"Ever thought downloading and mirroring to Bt might make them want to stop posting this stuff?"
Possible responses, take your pick:
Yeah! How the hell is WBGH going to pay for Nova if we're able to skip the commercials? Oh, wait...
Think of all the money WBGH is losing because of third-party mirrors instead of paying for a metric truckload of streaming connections? Er...
That content isn't yours! It belongs to PBS, who are paid by... um...
Seriously, if you're feeling guilty go find your local public television station's URL and give them some money. If you're feeling really guilty, a lot of them in their efforts to raise money will tell you exactly how much it costs to air a single episode of such-and-such (Nova in this case). Donate enough money to cover all of it and I can't see how you wouldn't be justified in mirroring it yourself.
"It seems the headhunters and employers are still wanting knowledge in everything, at least one degree but preferably two, and want to keep employees on minimal wages"
They have to at least pretend to be looking locally before they start outsourcing to India.
"Say you have someone on financial aid (welfare, what-have-you). They use that money to get some training (instead of buying food)."
Replace "training" with "a Segway" and you'd have the right analogy. The US and Soviet space programs occurred in industrialized countries that had a technology base high enough that the effects of the programs could be felt across the country (for instance, the IC-based computer you're using).
China, on the other hand, is still industrializing. Even now, many Chinese don't know their country has successfully completed their first manned spaceflight because they don't have the reliable communications medium that even a decent postal system could provide. This new push in technology only really benefits the elite few (Marx is spinning in his grave) and only serves as decorative jewelry for the country as a whole.
"In order for direct democracy to work, it requires other things, ie, decentralization, autonomy, federalism, the ability for anybody to propose, etc."
Then it isn't direct democracy. Direct democracy means "everybody votes on everything." Period. Everything you named there are patches for democracy that make it more workable, but do this by making it less direct (democracy by proxy a/k/a representative democracy).
"Anybody who think DD would be just a matter of internet polls is hopelessly deluded."
"Especially with the newest version, which doesn't spew its guts all over the SW spectrum, but zaps the... wait for it... 5GHz band!"
WTF? How did they find this out? Customers' microwave ovens started blowing up ala Masters of the Universe?
No, seriously, short of having your dish pointing through power lines, how do you screw up a communications frequency that's more or less line-of-sight?
"Maybe Nintendo should take some programming tips from the evil emulator community."
Like what? The only emulators the community has come up with for GameCube play Chip 8 and Game Boy software. To my knowledge, the emulator community has yet to produce an emulator for a console that adequately runs a console from the generation immediate preceeding it. The closest thing to that is a port of SNES9x for N64 that runs incredibly slow. It's just too difficult when you don't have the option of just throwing more RAM and a faster processor into your box.
Nintendo has managed to get a decent version of N64 games to play on a console that simply was not designed to play N64 games. While it may not be perfect, it's still good (better than what these games look like on an N64 emulator for a PC, I'd wager), it's cheap and it allows players who don't have an N64 (quite possible with the recent spike in GCN sales) to play some of the greatest games in gamedom.
You think the EMU community can do better? Put up or shut up.
The price of an N64 is one thing. The price of shipping an N64 to BFE China is something else. And lets not forget about tariffs, customs and excise, etc... That, and most N64 games and consoles speak a different language than most Chinese people and televisions, respectively.
"Am I the only one who sees a striking similarity between the Nintendo iQue and the Sega Dreamcast controller?"
Which in and of itself was almost a carbon copy of Sega's 3D controller for the Saturn.
I'm not sure that the shape can be wholly attributed to copying Sega, though. Part of it seems to be design constraints. I don't think a center-mounted stick would work very well with where they're putting the cartridge slot, so they moved it up a bit while filling in the spaces between the prongs on the N64 controller to house the electronics.
Of course, who else is there for Nintendo to copy? Somebody else already pointed out how Xbox controllers also look like DC controllers, and Nintendo trying to copy PlayStation controllers would cause a loop of Nintendo copying Sony copying Nintendo. I swear in their short time on the market Microsoft has done more in the way of original controller design than Sony has done in the past decade or so...
"It is not by any stretch a statement that treaties outrank the Constitution or Federal laws."
I never said that the US Constitution was outranked by treaties per se, just that they were given equal weight as the federal constitution, which is dangerous in and of itself. A document signed by the president and ratified by 67 senators is given equal treatment to something agreed to by 38 states.
