Right. That's why a better analogy (which is still flawed) is that of a crowbar.
The DMCA effectively outlaws the use or mere possession of a crowbar, because someone might use one to break open a door. Never mind that they have plenty of legitimate, useful uses besides breaking open a door -- or that you might have a need to break open your own door.
But the DMCA goes further than that. It's also illegal for me to sell one to you, or even give one to you, or to manufacture such an item. I can't even tell you where to buy one, even though I know the hardware store on Spicewood Springs sells them. I also can't tell you how to use a crowbar, and I certainly can't tell you how you might theoretically use one to break open a locked door -- even if you own the door in question. I can barely even acknowledge that such a tool exists.
Oh, and if you manage to find one, and manage to figure out how to break your door open with it, and you manage to get rid of the crowbar before the law shows up, you can still be arrested just for breaking your own locks!
The primary purpose of a marriage is to grant legal status to a man and a woman for the purpose of raising a family. Same sexed couples cannot have children on their own, therefore they should not have be entitled to the protections of marriage.
And, by extension, couples who cannot reproduce and those who do not wish to reproduce should not be entitled to the protections of marriage or the legal benefits.
Marriage is 'special'. Places that have allowed same sexed marriages have seen increased divorce and infidelity. Same sexed marriage takes away the 'specialness' of marriage.
And these ease of getting married and divorced in this country doesn't hurt the 'specialness' more? I know of more than a few people that didn't put a whole lot of thought into getting married, and didn't think it was all that special. By contrast, I don't see how letting gay people get married destroys the marriage covenant. Are divorce rates going to be any higher among gays? Are gays automatically predisposed to infidelity? Since some heterosexual people like to swing and have open marriages, should they not be allowed to marry either?
Marriage is not a right, it is, at best, a tradition or custom. Marriage is defined as being between a man and a woman.
This is somewhat true, in the case of a marriage in a church. I don't think any (or very few) gay people are saying that their church should recognise their marriage. I sincerely hope mine doesn't. However, a whole raft of legal benefits have been tacked onto the concept of marriage or 'union' with another. It is simply not right to allow one group to marry and deny that fact to another.
To put your argument another way, Christians should be allowed to marry because they have a tradition or custom of getting married, but Pagans should not, because they follow a different concept of marriage.
My point is that even when you do rollover, it's not always obvious what you're clicking on... especially in the first paragraph of a Slashdot article. Since Slashdot is at the very least, a semi-serious news site, this is inexcusible.
I know this is going to get moderated down into obscurity by it's "off topic" nature, but I want to address it anyway, because I never it see it mentioned, and I think it's a valid complaint.
What's with all the useless links in Slashdot articles? Granted, this article's links are more relevant than most, but it's still got a lot of links that are unclear where they actually go. It's almost as if the article with the most links gets posted on the front page rather than the article with the most relative links. Usually, it's very difficult to tell where the links go, and which link will give you the information you need.
For instance, this article. The Nova link takes you directly to the initial article. That's useful, but typically on Slashdot, a link like this will actaully take you to Nova's root website. It's often the little thing after it that says "article" or "report on" that takes you to the actual article text. Amos Ives Root takes you to a paper on Amos Ives Root, in case you didn't know who he was. Useful, certainly, but the Nova article already gives a lot of background information. The Scientific American link doesn't bring you to Scientific American's root website like you'd think, nor does it link to article about how they initially rejected (though it's briefly mentioned as unconfirmed) the article, it's just a Scientific American article about the Wright Brothers. Useful in a way, but not really relevant to the conversation. "Rejected his article", which in keeping with the Slashdot style, you'd think would bring you to the article, or at least to Scientific American's article about rejecting the commentary, instead brings you to a sight about beekeeping. Granted, there is an article about the rejection, and Root did publish it in a paper about beekeeping, it seems incredibly off topic and obscure, and as short as the article is, not helpful.
The words Wright Brothers brings you to an article about the Wright Brothers. That's intuitive, and if someone didn't know about the Wright Brothers, they might could use it, but the Nova article contains much of the same data and renders this article ultimately redundant. "Publish the article" brings you to the actual article, which is welcome, but I didn't know that this link would actually bring me back the article text until I clicked on it for the sake of writing this comment. The link on other experimenters just brings you to another Slashdot article (+1 linking to Slashdot) about one particular early experimenter. There's not much actual data there (New Zealander Richard Pearse may have very well made several flights... before the Wright Brothers) and doesn't clear up the matter of other early pioneers of flight not getting credit. Oh wait, the next link, entitled "credit they deserve" brings you to another Slashdot article similar to the first. Now I understand.
