I filled out my census. I filled it out ten years ago. However, my "team" doesn't exist as anything viable to elect to government, and it's that way for most thinking humans. That said, I have zero trust of the government... and I voted for the current president. I knew upfront that I was selecting the lesser of two evils.
So laws were passed to discourage a repeat of the Japanese-American concentration camps? Laws were also passed governing the proper use of wiretaps in the US. Not only did the last "team" who controlled the US government happily disregard such laws, but the new "team" reversed its position on the matter while still campaigning, and decided to completely forgive and forget about the law breaking that was done by the last "team" and all the complicit corporations who violated US laws in the process. That's one recent example out of many.
The only "teams" that control the government have agendas markedly different than what would be good for the People. The People get to "participate" by playing our little role of choosing the lesser evil here and there. Some people, who can only handle sports analogies, pick a "team" and its ideologies to get behind, and think that things are good when their "team" is winning... but the "game" here is how half of the result of your labor gets spent, and how the well-armed executors of the system will treat you for various behaviors or aspects of who you are.
If I weren't Caucasian, I might have serious concerns about filling in that field on my census, because I know my government's track record, 70 years ago, and 1 year ago, and I know its motivation structure has nothing to do with my best interests. To think otherwise, and to get angry at those who fail to trust our wise and benevolent rulers, is the naive behavior.
I used an OQO for a while... after it died on me, I bought a Zipit Z2, and that is my current carry computing device. I'm awaiting release of the Pandora, which should be the spiritual successor and technological superior to the Zaurus line of devices in every way. Oddly enough, my Zaurus still works, but it finally began showing its age a few years back, hence the succession of other machines.
The original idea of copyright, the whole "exchange" thing going on here, is that a content producer is granted a limited, exclusive time period to profit from a work before it becomes public domain, as the nature of any form of information allows unlimited copying anyway. In the US Constitution, this exchange is established to promote the advance of arts and sciences, and it is a reasonable way to encourage content creation as an actual profession. All understandable...
When a company places nasty digital restrictions management garbage on their information product, especially this kind of phone-home to use / read sort of nonsense, it completely removes the part of the exchange that the public receives. The public, the people, via government allowed a limited time for the content creator to exclusively profit from their work before it enters the public domain, and that is the concept of "copyright." DRM, especially this kind, breaks the agreement. It destroys the very foundation of the concept. Therefore, I do not consider any such work to be copyrighted. I am not a lawyer, etc... but I am someone who understands what copyright is for, and that it has become something else entirely. Unlimited terms (beyond a human's lifetime), means it is not under copyright. Permission-every-time sorts of access models mean it is not under copyright.
I know very well that these matters are settled by throwing money at lawyers and congress-creatures, and therefore, my opinion means nothing in a court of law. I also know that I do everything in my power to ensure that people understand the concept of "intellectual property" is against the very nature of information, and is a disgusting concept that has come about through purchased laws.
What I should really do is go back to having a separate phone and PDA, and put up with the hassle of sharing data between them manually. (With a PAYG plan, I'd probably save $50/month.) Except nobody makes a decent PDA any more...
I've considered this the only sound strategy for years... I currently, desperately, await the release of the Pandora to meet my needs, while I get by with a hacked Zipit Z2. Those meet my needs, but even previous generation PDAs were decent at PDA stuff... I just need a small Linux machine in addition to a phone. Works great for me since I switched from a Palm to a Zaurus many years back. Whatever you use, you can usually boil contacts, notes, and calendar sync down to a one or two click operation between your handheld, phone, and desktop PIM software... "manual" but not troublesome.
Your comment is on the right track... All of the comments about Netbooks being more powerful and useful than the iPad are missing a significant factor: the audience. And I'm not talking about "Apple Fan Boys." Most humans look at a computing device and see trouble, difficulty, mental exercises, frustration, etc... Most Slashdotters look at computing devices as powerful instruments that let us do our kind of magic.