For example, everybody's favorite constitutional amedment begins with "Congress shall make no law." However, there's a big "except" elsewhere in the document that everybody around here gets up in arms about: copyright. Congress giving somebody exclusive rights over distribution of a work is by definition Congress abridging the freedom of speech for everybody else. However, because the copyright clause explicitly giving Congress this power is elsewhere in the constitution (and hence equal in importantce to the First Amendment), copyright is considered exempt from this restriction.
Another example is military justice. Currently under much debate are the constitutional rights of the detainees at Guantanamo. It should be fairly obvious to anybody that these detainees are being denied rights mentioned in the Fifth Amendment (trial by jury, due process, etc.). However, the waters get muddy because Aricle I gives Congress the ability to set up a code of military justice, and this separate code (because it is also mentioned in the constitution) can and does prevent people from exercising the rights they would otherwise have in civillian courts. This happens because Congress' power to set up such a system is given equal weight to the civillian safeguards.
With that said, what would prevent the Senate from ratifying another such exception to constitutional guarantees through a treaty?
(No, seriously, I'd really like an answer to that question.)
First off, IANAL, just a curious voter-slash-fair-weather-politician.
"Not according to this."
Looking at what's here and looking up the court case they looked at (Reid v. Covert), it looks like there's at least precedent at striking down treaties which explicitly violate the US Constitution, but there's still the catch-all of Missouri v. Holland that seems to say "So long as Congress isn't explicitly denied power X..." When you get into stuff that Congress explicitly has control over (like copyright), they can still get away with murder while still being able to say "Oh no, it wasn't us! It was President So-And-So's Evil Treaty!"
"I don't know who's legally right, but as a practical matter I can't believe that Thomas Jefferson and friends would knowingly leave such a gaping loophole."
Disclaimer: I have an axe to grind concerning the Seventeenth Amendment. Consider this the lunatic rantings of yet another political crackpot.
They didn't. As written, the US Constitution made sure that no treaty was ratified without the implicit consent of the legislatures of 2/3rds of the states (almost as stringent as the 3/4ths required for a constitutional amendment). The Seventeenth Amendment, however, changes the way US Senators are chosen (popular election instead of appointment by the state), which means that a treaty gets signed based on whatever political issues are popular at that moment. If the Framers wanted public participation in diplomacy at such a direct level, they would have had the House ratify treaties, not the Senate.
"the US refuses to recognize it because it is our legal belief that the US Supreme Court is the "highest law in the land,""
I don't believe that was offered as one of the reasons why we chose not to sign it. One of the big ones that I remember seeing from the State Department (and one I personally agree with their thought on) is that, in the ICC, the judges and prosecuters are chosen by and work for the same people. In essence, it makes the UN General Assembly (or at least those UN members that signed the treaty) the judge, jury and executioner for anything that comes before the ICC.
"They pass the greivance on to the UN's enforcement arm: The UN Security Council."
No, the Security Council is specifically not involved in the process. Involving it somewhere was one of the proposals by the US to fix the system (from the US point of view) when the ICC was being designed, but it didn't get very far.
Besides, the ICC is supposed to be for trying individuals, not governments. The penalties would be jail terms and the like, not embargos and such.
This means that all the slimey advertisers looking for ways to circumvent pop-up blocking software will spend 99.99% of their time trying to break Microsoft's scheme, leaving Moz users such as myself alone.
On the other hand, I'm willing to bet that Microsoft will end up breaking two or three scripting languages in the process of implementing this...
"Well, for the US to even recognize a UN ruling requires approval of the president and 2/3 of the House and Senate."
The House isn't involved in ratifying treaties.
Depending on how one wants to look at it, any future move by the UN like this was already ratified by the US Senate over fifty years ago when the US signed the UN Charter to begin with
"And treaties cannot conflict with the Constitution. Such a treaty would fly in the face of the first amendment,"
Nope. International treaties entered by the United States are given equal weight as the US Constitution. Take a closer look at Article VI and/or check out Google for the phrase "supremacy clause" While it's true that we haven't entered a treaty that explicitly violates the US Constitution (yet), the Senate has used the supremacy clause to implicitly eviscerate the Tenth Amendment during the past century or so (why should the Senate care about states rights when they no longer have to answer to the states?).
"(Three of the four Xbox ads shown this holiday will feature women or girls in them.)"
