"If MS can start distributing Movies and TV shows through this thing, that will be HUGE."
Kids just want games, adults just want movies, and neither is all that interested in sharing with the other (I don't know about Japan, but most US homes have more than one television for just this reason).
Even at the PS2 launch in Japan, when it was bought more as a DVD player than a game console, it didn't do all that well against honest-to-God DVD players.
Dude, this is Slashdot. We aren't even able to get Wapanese girlfriends.
BTW, I don't think "Will you go out with me so you can teach me a new language?" will work as a good pick-up line. Not that I would know, since, again, I'm a Slashdotter.
"I've used it for a couple of months to teach myself German, it's fantastic."
Keep in mind you're using your experience learning a language from which English is derived and assuming it works equally well wtih a language that has nothing to do with English.
"verstehen Sie?"
I may not remember much from high school, but you have more than one reader: versteh ihr. Wakarimasu-ka?
Actually, considering how much the Japanese mangle English (I thought that was our job!), I'd say it's a good thing that more poor speakers are learning Japanese so that we can have our just revenge.:)
Mr Smiles likes the words "Fast", "Top of the Line" and "Expandable". He runs over to a machine surrounded in glitter and advertising and gestures at it. "This is probably what you want then. The latest thing. There's only two in the country and luckily we have one here today"
"Yes yes, but will it talk to my laptop?"
"THIS baby will talk to ANYTHING. What's the interface, ethernet?"
"No, a SCSI-1 Interface. My machine pretends to be a disk, ID 3. But lots of machines kill my machine's powersupply with inductive transience backflow due to a non-standard SCSI interface...
*DUMMY MODE ONE*
He practically BEGS me to try the new machine out. Which I've been waiting for. I drag out my luggable, which is, admittedly, a bit of a beast.
"Wow! That IS old!! And *ungh!*.. quite heavy too. I guess you're quite attached to it?"
I mumble about legacy data, only use it at home, sentimental value and irreplaceable software while he plugs it in and starts the host machine.
"Okay, let's see what we can see" he says, and presses the power-on switch on my "portable" The 31 hefty nicad batteries that make up almost the entire inside of my "laptop" pour grunt into a tripling inverter which in turn supplies RICH, CHUNKY VOLTS to alternate pins on the "SCSI" bus, whilst emitting a dull "uuurk" sound.
"My Laptop!" I cry, reaching for it, just as smoke starts pouring out the back of the display machine. Mr Smiles dives for the demo machine weeping, while I exit, in "anguish".......resetting the circuit breaker in my machine as I go.....to the next stall...
"Second of all, neither Social Security nor Medicare revenue is eligible to be spent by Congress."
That's a disingenuous comment at best. Since Congress is constitutionally in charge of any and all federal spending, just who is it that's preventing Congress from spending that money? Why, it's Congress!
It's pretty much like the debt limit: "We won't go over this amount of debt... until we do and decide to raise the limit."
"After a week of caching data, anyone monitoring your network will have no clue if you are hosting any illicit data or if you are caching data from another node."
Everything on Freenet has a timestamp. If a wiretap shows your node pushing an original key with a timestamp newer than when the wiretap started, you're the source. They may not be able to pin older material on you (depending on how much they know about your cache size), but if you continue to put new material on (i. e. continue to molest children), a wiretap will catch you.
"The US isn't preparing for war "on" the internet... as much as it's preparing for a war via the internet."
Considering the nature of war, that's a very fine distinction indeed. "Germany didn't wage war on Belgium, they waged war via Belgium." "The US and USSR didn't wage war on Iraq and Iran, they waged war via Iraq and Iran."
Even if the Pentagon's policy doesn't include scorched earth tactics, it would still be BAD for the internet in general.
But unlike with your analogy, the original poster was not an active participant in the reprehensible activity (be it kiddie porn or drunk driving), but at worst a facilitator. It'd be more proper if it was "I used to tend bar... until one of my patrons almost hit a pedestrian..." There's a difference between wanting to reform your own actions and wanting to reform the actions of others.
"Freenet's killer app is child pornography. I've never seen any evidence that any political dissident uses it."