Apple made a different kind of experience with the iPhone, Touch, and iPad... They removed the whole "computer" experience and made these devices that go straight to the objective of whatever Internet or computing task that everyone is expected to be capable of today. Want to "tweet?" You don't need to maintain anti-virus products, a proper web browser, keep bookmarks or remember URLs, wait for boot-up, have multiple parts of a computer working and connected, make sure your router is connected, upgrade the hard drive, upgrade RAM, blah blah blah... just point your finger at the shiny Twitter button and you can "tweet." All that other stuff is "magic" that they have to pay someone else to set up. Natural "computer wizards" might miss that.
If you've ever met someone who is uneasy with computers or downright hates them, you've met someone who will like Apple's "not-a-computer" approach with the iPad. Is it locked down and limited beyond what it could be as a computing device? Absolutely. Would a non-technical person actually prefer that? Yes. I'm personally not an Apple fan, and I haven't purchased anything of theirs, nor do I plan to any time soon. I both need and have the capability to use the power afforded by non-locked-down systems. I am not the average consumer. But there are plenty of people out there, for which the OS X UI and its single mouse button, etc... are still a complicated "computer thing." I expect this to be pretty successful, and I applaud them for targetting it this way, even though it is completely useless to me.
In a month or two, I do the little annual paperwork dance to confirm that the government stole the correct amount of money from me to deliver its "services." I've been told that this is the "Land of the Free" and that there is "Liberty and Justice For All" and such... Product not as advertised. I'd like a full refund. Seriously, if they can't live up to the founding document, and go out of their way to specifically violate this theoretical freedom from tyranny and blow as much money as possible on the stupidest shit (remember when they were selling Invade Iraq? They even had this anthrax mailing scare that they linked to it... where'd that come from?)
The new guy in the Executive seat with a supermajority of his own party in congress got how much done? He did a bit of copyright maximalism stuff that was sadly expected, and not a damn bit of the expected reversals of his predecessor's blunders.
I'm sick of it. Is there a country that is not freezing all year that has this alleged "freedom" stuff? A country where the taxes pay for first-world quality of life infrastructure (which is falling apart here, literally, see bridges), and where the taxes don't go mostly to diddling about with other countries for corporate interests and violating its own citizenry for theocratic interests? Which country?
Am I pissed because I'm a huge fan of this guy's work? Nope... seen some and it's humorous at best... The problem is that there is not a damn thing about it that the federal government, nor a state government should be concerned with. Fix our damn roads and STFU.
Sorry about the rant. I just really hate that any fraction of a penny that I worked for goes into this sort of Evil... while so few fractions of those pennies go towards a damn thing that would improve quality of life around here.
I've owned a Wii just over a year... first console owned since my 8-bit NES. I find that my desire for high-quality graphics games, networked play, innovation, and so much more (like the ability to modify with 3rd party content) is completely satisfied with PC gaming. No console can compete in those arenas, IMO, so I saw no need to buy any.
The Wii actually did something new for me: made games more physically interactive. I remember daydreaming about hacking a PC joystick to a treadmill to control Doom in 3 screen mode for immersive gameplay and thinking how cool that would be. I bought one of the no-base motion sensing PC joysticks, 3D shutter glasses, and the P5 Glove in the late '90s / early '00s, which worked sorta okay to various degrees, often requiring cooperation of multiple parties (game dev + driver authors) to deliver a really good gaming experience above and beyond the norm. The Wii, as a console, gets that cooperation by default, while introducing truly interesting innovations in game-play. The developers can actually rely on the installed user-base having the peripherals and not worrying about compatibility issues, etc... so games keep coming out for the balance board, the nunchuck, the DDR pads, the guitars, and now the Motion +. They're absolutely right that they haven't finished exploring this space. The loveliest graphics will always be on the PC... frankly, I expected innovations to remain there too (LAN play, expansions, 3rd party mods, the whole FPS genre, neat new peripherals, 3D), but the Wii has really impressed me in bringing some of that back to consoles.
No console's graphics are going to impress me... even if top-of-the-line or ground breaking at release time, the PC will bypass it shortly. Nintendo spent its efforts in areas that actually could impress me. My only (minor) complaint is that Nintendo has failed, software-wise, to deliver the media-playback set-top-box functionality that the others do decently. MPlayerCE is okay, but Nintendo really should deliver something like that for all of its customers (not just homebrew hackers, who they actively oppose anyway) to further reduce the benefits of the other consoles.
