Hmm, since they're copyprotected, that means there's no reason they can't take a return on them after they're opened. I think if they're going to do this we should be allowed to return CDs to the store after purchasing them and discovering that all but one of the tracks are utter crap.
As for me I won't be buying any CDs from Universal it seems. I simply don't own any equipment on which these CDs could be played...just computers and an Apex DVD player that from what I understand actually has a rather standard IDE DVD-ROM drive in it.
When i wired my house (it's a 100+ year old house in the middle of Detroit) i ran 16 pairs of cat5 to each drop with at least one drop per room. That's four 4-pair cables, all wired down into a patch panel in the basement. Generally each faceplate is set up with two RJ-45s (for Ethernet) and two RJ-11s (for phones.)
Now that I've read this I'm thinking of repulling 25-pair cables. It would make my wiring a LOT cleaner in the basement and give me a chance to do some of the runs better.
Grip also has the nice feature of automatically keeping track of all your mp3s in a MySQL database. You can then use that database with DigitalDJ to build play lists by artist, genre, etc. Or of course you can hit the database yourself and build your own frontend software for it.
I have already ripped most of my ~300 CDs to high-quality MP3. The server is mounted on all my computers around the house, so no matter where I am I can pull up my favorite music.
I certainly intend to boycott any CDs that have that ridiculous protection on them...not just because I can't MP3 them but because pretty much every CD player I own outside my car stereo (and that is even debatable) is actually a CD-ROM drive and probably won't play the disc anyways.
I wish the RIAA would wake up and smell the burning plastic. Hell, if I could pay for and download albums on-demand and they were in standard MP3 format I'd buy MORE than I do now, simply because of the convenience factor. Yes, people are going to trade songs no matter what you do; I think the solution is to just make it so CHEAP AND EASY to pay for the music legit that there isn't a whole lot of reason to get pirated copies. Something like emusic.com but with a decent selection.
You know I really resent the fact that the RIAA and MPAA automatically treats me as a criminal. What happened to innocent until proven guilty? The hundreds of CDs and DVDs in my possession should be ample proof that I'm willing to pay for what I use.
I just don't know folks. I am really starting to feel like my country has completely sold out.
Isn't the structural integrity field supposed to be a lower power subspace field? I remember reading it in some book or manual once; the idea is to actually lower the mass of the ship so that a large ship can actually do those impressive curved flight paths without tearing itself to pieces.
How that works without disrupting the artificial gravity is anybody's guess. But then again, after nearly 20 years of "new" Star Trek we've learned that subspace fields can do just about anything, probably including cleaning the windows.:)
I used to not mind paying taxes either, and then my tax bracket hit 30% and then 40%. I definately mind now.
What I'd like is to be able to at least determine where my tax dollars go. I don't mind paying for things that are worth having, but some things (the "war on drugs", for example) are a waste of my money.
Personally I am leaning towards the ideas that I see from time to time where income taxes are eliminated or greatly reduced and replaced by taxes on other things. It's a clean way of letting me put my tax dollars towards things of which I am a consumer. Example: taxes on gasoline to pay for roads. It puts the tax burden on exactly the people who USE the roads in the first place (including travelers from out of state.)
I've died numerous times in dreams too. I've been stabbed, shot, nuked several times, and incinerated (in a non-nuclear way). The funky part was I actually felt those things happen to me in the dreams. Being incinerated was kinda freaky.
You never hear anyone talk about that. What if at midnight we all drop dead or even worse wake up as unfertilized eggs because our bodies think it's 1900?
