion.
I certainly agree, though, that Pitfall is one of the great classics.
Nowhere in that line does it say "live pet bee on a string". It could easily be a dead bee on a string. I don't think that a "pet" necessarily implies that the object is alive: think pet rock, etc.
Actually, according to rule #11 in their official rules, "no items should use any living, non-human animals". So I guess a deceased bee (who must ipso-facto be not a bee) is the only option.
The other 'objective' senses that you mentioned are just special subsets of the general senses. Temperature sense - touch; CO2 sense - smell/taste; humidity sense - smell/taste and possibly touch; air pressure sense - sensed by the ear drum using the same mechanism as hearing, and possibly touch. The 'subjective' senses that you mention not senses in the strict sense of the word, because they're internal feedback mechanisms; they don't actually sense anything about the environment. The sense of "orientation" may be an exception. I don't disagree with calling that a sense, because it senses something about the environment - that is, the direction of gravity. I wouldn't put it at the same level as what we consider the five main senses, though, because its not nearly as developed a sense, and is (arguably) far less important.
I think this depends on how you define sense. A lot of the other senses that are often mentioned (hunger, location of our limbs, etc.) are not ways of sensing things about other objects or the environment. They're simply internal feedback mechanisms that help us to function. I think the common definition of the word sense, or at least the one implied by this article, involves the sensing of things that are distinct from the entity doing the sensing.
Most of our main senses "have big fucking organs smack in the middle of our face" because they're most useful there. Our face is high up, highly pointable, and close to our brain.
I don't disagree with this. I would consider the sense of balance as being a sense of inertia and gravity, both of which can be considered part of the external environment.
It seems we get a new "sixth sense" every few months. Perhaps it's time to review the whole "five senses" thing so that people stop using "sixth sense" as if it's something special or supernatural?
The five senses that humans have are classified as such because they are five distinct ways that we can sense our environment and surroundings. (Some even argue that smell and taste are the same sense because they're both a chemical composition sense.) The ability to sense electrical signals is in every way, shape and form a distinct sense from the five that humans have.
The universe allows only so many senses, because there are only so many ways that one object can make itself "known" to another object (which is exactly what senses are about). Think about it... there's radiation in the electromagnetic spectrum (sight), compression waves (sound), chemical traces (smell and taste), and actual contact (touch). But nature has a few other communication tricks up its sleeve, and electical signals is one of them. The fact that humans can't sense them doesn't mean that it's supernatural.
The Canon PowerShot G3, G5 and G6 cameras have focus bracketing. It's a really nice feature when you're trying to achieve a finely-focused shallow depth of field. I have two complaints about the implementation of it, though. 1) You have to switch to manual focusing mode for it to work. Not a big deal, but sometimes the simplicity of auto focus plus bracketing would be nice. 2) You can't use both focus bracketing and exposure bracketing at the same time. Sure, that would create nine photos (and take several seconds) every time you pressed the shutter button, but it would be nice to be able to do that for photos that you really want to get just right.
They see it as a way to move materials at a lower cost than jets and at a higher speed than ships.
Human psychology is interesting. This sounds great, whereas stating the truth from the other direction - "at a lower speed than jets and a higher cost than ships" - sounds terrible. But I suppose this polarity of viewpoint is present in every comprimise, by the very nature of comprimises.
As an aside: did you consider that God could, by definition he's omnipotent afterall, have forged the fossil record?
If an omnipotent God does exist and has created the earth in the manner that the creationists claim, then it seems pretty clear that he must have forged the fossil record. But I figure that if he took so much care to forge so much evidence (specifically for us to find), then it's pretty obvious that he wants us to believe in evolution. He'd be a pretty mean God if he planted all of this evidence, gave us the intelligence to interpret it, and then dammed us for coming to logical conclusions about it.
Sometimes my television is left on by accident because when I turn off the video source, the screen of the TV goes black as if it's off, and the only visual indication that the TV is still on is a small green LED that's not always easy to see. However, the moment I walk into my apartment, I can tell that the TV is on, because I can hear a very audible high-pitched whine coming from it. It always amazes my friends, because nobody else can seem to hear it at all, even those that are several years younger than me. (I'm 35.) So I guess my ability to hear high-pitched sounds is better than average. I suspect, then, that the entrance to the convenience store mentioned in the article would be as annoying to me as it is to the teens they're trying to drive away. That would suck.