Investigating links to yet another Slashdot article, this time a fairly irrelevant Ask Slashdot article on "Great Computer Science Papers?" Last, we have the technology link, which brings us to O'Reilly's Emerging Technology Conference. Lots of good information, but not linked in a way that helps you understand what you'll be visiting if you click the link.
I don't mean to single out this author, but we have a Slashdot article that supposed to be about the Nova show on Amos Ives Root, and it contains ten links to various articles of various relevance, only one of which will bring you to the article you wish to read, and it's not even clear which link that is! This is quite common with Slashdot articles, and it makes Slashdot more than a bit difficult to navigate.
Well, my recollection of the game could be somewhat wrong. I played it over the Thanksgiving holidays, so that's almost a month ago. I don't know that I watched the intro movies either, or maybe I just didn't pay attention.
Either way, I was fairly shocked by the content, and I consider myself pretty unshockable. I think I played through the first three levels or so then got bored with it. Shocking only goes so far, and I thought that the controls made executions overly difficult.
I've played the game as well. It's far from what I'd call a fun game, though it was interesting for about half an hour. My wife hated it, and requested several times that I turn it off. It's quite graphic, and the atmosphere is such that the game feels violent, dirty, and criminal. It's not something you'd watch and laugh at, like you might with Grand Theft Auto.
The only saving grace is that the game is somewhat of a "Running Man" scenario, where you are placed in a sealed off section of city with a bunch of homicidal gangs. You are innocent, they are cold blooded killers. It's literally kill or be killed. You also have to kill them "execution" style, so that the other gang members don't hear and come to save their bud. Oh, yeah, and the point is that some guy is filming it and giving you instructions through an earpiece.
My biggest problem with the game is that it's repetitive and the controls suck.
The problem is using just enough techno-babble that you get past the idiot drone that's scanning resumes and says "oh, there's no HTML experience here" and chunks resumes, even though it may be listed under something other than "programming languages". However, at the same time, you've got to put together a resume that doesn't make you look like an idiot when it lands in front of a technically competent person.
It's a horrible game, because the two people looking at resumes are looking for something completely different. I can't tell you how many times I've had HR come back and tell me that something wasn't on my resume when it, in fact, was, or when they've asked me to add things that will make me look like an idiot just to get my resume forwarded up one more level.
After working at IBM for a summer, I can very much confirm this. Not to say that they are some fantastically benign and great company (though there are many half as large that are twice as bad), but they are very much an old-style big company.
By that, I mean that they are very proud, and their name means a lot to them, and they exect it to mean a lot to their customers. They do not like to see it tarnished. They are also very big, and very slow, but they are also very deliberate, and they do not forget. I worked for them in 2002, and they were still upset over OS2 Warp, which to everyone outside the company is ancient history. They also have a ton of corporate lawyers on salary, which means they have nothing better to do than grind SCO into dust. On top of all that, they've got more money than God, and they aren't afraid to spend it.
SCO is toast. They not only poked the beast, they deliberately tried to hurt it. I can promise you that they are pissed about it, even if none of that sentiment escapes the company at large. I can also promise you that IBM loves nothing more than exacting what they feel is rightous vengance.
I'm on my second month of GamePass, and I haven't had any problems. OK, few problems.
The primary thing that sucks is that GamePass only works for one store. If you get it at the store that has a crappy selection or is twenty miles from your house, you're screwed. If a store across town has the game you want, you can't get it unless you rent it normally. Plus, Blockbuster doesn't carry every game. I can't get Dance Dance Revolution, for example.
But, overall, the service is good. I picked a store with a good selection, and it's a block from work, so I'm there literally every day. My previous month was at a store with an even better selection, but it was far enough away from the house as to be inconvienent. Games don't really stay checked out for vast periods of time, it's just that you have to be there when they do come in. If you've worked in the rental industry, you'll understand that people believe that movies (and games) are "always checked out", when the clerks know that a copy comes in nearly every day. In the first month of my membership, there was exactly [i]one[/i] game that I wanted that I was unable to obtain.
Halo doesn't support 16:9, so if you are watching it in widescreen, you're just watching the 4:3 stretched to fit the screen.
I can't really recommend 16:9 televisions, even though I love mine. You'll find with a 16:9, you can't just "watch" television anymore. Everything has it's own format, and the screen must be adjusted to fit that format.
For DVD's, it's typically standard mode, but if they aren't anamorphic (and many movies aren't), you'll have to use expand mode. If the DVD is 4:3 (many old movies, much animae, television shows, Pan and Scan), you'll either have to watch it in 'narrow', which leaves large bars on the side, or you'll have to use one of several stretch modes, any one of which can look fine or utterly horrible depending on what you watch.