I see a trend in that the BSA or whichever witch-hunter is mining information on existing licensees, looking for differences in numbers of seats for OS, office suite, email users, etc... So, for the business that wishes to avoid this nonsense, it appears that pirating every single piece of proprietary software they use would be safer than trying to license some, most, or even all of it without some kind of bulletproof guaranteed software accounting and desktop lockdowns in place. Obviously, full-on use of free software would beat that, but I'm just noticing that the people getting "busted" seem to always be those who made some purchases.
I've used 3D shutter glasses for my PC that work with nVidia drivers/cards for well over a decade. Any 3D game can render this way... the tech works okay, but nowhere near as lovely or convenient as the Captain EO / Avatar method which uses polarized projection and unpowered polarized glasses... and 3D eyeglass-free monitors that use parallax have existed for about a decade as well now... None of the new TVs do this? You can add field-sequential, shutter-frame tech to your PC and a good CRT for under $50... for the last decade. Fun for immersion... a bit of an impediment for high accuracy things like sniping in a FPS though.
What if everyone of the 4chan generation took this to the next level... what if everyone who didn't have too many qualms about it puts on a big grin and says to the TSA folk, "Heh, I request a pat-down instead!" Turn their shit against them and make them squirm. They thought they were gonna be giving the rapes; ha. Seriously, whenever the government decides to make our lives miserable for theatrical purposes, there are often exploits and flaws that we could use to make sure they're just as miserable with it.
Annnnnnd one more: first sale doctrine and right of resale, as it applies to all things I buy, is damaged in cases of any software or game that requires "activation." That is why I purchase absolutely nothing that requires "activation." They don't consider it a real purchase, so I won't consider it either. Many DRM schemes fail in this manner as well.
Going deeper into the copyright wars... The legal concept of copyright is that the holder gains exclusivity of copying for a limited time. If they attempt to limit copying permanently and forever, technologically, via DRM or other bastardizations of digital information, then they, first and foremost, have made that information something outside of the definition of copyrighted material.
The advent of widespread digital copying and distributing capabilities among the regular population has set many in the content production industries into a frenzy of attempting to fight the new reality. Nothing has changed about right and wrong. If you tell me a joke today, I am 100% free to tell that joke to someone else; such is the nature of information. Now that it has scaled up, some business models can either change, or some very large businesses can continue to fight a losing battle with their legal teams, lobbyists, senators, etc... at great expense, gaining nothing but extreme distrust and disdain from a growing segment of the population.
Generally, an advertiser wants to accomplish a couple of things: (A) make the target demographic aware of its product or service offering, or (B) raise that existing awareness... remind people about the product or service. In both cases, they are ultimately attempting to influence people who would otherwise not spend their money, to do so.
Personally, I find that motive A, if demographically appropriate, doesn't bother me that much, and in fact, has been useful to me at times. After I've seen the motive A advertisement once, subsequent viewings fall into motive B. I usually find motive B extremely annoying. Back when I watched television, I would see the same exact advertisement multiple times a day. Before I started using Mozilla and Adblock, I would add sites to my hosts file constantly. One of the few motive B advertising methods that never got on my nerves are coupons and discount offers.
Once you've gone a while without seeing virtually any advertising, your perspective changes a bit. The times when you are exposed to an annoying advertisement (on another person's computer, somewhere with a TV playing, rent a car and turn on the radio) it's even more distasteful than you recall. I think the annoying methods are crumbling fast. As Clear Channel destroyed the value and variety of radio, MP3 players rose to fill the gap; people obtain their news from website articles, sometimes using adblockers, while newspapers lose subscribers. Between independent video content, DVD collections of shows, Tivos, and piracy, people can get their episodic video fix without seeing a single commercial.
