We haven't come to a conclusion yet, but one of the questions I brought up was whether or not the council would censor the access to try to prevent folks from downloading free porn in our parks on their laptops.
One corollary question to consider with this? Who decides what content should be blocked? Whoever ends up making this decision can wield a lot of power. As people come to rely on the system for access, the body who makes the decisions of what is indecnet will wield a lot of power over what those people see. And does the city wish to contend with people who feel they have been slighted possibly filing suit against the city? I'm all for public internet access, and tend to think that we are probably going to end up there, but the idea of government imposed morality is disturbing. It's far too easy for those who decide what is indecent to push their own moral agenda. (see PRC)
It's funny, but that rule has always struck me as a way to avoid dealing with the perfect example of many things taken to an extreme. Really, give a good, logical reason that drawing parallels to the Nazis should mean defeat for a person in a debate. Sometimes, it's a good parallel, and and good way of using history as an example. If anything, the unwillingness to deal with real history, and real examples of what can go very wrong seems to be an admission that a debater is unwilling to deal with reality.
We haven't yet cracked the code on how to fully minimize the crunches in the development and production process.
- From TFA
Maybe, just maybe, you should consider setting more realistic goals? Granted, they want to hit the market during the holiday rush, but then, add more programmers.
It sounds like EA is just trying to exist as a programming sweat shop, keep the minimum number of programmers to do the job, and push them to work ridiculous hours to make a deadline. While I don't want to see a law to stop this, I'd at least like to see a few good lawsuits take a ton of money from EA on this. Perhaps, fine them an amount equivilent to the net profit made from all the games which suffered from this sort of behavior, and divide it up between the people who worked under these conditions.
Is the address just available to *just* "users" or is it somewhere on the site where random visitors have access to it?
If it is the former, then I think it's perfectly reasonable for you to set and enforce terms of use for that address.
If it's the latter, then you haven't just given it to your users, you've published it to the websurfing public, and should expect that the only terms of use are any currently applicable laws.[Emphasis added.]
This is sort of what I was trying to get at in my post. Why should I not be able to expect that the intention under which I published my email address will be respected? I'm not arguing about what currently is, I'm asking, why can't it be better? Why is it that, in order for to maintain any level of privacy in the US, do I have to hide inside my home? Why can I not post my email address, state that it is only being posted for use with items pertaining to my web site, and expect for that to be respected.
This is just my opinion, but I really think we have let companies get out of hand. Yes, they should be allowed to advertise in public spaces, and, if someone gives them their address/phone number, with the express purpose of being advertised at, companies should be allowed to advertise to those people. However, if a person posts his/her information in a public space, with an intent other than to be advertised at, companies should respect that.
What I am arguing is that people play a significant role in controlling their own privacy. If you mean to tell just audience X something, but, for whatever reason, you tell a much larger audience, that's kind of your own fault, not theirs.
I think this is the main difference between our thinking. I don't agree that a person's information becomes public the minute it hits a public space. If information is posted for a particular purpose, that information should be respected as still being private, and ununsable, unless it is for the intened purpose of publication. (Or it serves a vaild public concern) Basiclly, I don't think that a person should have to be a paranoid hermit to be left alone.
There are two freedoms: the freedom from being pestered by someone selling something, and the freedom to sell something. Which takes precedence?
I don't think this is a case of precidence. Advertisers should be free to advertise; however, what I am claiming is that advertisers should not be allowed to simply collect and use personal information, even if it is posted in a public place. i.e. I could publish my email address, with a statement akin to, "For use pertaining to my website." And I would not end up getting email which was unrelated to my site. I'd even go so far as to say that ads which are about web hosting, would be OK, as they might, arguably, be pertinent to my site.
What I'm aiming for here is a default that personal information about you cannot be used without prior affirmative consent. As opposed to the current situation where any information about you can be used in any way anyone wants. Yes, it would create headaches for companies, as they would have to keep a record of that consent. But, it might also make them a bit more responsible in how they use that data.
The bit about a surveillance society loses me...how would such a society alleviate the spam problem? (Incidentally, I for one do not want to live in a surveillance society:)
Sorry, it was a bit of a non-sequitor, it wasn't meant to imply that a surveillance society would make the SPAM problem better. It was simply to note that the US is currently stuck in this idea that you have no privacy in a public place, which lends itself naturally to a surviellence society. Something which, hopefully, most people realize is a very bad thing for freedom.
I think this is a matter of how you view "public" release. If I put an email address on my web site, so that users of my site can send let me know if there are brokern links, incorrect information, etc. Why should I suddenly be deluged with advertisements for fake Viagra? That is not why that email address is there, and that intention should be fairly obvious. A mailto link, with the words, "If you find any broken links, or have any questions about this site, please contact me here", in no way implies that I want ads for anything.
I like this ruling, and wish we had a similar law in the US. If my work place lists my email address in a public directory, with the intent that people who need to contact me about subjects relating to my work can easily do so, I should not have to contend with people sending advertisments to that email address. It is fairly obvious that the intention of that directory is not so that I can be advertised at.