You run into the same problem with games. X-Box is the best about this, as it has the preferences for 16:9 and various display modes in the box. Set all the resolutions your television supports, and the XBox will automatically pick the best one supported by the game. However, there's still a lot of games that don't support high resolution or 16:9. Here's the HDTV list for X-Box, GameCube, and PS2. If you want to search for specific games, including non-HDTV games in 16:9, go here.
As you can see, there aren't many high-def games, and not many widescreen games either. My biggest problem is that although I watch a lot of movies, I watch a lot of 4:3 content because I play a lot of videogames and my wife watches a lot of television. This means my 16:9 set spends a lot of time in narrow mode, which is bad for the television. So, I end up compromising and finding one of the stretch modes that looks 'good enough' for what I'm doing to help offset the damage I"m doing.
Essentially, it is a lock. If the opener is functioning properly, it's impossible to open the door (from the outside) without using it. Plus, using the normal lock is extremely impractical if you are using a garage door opener.
Mr. XXXXX: thanks for the note. My daughter shares your view. She's wrong too:) Stealing is stealing and this is theft. Do I think the industry has handled this correctly? I think my questions suggest probably not. But at the end of the day it is stealing. I am a bit at a loss that you see it otherwise.
Right, but it's only theft as long as everyone agrees that it's theft. As people like his daughter get older and gain influence, there will be more and more people who feel this isn't theft at all, but some other new form of fair use. All the kids I know use P2P because they simply cannot afford CDs, what do you think their attitude will be toward filesharing in ten or twenty years? Mr. Cable Guy can believe it's stealing all he wants, but if the majority of the population says "no, it isn't", then his view really becomes a moot point.
First, the 'scientific community as a whole' does not believe that global warming exists. There are many prominent and well-known scientists (along with many lesser-known ones) that believe that global warming isn't happening, and if it is, there's not much we can do about it at this point.
Talking about global climate change reminds me of a five year old telling his mother that the house is too hot or too cold. There's a reason we don't let five year olds play with the thermostat in the house. First, his conclusions may be completely wrong. He may feel cold, but maybe that's because he just got out of the bathtub. Maybe the temperature is actually fine. He doesn't know, and can't tell. Maybe a better action would be to put on some clothes. He probably doesn't understand how the thermostat works either, and will slam it all the way over to full heat. If you don't understand how something works, trying to adjust it can sometimes cause worse effects. I worked with a girl in high school who couldn't understand that setting the thermostat all the way to one side or the other didn't heat or cool the building any faster. As such, every single day that I worked with her, I went through extreme periods of heat and cold. When I was 10, I got out of a pool and went in my father's house. I was cold and no one was home, so I turned on the heater. Of course, no one had explained to me how things worked, so I ended up cranking the temperature inside well past the temperature outside -- in the summertime.
What I'm driving at, is that we shouldn't rush to fix a problem before we fully understand that problem. Especially with something so complex as the environment. You do know that we are overdue for an ice age, perhaps our current 'human global warming' is keeping that from happening, which I would classify as a good thing. Then again, things have been warmer in the past (look at the medival vineyards in Europe where it is currently too cold to grow grapes), so maybe it's not such a bad thing for the earth to warm up, and maybe it's totally natural. Maybe that big ball of fire in the sky doesn't pump out a constant 23 trillion BTUs of heat, and instead, like everything else in nature fluctuates over time.
Who knows. But, I think the wrong thing to do is to rush in and try to fix things when we can't be sure if we're fixing things or just making things worse.
What about for the people who sell adults drugs?
I think we're on the same page when it comes to selling to kids, but I'm not sure about adults.
Personally, I'd love to see drugs handled just a step above the way we currently handle alcohol. You can't buy it just anywhere, or at any old time (except in Louisiana). You have to drink it in your home or certain other designated places. Not everyone can sell it, and not everyone can buy it. Certain potencies are handled differently. Intoxicated people can't buy it. Help is easy to find if you need it, and is freely given. There's little stigma for going to rehab for alcohol abuse.
All of these help cut down on alcohol abuse. The social stigma of being a cigarette smoker helps cut down on nicotine abuse. There's certianly a lot less smokers today than there was when I was a young kid, and every week I hear of someone that has quit. We didn't achieve this by making cigarettes illegal. Think about it.
And let me touch briefly on hallucinogens: They are too dangerous for the average person. I think keeping them illegal is the right thing to do because it motivates people to be cautious about how they use them, which can only be a good thing. Most people have only a tenuous grip on reality to begin with:P
Have you ever actually tried hallucinogins? They are not nearly as dangerous as they are rumoured to be -- much like marijuana. Oh, they certainly can change your perceptions, and they can make you uncomfortable, but it is nearly impossible to die from taking too much LSD or psilocybin. They aren't addictive. There isn't a physical withdrawl. They build tolerance quite rapidly, meaning it's hard to do them often. They are in many ways, quite safe.
