I've donated to the EFF in the past, but they've got a pretty craptastic track record, which makes me wonder whether they're the best use of my resources. The ACLU, on the other hand, is so controversial not merely for the positions they take, but because they have shown that they can be effective in arguing those positions before a judge and jury.
Either way, I'm inclined to believe that the best use of my resources is to donate to the defense of specific cases rather than an organization where I have no idea what specific cause my dollars might support.
Ok, I'm busted -- I didn't bother to look up the year the PS was released. Regardless, the screenshots I posted were from 1996, one year after the worldwide release, and the rest of my comparisons were accurate. Even if the PS exceeded the potential of its contemporary home computers -- a point which I'm not conceeding, just too lazy to do more research on -- a console besting a desktop is still the exception, not the rule.
So fine the end users. You know -- the people actually doing that stuff? "Enabling" is a half-assed argument, because not all of the people sending SPAM are the same people setting up phishing sites or nigerian e-mail scams, and throwing them all into the same group is either ignorant, lazy, or both -- neither of which are characteristics a criminal justice system should have.
Feeling sorry for the people that seek out ways to support and do business with them through the sale of information that they have no right to sell... well, I've got to wonder what drives your perspective on this.
I'm not feeling sorry for anyone; what I'm saying is that it is the responsibility of government to conduct itself in a manner befitting its position. That is to say, it should lead by example. It's ridiculous to accuse someone of reckless behavior and then act recklessly with their fates. It's hypocracy.
You think you know everything despite not having done everything
More strawman BS. By no stretch of the imagination did anything I say even remotely resemble a claim to know everything. Furthermore, you don't have the first inkling of my life experiences. But feel free to come up with even more unrelated arguments -- less reposting for me.
And how many years can it take to recover from having your credit history trashed, from losing your sensitive job because you appear to be financially wreckless or in debt, or from having to rebuild your reputation when someone sends around child pr0n links/content or stock-pumping scams that appear to be coming from you?
WTF are you talking about? Because *we're* talking about sending people to jail for selling e-mail addresses. In no way does that financially wreck someone's life or prop up any of your other strawman arguments.
If you feel your life has been ruined by SPAM, maybe you should do a couple of years in the joint to gain some perspective.
(In fact, I think all potential judges, prosecutors, and police should spend no less than 30 days in jail [general population, not the cushy Club Fed] and all politicians [actually, all citizens] should have to serve no less than 2 years in the military, because for the most part, none of them have any idea what they're doing to other people's lives.)
No, they really don't. Neither the NES nor the SNES outperformed the contemporary Amiga or Ataris, the PlayStation did not outperform a 450MHz P2 with a VooDoo2, and the PS2 did not outperform a 1GHz Athlon with a GeForce 2.
For example, Tomb Raider Screens on the PlayStation compared to the PC.
On top of that console's...have a much lower resolution.
Which just brings your definition of "outperforming" further into question.
This is a stupid idea. Let's make it illegal for deaf people to cross the street while we're at it. Here's an idea: How about a $10,000 fine for people who hit pedestrians?
On a side note, pedestrians/joggers (and drivers, of course) are prohibited from wearing headphones on most military installations, although sometimes exceptions are made such as only 1 ear, or only on specific paths, or both. While there's no fine per se, they can just ban you from the base if you're a civilian, or use NJP and/or letters of reprimand if you're a uni, any of which is potentially much more devastating than a meager fine. Of course, the military isn't fond of letting its people make their own decisions in life, and that's just one example.
Meet Google Presently, whose name only marginally beat out heavy contenders Google Naptime and Google Notagain. Google toyed with Ihopetheyturnoffthelightssonobodynoticesmesleeping , but decided it was confusingly similar to PowerPoint.
it was also a dumb marketing campaign and the agency should have known better in this day and age
No kidding. For example, I've removed all the lights in my home so nobody becomes alarmed and calls the police, and with a little luck my petition to remove backlighted highway signs and stadium scoreboards will come to fruition.
(Mostly) self parking Lexuses are available in the US as well. (Lexus is the luxury brand of Toyota, the same company described in the article linked above).
I was unceremoniously kicked from the server before even getting into the game, with a note that Punkbuster had inadequate OS privileges.
You know what? GOOD. PunkBuster is crap. My BF2 CD key was banned less than one week after I bought the game for supposedly running some sort of hack. I tried protesting, but PB said "we have clear evidence that you were using a hack," although they wouldn't elaborate AT ALL as to what sort of evidence it was, or what sort of hack it might have been, and they said the only solution would be for me to buy a new copy of the game, which is utter bullshit. The only thing I can think of is using DaemonTools to mount an image, but that doesn't affect gameplay.
At any rate, EA wouldn't give me a new CD Key either, because they claimed "Punkbuster is a third party application and we have no control over their decisions. Additionally, you can still play on servers without Punkbuster." Ok, so you hand over total control of your game to a third party? WTF sense does that make? Second, you expect me to want to play on a bunch of hack-infested servers? It was hard enough finding a playable server with a ping under 200 that didn't ban me for having a "high" ping, let alone one without PB.