Advertisement exposure is no longer all that mandatory. The other side of this, however, is that people still want to know about products and services that interest them. As such, a person like me, who hates annoying old-school advertising, willfully signs up for deal mailing lists from my preferred hardware vendors, actively seeks out reviews and product previews on sites that cover my interests, and constantly monitors feeds of local news / reviews concerning the sorts of local businesses I like to visit. I am empowered by features like RSS, which make that kind of monitoring possible. The companies who do their best to get their products reviewed far and wide, who publish press releases, etc... will receive my attention. If they make a good product or offer a good service, that attention may have positive results for them. If advertisers wish to stay ahead of the curve (or just plain afloat), they need to start looking at this a lot more. Potential consumers are sending a pretty clear message: Be useful, or shut up.
You demonstrated two things with your answer, both of which are anathema to a lawyer considering a potential juror: a rational mindset (a percentage answer to that question), and that you've thought about these sorts of things before and came to conclusions.
Lawyers are trained to target Joe and Jane Six-pack with emotional appeals. They'd much prefer a jury populated by Joes and Janes than with individual thinkers who might not merely ignore their emotional appeals, but see through them as well.
Next time you want to be on a jury, you be "Every Man" during that phase... what answer would the fifty percentile give to this question? That is your answer.
they were even asking me and others questions about our siblings and what they did (maybe they were asking that because the defendant killed a sibling?
In a criminal case, they're generally going to drop potential jurors who have a close family member in law enforcement or incarcerated, etc... as that might give the potential juror a stronger-than-usual ability to identify with one side or another on the case. That much is reasonable...
If you want to be on a jury (I did, and have), especially for jury nullification purposes, be dumb and malleable during that interviewing process... not outrageously stupid, just a nodding your head in the direction the lawyers want you to sort of way; keep your eyes wide. Oh, and never admit to knowing what Jury Nullification is. The last thing you want to do is what another poster here mentioned and that is give well-reasoned, articulate answers that show you've thought about the relevant topics before and have come to conclusions. Be as much of an Every Man as you possibly can in your responses. If asked whether you agree with the laws as written, the answer is "yes." Both the prosecution and the defense want to sway you with emotion, and they want to target average Joes, because that's who they're trained to appeal to. A highly rational person is the best potential juror for justice, and the worst potential juror from a lawyer's perspective.
As for "getting out of" jury duty vs. trying to get in... consider that it is one of the few and only ways an individual citizen can make a significant difference in how the government treats its citizens, in the face of massive lobbying efforts, emotionally manipulated masses, etc... having a stranglehold on the legislative branch, and massive bureaucratic inertia on the executive branch.
GP's point is that most people are confused about the television business model, mistaking themselves as the customers and entertaining content as the product... The real model being that viewers' attention is the product being sold to advertisers is really something most people miss. This model is the true model for all television, including "News" channels, "Science Fiction" channels, "Music" channels, etc... For media in general, especially large, older, corporate-run media, the model is pretty much the same, and GP isn't musing that Facebook might be trying to make money as a business, but rather musing on who are Facebook's actual customers and what is the true business model. Like with TV, I bet most Facebook users mistakenly believe that they are also Facebook's customers.
So... let's consider why Saudi nationals are not included in the mandatory extra screening... possibilities:
The BFF relationship between the US government and Saudi Arabia is too fragile and too important to risk doing the kind of real security that might prevent a duplicate of 9/11.
The BFF relationship between the US government and Saudi Arabia is too fragile and too important to risk over ridiculous security theater, because no one, let alone Saudis, will try the same method again given that Americans learned to stop it within about an hour of the first successful use of that technique.
Saudi nationals were not actually involved in 9/11 and therefore do not need to be on that list.
Not only is TSA "Security Theater," but, much as long lined checkpoints provide great new targets, TSA's procedures are intended to make us more vulnerable to attack.
I read the PDF and glossed right over that list of nationalities... Excellent question, Ralph Spoilsport. I don't buy into most of the 9/11 alternate theories, but this actually disturbs me more than most related data.
A specific example of this were the aquarium filters made by Marineland. The Walmart ones were exactly the same as ones found in stores and online for usually about $10 more... Walmart's lower price was due to the lack of a spinning, cylindrical biofilter, and instead just a plastic mesh one.