Keep in mind, the most dangerous of hallucinogins, datura, is quite legal. You can grow it, you can possess it, you can even ingest it, all without incurring a penalty. Of course, it could easily kill you and basically make you a danger to yourself and others for about 12 hours, but never mind that. A lot of people fool around with this plant simply because it is legal. The effects and dangers are well known, and well documented, but when you can't get ahold of 'safe' hallucinogins, sometimes unsafe ones become quite attractive.
Honestly, your attitude of "these drugs should be legal, and these illegal" is no better than our current state of affairs of "these drugs should be legal, and these illegal." If nothing else, you should be advocating help for those truly addicted, not jail time.
I don't think it actually is easier for someone to grow marijuana than it is tobacco. Oh sure, you'll hear all the time, "but it's a weed! It grows everywhere!" However, have you actually watched someone try to grow pot? Better yet, have you smoked that pot?
In much the same way that it is 'easy' to make alcohol (let some fruit ferment in a covered jar), it is 'easy' to grow marijuana. Actually producing high quality product is somewhat more difficult.
Hmm.. I've always wondered if we'd run out of oil (reasonably priced.. when the price is fixed) in my lifetime... some say yes... I really don't care about having a car.. it's convenient... but I do care about plastics and other poly-things that we get from oil-based resources... how long could humanity go without?
In case you haven't noticed, oil is cheap. Even in places where it seems expensive, it is only expensive because of the massive amounts of tax levied on it. Even then, it's still cheaper than a gallon of milk. It's cheap because there is a lot of it, and it's fairly easy to get.
This may change over time. If we start to run out of oil, it won't be that one day we have oil and one day all the wells are dry. We'll notice a slow, gradual tapering off of available oil, and prices will slowly but surely increase. At some point, it won't make any sense economically to put it in our gas tanks, and we'll either move on to another fuel or we'll start traveling less. It won't happen overnight, and whatever the end result, it will likely be quite transparent to us. The very last pint of crude, if we ever get down that far, will almost certainly go towards something more nobel than propelling a 1953 Buick down the highway.
More than likely, what will happen is what always happens -- someone will make a technological breakthrough, entirely indendpendent on government legislation, and slowly, our dependence on oil will decline -- much as we don't use coal very much today. When this breakthrough occurs, we won't have to 'trick' or 'convince' people into driving these new cars, they will do it simply because it makes sense to do so, either economically or technologically.
We're always saying you can't legislate technological innovation, so why do we believe we can do it when it comes to alternate fuels?
Except that we don't have really efficent methods of converting sunlight to usable energy yet, meaning that to supply us with enough energy to meet our current needs, we'd have to literally blanket the United States with NASA's superior (and highly expensive) solar cells.
Plus, the same people who are against fossil fuels also tend to be against nuclear energy as well. There is no current 'magical' solution.
You don't see this with movies, books or other forms of media. If I buy a DVD I can watch it in as many DVD players I want with out calling th company and explaining to them how I want to watch it in a different DVD player (I hope the MPAA isn't ideas from this).
They did, it was called Divx. Thank God it failed.
The first time I saw GIMP, I figured the original author(s) had been watching Pulp Fiction and heard the line "bring out the gimp" and thought that was hillariously funny, and would be hillariously funny to say when they needed to do Photoshop style work. The greater implications were never considered.
It's an absolute horrible name for a product. I also thought that the first time I saw it. I just figured that by now it would have changed, kind of how products are called one thing in development and testing and something much more commerical when they are actually released.
I think this is a problem with much open source software. It all tends to be written for programmers by programmers.
I'm a programmer. I use Photoshop. But that by no means implies that I fully understand how to use Photoshop. I can get around in it and do some amazing stuff with it because it's so powerful, but one of my graphics friends will use it and suddenly I feel like a 16 year old kid driving Michael Schumaker's F1 Ferrari.
Now, understand that I have no real idea which features I'm not using, much less how to begin using them at all. I know there are dozens of tools in Photoshop I've never touched, dozens that I've played with and never figured out how to use, and dozens more that I've only used in the most basic terms. How in the world would I know how to begin coding these tools into the GIMP? Even if I could figure them out, I probably wouldn't be using them in the 'right' way, and I'd probably get the interface down wrong, or worse, incorrectly duplicate (or improve upon) the tool.
The biggest problem in open source is that rather than listening to the people who would actually be using the tool (graphic artists), we sit back and say really constructive things like "but, the GIMP works just as good as Photoshop, you need to figure out how to use it" or "but you don't really need that particular tool" or "but look at all these other 31137 things you can do" or "I do more things better and quicker with GIMP than Photoshop. It's extremely powerful (to me) and extremely useful (to me)." These all sound great, but when the end user says they tried the tool and these claims don't appear to be true, we ought to be listening to them rather than dismissing the claims outright.