Even if no political dissidents use it, "killer app" doesn't mean "only app" (otherwise Slashdot would be a porn site). Where is the line drawn between "single use" and "multiple use" technologies? Who decides?
"The difference between Freenet and your examples is that Freenet is designed to be untraceable,"
Why would you think to trace any of it if you don't know the contents?
Anybody can set up local wiretap to confirm whether or not Person X is the source of Content Y on Freenet ("Gee, he never downloaded the content that's currently uploading..."). It doesn't get in the way of either a sufficiently far-reaching "Big Brother" government nor does it get in the way of of a law enforcement agency that has cause to be suspicious. The only things it gets in the way of is random searches, broad dragnets and datamining, tactics that would have most people up in arms about their civil liberties if they were conducted in other mediums, as the parent tried to show in his analogies.
"Not only does he believe that government shouldn't be able to regulate any kind of speech, including child pornography, but he is actively helping people to distribute child pornography,"
So's your local mailman. I hope you didn't send out any Christmas cards last year, and you had better make sure you handle all your bills online, otherwise you're aiding that pernicious distribution medium of kiddie porn known as "First Class Mail" (which, while not anonymous, is physically and legally protected from inspection).
"But the Japanese & Korean markets are reportedly solid."
Reported by whom? It's the US where the PSP is selling. The Japanese are ignoring the PSP and buying every DS they can get their hands on, and the Koreans tend not to like things that come from Japan to begin with.
"They own the largest catalog of movies, making up over a third of the titles produced by major film studios in the last 60 years."
The submission that this duped pointed out rumors (at least) that Wal-Mart (among other retailers) is beginning to pull UMD movies from their shelves. Sony can publish all the UMD movies it wants, if nobody buys them, the stores won't carry them, and all those UMD movies can be buried next to Atari's ET cartridges.
Because I'm too lazy to rehash what Madison has said, here. His summary:
The proposed Constitution, therefore, is, in strictness, neither a national nor a federal Constitution, but a composition of both. In its foundation it is federal, not national; in the sources from which the ordinary powers of the government are drawn, it is partly federal and partly national; in the operation of these powers, it is national, not federal; in the extent of them, again, it is federal, not national; and, finally, in the authoritative mode of introducing amendments, it is neither wholly federal nor wholly national.
"and entered into a new political arrangement wherein the individual states could no longer act autonomously,"
Their autonomy was voluntarily restricted, but was not eliminated. The states (collectively, at least) still have the power to alter the nature of the union (or even abolish it) with no involvement of the government you seem to believe is their superior.
"In common usage, atleast in the context of political science"
And you're accusing me of being indecisive? Wiktionary lists both definitions, and apparently lists the "people" definition first.
"If people really consider the U.S. a nation simply because it has a homogeneous population, not because of its political structure, then why do people not consider Canada part of the U.S.?"
Have you spoken to a Canadian recently? Canada exists because its people do not consider themselves to be the same as those south of the border. However, there are parts of the world that consider both the US and Canada to simply fall under the general category of "norteamericanos"
"I asked why don't the states conduct their own national elections."
And you seem to be unable to define the word "national." If you are referring to "nation" as either "people" or "sovereign." then the states do conduct them as they do all other elections in the United States. However, if you are trying to use "nation" as a synonym for "government of the United States," then you are using it improperly, as they are federal elections, and are described as such by both the state and federal governments.
"The states participate in a national election, but California itself doesn't get to decide who the president is."
And the United States itself doesn't get to pick who the UN Secretary-General is (at least not officially). Does that mean that there is only one country on this planet now?
"If each state is its own sovereign nation, then why are national elections held across all states?"
Because the states have agreed to.
"Let me spell it out in even simpler terms for you: why would a sovereign nation conduct a national election outside of its own nation?"
Why not? If they are sovereign, they can choose what to do with their sovereingty, just as an individual can choose to sign a binding contract.
"the states consider themselves"
What the states consider themselves to be and what they are can be two different things. Again, I'm not talking about public perception (which has a history of being wrong), I'm talking about the constitution itself, that document you continue to refuse to cite to back up any of your assertions.
"So let me ask you this, are U.S. states nations (autonomous self-governing sovreignties) or are they subnational states (partially self-governing provinces subject to the governance of a federal government)?"