So I hope Vista sinks the whole PB franchise. It's a shitty "solution" and a cop out for game publishers who don't want to take responsibility for their design flaws. That would be the only benefit to Vista that I can think of thus far.
Pardon my french, but I really hate those bastards.
Doctors do not get "kickbacks" for prescribing medication. They might get a crappy pen and a doodle pad, or some golf balls with CureAllix written on it, but that's about it. Nor do they deliberately attempt to make their services unaffordable. Malpractice insurance takes a huge cut of doctors' salaries, along with the need to repay education loans, administrative overhead, crappy Medicare reimbursement, not to mention treating people who never pay their bills -- and since the poorest people are statistically likely to be in the worst health, they tend to cost the most money to treat. There are many failures of healthcare, but high costs are a symptom, not the cause.
Can you work out just how long they would have stayed in business in the states *without* drm? Weeks? Days? It would have ended in a very loud lawsuit, I can work out that much.
The ridiculous part of that is that DRM does nothing to prevent piracy. The people who want to obtain unrestricted copies already can, from a plethora of sources from friends' CDs to torrents. The only thing DRM does is give you less product for your money.
Real men don't need user-friendly names for their ip addresses:)
Sure.. except that 99.999% of links use names instead of IPs. Some sites aren't even accessible by IP. Just try going to GMail by IP with DNS disabled and/or misconfigured -- you won't even make it to your Inbox. Not to mention virtual hosts. In theory, domain names are merely convenience, but in practice, the net would grind to a halt without them. My ISPs servers go down all the time, and it's a major PITA.
On a side note, anyone know if there are there any publicly accessible DNS sites so I can bypass my ISP entirely? (For lookups, not for listing).
It would be interesting to see what would happen if a "botnet" was to send takedown notices for every single video on YouTube, such that the notices appeared to come from either multiple individuals or multiple corporations. Of course that would probably be a criminal act, so I don't suggest anyone actually do it, but I'm guessing YouTube would either have to comply, or spend tons of resources determining legitimate, or likely-legitimate requests. Either way, I'm guessing they would soon become anti-DMCA.
Slashdot Mirror
I've donated to the EFF in the past, but they've got a pretty craptastic track record, which makes me wonder whether they're the best use of my resources. The ACLU, on the other hand, is so controversial not merely for the positions they take, but because they have shown that they can be effective in arguing those positions before a judge and jury.
Either way, I'm inclined to believe that the best use of my resources is to donate to the defense of specific cases rather than an organization where I have no idea what specific cause my dollars might support.
Ok, I'm busted -- I didn't bother to look up the year the PS was released. Regardless, the screenshots I posted were from 1996, one year after the worldwide release, and the rest of my comparisons were accurate. Even if the PS exceeded the potential of its contemporary home computers -- a point which I'm not conceeding, just too lazy to do more research on -- a console besting a desktop is still the exception, not the rule.
Who do you suppose is buying them?
So fine the end users. You know -- the people actually doing that stuff? "Enabling" is a half-assed argument, because not all of the people sending SPAM are the same people setting up phishing sites or nigerian e-mail scams, and throwing them all into the same group is either ignorant, lazy, or both -- neither of which are characteristics a criminal justice system should have.
Feeling sorry for the people that seek out ways to support and do business with them through the sale of information that they have no right to sell... well, I've got to wonder what drives your perspective on this.
I'm not feeling sorry for anyone; what I'm saying is that it is the responsibility of government to conduct itself in a manner befitting its position. That is to say, it should lead by example. It's ridiculous to accuse someone of reckless behavior and then act recklessly with their fates. It's hypocracy.
You think you know everything despite not having done everything
More strawman BS. By no stretch of the imagination did anything I say even remotely resemble a claim to know everything. Furthermore, you don't have the first inkling of my life experiences. But feel free to come up with even more unrelated arguments -- less reposting for me.
Right, thanks. I wasn't intentionally ignoring the obvious or anything. Woosh indeed.
And how many years can it take to recover from having your credit history trashed, from losing your sensitive job because you appear to be financially wreckless or in debt, or from having to rebuild your reputation when someone sends around child pr0n links/content or stock-pumping scams that appear to be coming from you?
WTF are you talking about? Because *we're* talking about sending people to jail for selling e-mail addresses. In no way does that financially wreck someone's life or prop up any of your other strawman arguments.
If you feel your life has been ruined by SPAM, maybe you should do a couple of years in the joint to gain some perspective.
(In fact, I think all potential judges, prosecutors, and police should spend no less than 30 days in jail [general population, not the cushy Club Fed] and all politicians [actually, all citizens] should have to serve no less than 2 years in the military, because for the most part, none of them have any idea what they're doing to other people's lives.)
Consoles outperform a similar aged PCs
No, they really don't. Neither the NES nor the SNES outperformed the contemporary Amiga or Ataris, the PlayStation did not outperform a 450MHz P2 with a VooDoo2, and the PS2 did not outperform a 1GHz Athlon with a GeForce 2.
For example, Tomb Raider Screens on the PlayStation compared to the PC.