Of course, I don't remember Microsoft throwing money into Apple in the late 90's, when they were on the verge of being extinct. Of course, they didn't do it to be nice, they needed a psudo-competitor to help avoid the anti-trust lawsuit that was looming on the horizon.
Plus, I think Apple in 2003 is a very different company than it was in 1997.
Most of them are easy, though I can see why a young kid wouldn't know them. Some of them I still don't know, just because I don't have the right chronological frame of reference.
I don't think Sony is the one that needs to worry right now, and I don't think Microsoft is gunning for them -- yet. Remember, there's always been space for two consoles, but not three. Nintendo's market share for it's primary console has been slipping for years, as they constantly try to make the hardware they want to make and then try to convince people to buy it rather than figuring out what people want to buy and then making that.
Sounds a lot like another company Microsoft and Intel cratered about a decade ago.
Slashdot Mirror
The DMCA effectively outlaws the use or mere possession of a crowbar, because someone might use one to break open a door. Never mind that they have plenty of legitimate, useful uses besides breaking open a door -- or that you might have a need to break open your own door.
But the DMCA goes further than that. It's also illegal for me to sell one to you, or even give one to you, or to manufacture such an item. I can't even tell you where to buy one, even though I know the hardware store on Spicewood Springs sells them. I also can't tell you how to use a crowbar, and I certainly can't tell you how you might theoretically use one to break open a locked door -- even if you own the door in question. I can barely even acknowledge that such a tool exists.
Oh, and if you manage to find one, and manage to figure out how to break your door open with it, and you manage to get rid of the crowbar before the law shows up, you can still be arrested just for breaking your own locks!
And, by extension, couples who cannot reproduce and those who do not wish to reproduce should not be entitled to the protections of marriage or the legal benefits.
Marriage is 'special'. Places that have allowed same sexed marriages have seen increased divorce and infidelity. Same sexed marriage takes away the 'specialness' of marriage.
And these ease of getting married and divorced in this country doesn't hurt the 'specialness' more? I know of more than a few people that didn't put a whole lot of thought into getting married, and didn't think it was all that special. By contrast, I don't see how letting gay people get married destroys the marriage covenant. Are divorce rates going to be any higher among gays? Are gays automatically predisposed to infidelity? Since some heterosexual people like to swing and have open marriages, should they not be allowed to marry either?
Marriage is not a right, it is, at best, a tradition or custom. Marriage is defined as being between a man and a woman.
This is somewhat true, in the case of a marriage in a church. I don't think any (or very few) gay people are saying that their church should recognise their marriage. I sincerely hope mine doesn't. However, a whole raft of legal benefits have been tacked onto the concept of marriage or 'union' with another. It is simply not right to allow one group to marry and deny that fact to another.
To put your argument another way, Christians should be allowed to marry because they have a tradition or custom of getting married, but Pagans should not, because they follow a different concept of marriage.
My point is that even when you do rollover, it's not always obvious what you're clicking on ... especially in the first paragraph of a Slashdot article. Since Slashdot is at the very least, a semi-serious news site, this is inexcusible.
What's with all the useless links in Slashdot articles? Granted, this article's links are more relevant than most, but it's still got a lot of links that are unclear where they actually go. It's almost as if the article with the most links gets posted on the front page rather than the article with the most relative links. Usually, it's very difficult to tell where the links go, and which link will give you the information you need.
For instance, this article. The Nova link takes you directly to the initial article. That's useful, but typically on Slashdot, a link like this will actaully take you to Nova's root website. It's often the little thing after it that says "article" or "report on" that takes you to the actual article text. Amos Ives Root takes you to a paper on Amos Ives Root, in case you didn't know who he was. Useful, certainly, but the Nova article already gives a lot of background information. The Scientific American link doesn't bring you to Scientific American's root website like you'd think, nor does it link to article about how they initially rejected (though it's briefly mentioned as unconfirmed) the article, it's just a Scientific American article about the Wright Brothers. Useful in a way, but not really relevant to the conversation. "Rejected his article", which in keeping with the Slashdot style, you'd think would bring you to the article, or at least to Scientific American's article about rejecting the commentary, instead brings you to a sight about beekeeping. Granted, there is an article about the rejection, and Root did publish it in a paper about beekeeping, it seems incredibly off topic and obscure, and as short as the article is, not helpful.