Not only is the aimbot possible without open source but I have a friend who did it a couple years ago. It wasn't much fun to play against a guy who could kill you with an axe without taking a single point of damage himself.:)
(it _was_ neat to watch though; the bot would let you run in a circle around the victim faster than they could aim, all while hitting them with the axe. It also did auto-aim, did motion prediction so it could fire ahead of players, and even knew how to aim at the wall in front of a player with a rocket so they got explosion damage while the bot switched to another weapon and hit 'em with that too)
And then there was Mega Music for the Apple II, which actually let you _sample_ sounds from the casette in port and play them back through the speaker. A damned fine piece of code, I remember being so amazed by it that I disassembled the whole thing, figured out how it worked and wrote an enhanced version (Mega Music Pro.)
Agreed. On my work machine (P233MMX, 64 megs RAM, 12 MB Voodoo2) it's actually very playable with all the "cool" options turned on (high-quality sky, high geometric detail, etc.). The previous version required me to turn off a lot of these options to avoid jerky gameplay.
Now I gotta try the Win32 version on my Celeron 450...I hate booting back into Windows 98 but alas my 3D card is a Riva TNT.:(
Um, Metro GL is software 3D rendering only. If it _does_ work it's going to be slow as hell...
They've been talking about a free upgrade when hardware support is available, but then again i remember them mentioning hardware support two years ago and have yet to see anything come of it.
I think the point being made (and I speak from experience) is that it can be _very_ difficult to recover from the damage done during middle and high school. I've been out of high school for nearly nine years and I'm still working on it.
I was fine up until sixth grade, which I entered directly from fourth grade. Before that I wasn't the "in" crowd but I also wasn't really bothered by anyone. From sixth grade on though things got continually worse, up until my senior year in high school which wasn't as bad because a lot of my "enemies" had graduated. But the damage of all those years of teasing, taunting, occasional violence (nothing major, fortunately) and other harassement took its toll. Hell the damage continued to grow after high school, even after the causes had gone away. I finally ended up in a state where I just didn't _care_ about much of anything...being emotionally dead was just easier than the pain. Although I'm pulling myself out of that state it does still come back now and then (reading all these stories has brought it back, for example.)
In the wake of the whole Colorado thing it seems there are some people going around the net, looking for "questionable" materials, and then complaining to ISPs to get them removed.
Today I get a call from my boss. Seems a page on our system (a friend's page) has pipebomb directions on it and somebody with a yahoo return address was complaining about it and threatening to inform the FBI. To be fair, the pages were hosted as a freebie, but I was also told that I was not allowed to move the pages to my personal servers either (specifically the pages weren't to traverse our network at all.) To make a long story short we got into an argument that ended with me slamming my phone down *hard* and proceeding to lock down the pages (actually the whole domain for that web page).
I read the complaint letter and it was obvious what the guy was doing. My friend is a goth/geek type too and this guy did _not_ seem like he just happened to be browsing when he found this stuff. No, he was explicitly looking for it, probably via search engine, and proceeding to erradicate it wherever he found it. He's just a self-appointed net censor. Better than a government-appointed one I suppose but a censor nonetheless.
I just wish someone would realize that the Internet, computers, video games and music aren't the cause of all our problems.
We need publicity. Maybe sending the URLs to this topic to as many mass media folks as possible would get a bit of attention. Email it to talk shows, news shows, newspapers, whatever. There has to be _someone_ out there that cares about the truth.
What I'd really like to see is some sort of geek talk show or forum, even if it's just a one-time thing related to the Colorado massacre. Shouldn't be hard to get something like that done on public TV...you wouldn't get coverage with it but you might attract enough attention to get the ball rolling more.
It's not strange. Ever since this Colorado thing broke I've been telling people at work how much I hated high school...about how I still haven't recovered from it (I've been out since 1990). I was a major geek/nerd and on top of that I was two years younger than everyone else in my class, which made things even harder.
Nowadays, much like you the only thing that keeps me happy is my job. I'm a network admin for a medium-sized ISP and the only way I really get to express myself creatively is through the programs I write and the networks I build.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm, since they're copyprotected, that means there's no reason they can't take a return on them after they're opened. I think if they're going to do this we should be allowed to return CDs to the store after purchasing them and discovering that all but one of the tracks are utter crap.