Unfortunatly, the US seems to be stuck on this idea that you have no privacy in a public place. This is a wonderful idea if your intention is to live in a surveillance society, bad if you hope to live in a free one. Privacy, even in a public space should be the default, I shouldn't have to hide in my home if I wish to keep anything about me private.
Nope, you not the only one. I played, beat and enjoyed ET on the Atari, though I thought I was the only one, guess there are two of us.
As a later poster mentioned the pits could be annoying, the trick was to make sure you kept holding the button down, and then moved off the pit in the upper screen, not that hard, and no reset needed.
The most important thing to remember to do was, always find the location the ship would land, before you called them. Trying to find just the right spot on that forest screen when the timer was running down, was nearly impossible.
How is this different, than say, preventing children from seeing a rated R movie without their parent?
Simple, there is nothing in law that mandates that theaters keeps kids out. The MPAA's rating system, and near universal enforcement of age restrictions is all volutary. source Actually, its not too dissimilar to what we are seeing happen today with video games. With legislative bodies threatening legislation, the MPAA adopted the rating system volutarally. The gaming industry is moving that way, and will get there, the last thing we need is yet another nanny-state law to create problems for legitimate purchasers.
And hey, if a kid wants to drink alcohol, he's gonna drink it, so let's legalize it for minors.
Yes, please, maybe then we might be able to emulate the success of Germany and other countries where underage binge drinking isn't a widespread problem. But them, it's better to have this forbidden fruit out there which teenages will get a hold of and will over indulge in.
The difference is it takes a parent to make that game available to the child, so the parent is better able to enforce their decisions.
These games cost upwards of $50, how are they getting a hold of them in the first place? Second, why aren't the parents paying a little bit of attention to what their kids are doing? Yes, the kids are going to manage to hide some stuff from their parents, but honestly, a mildly involved parent is going to notice this stuff. Why not, instead of shirking responsibilities, the parents actually spend time with their kids and pay attention to what the kids are doing?
And if you don't run IE at all, no spyware.
If only this was true. I support several students at a university's Masters in GIS program, many of them have converted to FireFox. However, many of them also like to install programs like Kazaa Media Desktop, Gator, etc. One of my recurrent problems is uninstalling crap like WhenU from the students laptops. Unfortunatly, the laptops belong to the students, so they have full control over them, I just get to support them.
Spyware isn't just an IE problem, its a windows and user problem. If you think you're safe, just because you don't run IE, might I suggest you give Spybot or AdAware a whirl, the results may suprise you.
We've looked hard at the nature of this problem, and made a decision that this anti-spyware capability will become something that's available at no additional charge for Windows users
--Bill Gates
Yes, its called AdAware and SpyBot S&D. Free spyware killing tools on Windows has little to do with MS putting one out for free.
So, what you are saying is that: IE has better error handeling than Firefox?
I use Firefox, and love it. I only bother with IE on those few sites where Firefox doesn't seem to work. But the truth of the matter is, if a site has broken HTML, Firefox tends to just give up, IE at least tries to act intellegently about it, whether it gets it right is beside the point. This would be a nice feature to see in Firefox, if a site's code is broken, at least give it a best effort to clean it up.
Of course, given everything else which Firefox does well, I wouldn't gripe about this, and the number of sites where it comes up is rather small.
Although it would kinda suck to find that the HIV stuck around even after its job was done. Eventually everone would have it.
Actually, this would probably be a good thing. First off, I have to belive that the first thing to go in that 80% of genetic material removed, was the part that makes HIV such a problem. Second, even if part of that was left, the virus is designed to only target cells with a particular protein structure, one that is basically unique to cancer cells. So, assuming that we all got "infected" with this virus, via the normal HIV means, this would mean that we all become immune to the types of cancers that carry this particular protein. (Except slashdotters, of course, they would never get "infected")
The guys working on this stuff are pretty smart, if the average slashdotter can think of the problem with giving people the HIV virus, I'm sure one of the researchers came up with it, and worked out a solution before UCLA's gene therapy lab opened its collective mouth.
This sounds very promising, if it does turn out to kill several cancers, not have any really bad side effects, and be transmitted via sex; imagine how much good it would do. They would simply have to give the virus to a part of the population, and then just left those people pass it along. And think of the new pickup line, "Hey baby, want to get vaccinated?"
This is why I get irritated at people who constantly go off about how much cheaper PCs are than macs. They never mention these little things, and these little things start to add up real fast
You go out and pay $70-$100 for a firewall, get a mcafee virus scan subscription for $35/year. Oh, just to be safe you better grab yourself the latest copy of AdAware, another $40-ish dollars down the drain. Holy cow, your $499 pc now cost you like $700 for the bare minimum! And that's just the beginning of the pain you're in for. You can't use your regular browser, no sir! You need Firefox to avoid totally foobaring your computer. Download and install that.
You want to talk about honesty, at least be honest yourself.
New PC: $499 + Tax/Shipping
Firewall: DI-604 w/NAT $49.99 source
Ok, its just NAT, not really a firewall, but it accomplished the purpose
Firewall (part 2): Zone Alarm, free for home use.