The words Wright Brothers brings you to an article about the Wright Brothers. That's intuitive, and if someone didn't know about the Wright Brothers, they might could use it, but the Nova article contains much of the same data and renders this article ultimately redundant. "Publish the article" brings you to the actual article, which is welcome, but I didn't know that this link would actually bring me back the article text until I clicked on it for the sake of writing this comment. The link on other experimenters just brings you to another Slashdot article (+1 linking to Slashdot) about one particular early experimenter. There's not much actual data there (New Zealander Richard Pearse may have very well made several flights... before the Wright Brothers) and doesn't clear up the matter of other early pioneers of flight not getting credit. Oh wait, the next link, entitled "credit they deserve" brings you to another Slashdot article similar to the first. Now I understand.
Investigating links to yet another Slashdot article, this time a fairly irrelevant Ask Slashdot article on "Great Computer Science Papers?" Last, we have the technology link, which brings us to O'Reilly's Emerging Technology Conference. Lots of good information, but not linked in a way that helps you understand what you'll be visiting if you click the link.
I don't mean to single out this author, but we have a Slashdot article that supposed to be about the Nova show on Amos Ives Root, and it contains ten links to various articles of various relevance, only one of which will bring you to the article you wish to read, and it's not even clear which link that is! This is quite common with Slashdot articles, and it makes Slashdot more than a bit difficult to navigate.
Yeah, but since it's not available in the states, it looks like I'll have to pirate it.
Either way, I was fairly shocked by the content, and I consider myself pretty unshockable. I think I played through the first three levels or so then got bored with it. Shocking only goes so far, and I thought that the controls made executions overly difficult.
The only saving grace is that the game is somewhat of a "Running Man" scenario, where you are placed in a sealed off section of city with a bunch of homicidal gangs. You are innocent, they are cold blooded killers. It's literally kill or be killed. You also have to kill them "execution" style, so that the other gang members don't hear and come to save their bud. Oh, yeah, and the point is that some guy is filming it and giving you instructions through an earpiece.
My biggest problem with the game is that it's repetitive and the controls suck.
It's a horrible game, because the two people looking at resumes are looking for something completely different. I can't tell you how many times I've had HR come back and tell me that something wasn't on my resume when it, in fact, was, or when they've asked me to add things that will make me look like an idiot just to get my resume forwarded up one more level.
By that, I mean that they are very proud, and their name means a lot to them, and they exect it to mean a lot to their customers. They do not like to see it tarnished. They are also very big, and very slow, but they are also very deliberate, and they do not forget. I worked for them in 2002, and they were still upset over OS2 Warp, which to everyone outside the company is ancient history. They also have a ton of corporate lawyers on salary, which means they have nothing better to do than grind SCO into dust. On top of all that, they've got more money than God, and they aren't afraid to spend it.
SCO is toast. They not only poked the beast, they deliberately tried to hurt it. I can promise you that they are pissed about it, even if none of that sentiment escapes the company at large. I can also promise you that IBM loves nothing more than exacting what they feel is rightous vengance.
The primary thing that sucks is that GamePass only works for one store. If you get it at the store that has a crappy selection or is twenty miles from your house, you're screwed. If a store across town has the game you want, you can't get it unless you rent it normally. Plus, Blockbuster doesn't carry every game. I can't get Dance Dance Revolution, for example.
But, overall, the service is good. I picked a store with a good selection, and it's a block from work, so I'm there literally every day. My previous month was at a store with an even better selection, but it was far enough away from the house as to be inconvienent. Games don't really stay checked out for vast periods of time, it's just that you have to be there when they do come in. If you've worked in the rental industry, you'll understand that people believe that movies (and games) are "always checked out", when the clerks know that a copy comes in nearly every day. In the first month of my membership, there was exactly [i]one[/i] game that I wanted that I was unable to obtain.
On top of that, it costs less than three rentals.
I can't really recommend 16:9 televisions, even though I love mine. You'll find with a 16:9, you can't just "watch" television anymore. Everything has it's own format, and the screen must be adjusted to fit that format.
For DVD's, it's typically standard mode, but if they aren't anamorphic (and many movies aren't), you'll have to use expand mode. If the DVD is 4:3 (many old movies, much animae, television shows, Pan and Scan), you'll either have to watch it in 'narrow', which leaves large bars on the side, or you'll have to use one of several stretch modes, any one of which can look fine or utterly horrible depending on what you watch.
You run into the same problem with games. X-Box is the best about this, as it has the preferences for 16:9 and various display modes in the box. Set all the resolutions your television supports, and the XBox will automatically pick the best one supported by the game. However, there's still a lot of games that don't support high resolution or 16:9. Here's the HDTV list for X-Box, GameCube, and PS2. If you want to search for specific games, including non-HDTV games in 16:9, go here.
As you can see, there aren't many high-def games, and not many widescreen games either. My biggest problem is that although I watch a lot of movies, I watch a lot of 4:3 content because I play a lot of videogames and my wife watches a lot of television. This means my 16:9 set spends a lot of time in narrow mode, which is bad for the television. So, I end up compromising and finding one of the stretch modes that looks 'good enough' for what I'm doing to help offset the damage I"m doing.