As for me I won't be buying any CDs from Universal it seems. I simply don't own any equipment on which these CDs could be played...just computers and an Apex DVD player that from what I understand actually has a rather standard IDE DVD-ROM drive in it.
When i wired my house (it's a 100+ year old house in the middle of Detroit) i ran 16 pairs of cat5 to each drop with at least one drop per room. That's four 4-pair cables, all wired down into a patch panel in the basement. Generally each faceplate is set up with two RJ-45s (for Ethernet) and two RJ-11s (for phones.)
Now that I've read this I'm thinking of repulling 25-pair cables. It would make my wiring a LOT cleaner in the basement and give me a chance to do some of the runs better.
Grip also has the nice feature of automatically keeping track of all your mp3s in a MySQL database. You can then use that database with DigitalDJ to build play lists by artist, genre, etc. Or of course you can hit the database yourself and build your own frontend software for it.
I have already ripped most of my ~300 CDs to high-quality MP3. The server is mounted on all my computers around the house, so no matter where I am I can pull up my favorite music.
I certainly intend to boycott any CDs that have that ridiculous protection on them...not just because I can't MP3 them but because pretty much every CD player I own outside my car stereo (and that is even debatable) is actually a CD-ROM drive and probably won't play the disc anyways.
I wish the RIAA would wake up and smell the burning plastic. Hell, if I could pay for and download albums on-demand and they were in standard MP3 format I'd buy MORE than I do now, simply because of the convenience factor. Yes, people are going to trade songs no matter what you do; I think the solution is to just make it so CHEAP AND EASY to pay for the music legit that there isn't a whole lot of reason to get pirated copies. Something like emusic.com but with a decent selection.
You know I really resent the fact that the RIAA and MPAA automatically treats me as a criminal. What happened to innocent until proven guilty? The hundreds of CDs and DVDs in my possession should be ample proof that I'm willing to pay for what I use.
I just don't know folks. I am really starting to feel like my country has completely sold out.
Isn't the structural integrity field supposed to be a lower power subspace field? I remember reading it in some book or manual once; the idea is to actually lower the mass of the ship so that a large ship can actually do those impressive curved flight paths without tearing itself to pieces.
:)
How that works without disrupting the artificial gravity is anybody's guess. But then again, after nearly 20 years of "new" Star Trek we've learned that subspace fields can do just about anything, probably including cleaning the windows.
Informed about current events? Not from American television. ;)
Maybe it's a powered hardsuit. Get ready for Bubblegum Crisis 2001!
I used to not mind paying taxes either, and then my tax bracket hit 30% and then 40%. I definately mind now.
What I'd like is to be able to at least determine where my tax dollars go. I don't mind paying for things that are worth having, but some things (the "war on drugs", for example) are a waste of my money.
Personally I am leaning towards the ideas that I see from time to time where income taxes are eliminated or greatly reduced and replaced by taxes on other things. It's a clean way of letting me put my tax dollars towards things of which I am a consumer. Example: taxes on gasoline to pay for roads. It puts the tax burden on exactly the people who USE the roads in the first place (including travelers from out of state.)
I've died numerous times in dreams too. I've been stabbed, shot, nuked several times, and incinerated (in a non-nuclear way). The funky part was I actually felt those things happen to me in the dreams. Being incinerated was kinda freaky.
You never hear anyone talk about that. What if at midnight we all drop dead or even worse wake up as unfertilized eggs because our bodies think it's 1900?
Not only is the aimbot possible without open source but I have a friend who did it a couple :)
years ago. It wasn't much fun to play against a
guy who could kill you with an axe without taking
a single point of damage himself.