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In my opinion, it is a big whoop. It means that that their pricing mechanism would no longer be misleading. Right now they're saying "Our prices are great! Look, we only charge $20 a month (plus a couple of fees that are out of our control)." They hide some of the real cost in the sidelines behind a bogus "fee" just to make the cost of the plan look smaller. Ticketmaster does this too (with ridiculously high "service fees"), and I think it's very dishonest.
No, I don't think it's too late at all. If it's a decent operating system and has certain advantages over Linux (regardless as to whether or not Linux in turn has certain other advantages over it), then it will eventually catch on. In the world of software, it's never too late to introduce competing technologies.
CBC also provides most (if not all?) of its online audio content in Ogg Vorbis format. They even provide live Ogg Vorbis streams of their radio stations (See http://www.cbc.ca/listen/ogg.html). CBC is very open-source friendly.
Your comments makes it sound like you're saying regulation = forcing something = censorship = bad. Surely you don't believe that.
Regulating certain types of content to certain ports isn't forcing people to do anything. What it does is allow people to block pornography should they not wish to see it (or not wish their children to see it). Right now this is a very difficult thing to do, and the proposed regulation would (in theory) make it a bit easier.
(That being said, I disagree with the proposed regulation; it would never work in practice.)
Those that can, do. Those that can't, teach.
Very few people seem to understand the long-term implications of not finding a sustainable way of life. Sustainability certainly isn't something that we as a species can achieve in a single generation, but it's something that we must aim for as a long-term goal, even if it's just one baby step at a time. The alternative to living sustainably is to eventually run out of the resources required to maintain a first-world lifestle, plunging humanity back into a survival mode of existance. What's worse, a lot of the damage done to the ecosystem will be irreversable, as we will have lost a lot of the biodiversity that's essential for a healthy ecosystem. (Yes, the earth and the ecosystem will adapt; there have been many mass extinctions in the past that the ecosystem has rebounded from; but we're not talking about whether or not the earth will be fine in the long run; we're talking about whether or not humanity will be fine in the long run.) What we're talking about here might not seriously start affecting humanity for several hundred years, but by the time it does, it'll probably be too late to do much; the damage will already have been done. However, we humans are intelligent creatures (or at least claim to be), and have the advantage of some foresight here. We can see this coming, and it would be very irresponsible of us not to take actions to at least attempt to avoid such a future.
(To anyone with the attitude of "we don't know for sure that we're causing irreversable environmental damage, so we shouldn't take any effort to do anything about it" or "we don't know for sure that the environmental damage that we're causing will actually affect us as a species negatively in the future..." - smarten up! No, we don't know for sure. But the stakes, the long term survivability and quality of living of humanity itself, are about the biggest stakes there are. If there's even a reasonable chance that humanity's current way of managing the world's resources are unsustainable, we'd be fools of a species to not correct this!)
(To anyone with the attitude of "I don't care, I won't be alive when this really becomes an issue" - go away, I don't want to talk to you.)
Yeah, but that's the problem. Inheriting both of these parent fields, so to speak, is very common. In fact, astronomy is in many ways a subfield of geology. Pick up any textbook on astronomy, and you'll find that the sections on planets and planetary formation are full of geology terms.
So in other words,
field geology { //etc
//etc
//etc
// WARNING: namespace clash!
definition pluton = "A specific type of rock formation";
}
field physics {
}
field astronomy inherits geology, physics {
definition pluton = "A specific type of planetoid under a specific mass";
}
Then don't buy this format. Warner Brothers isn't attempting to replace the CD with this format. They're simply trying to give consumers another option for those who dig the thought of listening to their albums in higher-quality surround sound.
Your statement is akin to saying "what good are CDs if I can't play them in my VCR?".
Since do-everything DVD players are literally $40 each now, the age of the home CD player (which can only play CDs) is pretty much over for the average consumer. Why would someone buy a CD player when for the same price they can buy a CD/VCD/SVCD/DiVX/MP3/WMA/WMV/AVI/DVD/JPEG player? My point is that soon (if not already) the average home CD player will be able to play these DVD albums. I'm personally looking forward to being able to buy higher-quality audio versions of some of my favourite albums.