Essentially, it is a lock. If the opener is functioning properly, it's impossible to open the door (from the outside) without using it. Plus, using the normal lock is extremely impractical if you are using a garage door opener.
Right, but it's only theft as long as everyone agrees that it's theft. As people like his daughter get older and gain influence, there will be more and more people who feel this isn't theft at all, but some other new form of fair use. All the kids I know use P2P because they simply cannot afford CDs, what do you think their attitude will be toward filesharing in ten or twenty years? Mr. Cable Guy can believe it's stealing all he wants, but if the majority of the population says "no, it isn't", then his view really becomes a moot point.
Talking about global climate change reminds me of a five year old telling his mother that the house is too hot or too cold. There's a reason we don't let five year olds play with the thermostat in the house. First, his conclusions may be completely wrong. He may feel cold, but maybe that's because he just got out of the bathtub. Maybe the temperature is actually fine. He doesn't know, and can't tell. Maybe a better action would be to put on some clothes. He probably doesn't understand how the thermostat works either, and will slam it all the way over to full heat. If you don't understand how something works, trying to adjust it can sometimes cause worse effects. I worked with a girl in high school who couldn't understand that setting the thermostat all the way to one side or the other didn't heat or cool the building any faster. As such, every single day that I worked with her, I went through extreme periods of heat and cold. When I was 10, I got out of a pool and went in my father's house. I was cold and no one was home, so I turned on the heater. Of course, no one had explained to me how things worked, so I ended up cranking the temperature inside well past the temperature outside -- in the summertime.
What I'm driving at, is that we shouldn't rush to fix a problem before we fully understand that problem. Especially with something so complex as the environment. You do know that we are overdue for an ice age, perhaps our current 'human global warming' is keeping that from happening, which I would classify as a good thing. Then again, things have been warmer in the past (look at the medival vineyards in Europe where it is currently too cold to grow grapes), so maybe it's not such a bad thing for the earth to warm up, and maybe it's totally natural. Maybe that big ball of fire in the sky doesn't pump out a constant 23 trillion BTUs of heat, and instead, like everything else in nature fluctuates over time.
Who knows. But, I think the wrong thing to do is to rush in and try to fix things when we can't be sure if we're fixing things or just making things worse.
What about for the people who sell adults drugs?
I think we're on the same page when it comes to selling to kids, but I'm not sure about adults.
Personally, I'd love to see drugs handled just a step above the way we currently handle alcohol. You can't buy it just anywhere, or at any old time (except in Louisiana). You have to drink it in your home or certain other designated places. Not everyone can sell it, and not everyone can buy it. Certain potencies are handled differently. Intoxicated people can't buy it. Help is easy to find if you need it, and is freely given. There's little stigma for going to rehab for alcohol abuse.
All of these help cut down on alcohol abuse. The social stigma of being a cigarette smoker helps cut down on nicotine abuse. There's certianly a lot less smokers today than there was when I was a young kid, and every week I hear of someone that has quit. We didn't achieve this by making cigarettes illegal. Think about it.
And let me touch briefly on hallucinogens: They are too dangerous for the average person. I think keeping them illegal is the right thing to do because it motivates people to be cautious about how they use them, which can only be a good thing. Most people have only a tenuous grip on reality to begin with :P
Have you ever actually tried hallucinogins? They are not nearly as dangerous as they are rumoured to be -- much like marijuana. Oh, they certainly can change your perceptions, and they can make you uncomfortable, but it is nearly impossible to die from taking too much LSD or psilocybin. They aren't addictive. There isn't a physical withdrawl. They build tolerance quite rapidly, meaning it's hard to do them often. They are in many ways, quite safe.
Keep in mind, the most dangerous of hallucinogins, datura, is quite legal. You can grow it, you can possess it, you can even ingest it, all without incurring a penalty. Of course, it could easily kill you and basically make you a danger to yourself and others for about 12 hours, but never mind that. A lot of people fool around with this plant simply because it is legal. The effects and dangers are well known, and well documented, but when you can't get ahold of 'safe' hallucinogins, sometimes unsafe ones become quite attractive.
Honestly, your attitude of "these drugs should be legal, and these illegal" is no better than our current state of affairs of "these drugs should be legal, and these illegal." If nothing else, you should be advocating help for those truly addicted, not jail time.
I don't think it actually is easier for someone to grow marijuana than it is tobacco. Oh sure, you'll hear all the time, "but it's a weed! It grows everywhere!" However, have you actually watched someone try to grow pot? Better yet, have you smoked that pot?