Yeah, as if that's a real step forward. DOA Volleyball commercials had a lot of focus on all the playable female characters in the commercials. Did that make women go out and buy the game? If game companies focused half as much on game design elements as they do target demographics, they might actually get more women playing.
Of course, aiming for demographics has the promise of the Almighty Dollar (think "pop music"), so what do I know?
"From the FAQ at thematrixonline.com: Yes, BULLET TIME(tm), slow motion interactive gameplay, is an essential part of the Matrix Online experience."
That will be a neat trick. If one person uses bullet time, does everybody else in the same zone also experience slowdown? If not, how would they manage to keep the specific character from falling out of synch with the server?
"would European countries BAN the game from the shelves if there was not i18n version."
I'd be willing to wager that some would, yes. And banning based on the language used seems far more palletable and benign than the censorship that does go on over there (even to Europeans).
Don't forget that us USAians are in the minority who live in a country without an official legislated language.
"it is hardly surprising that these games offend some and disappoint others."
There is no such thing as bad publicity. This is one of the main reasons these game companies try to make games out of the wars to begin with. It's essentially an Acclaim marketing tactic.
I recall someone on the side of Quebec on this debate had a point: They release the games in French (and Spanish and German and...) in Europe. What would be so difficult about releasing a bilingual disk in North America? Hell, they won't even let you play the European French version on North American hardware. What's the worst that would happen if they gave Quebec multilingual software, Canada getting new games when Europe gets them instead of the US? Heck, I could even see potential for multilingual games in the US.
About the only reason I can see why they don't do it is that the game companies too stubborn to change the way they always did things. Kinda like what most of the posters here are accusing the Quebec government of being.
Who knows... Multilingual software for North America might actually force Japanese game companies to hire competent translators instead of just tossing the script to some high school student in his second semster of Engrish.
Slashdot Mirror
"That is the illegal pirate version and not the official PBS release."
Pirating public broadcasting... but if... and... yet... er... my head hurts!
Possible responses, take your pick:
- Yeah! How the hell is WBGH going to pay for Nova if we're able to skip the commercials? Oh, wait...
- Think of all the money WBGH is losing because of third-party mirrors instead of paying for a metric truckload of streaming connections? Er...
- That content isn't yours! It belongs to PBS, who are paid by... um...
Seriously, if you're feeling guilty go find your local public television station's URL and give them some money. If you're feeling really guilty, a lot of them in their efforts to raise money will tell you exactly how much it costs to air a single episode of such-and-such (Nova in this case). Donate enough money to cover all of it and I can't see how you wouldn't be justified in mirroring it yourself."It seems the headhunters and employers are still wanting knowledge in everything, at least one degree but preferably two, and want to keep employees on minimal wages"
They have to at least pretend to be looking locally before they start outsourcing to India.
"Say you have someone on financial aid (welfare, what-have-you). They use that money to get some training (instead of buying food)."
Replace "training" with "a Segway" and you'd have the right analogy. The US and Soviet space programs occurred in industrialized countries that had a technology base high enough that the effects of the programs could be felt across the country (for instance, the IC-based computer you're using).
China, on the other hand, is still industrializing. Even now, many Chinese don't know their country has successfully completed their first manned spaceflight because they don't have the reliable communications medium that even a decent postal system could provide. This new push in technology only really benefits the elite few (Marx is spinning in his grave) and only serves as decorative jewelry for the country as a whole.
"In order for direct democracy to work, it requires other things, ie, decentralization, autonomy, federalism, the ability for anybody to propose, etc."
Then it isn't direct democracy. Direct democracy means "everybody votes on everything." Period. Everything you named there are patches for democracy that make it more workable, but do this by making it less direct (democracy by proxy a/k/a representative democracy).
"Anybody who think DD would be just a matter of internet polls is hopelessly deluded."
No, that's exactly what direct democracy is.
"I can't wait :)"
You say that now, but will you be so happy when you find out that your only new ISP option will be AOL-SW?
"Especially with the newest version, which doesn't spew its guts all over the SW spectrum, but zaps the... wait for it ... 5GHz band!"
WTF? How did they find this out? Customers' microwave ovens started blowing up ala Masters of the Universe?
No, seriously, short of having your dish pointing through power lines, how do you screw up a communications frequency that's more or less line-of-sight?
"Maybe Nintendo should take some programming tips from the evil emulator community."