That said, those filters were indeed branded differently with different product names, etc... but the plastic molds and most of the parts were exactly the same. I've not seen examples where something at Walmart was truly identified as the same model as something that's higher quality elsewhere, but I also haven't bought appliances or electronics there for many years.
I concur. My girlfriend and I spent last weekend hunting down old games we played as kids and the non-PC platform versions were often much richer in sounds, graphical detail, etc... Hard Hat Mac was best on the Apple ][+, Agent USA best on the C64, etc... The PC at the time was a CGA (4 color including black) machine. I remember looking at the back of game boxes in computer stores as a kid, wishing I had a C64 or Amiga instead of an Apple and a PC. Now we can emulate anything we want. On our phones and living room consoles, for that matter.:-)
So many of these stupid laws talk about hands free being the way to go. FAIL. When I built my first car PC and onward, I focused on safety by making my interfaces eyes free. A handheld MP3 player that reads out directory names as you switch, etc... is safer than an in-dash, traditional radio.
But what I've always really wanted in my pocket was a little debian box
If your local Target still has any, grab a Zipit Z2 (warning: horrible flash and music). My girlfriend got one on clearance for $12.50; I got one for $25... We're running Debian on one and Angstrom on the other currently. Check out this guy's tutorials. It's got a 312MHz ARM chip, wifi, querty keyboard, MiniSD slot, and a 320x240 color screen. I'm currently attempting to tune Angstrom to the point that I get all the stuff I had on my old Zaurus.
Also, you may want to check out the Pandora, which is nearing release. The unofficial blog has a lot of recent info. I was about to buy an N810 when my OQO died, but saw that the Pandora was getting less vapory and pre-ordered that instead.
I object... I consider myself quite a nerd and everyone who attended the first party I threw (who can recall much of it) considers it the best party they ever attended.
Here's how real nerds party: There was an excellent selection of quality alcohol, Nyotaimori(nsfw), Darth Vader reading the bible continuously in the "relaxing" room, and a ceremony involving Ritz Crackers, Easy Cheese, 40s of Miller High Life, and through the magic of transubstantiation, a surprise, posthumous, celebrity visit from Ol' Dirty Bastard.
Slashdot Mirror
I filled out my census. I filled it out ten years ago. However, my "team" doesn't exist as anything viable to elect to government, and it's that way for most thinking humans. That said, I have zero trust of the government... and I voted for the current president. I knew upfront that I was selecting the lesser of two evils.
So laws were passed to discourage a repeat of the Japanese-American concentration camps? Laws were also passed governing the proper use of wiretaps in the US. Not only did the last "team" who controlled the US government happily disregard such laws, but the new "team" reversed its position on the matter while still campaigning, and decided to completely forgive and forget about the law breaking that was done by the last "team" and all the complicit corporations who violated US laws in the process. That's one recent example out of many.
The only "teams" that control the government have agendas markedly different than what would be good for the People. The People get to "participate" by playing our little role of choosing the lesser evil here and there. Some people, who can only handle sports analogies, pick a "team" and its ideologies to get behind, and think that things are good when their "team" is winning... but the "game" here is how half of the result of your labor gets spent, and how the well-armed executors of the system will treat you for various behaviors or aspects of who you are.
If I weren't Caucasian, I might have serious concerns about filling in that field on my census, because I know my government's track record, 70 years ago, and 1 year ago, and I know its motivation structure has nothing to do with my best interests. To think otherwise, and to get angry at those who fail to trust our wise and benevolent rulers, is the naive behavior.
"for fuck sake, people are stupid." Indeed.
I used an OQO for a while... after it died on me, I bought a Zipit Z2, and that is my current carry computing device. I'm awaiting release of the Pandora, which should be the spiritual successor and technological superior to the Zaurus line of devices in every way. Oddly enough, my Zaurus still works, but it finally began showing its age a few years back, hence the succession of other machines.
The original idea of copyright, the whole "exchange" thing going on here, is that a content producer is granted a limited, exclusive time period to profit from a work before it becomes public domain, as the nature of any form of information allows unlimited copying anyway. In the US Constitution, this exchange is established to promote the advance of arts and sciences, and it is a reasonable way to encourage content creation as an actual profession. All understandable...