(it _was_ neat to watch though; the bot would let you run in a circle around the victim faster than they could aim, all while hitting them with the axe. It also did auto-aim, did motion prediction so it could fire ahead of players, and even knew how to aim at the wall in front of a player with a rocket so they got explosion damage while the bot switched to another weapon and hit 'em with that too)
And then there was Mega Music for the Apple II, which actually let you _sample_ sounds from the casette in port and play them back through the speaker. A damned fine piece of code, I remember being so amazed by it that I disassembled the whole thing, figured out how it worked and wrote an enhanced version (Mega Music Pro.)
Agreed. On my work machine (P233MMX, 64 megs RAM, 12 MB Voodoo2) it's actually very playable with all the "cool" options turned on (high-quality sky, high geometric detail, etc.). The previous version required me to turn off a lot of these options to avoid jerky gameplay.
:(
Now I gotta try the Win32 version on my Celeron 450...I hate booting back into Windows 98 but alas my 3D card is a Riva TNT.
Nah, let's throw AOL CDs. They're free. :-)
Um, Metro GL is software 3D rendering only. If it _does_ work it's going to be slow as hell...
They've been talking about a free upgrade when hardware support is available, but then again i remember them mentioning hardware support two years ago and have yet to see anything come of it.
Hmm so if I build a computer in one of these can I call it an iWin?
(Ok well I actually run Linux...but iLin sounds weird. Anyone got any better ideas?)
I think the point being made (and I speak from experience) is that it can be _very_ difficult to recover from the damage done during middle and high school. I've been out of high school for nearly nine years and I'm still working on it.
I was fine up until sixth grade, which I entered directly from fourth grade. Before that I wasn't the "in" crowd but I also wasn't really bothered by anyone. From sixth grade on though things got continually worse, up until my senior year in high school which wasn't as bad because a lot of my "enemies" had graduated. But the damage of all those years of teasing, taunting, occasional violence (nothing major, fortunately) and other harassement took its toll. Hell the damage continued to grow after high school, even after the causes had gone away. I finally ended up in a state where I just didn't _care_ about much of anything...being emotionally dead was just easier than the pain. Although I'm pulling myself out of that state it does still come back now and then (reading all these stories has brought it back, for example.)
In the wake of the whole Colorado thing it seems there are some people going around the net, looking for "questionable" materials, and then complaining to ISPs to get them removed.
Today I get a call from my boss. Seems a page on our system (a friend's page) has pipebomb directions on it and somebody with a yahoo return address was complaining about it and threatening to inform the FBI. To be fair, the pages were hosted as a freebie, but I was also told that I was not allowed to move the pages to my personal servers either (specifically the pages weren't to traverse our network at all.) To make a long story short we got into an argument that ended with me slamming my phone down *hard* and proceeding to lock down the pages (actually the whole domain for that web page).
I read the complaint letter and it was obvious what the guy was doing. My friend is a goth/geek type too and this guy did _not_ seem like he just happened to be browsing when he found this stuff. No, he was explicitly looking for it, probably via search engine, and proceeding to erradicate it wherever he found it. He's just a self-appointed net censor. Better than a government-appointed one I suppose but a censor nonetheless.
I just wish someone would realize that the Internet, computers, video games and music aren't the cause of all our problems.
We need publicity. Maybe sending the URLs to this topic to as many mass media folks as possible would get a bit of attention. Email it to talk shows, news shows, newspapers, whatever. There has to be _someone_ out there that cares about the truth.
What I'd really like to see is some sort of geek talk show or forum, even if it's just a one-time thing related to the Colorado massacre. Shouldn't be hard to get something like that done on public TV...you wouldn't get coverage with it but you might attract enough attention to get the ball rolling more.
It's not strange. Ever since this Colorado thing broke I've been telling people at work how much I hated high school...about how I still haven't recovered from it (I've been out since 1990). I was a major geek/nerd and on top of that I was two years younger than everyone else in my class, which made things even harder.
Nowadays, much like you the only thing that keeps me happy is my job. I'm a network admin for a medium-sized ISP and the only way I really get to express myself creatively is through the programs I write and the networks I build.