Like what? The only emulators the community has come up with for GameCube play Chip 8 and Game Boy software. To my knowledge, the emulator community has yet to produce an emulator for a console that adequately runs a console from the generation immediate preceeding it. The closest thing to that is a port of SNES9x for N64 that runs incredibly slow. It's just too difficult when you don't have the option of just throwing more RAM and a faster processor into your box.
Nintendo has managed to get a decent version of N64 games to play on a console that simply was not designed to play N64 games. While it may not be perfect, it's still good (better than what these games look like on an N64 emulator for a PC, I'd wager), it's cheap and it allows players who don't have an N64 (quite possible with the recent spike in GCN sales) to play some of the greatest games in gamedom.
You think the EMU community can do better? Put up or shut up.
"A N64 can be had for $1.99 on ebay."
The price of an N64 is one thing. The price of shipping an N64 to BFE China is something else. And lets not forget about tariffs, customs and excise, etc... That, and most N64 games and consoles speak a different language than most Chinese people and televisions, respectively.
"(que != cue && que != queue)"
Here in the English-speaking work, perhaps. But you forget we're dealing with two countries that speak different dialects of Engrish.
At any rate, I'm going to go get myself a can of Bite the Wax Tadpole.
"Am I the only one who sees a striking similarity between the Nintendo iQue and the Sega Dreamcast controller?"
Which in and of itself was almost a carbon copy of Sega's 3D controller for the Saturn.
I'm not sure that the shape can be wholly attributed to copying Sega, though. Part of it seems to be design constraints. I don't think a center-mounted stick would work very well with where they're putting the cartridge slot, so they moved it up a bit while filling in the spaces between the prongs on the N64 controller to house the electronics.
Of course, who else is there for Nintendo to copy? Somebody else already pointed out how Xbox controllers also look like DC controllers, and Nintendo trying to copy PlayStation controllers would cause a loop of Nintendo copying Sony copying Nintendo. I swear in their short time on the market Microsoft has done more in the way of original controller design than Sony has done in the past decade or so...
" Hint: RadioShack....
Hint2: Its not sold as a macrovision breaking software."
A radio-controlled car? A 200 ohm resistor? A watch battery? An HPaq? A 200-in-1 electronics lab kit?
"It is not by any stretch a statement that treaties outrank the Constitution or Federal laws."
I never said that the US Constitution was outranked by treaties per se, just that they were given equal weight as the federal constitution, which is dangerous in and of itself. A document signed by the president and ratified by 67 senators is given equal treatment to something agreed to by 38 states.
For example, everybody's favorite constitutional amedment begins with "Congress shall make no law." However, there's a big "except" elsewhere in the document that everybody around here gets up in arms about: copyright. Congress giving somebody exclusive rights over distribution of a work is by definition Congress abridging the freedom of speech for everybody else. However, because the copyright clause explicitly giving Congress this power is elsewhere in the constitution (and hence equal in importantce to the First Amendment), copyright is considered exempt from this restriction.
Another example is military justice. Currently under much debate are the constitutional rights of the detainees at Guantanamo. It should be fairly obvious to anybody that these detainees are being denied rights mentioned in the Fifth Amendment (trial by jury, due process, etc.). However, the waters get muddy because Aricle I gives Congress the ability to set up a code of military justice, and this separate code (because it is also mentioned in the constitution) can and does prevent people from exercising the rights they would otherwise have in civillian courts. This happens because Congress' power to set up such a system is given equal weight to the civillian safeguards.
With that said, what would prevent the Senate from ratifying another such exception to constitutional guarantees through a treaty?
(No, seriously, I'd really like an answer to that question.)
First off, IANAL, just a curious voter-slash-fair-weather-politician.
"Not according to this."
Looking at what's here and looking up the court case they looked at (Reid v. Covert), it looks like there's at least precedent at striking down treaties which explicitly violate the US Constitution, but there's still the catch-all of Missouri v. Holland that seems to say "So long as Congress isn't explicitly denied power X..." When you get into stuff that Congress explicitly has control over (like copyright), they can still get away with murder while still being able to say "Oh no, it wasn't us! It was President So-And-So's Evil Treaty!"
"I don't know who's legally right, but as a practical matter I can't believe that Thomas Jefferson and friends would knowingly leave such a gaping loophole."
Disclaimer: I have an axe to grind concerning the Seventeenth Amendment. Consider this the lunatic rantings of yet another political crackpot.