When a company places nasty digital restrictions management garbage on their information product, especially this kind of phone-home to use / read sort of nonsense, it completely removes the part of the exchange that the public receives. The public, the people, via government allowed a limited time for the content creator to exclusively profit from their work before it enters the public domain, and that is the concept of "copyright." DRM, especially this kind, breaks the agreement. It destroys the very foundation of the concept. Therefore, I do not consider any such work to be copyrighted. I am not a lawyer, etc... but I am someone who understands what copyright is for, and that it has become something else entirely. Unlimited terms (beyond a human's lifetime), means it is not under copyright. Permission-every-time sorts of access models mean it is not under copyright.
I know very well that these matters are settled by throwing money at lawyers and congress-creatures, and therefore, my opinion means nothing in a court of law. I also know that I do everything in my power to ensure that people understand the concept of "intellectual property" is against the very nature of information, and is a disgusting concept that has come about through purchased laws.
I've considered this the only sound strategy for years... I currently, desperately, await the release of the Pandora to meet my needs, while I get by with a hacked Zipit Z2. Those meet my needs, but even previous generation PDAs were decent at PDA stuff... I just need a small Linux machine in addition to a phone. Works great for me since I switched from a Palm to a Zaurus many years back. Whatever you use, you can usually boil contacts, notes, and calendar sync down to a one or two click operation between your handheld, phone, and desktop PIM software... "manual" but not troublesome.
Your comment is on the right track... All of the comments about Netbooks being more powerful and useful than the iPad are missing a significant factor: the audience. And I'm not talking about "Apple Fan Boys." Most humans look at a computing device and see trouble, difficulty, mental exercises, frustration, etc... Most Slashdotters look at computing devices as powerful instruments that let us do our kind of magic.
Apple made a different kind of experience with the iPhone, Touch, and iPad... They removed the whole "computer" experience and made these devices that go straight to the objective of whatever Internet or computing task that everyone is expected to be capable of today. Want to "tweet?" You don't need to maintain anti-virus products, a proper web browser, keep bookmarks or remember URLs, wait for boot-up, have multiple parts of a computer working and connected, make sure your router is connected, upgrade the hard drive, upgrade RAM, blah blah blah... just point your finger at the shiny Twitter button and you can "tweet." All that other stuff is "magic" that they have to pay someone else to set up. Natural "computer wizards" might miss that.
If you've ever met someone who is uneasy with computers or downright hates them, you've met someone who will like Apple's "not-a-computer" approach with the iPad. Is it locked down and limited beyond what it could be as a computing device? Absolutely. Would a non-technical person actually prefer that? Yes. I'm personally not an Apple fan, and I haven't purchased anything of theirs, nor do I plan to any time soon. I both need and have the capability to use the power afforded by non-locked-down systems. I am not the average consumer. But there are plenty of people out there, for which the OS X UI and its single mouse button, etc... are still a complicated "computer thing." I expect this to be pretty successful, and I applaud them for targetting it this way, even though it is completely useless to me.
In a month or two, I do the little annual paperwork dance to confirm that the government stole the correct amount of money from me to deliver its "services." I've been told that this is the "Land of the Free" and that there is "Liberty and Justice For All" and such... Product not as advertised. I'd like a full refund. Seriously, if they can't live up to the founding document, and go out of their way to specifically violate this theoretical freedom from tyranny and blow as much money as possible on the stupidest shit (remember when they were selling Invade Iraq? They even had this anthrax mailing scare that they linked to it... where'd that come from?)
The new guy in the Executive seat with a supermajority of his own party in congress got how much done? He did a bit of copyright maximalism stuff that was sadly expected, and not a damn bit of the expected reversals of his predecessor's blunders.
I'm sick of it. Is there a country that is not freezing all year that has this alleged "freedom" stuff? A country where the taxes pay for first-world quality of life infrastructure (which is falling apart here, literally, see bridges), and where the taxes don't go mostly to diddling about with other countries for corporate interests and violating its own citizenry for theocratic interests? Which country?