The answer is "yes." The states are the source of all sovereignty within the United States, and have opted to grant them to a new construct, the federal government, through a constitution. The federal government acts in the name of the states (if only in name nowadays), much as how Parliament acts in the name of the British monarch.
"If it's the former, why do people only refer to the union as the nation"
"Nation" can have different meanings. For example, when Thomas Paine wrote about the French "Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Nation," he seemed to be of the opinion that the French people used the word "nation" not to refer to the government or to a piece of real estate, but to the body of the French people. The people of the United States are (for better or for worse) rather homogeneous throughout, so it is proper to refer to the "American people" as a singular.
"and why don't the states conduct their own national elections?"
The states conduct all elections in the United States. They even decide who gets to vote.
Early games had very dark color palettes because the display in the development kits was much brighter than the one in the production units; the production display has a gamma value of 4. Newer titles use gamma correction in their palettes.
"but that's primarily people being picky."
No, it was a design flaw in either the dev kits or the units sold.
"And that's why the sp had a backlite screen."
Except for the new ones that advertise brighter screens, the SP was frontlit.
"or having dead pixels in the screen?"
The DS has had its share of dead pixel units. The difference is with Nintendo customer service, which will replace a DS if any pixel is dead anywhere on either screen.
And the first line of the original Game Boy also had its share of pixel problems; on some early units vertical lines along the sides of the screen did not light up. But, again, Nintendo's policy was to replace rather than dither.
If I remember right, Sony had similar problems with the PS2 and it seemed to do alright.
At any rate, it won't be an issue: Nintendo isn't using some new whiz-bang chip or whatever that needs to be developed and manufactured from scratch, instead relying mostly on off-the-shelf parts.
Slashdot Mirror
"If MS can start distributing Movies and TV shows through this thing, that will be HUGE."
Kids just want games, adults just want movies, and neither is all that interested in sharing with the other (I don't know about Japan, but most US homes have more than one television for just this reason).
Even at the PS2 launch in Japan, when it was bought more as a DVD player than a game console, it didn't do all that well against honest-to-God DVD players.
"Ideally get a Japanese boy/girl friend."
Dude, this is Slashdot. We aren't even able to get Wapanese girlfriends.
BTW, I don't think "Will you go out with me so you can teach me a new language?" will work as a good pick-up line. Not that I would know, since, again, I'm a Slashdotter.
"I've used it for a couple of months to teach myself German, it's fantastic."
Keep in mind you're using your experience learning a language from which English is derived and assuming it works equally well wtih a language that has nothing to do with English.
"verstehen Sie?"
I may not remember much from high school, but you have more than one reader: versteh ihr. Wakarimasu-ka?
Actually, considering how much the Japanese mangle English (I thought that was our job!), I'd say it's a good thing that more poor speakers are learning Japanese so that we can have our just revenge. :)
Ah yes, the ol' "Article is flawed because of $ANECDOTAL_EVIDENCE!" post, a true staple of Slashdot!
OK, so conservatives say NPR is too liberal, and liberals say NPR is too conservative.
Sounds like NPR is getting it about right to me.
"(the Lite comes with a cover, with the original, Nintendo assumed you'd always have a GBA cart in there)"
Well, I do keep my rumble pak there...
"or at least a considerable smolder, complete with firemen, evacuation orders"
It's all OK, this is Unisys, They Have the Way Out!
source
...resetting the circuit breaker in my machine as I go... ..to the next stall...
Mr Smiles likes the words "Fast", "Top of the Line" and "Expandable". He runs over to a machine surrounded in glitter and advertising and gestures at it. "This is probably what you want then. The latest thing. There's only two in the country and luckily we have one here today"
"Yes yes, but will it talk to my laptop?"
"THIS baby will talk to ANYTHING. What's the interface, ethernet?"
"No, a SCSI-1 Interface. My machine pretends to be a disk, ID 3. But lots of machines kill my machine's powersupply with inductive transience backflow due to a non-standard SCSI interface...
*DUMMY MODE ONE*
He practically BEGS me to try the new machine out. Which I've been waiting for. I drag out my luggable, which is, admittedly, a bit of a beast.