They didn't. As written, the US Constitution made sure that no treaty was ratified without the implicit consent of the legislatures of 2/3rds of the states (almost as stringent as the 3/4ths required for a constitutional amendment). The Seventeenth Amendment, however, changes the way US Senators are chosen (popular election instead of appointment by the state), which means that a treaty gets signed based on whatever political issues are popular at that moment. If the Framers wanted public participation in diplomacy at such a direct level, they would have had the House ratify treaties, not the Senate.
"the US refuses to recognize it because it is our legal belief that the US Supreme Court is the "highest law in the land,""
I don't believe that was offered as one of the reasons why we chose not to sign it. One of the big ones that I remember seeing from the State Department (and one I personally agree with their thought on) is that, in the ICC, the judges and prosecuters are chosen by and work for the same people. In essence, it makes the UN General Assembly (or at least those UN members that signed the treaty) the judge, jury and executioner for anything that comes before the ICC.
"They pass the greivance on to the UN's enforcement arm: The UN Security Council."
No, the Security Council is specifically not involved in the process. Involving it somewhere was one of the proposals by the US to fix the system (from the US point of view) when the ICC was being designed, but it didn't get very far.
Besides, the ICC is supposed to be for trying individuals, not governments. The penalties would be jail terms and the like, not embargos and such.
This means that all the slimey advertisers looking for ways to circumvent pop-up blocking software will spend 99.99% of their time trying to break Microsoft's scheme, leaving Moz users such as myself alone.
On the other hand, I'm willing to bet that Microsoft will end up breaking two or three scripting languages in the process of implementing this...
"And treaties cannot conflict with the Constitution. Such a treaty would fly in the face of the first amendment,"
Nope. International treaties entered by the United States are given equal weight as the US Constitution. Take a closer look at Article VI and/or check out Google for the phrase "supremacy clause" While it's true that we haven't entered a treaty that explicitly violates the US Constitution (yet), the Senate has used the supremacy clause to implicitly eviscerate the Tenth Amendment during the past century or so (why should the Senate care about states rights when they no longer have to answer to the states?).
If you're concerned about this loophole, you might be interested in the history of the Bricker Amendment, but I'm not altogether sure even that would help, what with their inability to abide by the Twenty-Seventh Amendment.
"(Three of the four Xbox ads shown this holiday will feature women or girls in them.)"
Yeah, as if that's a real step forward. DOA Volleyball commercials had a lot of focus on all the playable female characters in the commercials. Did that make women go out and buy the game? If game companies focused half as much on game design elements as they do target demographics, they might actually get more women playing.
Of course, aiming for demographics has the promise of the Almighty Dollar (think "pop music"), so what do I know?
That would require that player's character be able to react like that. And that's before network latency rears its ugly head.
"It was hell. I spent *hours* unable to access /. -- can you imagine the suffering that such a fate would cause *you*??!
Eventually, I was issued a new IP address from earthlink"
And you couldn't manually request a new DHCP address because... ?
"From the FAQ at thematrixonline.com: Yes, BULLET TIME(tm), slow motion interactive gameplay, is an essential part of the Matrix Online experience."
That will be a neat trick. If one person uses bullet time, does everybody else in the same zone also experience slowdown? If not, how would they manage to keep the specific character from falling out of synch with the server?
"would European countries BAN the game from the shelves if there was not i18n version."
I'd be willing to wager that some would, yes. And banning based on the language used seems far more palletable and benign than the censorship that does go on over there (even to Europeans).
Don't forget that us USAians are in the minority who live in a country without an official legislated language.
"it is hardly surprising that these games offend some and disappoint others."
There is no such thing as bad publicity. This is one of the main reasons these game companies try to make games out of the wars to begin with. It's essentially an Acclaim marketing tactic.
I recall someone on the side of Quebec on this debate had a point: They release the games in French (and Spanish and German and...) in Europe. What would be so difficult about releasing a bilingual disk in North America? Hell, they won't even let you play the European French version on North American hardware. What's the worst that would happen if they gave Quebec multilingual software, Canada getting new games when Europe gets them instead of the US? Heck, I could even see potential for multilingual games in the US.
About the only reason I can see why they don't do it is that the game companies too stubborn to change the way they always did things. Kinda like what most of the posters here are accusing the Quebec government of being.
Who knows... Multilingual software for North America might actually force Japanese game companies to hire competent translators instead of just tossing the script to some high school student in his second semster of Engrish.