Virus Scanner: AVG Free for home use
AdAware: Free for home use
Spybot S&D: Free for home use, because 2 is better than one
So, that $499 has only managed to make it up to $549, not $700. Yes, this requires a little bit of thought, but not a lot. If the user can manage to get AdAware, they can get the rest as well. Plus, I would imagine that, by now, most homes will have some sort of router, reguardless of OS,
This was my thought the moment I read the submitter's blurb. If the spammers are following the CAN-SPAM act, then great, we've won. The way I see it, there are certain things that must exist in "legitimate" spam. With a half decent baysian filter, these words should be quickly associated with spam, and will, therefore get deleted. In time, and with a bit of training, users won't even see this stuff.
Of course, this still leaves the problem on the server side. Which can be mitigated with things like blacklists.
I will grant that it is not a complete solution, but it's a small step. Whether we like it or not, SPAM is here to stay, the best thing for us to do is make them tag it as such, so that it can be easily filtered. Perhaps the only solution is going to be something along the lines of mandating an update to the SMTP standard, and include a command which basically says, "I'm about to send you SPAM instead of normal email", maybe a SPAM TO: instead of a RCPT TO:, this could then be filtered per user at the server level.
e.g. Each user is allowed to either accept all or reject all SPAM TO:me@domain.com. Or, if an ISP is feeling adventerous, they could allow a user to keep a list vendors which they want to see spam from.
The last part of this would be to legislate that companies must use this on all commercial email, with nasty fines if they don't. Something like $1000 per message which didn't use this. And a revoking of business license for repeat offenders.
After that, declare the war "won" and go about your way. It's time to piss off more countries my friend...
You had an A+ in Jingoism right up until that last line. Never, never, never, end the war. Just let it simmer down and sit in the background while the next war is fought. Then, every once in a while trot it out, like an old trophy horse, and use it to scare a few more people into giving up their liberties.
Remeber, we're still fighting the war on drugs.
Wow, just reading the little snippet provided I knew the source had no clue: ...Chernobyl No. 4's outer shell was probably breached by a powerful hydrogen explosion...[emphasis added]
1. Chernobyl suffered a steam explosion.
2. Cherynobyl was a fission reactor, not a fusion reactor (there still isn't a viable one of those yet). Fission reactors don't have a use for hydrogen, nor would they be operating in a way which might possibly cause a hydrogen explosion.
Considering that, rather obvious, failure to get the facts straight, I'd take anything this source says with a grain of salt (and the rest of the mine it came from).
I think Solo Han may be chanelling Mao. You are basically asking people to explain how to circumvent their government's controls, when that government is known to do some rather painful things to those that subvert the government?
I call Shenanagins, the question is either just troll BS, or the the guy asking it is too dumb to utilize the answers.
Face it, would anyone comming to the US really ask, in a public forum, how do I get around the US's stupid drug laws? (Please don't answer this, I'm trying to nurture a little faith in humanity)
I agree that swearing, blood, etc. are not required for adult games. What tends to get me with Nintendo games these days is that all of the characters tend to look like kids. Not just teenagers, but little kids. And the dialogue isn't much better. I understand that there might be a bit of a cultural disconnect here, I'm beginning to think that the Japaneese audiance likes melodrama. Personally, I find it annoying. It should probably be noted at this point that this was one of the large factors which made me dislike every Final Fantasy after the first one in the US.
I just have trouble playing a game which looks like and has the writting of your average cartoon. I don't even mind re-used plots, but presentation means a lot to me, and I've just not been impressed with the way most Nintendo games come off these days. Not that the PS2 hasn't had it's share of "13 year old saves the day and figures out his dating life at the same time" games, but with the number of 3rd party games out there for the system, I can usually find something I like. Yes, some of the writting is on par with a B rate movie, but I find that more forgivable, just a personal choice.
Nintendo's biggest enemy seems to be Nintendo. One of the things that Nintendo did very well was market to kids. The problem is, now they have a bunch of people trained to equate Nintendo with kid's games. PS2, on the other hand, went after the late teen and young adult market. So many people are stuck with the Nintendo=Kids, PS2=Adults mentality. While this isn't really true anymore, Nintendo is stuck trying to undo the marketing of the past. Plus, the Nintendo 64 was a dud. I was one of the people to get one early on, I liked Super Mario 64, and had seen some adds for some interesting 3rd party games. Nintendo was screwed by the third party developers in some cases, and the games just didn't materialize for the N64. In the end, I think I owned about 4 games for thr system, because I couldn't find anything on the system which appealed to me. I finally bought a Playstation used, and got more games for it than I did for my N64. When the time to choose between the PS2 and the GameCube came along, I wasn't willing to touch another new Nintendo product, I got a PS2, and have been very happy with it.
Funny aside to that. I went to the E3 where Nintendo and MS were announcing their respective systems. At the time the PS2 looked like it was in trouble. All it had were a bunch of remakes and sequals to show. Then we walked into the Nintendo area, which was a teaming mass of people. We got to see such wonderful titiles as Super Smash Brothers, Pikman, Star Fox Adventures, Rouge Squadron (whatever incarnation), and Luigi's Haunted Mansion. It looked pretty good, though mostly aimed at kids. Lastly we hit the Xbox area, and got to see very little. They had some sort of skiing game and a water based shooter. The graphics were pretty but I just didn't see a killer game on it. The GameCube looked poised to win the war. Now I own a PS2 (which I thought to be the worst in show), the Xbox still has zero interest from me, and the GameCube is only now a consideration since I've watched a friend play Metroid Prime.