In much the same way that it is 'easy' to make alcohol (let some fruit ferment in a covered jar), it is 'easy' to grow marijuana. Actually producing high quality product is somewhat more difficult.
Hmm.. I've always wondered if we'd run out of oil (reasonably priced.. when the price is fixed) in my lifetime... some say yes... I really don't care about having a car.. it's convenient... but I do care about plastics and other poly-things that we get from oil-based resources... how long could humanity go without?
In case you haven't noticed, oil is cheap. Even in places where it seems expensive, it is only expensive because of the massive amounts of tax levied on it. Even then, it's still cheaper than a gallon of milk. It's cheap because there is a lot of it, and it's fairly easy to get.
This may change over time. If we start to run out of oil, it won't be that one day we have oil and one day all the wells are dry. We'll notice a slow, gradual tapering off of available oil, and prices will slowly but surely increase. At some point, it won't make any sense economically to put it in our gas tanks, and we'll either move on to another fuel or we'll start traveling less. It won't happen overnight, and whatever the end result, it will likely be quite transparent to us. The very last pint of crude, if we ever get down that far, will almost certainly go towards something more nobel than propelling a 1953 Buick down the highway.
More than likely, what will happen is what always happens -- someone will make a technological breakthrough, entirely indendpendent on government legislation, and slowly, our dependence on oil will decline -- much as we don't use coal very much today. When this breakthrough occurs, we won't have to 'trick' or 'convince' people into driving these new cars, they will do it simply because it makes sense to do so, either economically or technologically.
We're always saying you can't legislate technological innovation, so why do we believe we can do it when it comes to alternate fuels?
Except that we don't have really efficent methods of converting sunlight to usable energy yet, meaning that to supply us with enough energy to meet our current needs, we'd have to literally blanket the United States with NASA's superior (and highly expensive) solar cells.
Plus, the same people who are against fossil fuels also tend to be against nuclear energy as well. There is no current 'magical' solution.
You don't see this with movies, books or other forms of media. If I buy a DVD I can watch it in as many DVD players I want with out calling th company and explaining to them how I want to watch it in a different DVD player (I hope the MPAA isn't ideas from this).
They did, it was called Divx. Thank God it failed.
The first time I saw GIMP, I figured the original author(s) had been watching Pulp Fiction and heard the line "bring out the gimp" and thought that was hillariously funny, and would be hillariously funny to say when they needed to do Photoshop style work. The greater implications were never considered.
It's an absolute horrible name for a product. I also thought that the first time I saw it. I just figured that by now it would have changed, kind of how products are called one thing in development and testing and something much more commerical when they are actually released.
I think this is a problem with much open source software. It all tends to be written for programmers by programmers.
I'm a programmer. I use Photoshop. But that by no means implies that I fully understand how to use Photoshop. I can get around in it and do some amazing stuff with it because it's so powerful, but one of my graphics friends will use it and suddenly I feel like a 16 year old kid driving Michael Schumaker's F1 Ferrari.
Now, understand that I have no real idea which features I'm not using, much less how to begin using them at all. I know there are dozens of tools in Photoshop I've never touched, dozens that I've played with and never figured out how to use, and dozens more that I've only used in the most basic terms. How in the world would I know how to begin coding these tools into the GIMP? Even if I could figure them out, I probably wouldn't be using them in the 'right' way, and I'd probably get the interface down wrong, or worse, incorrectly duplicate (or improve upon) the tool.
The biggest problem in open source is that rather than listening to the people who would actually be using the tool (graphic artists), we sit back and say really constructive things like "but, the GIMP works just as good as Photoshop, you need to figure out how to use it" or "but you don't really need that particular tool" or "but look at all these other 31137 things you can do" or "I do more things better and quicker with GIMP than Photoshop. It's extremely powerful (to me) and extremely useful (to me)." These all sound great, but when the end user says they tried the tool and these claims don't appear to be true, we ought to be listening to them rather than dismissing the claims outright.
Of course, I don't remember Microsoft throwing money into Apple in the late 90's, when they were on the verge of being extinct. Of course, they didn't do it to be nice, they needed a psudo-competitor to help avoid the anti-trust lawsuit that was looming on the horizon.
Plus, I think Apple in 2003 is a very different company than it was in 1997.
and the answers, they are all right here.
Most of them are easy, though I can see why a young kid wouldn't know them. Some of them I still don't know, just because I don't have the right chronological frame of reference.
I don't think Sony is the one that needs to worry right now, and I don't think Microsoft is gunning for them -- yet. Remember, there's always been space for two consoles, but not three. Nintendo's market share for it's primary console has been slipping for years, as they constantly try to make the hardware they want to make and then try to convince people to buy it rather than figuring out what people want to buy and then making that.
Sounds a lot like another company Microsoft and Intel cratered about a decade ago.