"Wow! That IS old!! And *ungh!*.. quite heavy too. I guess you're quite attached to it?"
I mumble about legacy data, only use it at home, sentimental value and irreplaceable software while he plugs it in and starts the host machine.
"Okay, let's see what we can see" he says, and presses the power-on switch on my "portable" The 31 hefty nicad batteries that make up almost the entire inside of my "laptop" pour grunt into a tripling inverter which in turn supplies RICH, CHUNKY VOLTS to alternate pins on the "SCSI" bus, whilst emitting a dull "uuurk" sound.
"My Laptop!" I cry, reaching for it, just as smoke starts pouring out the back of the display machine. Mr Smiles dives for the demo machine weeping, while I exit, in "anguish"....
"Second of all, neither Social Security nor Medicare revenue is eligible to be spent by Congress."
That's a disingenuous comment at best. Since Congress is constitutionally in charge of any and all federal spending, just who is it that's preventing Congress from spending that money? Why, it's Congress!
It's pretty much like the debt limit: "We won't go over this amount of debt... until we do and decide to raise the limit."
Number 6 is explained by number 2. Why do you think we're not hosting them domestically?
"After a week of caching data, anyone monitoring your network will have no clue if you are hosting any illicit data or if you are caching data from another node."
Everything on Freenet has a timestamp. If a wiretap shows your node pushing an original key with a timestamp newer than when the wiretap started, you're the source. They may not be able to pin older material on you (depending on how much they know about your cache size), but if you continue to put new material on (i. e. continue to molest children), a wiretap will catch you.
The FAQ even alludes to this.
"However, I would not be surprised for a jury to rule against you, should a case ever be brought up"
That's what appeals are for.
"You can be sued,"
The creator of Freenet bringing forward a libel suit. Now that's irony!
"The US isn't preparing for war "on" the internet... as much as it's preparing for a war via the internet."
Considering the nature of war, that's a very fine distinction indeed. "Germany didn't wage war on Belgium, they waged war via Belgium." "The US and USSR didn't wage war on Iraq and Iran, they waged war via Iraq and Iran."
Even if the Pentagon's policy doesn't include scorched earth tactics, it would still be BAD for the internet in general.
But unlike with your analogy, the original poster was not an active participant in the reprehensible activity (be it kiddie porn or drunk driving), but at worst a facilitator. It'd be more proper if it was "I used to tend bar... until one of my patrons almost hit a pedestrian..." There's a difference between wanting to reform your own actions and wanting to reform the actions of others.
"Freenet's killer app is child pornography. I've never seen any evidence that any political dissident uses it."
Even if no political dissidents use it, "killer app" doesn't mean "only app" (otherwise Slashdot would be a porn site). Where is the line drawn between "single use" and "multiple use" technologies? Who decides?
"The difference between Freenet and your examples is that Freenet is designed to be untraceable,"
Why would you think to trace any of it if you don't know the contents?
Anybody can set up local wiretap to confirm whether or not Person X is the source of Content Y on Freenet ("Gee, he never downloaded the content that's currently uploading..."). It doesn't get in the way of either a sufficiently far-reaching "Big Brother" government nor does it get in the way of of a law enforcement agency that has cause to be suspicious. The only things it gets in the way of is random searches, broad dragnets and datamining, tactics that would have most people up in arms about their civil liberties if they were conducted in other mediums, as the parent tried to show in his analogies.
"Not only does he believe that government shouldn't be able to regulate any kind of speech, including child pornography, but he is actively helping people to distribute child pornography,"
So's your local mailman. I hope you didn't send out any Christmas cards last year, and you had better make sure you handle all your bills online, otherwise you're aiding that pernicious distribution medium of kiddie porn known as "First Class Mail" (which, while not anonymous, is physically and legally protected from inspection).
"But the Japanese & Korean markets are reportedly solid."
Reported by whom? It's the US where the PSP is selling. The Japanese are ignoring the PSP and buying every DS they can get their hands on, and the Koreans tend not to like things that come from Japan to begin with.
"They own the largest catalog of movies, making up over a third of the titles produced by major film studios in the last 60 years."