Somehow I don't think Nintendo is going anywhere, they've got a ton of cash, lots of brand recognition, and they are finally starting to win the battle against their previous image. Sure, they may go through a few slow years/systems, but I'm expecting that they will end up beating Microsoft in the end.
Peronsally, I'd not really looked too hard at it until the first reply to my post, which was at a 0 score, so it tends not to show up. Basically, the post claimed that every person in the world could be stuffed in Australia, with enough room to have a house and a yard. Obviously this smooths over a lot of things, like the landscape, but, it's fairly true.
Australia is roughly 2,969,907 sq.mi.
At 640 acres per sq.mi. we get.
2,969,907 sq.mi. * 640 acres/sq.mi. = 1,900,740,480 acres
1.9B acres / 6.5B people =.29 acres/person
So each person gets slightly more than a quarter of an acre, it's not a huge parcel of land, but not uncommon in developed countries.
Yes, this is impracticable and ignores terrain features, etc. But the point is, we really aren't that crowded, we just tend to clump together in groups. This also means that there is a ton of land for industry, agriculture, etc. Even if we didn't go vertical.
Now, this isn't to say that we shouldn't keep an eye on things, US consumerism is an issue, and allowed to grow uncontrolled will probably lead to problems. Also, I like clean air and water, so I'm all for doing what we can to keep the environment clean, but let's be reasonable about it.
Actually, I agree, we are not currently over populated. Though over population has a lot more than just living space to sort out, we are not at that point yet. However, if death from old age wasn't an issue, we could get there and quick. Right now our population is growing at a pretty steady rate, how much higher would it be without regular death?
Can you imagine the population growth if people actually lived this long? Sure, I'd love to be around for 1000 years, and I'd do it if I could; but, it's going to create a social nightmare. But then, what major technological change hasn't? If this comes to pass, we're probably going to have to finally bite the bullet and accept enforced birth controls, which, if nothing else, will finally solve the problem of resources running out. We simply pick a level of consumption we want to live at, calculate the population which can be supported by the planet at that level, and work to maintain 90% of that level.
I agree that it's just a matter of making the convience worth the money, but I think this is actually going to be very hard. Sure, for the first couple of people pirating the movie is going to be slow and awkward, but once it hits any major P2P network, it suddenly becomes easy. This will be more true as bandwidth to the home increses. Add to this BitTorrent and its inevitable children, and we have easy, and fast pirating.
As for the **AA's lawsuits, this will deter some, but it's also doomed to failure. Take a look at the MUTE page. It proposes a simple, and probably effective, anonymous P2P network. Couple that with a BitTorrent type download system, using file hashes, and a FreeNet style system of web pages and you have untrackable piracy. e.g. A pirate group puts the tracker file on a FreeNet page, which works with a MUTE based P2P application. No one knows who anyone is in the system, or where any of it is comming from. Granted, I doubt it's fool proof, but it's going to get harder and harder to track this stuff on the internet without some rather draconian measures.
The last part of this is already in place, pirate groups that are willing to put stuff out, just because they can. They can post the info to connect to their FreeNet page in a few IRC groups, and tag all of their releases with their info. Word of mouth will bring in more people, and people will probably start to rely on specfic groups, as they show the quality of their work. Heck, I would imagine that IRC would be used to critique said work.
The pieces are comming together to make internet piracy easy, and basically an anonymous activity. Right or wrong (that's not the point of this post) it's going to happen. The **AA will probably have to follow Bollywood's lead at some point, or really suffer from piracy. Or, if the argument is true, just get a bunch of free advertising for their product (I have a feeling we will get to see this theory tested at its logical extreme during the transition, I expect a diminishing returns situation).
Does he have enough money to hire someone to replace himself? Only then will a large budget be warranted.
No, you see Berman has it all figured out. He's going to go back in time and make ST:TNG suck so horribly that his shows seem great in comparison. This will probably involve pavlovian conditioning, wherein he subjects every person watching the show to Jerry Lewis every other minute of the show. The only exception to this will be those episodes where a time anomoly occurs, during which he will include a Playboy Playmate nude occasionally.
At the end of this, people will be conditioned to hate good ST episodes, with something resembling a good plot; and love ST episodes which revolve around time anomolies. This will make Voyager and Enterprise the best Star Trek series ever made. Further, it will allow Berman to continue writting bad time travel/anomoly plots. Because of the conditioning, everyone will love "Vulcans in the Old West", "T'Pal strips to her Skivies in the '50's", "Star Trek People Visit Current Day Earth", and other such favorites.
Why did Berman have to outlive Roddenberry?
Slashdot Mirror
We haven't come to a conclusion yet, but one of the questions I brought up was whether or not the council would censor the access to try to prevent folks from downloading free porn in our parks on their laptops.