On top of that console's...have a much lower resolution.
Which just brings your definition of "outperforming" further into question.
Or, and I'm just going out on a limb here, they could do something like if hard drive is present {cache the fscking data}; else don't
This is a stupid idea. Let's make it illegal for deaf people to cross the street while we're at it. Here's an idea: How about a $10,000 fine for people who hit pedestrians?
On a side note, pedestrians/joggers (and drivers, of course) are prohibited from wearing headphones on most military installations, although sometimes exceptions are made such as only 1 ear, or only on specific paths, or both. While there's no fine per se, they can just ban you from the base if you're a civilian, or use NJP and/or letters of reprimand if you're a uni, any of which is potentially much more devastating than a meager fine. Of course, the military isn't fond of letting its people make their own decisions in life, and that's just one example.
they could do so comfortably knowing that they already won-- "piracy" has been stygmatized
Sounds like the work of Stygmies.
It sounds like *you* need to learn to think from the gut!
HR?
Meet Google Presently, whose name only marginally beat out heavy contenders Google Naptime and Google Notagain. Google toyed with Ihopetheyturnoffthelightssonobodynoticesmesleeping , but decided it was confusingly similar to PowerPoint.
it was also a dumb marketing campaign and the agency should have known better in this day and age
No kidding. For example, I've removed all the lights in my home so nobody becomes alarmed and calls the police, and with a little luck my petition to remove backlighted highway signs and stadium scoreboards will come to fruition.
(Mostly) self parking Lexuses are available in the US as well. (Lexus is the luxury brand of Toyota, the same company described in the article linked above).
I was unceremoniously kicked from the server before even getting into the game, with a note that Punkbuster had inadequate OS privileges.
You know what? GOOD. PunkBuster is crap. My BF2 CD key was banned less than one week after I bought the game for supposedly running some sort of hack. I tried protesting, but PB said "we have clear evidence that you were using a hack," although they wouldn't elaborate AT ALL as to what sort of evidence it was, or what sort of hack it might have been, and they said the only solution would be for me to buy a new copy of the game, which is utter bullshit. The only thing I can think of is using DaemonTools to mount an image, but that doesn't affect gameplay.
At any rate, EA wouldn't give me a new CD Key either, because they claimed "Punkbuster is a third party application and we have no control over their decisions. Additionally, you can still play on servers without Punkbuster." Ok, so you hand over total control of your game to a third party? WTF sense does that make? Second, you expect me to want to play on a bunch of hack-infested servers? It was hard enough finding a playable server with a ping under 200 that didn't ban me for having a "high" ping, let alone one without PB.
So I hope Vista sinks the whole PB franchise. It's a shitty "solution" and a cop out for game publishers who don't want to take responsibility for their design flaws. That would be the only benefit to Vista that I can think of thus far.
Pardon my french, but I really hate those bastards.
Doctors do not get "kickbacks" for prescribing medication. They might get a crappy pen and a doodle pad, or some golf balls with CureAllix written on it, but that's about it. Nor do they deliberately attempt to make their services unaffordable. Malpractice insurance takes a huge cut of doctors' salaries, along with the need to repay education loans, administrative overhead, crappy Medicare reimbursement, not to mention treating people who never pay their bills -- and since the poorest people are statistically likely to be in the worst health, they tend to cost the most money to treat. There are many failures of healthcare, but high costs are a symptom, not the cause.
Not right now, but I've got a cold...
Can you work out just how long they would have stayed in business in the states *without* drm? Weeks? Days? It would have ended in a very loud lawsuit, I can work out that much.
The ridiculous part of that is that DRM does nothing to prevent piracy. The people who want to obtain unrestricted copies already can, from a plethora of sources from friends' CDs to torrents. The only thing DRM does is give you less product for your money.
The flaw in that particular wigglument is that protected AAC is already compromised, and Apple has not fixed it.
Real men don't need user-friendly names for their ip addresses :)
Sure.. except that 99.999% of links use names instead of IPs. Some sites aren't even accessible by IP. Just try going to GMail by IP with DNS disabled and/or misconfigured -- you won't even make it to your Inbox. Not to mention virtual hosts. In theory, domain names are merely convenience, but in practice, the net would grind to a halt without them. My ISPs servers go down all the time, and it's a major PITA.
On a side note, anyone know if there are there any publicly accessible DNS sites so I can bypass my ISP entirely? (For lookups, not for listing).
Apparently I did when I failed to sufficiently proofread. For my next trick, C is now 299,792,458 miles per second.
It would be interesting to see what would happen if a "botnet" was to send takedown notices for every single video on YouTube, such that the notices appeared to come from either multiple individuals or multiple corporations. Of course that would probably be a criminal act, so I don't suggest anyone actually do it, but I'm guessing YouTube would either have to comply, or spend tons of resources determining legitimate, or likely-legitimate requests. Either way, I'm guessing they would soon become anti-DMCA.
More people should just rename their files to usher.mp3.
Civ 4 - The part where you have to click things.
Seriously, I've only beat the game once, by accident, with the space race, the very first time I played (and had no idea what I was doing).