The submission that this duped pointed out rumors (at least) that Wal-Mart (among other retailers) is beginning to pull UMD movies from their shelves. Sony can publish all the UMD movies it wants, if nobody buys them, the stores won't carry them, and all those UMD movies can be buried next to Atari's ET cartridges.
Wi-Fi. Be sure to stock up on MagicGate memory sticks (preferably Sony brand).
Because I'm too lazy to rehash what Madison has said, here. His summary: "and entered into a new political arrangement wherein the individual states could no longer act autonomously,"
Their autonomy was voluntarily restricted, but was not eliminated. The states (collectively, at least) still have the power to alter the nature of the union (or even abolish it) with no involvement of the government you seem to believe is their superior.
"In common usage, atleast in the context of political science"
And you're accusing me of being indecisive? Wiktionary lists both definitions, and apparently lists the "people" definition first.
"If people really consider the U.S. a nation simply because it has a homogeneous population, not because of its political structure, then why do people not consider Canada part of the U.S.?"
Have you spoken to a Canadian recently? Canada exists because its people do not consider themselves to be the same as those south of the border. However, there are parts of the world that consider both the US and Canada to simply fall under the general category of "norteamericanos"
"I asked why don't the states conduct their own national elections."
And you seem to be unable to define the word "national." If you are referring to "nation" as either "people" or "sovereign." then the states do conduct them as they do all other elections in the United States. However, if you are trying to use "nation" as a synonym for "government of the United States," then you are using it improperly, as they are federal elections, and are described as such by both the state and federal governments.
"The states participate in a national election, but California itself doesn't get to decide who the president is."
And the United States itself doesn't get to pick who the UN Secretary-General is (at least not officially). Does that mean that there is only one country on this planet now?
"If each state is its own sovereign nation, then why are national elections held across all states?"
Because the states have agreed to.
"Let me spell it out in even simpler terms for you: why would a sovereign nation conduct a national election outside of its own nation?"
Why not? If they are sovereign, they can choose what to do with their sovereingty, just as an individual can choose to sign a binding contract.
"the states consider themselves"
What the states consider themselves to be and what they are can be two different things. Again, I'm not talking about public perception (which has a history of being wrong), I'm talking about the constitution itself, that document you continue to refuse to cite to back up any of your assertions.
"So let me ask you this, are U.S. states nations (autonomous self-governing sovreignties) or are they subnational states (partially self-governing provinces subject to the governance of a federal government)?"
The answer is "yes." The states are the source of all sovereignty within the United States, and have opted to grant them to a new construct, the federal government, through a constitution. The federal government acts in the name of the states (if only in name nowadays), much as how Parliament acts in the name of the British monarch.
"If it's the former, why do people only refer to the union as the nation"
"Nation" can have different meanings. For example, when Thomas Paine wrote about the French "Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Nation," he seemed to be of the opinion that the French people used the word "nation" not to refer to the government or to a piece of real estate, but to the body of the French people. The people of the United States are (for better or for worse) rather homogeneous throughout, so it is proper to refer to the "American people" as a singular.
"and why don't the states conduct their own national elections?"
The states conduct all elections in the United States. They even decide who gets to vote.
"I was all set to post about reams of colored paper,"
Got your own ideas for "OMG PONIES!" signs?
From Wikipedia: "but that's primarily people being picky."
No, it was a design flaw in either the dev kits or the units sold.
"And that's why the sp had a backlite screen."
Except for the new ones that advertise brighter screens, the SP was frontlit.
"or having dead pixels in the screen?"
The DS has had its share of dead pixel units. The difference is with Nintendo customer service, which will replace a DS if any pixel is dead anywhere on either screen.
And the first line of the original Game Boy also had its share of pixel problems; on some early units vertical lines along the sides of the screen did not light up. But, again, Nintendo's policy was to replace rather than dither.
"Nintendo is the only company who's launches have not been met with console flaws or games that won't run"
Don't remember the gamma problems of GBA launch titles?
"Nintendo has always had the console launch first in Japan and then in the States"
The DS was released in North America first.
If I remember right, Sony had similar problems with the PS2 and it seemed to do alright.
At any rate, it won't be an issue: Nintendo isn't using some new whiz-bang chip or whatever that needs to be developed and manufactured from scratch, instead relying mostly on off-the-shelf parts.