One corollary question to consider with this? Who decides what content should be blocked? Whoever ends up making this decision can wield a lot of power. As people come to rely on the system for access, the body who makes the decisions of what is indecnet will wield a lot of power over what those people see. And does the city wish to contend with people who feel they have been slighted possibly filing suit against the city? I'm all for public internet access, and tend to think that we are probably going to end up there, but the idea of government imposed morality is disturbing. It's far too easy for those who decide what is indecent to push their own moral agenda. (see PRC)
It's funny, but that rule has always struck me as a way to avoid dealing with the perfect example of many things taken to an extreme. Really, give a good, logical reason that drawing parallels to the Nazis should mean defeat for a person in a debate. Sometimes, it's a good parallel, and and good way of using history as an example. If anything, the unwillingness to deal with real history, and real examples of what can go very wrong seems to be an admission that a debater is unwilling to deal with reality.
We haven't yet cracked the code on how to fully minimize the crunches in the development and production process.
- From TFA
Maybe, just maybe, you should consider setting more realistic goals? Granted, they want to hit the market during the holiday rush, but then, add more programmers.
It sounds like EA is just trying to exist as a programming sweat shop, keep the minimum number of programmers to do the job, and push them to work ridiculous hours to make a deadline. While I don't want to see a law to stop this, I'd at least like to see a few good lawsuits take a ton of money from EA on this. Perhaps, fine them an amount equivilent to the net profit made from all the games which suffered from this sort of behavior, and divide it up between the people who worked under these conditions.
Is the address just available to *just* "users" or is it somewhere on the site where random visitors have access to it?
If it is the former, then I think it's perfectly reasonable for you to set and enforce terms of use for that address.
If it's the latter, then you haven't just given it to your users, you've published it to the websurfing public, and should expect that the only terms of use are any currently applicable laws. [Emphasis added.]
This is sort of what I was trying to get at in my post. Why should I not be able to expect that the intention under which I published my email address will be respected? I'm not arguing about what currently is, I'm asking, why can't it be better? Why is it that, in order for to maintain any level of privacy in the US, do I have to hide inside my home? Why can I not post my email address, state that it is only being posted for use with items pertaining to my web site, and expect for that to be respected.
This is just my opinion, but I really think we have let companies get out of hand. Yes, they should be allowed to advertise in public spaces, and, if someone gives them their address/phone number, with the express purpose of being advertised at, companies should be allowed to advertise to those people. However, if a person posts his/her information in a public space, with an intent other than to be advertised at, companies should respect that.
What I am arguing is that people play a significant role in controlling their own privacy. If you mean to tell just audience X something, but, for whatever reason, you tell a much larger audience, that's kind of your own fault, not theirs.
I think this is the main difference between our thinking. I don't agree that a person's information becomes public the minute it hits a public space. If information is posted for a particular purpose, that information should be respected as still being private, and ununsable, unless it is for the intened purpose of publication. (Or it serves a vaild public concern) Basiclly, I don't think that a person should have to be a paranoid hermit to be left alone.
There are two freedoms: the freedom from being pestered by someone selling something, and the freedom to sell something. Which takes precedence?
:)
I don't think this is a case of precidence. Advertisers should be free to advertise; however, what I am claiming is that advertisers should not be allowed to simply collect and use personal information, even if it is posted in a public place. i.e. I could publish my email address, with a statement akin to, "For use pertaining to my website." And I would not end up getting email which was unrelated to my site. I'd even go so far as to say that ads which are about web hosting, would be OK, as they might, arguably, be pertinent to my site.
What I'm aiming for here is a default that personal information about you cannot be used without prior affirmative consent. As opposed to the current situation where any information about you can be used in any way anyone wants. Yes, it would create headaches for companies, as they would have to keep a record of that consent. But, it might also make them a bit more responsible in how they use that data.
The bit about a surveillance society loses me...how would such a society alleviate the spam problem? (Incidentally, I for one do not want to live in a surveillance society
Sorry, it was a bit of a non-sequitor, it wasn't meant to imply that a surveillance society would make the SPAM problem better. It was simply to note that the US is currently stuck in this idea that you have no privacy in a public place, which lends itself naturally to a surviellence society. Something which, hopefully, most people realize is a very bad thing for freedom.
I think this is a matter of how you view "public" release. If I put an email address on my web site, so that users of my site can send let me know if there are brokern links, incorrect information, etc. Why should I suddenly be deluged with advertisements for fake Viagra? That is not why that email address is there, and that intention should be fairly obvious. A mailto link, with the words, "If you find any broken links, or have any questions about this site, please contact me here", in no way implies that I want ads for anything.
I like this ruling, and wish we had a similar law in the US. If my work place lists my email address in a public directory, with the intent that people who need to contact me about subjects relating to my work can easily do so, I should not have to contend with people sending advertisments to that email address. It is fairly obvious that the intention of that directory is not so that I can be advertised at.
Unfortunatly, the US seems to be stuck on this idea that you have no privacy in a public place. This is a wonderful idea if your intention is to live in a surveillance society, bad if you hope to live in a free one. Privacy, even in a public space should be the default, I shouldn't have to hide in my home if I wish to keep anything about me private.