Yes, car stereos are (for now) an exception. But a growing number of people are moving beyond the standard CD in this arena too, instead popping in MP3 CDs to play. And the DVD album format that Warner Brothers is proposing will include pre-ripped CD-quality tracks, making it easy to create MP3s of the music for situations like this.
Yeah, but now they can operate two of these chips at 4.5 Kelvins. Blammo! One terahertz!
To the best of my knowledge, Pitfall was never a paddle-based game. It used a joystick like most other games of that era. There was no variable-speed motion.
I certainly agree, though, that Pitfall is one of the great classics.
I seem to recall something like this in the movie "S1m0ne".
The other 'objective' senses that you mentioned are just special subsets of the general senses. Temperature sense - touch; CO2 sense - smell/taste; humidity sense - smell/taste and possibly touch; air pressure sense - sensed by the ear drum using the same mechanism as hearing, and possibly touch. The 'subjective' senses that you mention not senses in the strict sense of the word, because they're internal feedback mechanisms; they don't actually sense anything about the environment. The sense of "orientation" may be an exception. I don't disagree with calling that a sense, because it senses something about the environment - that is, the direction of gravity. I wouldn't put it at the same level as what we consider the five main senses, though, because its not nearly as developed a sense, and is (arguably) far less important.
Most of our main senses "have big fucking organs smack in the middle of our face" because they're most useful there. Our face is high up, highly pointable, and close to our brain.
I don't disagree with this. I would consider the sense of balance as being a sense of inertia and gravity, both of which can be considered part of the external environment.
The five senses that humans have are classified as such because they are five distinct ways that we can sense our environment and surroundings. (Some even argue that smell and taste are the same sense because they're both a chemical composition sense.) The ability to sense electrical signals is in every way, shape and form a distinct sense from the five that humans have.
The universe allows only so many senses, because there are only so many ways that one object can make itself "known" to another object (which is exactly what senses are about). Think about it... there's radiation in the electromagnetic spectrum (sight), compression waves (sound), chemical traces (smell and taste), and actual contact (touch). But nature has a few other communication tricks up its sleeve, and electical signals is one of them. The fact that humans can't sense them doesn't mean that it's supernatural.
The Canon PowerShot G3, G5 and G6 cameras have focus bracketing. It's a really nice feature when you're trying to achieve a finely-focused shallow depth of field. I have two complaints about the implementation of it, though. 1) You have to switch to manual focusing mode for it to work. Not a big deal, but sometimes the simplicity of auto focus plus bracketing would be nice. 2) You can't use both focus bracketing and exposure bracketing at the same time. Sure, that would create nine photos (and take several seconds) every time you pressed the shutter button, but it would be nice to be able to do that for photos that you really want to get just right.
Human psychology is interesting. This sounds great, whereas stating the truth from the other direction - "at a lower speed than jets and a higher cost than ships" - sounds terrible. But I suppose this polarity of viewpoint is present in every comprimise, by the very nature of comprimises.
If an omnipotent God does exist and has created the earth in the manner that the creationists claim, then it seems pretty clear that he must have forged the fossil record. But I figure that if he took so much care to forge so much evidence (specifically for us to find), then it's pretty obvious that he wants us to believe in evolution. He'd be a pretty mean God if he planted all of this evidence, gave us the intelligence to interpret it, and then dammed us for coming to logical conclusions about it.
Hello?!? Where's 2*2*3*75011 when his infamous postings would finally be relevant?!?
Sometimes my television is left on by accident because when I turn off the video source, the screen of the TV goes black as if it's off, and the only visual indication that the TV is still on is a small green LED that's not always easy to see. However, the moment I walk into my apartment, I can tell that the TV is on, because I can hear a very audible high-pitched whine coming from it. It always amazes my friends, because nobody else can seem to hear it at all, even those that are several years younger than me. (I'm 35.) So I guess my ability to hear high-pitched sounds is better than average. I suspect, then, that the entrance to the convenience store mentioned in the article would be as annoying to me as it is to the teens they're trying to drive away. That would suck.