Nope, you not the only one. I played, beat and enjoyed ET on the Atari, though I thought I was the only one, guess there are two of us.
As a later poster mentioned the pits could be annoying, the trick was to make sure you kept holding the button down, and then moved off the pit in the upper screen, not that hard, and no reset needed.
The most important thing to remember to do was, always find the location the ship would land, before you called them. Trying to find just the right spot on that forest screen when the timer was running down, was nearly impossible.
How is this different, than say, preventing children from seeing a rated R movie without their parent?
Simple, there is nothing in law that mandates that theaters keeps kids out. The MPAA's rating system, and near universal enforcement of age restrictions is all volutary. source Actually, its not too dissimilar to what we are seeing happen today with video games. With legislative bodies threatening legislation, the MPAA adopted the rating system volutarally. The gaming industry is moving that way, and will get there, the last thing we need is yet another nanny-state law to create problems for legitimate purchasers.
And hey, if a kid wants to drink alcohol, he's gonna drink it, so let's legalize it for minors.
Yes, please, maybe then we might be able to emulate the success of Germany and other countries where underage binge drinking isn't a widespread problem. But them, it's better to have this forbidden fruit out there which teenages will get a hold of and will over indulge in.
The difference is it takes a parent to make that game available to the child, so the parent is better able to enforce their decisions.
These games cost upwards of $50, how are they getting a hold of them in the first place? Second, why aren't the parents paying a little bit of attention to what their kids are doing? Yes, the kids are going to manage to hide some stuff from their parents, but honestly, a mildly involved parent is going to notice this stuff. Why not, instead of shirking responsibilities, the parents actually spend time with their kids and pay attention to what the kids are doing?
And if you don't run IE at all, no spyware.
If only this was true. I support several students at a university's Masters in GIS program, many of them have converted to FireFox. However, many of them also like to install programs like Kazaa Media Desktop, Gator, etc. One of my recurrent problems is uninstalling crap like WhenU from the students laptops. Unfortunatly, the laptops belong to the students, so they have full control over them, I just get to support them.
Spyware isn't just an IE problem, its a windows and user problem. If you think you're safe, just because you don't run IE, might I suggest you give Spybot or AdAware a whirl, the results may suprise you.
We've looked hard at the nature of this problem, and made a decision that this anti-spyware capability will become something that's available at no additional charge for Windows users
--Bill Gates
Yes, its called AdAware and SpyBot S&D. Free spyware killing tools on Windows has little to do with MS putting one out for free.
A real solution for this problem is posted here
:-
/[^\x20-\xFF]/
The applicable part is:
1. Install the Adblock Firefox extension.
here
2. Look at the Adblock 'Preferences' and go to 'Adblock Options'
3. Tick 'Site Blocking'
4. Add the following filter
So, what you are saying is that: IE has better error handeling than Firefox?
I use Firefox, and love it. I only bother with IE on those few sites where Firefox doesn't seem to work. But the truth of the matter is, if a site has broken HTML, Firefox tends to just give up, IE at least tries to act intellegently about it, whether it gets it right is beside the point. This would be a nice feature to see in Firefox, if a site's code is broken, at least give it a best effort to clean it up.
Of course, given everything else which Firefox does well, I wouldn't gripe about this, and the number of sites where it comes up is rather small.
Although it would kinda suck to find that the HIV stuck around even after its job was done. Eventually everone would have it.
Actually, this would probably be a good thing. First off, I have to belive that the first thing to go in that 80% of genetic material removed, was the part that makes HIV such a problem. Second, even if part of that was left, the virus is designed to only target cells with a particular protein structure, one that is basically unique to cancer cells. So, assuming that we all got "infected" with this virus, via the normal HIV means, this would mean that we all become immune to the types of cancers that carry this particular protein. (Except slashdotters, of course, they would never get "infected")
The guys working on this stuff are pretty smart, if the average slashdotter can think of the problem with giving people the HIV virus, I'm sure one of the researchers came up with it, and worked out a solution before UCLA's gene therapy lab opened its collective mouth.
This sounds very promising, if it does turn out to kill several cancers, not have any really bad side effects, and be transmitted via sex; imagine how much good it would do. They would simply have to give the virus to a part of the population, and then just left those people pass it along. And think of the new pickup line, "Hey baby, want to get vaccinated?"
This is why I get irritated at people who constantly go off about how much cheaper PCs are than macs. They never mention these little things, and these little things start to add up real fast
You go out and pay $70-$100 for a firewall, get a mcafee virus scan subscription for $35/year. Oh, just to be safe you better grab yourself the latest copy of AdAware, another $40-ish dollars down the drain. Holy cow, your $499 pc now cost you like $700 for the bare minimum! And that's just the beginning of the pain you're in for. You can't use your regular browser, no sir! You need Firefox to avoid totally foobaring your computer. Download and install that.
You want to talk about honesty, at least be honest yourself.
New PC: $499 + Tax/Shipping
Firewall: DI-604 w/NAT $49.99 source
Ok, its just NAT, not really a firewall, but it accomplished the purpose
Firewall (part 2): Zone Alarm, free for home use.
Virus Scanner: AVG Free for home use
AdAware: Free for home use
Spybot S&D: Free for home use, because 2 is better than one
So, that $499 has only managed to make it up to $549, not $700. Yes, this requires a little bit of thought, but not a lot. If the user can manage to get AdAware, they can get the rest as well. Plus, I would imagine that, by now, most homes will have some sort of router, reguardless of OS,
This was my thought the moment I read the submitter's blurb. If the spammers are following the CAN-SPAM act, then great, we've won. The way I see it, there are certain things that must exist in "legitimate" spam. With a half decent baysian filter, these words should be quickly associated with spam, and will, therefore get deleted. In time, and with a bit of training, users won't even see this stuff.
Of course, this still leaves the problem on the server side. Which can be mitigated with things like blacklists.
I will grant that it is not a complete solution, but it's a small step. Whether we like it or not, SPAM is here to stay, the best thing for us to do is make them tag it as such, so that it can be easily filtered. Perhaps the only solution is going to be something along the lines of mandating an update to the SMTP standard, and include a command which basically says, "I'm about to send you SPAM instead of normal email", maybe a SPAM TO: instead of a RCPT TO:, this could then be filtered per user at the server level.
e.g. Each user is allowed to either accept all or reject all SPAM TO:me@domain.com. Or, if an ISP is feeling adventerous, they could allow a user to keep a list vendors which they want to see spam from.
The last part of this would be to legislate that companies must use this on all commercial email, with nasty fines if they don't. Something like $1000 per message which didn't use this. And a revoking of business license for repeat offenders.
After that, declare the war "won" and go about your way. It's time to piss off more countries my friend...
You had an A+ in Jingoism right up until that last line. Never, never, never, end the war. Just let it simmer down and sit in the background while the next war is fought. Then, every once in a while trot it out, like an old trophy horse, and use it to scare a few more people into giving up their liberties.
Remeber, we're still fighting the war on drugs.
Wow, just reading the little snippet provided I knew the source had no clue:
...Chernobyl No. 4's outer shell was probably breached by a powerful hydrogen explosion...[emphasis added]
1. Chernobyl suffered a steam explosion.
2. Cherynobyl was a fission reactor, not a fusion reactor (there still isn't a viable one of those yet). Fission reactors don't have a use for hydrogen, nor would they be operating in a way which might possibly cause a hydrogen explosion.
Considering that, rather obvious, failure to get the facts straight, I'd take anything this source says with a grain of salt (and the rest of the mine it came from).
I think Solo Han may be chanelling Mao. You are basically asking people to explain how to circumvent their government's controls, when that government is known to do some rather painful things to those that subvert the government?
I call Shenanagins, the question is either just troll BS, or the the guy asking it is too dumb to utilize the answers.
Face it, would anyone comming to the US really ask, in a public forum, how do I get around the US's stupid drug laws? (Please don't answer this, I'm trying to nurture a little faith in humanity)
I agree that swearing, blood, etc. are not required for adult games. What tends to get me with Nintendo games these days is that all of the characters tend to look like kids. Not just teenagers, but little kids. And the dialogue isn't much better. I understand that there might be a bit of a cultural disconnect here, I'm beginning to think that the Japaneese audiance likes melodrama. Personally, I find it annoying. It should probably be noted at this point that this was one of the large factors which made me dislike every Final Fantasy after the first one in the US.
I just have trouble playing a game which looks like and has the writting of your average cartoon. I don't even mind re-used plots, but presentation means a lot to me, and I've just not been impressed with the way most Nintendo games come off these days. Not that the PS2 hasn't had it's share of "13 year old saves the day and figures out his dating life at the same time" games, but with the number of 3rd party games out there for the system, I can usually find something I like. Yes, some of the writting is on par with a B rate movie, but I find that more forgivable, just a personal choice.
Nintendo's biggest enemy seems to be Nintendo. One of the things that Nintendo did very well was market to kids. The problem is, now they have a bunch of people trained to equate Nintendo with kid's games. PS2, on the other hand, went after the late teen and young adult market. So many people are stuck with the Nintendo=Kids, PS2=Adults mentality. While this isn't really true anymore, Nintendo is stuck trying to undo the marketing of the past. Plus, the Nintendo 64 was a dud. I was one of the people to get one early on, I liked Super Mario 64, and had seen some adds for some interesting 3rd party games. Nintendo was screwed by the third party developers in some cases, and the games just didn't materialize for the N64. In the end, I think I owned about 4 games for thr system, because I couldn't find anything on the system which appealed to me. I finally bought a Playstation used, and got more games for it than I did for my N64. When the time to choose between the PS2 and the GameCube came along, I wasn't willing to touch another new Nintendo product, I got a PS2, and have been very happy with it.
Funny aside to that. I went to the E3 where Nintendo and MS were announcing their respective systems. At the time the PS2 looked like it was in trouble. All it had were a bunch of remakes and sequals to show. Then we walked into the Nintendo area, which was a teaming mass of people. We got to see such wonderful titiles as Super Smash Brothers, Pikman, Star Fox Adventures, Rouge Squadron (whatever incarnation), and Luigi's Haunted Mansion. It looked pretty good, though mostly aimed at kids. Lastly we hit the Xbox area, and got to see very little. They had some sort of skiing game and a water based shooter. The graphics were pretty but I just didn't see a killer game on it. The GameCube looked poised to win the war. Now I own a PS2 (which I thought to be the worst in show), the Xbox still has zero interest from me, and the GameCube is only now a consideration since I've watched a friend play Metroid Prime.
Somehow I don't think Nintendo is going anywhere, they've got a ton of cash, lots of brand recognition, and they are finally starting to win the battle against their previous image. Sure, they may go through a few slow years/systems, but I'm expecting that they will end up beating Microsoft in the end.
Peronsally, I'd not really looked too hard at it until the first reply to my post, which was at a 0 score, so it tends not to show up. Basically, the post claimed that every person in the world could be stuffed in Australia, with enough room to have a house and a yard. Obviously this smooths over a lot of things, like the landscape, but, it's fairly true. .29 acres/person
Australia is roughly 2,969,907 sq.mi.
At 640 acres per sq.mi. we get.
2,969,907 sq.mi. * 640 acres/sq.mi. = 1,900,740,480 acres
1.9B acres / 6.5B people =
So each person gets slightly more than a quarter of an acre, it's not a huge parcel of land, but not uncommon in developed countries.
Yes, this is impracticable and ignores terrain features, etc. But the point is, we really aren't that crowded, we just tend to clump together in groups. This also means that there is a ton of land for industry, agriculture, etc. Even if we didn't go vertical.
Now, this isn't to say that we shouldn't keep an eye on things, US consumerism is an issue, and allowed to grow uncontrolled will probably lead to problems. Also, I like clean air and water, so I'm all for doing what we can to keep the environment clean, but let's be reasonable about it.
Actually, I agree, we are not currently over populated. Though over population has a lot more than just living space to sort out, we are not at that point yet. However, if death from old age wasn't an issue, we could get there and quick. Right now our population is growing at a pretty steady rate, how much higher would it be without regular death?
Can you imagine the population growth if people actually lived this long? Sure, I'd love to be around for 1000 years, and I'd do it if I could; but, it's going to create a social nightmare. But then, what major technological change hasn't? If this comes to pass, we're probably going to have to finally bite the bullet and accept enforced birth controls, which, if nothing else, will finally solve the problem of resources running out. We simply pick a level of consumption we want to live at, calculate the population which can be supported by the planet at that level, and work to maintain 90% of that level.
I agree that it's just a matter of making the convience worth the money, but I think this is actually going to be very hard. Sure, for the first couple of people pirating the movie is going to be slow and awkward, but once it hits any major P2P network, it suddenly becomes easy. This will be more true as bandwidth to the home increses. Add to this BitTorrent and its inevitable children, and we have easy, and fast pirating.
As for the **AA's lawsuits, this will deter some, but it's also doomed to failure. Take a look at the MUTE page. It proposes a simple, and probably effective, anonymous P2P network. Couple that with a BitTorrent type download system, using file hashes, and a FreeNet style system of web pages and you have untrackable piracy. e.g. A pirate group puts the tracker file on a FreeNet page, which works with a MUTE based P2P application. No one knows who anyone is in the system, or where any of it is comming from. Granted, I doubt it's fool proof, but it's going to get harder and harder to track this stuff on the internet without some rather draconian measures.
The last part of this is already in place, pirate groups that are willing to put stuff out, just because they can. They can post the info to connect to their FreeNet page in a few IRC groups, and tag all of their releases with their info. Word of mouth will bring in more people, and people will probably start to rely on specfic groups, as they show the quality of their work. Heck, I would imagine that IRC would be used to critique said work.
The pieces are comming together to make internet piracy easy, and basically an anonymous activity. Right or wrong (that's not the point of this post) it's going to happen. The **AA will probably have to follow Bollywood's lead at some point, or really suffer from piracy. Or, if the argument is true, just get a bunch of free advertising for their product (I have a feeling we will get to see this theory tested at its logical extreme during the transition, I expect a diminishing returns situation).
Does he have enough money to hire someone to replace himself? Only then will a large budget be warranted.
No, you see Berman has it all figured out. He's going to go back in time and make ST:TNG suck so horribly that his shows seem great in comparison. This will probably involve pavlovian conditioning, wherein he subjects every person watching the show to Jerry Lewis every other minute of the show. The only exception to this will be those episodes where a time anomoly occurs, during which he will include a Playboy Playmate nude occasionally.
At the end of this, people will be conditioned to hate good ST episodes, with something resembling a good plot; and love ST episodes which revolve around time anomolies. This will make Voyager and Enterprise the best Star Trek series ever made. Further, it will allow Berman to continue writting bad time travel/anomoly plots. Because of the conditioning, everyone will love "Vulcans in the Old West", "T'Pal strips to her Skivies in the '50's", "Star Trek People Visit Current Day Earth", and other such favorites.
Why did Berman have to outlive Roddenberry?