Am I pissed because I'm a huge fan of this guy's work? Nope... seen some and it's humorous at best... The problem is that there is not a damn thing about it that the federal government, nor a state government should be concerned with. Fix our damn roads and STFU.
Sorry about the rant. I just really hate that any fraction of a penny that I worked for goes into this sort of Evil... while so few fractions of those pennies go towards a damn thing that would improve quality of life around here.
I've owned a Wii just over a year... first console owned since my 8-bit NES. I find that my desire for high-quality graphics games, networked play, innovation, and so much more (like the ability to modify with 3rd party content) is completely satisfied with PC gaming. No console can compete in those arenas, IMO, so I saw no need to buy any.
The Wii actually did something new for me: made games more physically interactive. I remember daydreaming about hacking a PC joystick to a treadmill to control Doom in 3 screen mode for immersive gameplay and thinking how cool that would be. I bought one of the no-base motion sensing PC joysticks, 3D shutter glasses, and the P5 Glove in the late '90s / early '00s, which worked sorta okay to various degrees, often requiring cooperation of multiple parties (game dev + driver authors) to deliver a really good gaming experience above and beyond the norm. The Wii, as a console, gets that cooperation by default, while introducing truly interesting innovations in game-play. The developers can actually rely on the installed user-base having the peripherals and not worrying about compatibility issues, etc... so games keep coming out for the balance board, the nunchuck, the DDR pads, the guitars, and now the Motion +. They're absolutely right that they haven't finished exploring this space. The loveliest graphics will always be on the PC... frankly, I expected innovations to remain there too (LAN play, expansions, 3rd party mods, the whole FPS genre, neat new peripherals, 3D), but the Wii has really impressed me in bringing some of that back to consoles.
No console's graphics are going to impress me... even if top-of-the-line or ground breaking at release time, the PC will bypass it shortly. Nintendo spent its efforts in areas that actually could impress me. My only (minor) complaint is that Nintendo has failed, software-wise, to deliver the media-playback set-top-box functionality that the others do decently. MPlayerCE is okay, but Nintendo really should deliver something like that for all of its customers (not just homebrew hackers, who they actively oppose anyway) to further reduce the benefits of the other consoles.
I see a trend in that the BSA or whichever witch-hunter is mining information on existing licensees, looking for differences in numbers of seats for OS, office suite, email users, etc... So, for the business that wishes to avoid this nonsense, it appears that pirating every single piece of proprietary software they use would be safer than trying to license some, most, or even all of it without some kind of bulletproof guaranteed software accounting and desktop lockdowns in place. Obviously, full-on use of free software would beat that, but I'm just noticing that the people getting "busted" seem to always be those who made some purchases.
I've used 3D shutter glasses for my PC that work with nVidia drivers/cards for well over a decade. Any 3D game can render this way... the tech works okay, but nowhere near as lovely or convenient as the Captain EO / Avatar method which uses polarized projection and unpowered polarized glasses... and 3D eyeglass-free monitors that use parallax have existed for about a decade as well now... None of the new TVs do this? You can add field-sequential, shutter-frame tech to your PC and a good CRT for under $50... for the last decade. Fun for immersion... a bit of an impediment for high accuracy things like sniping in a FPS though.
What if everyone of the 4chan generation took this to the next level... what if everyone who didn't have too many qualms about it puts on a big grin and says to the TSA folk, "Heh, I request a pat-down instead!" Turn their shit against them and make them squirm. They thought they were gonna be giving the rapes; ha. Seriously, whenever the government decides to make our lives miserable for theatrical purposes, there are often exploits and flaws that we could use to make sure they're just as miserable with it.
Annnnnnd one more: first sale doctrine and right of resale, as it applies to all things I buy, is damaged in cases of any software or game that requires "activation." That is why I purchase absolutely nothing that requires "activation." They don't consider it a real purchase, so I won't consider it either. Many DRM schemes fail in this manner as well.
Going deeper into the copyright wars... The legal concept of copyright is that the holder gains exclusivity of copying for a limited time. If they attempt to limit copying permanently and forever, technologically, via DRM or other bastardizations of digital information, then they, first and foremost, have made that information something outside of the definition of copyrighted material.
The advent of widespread digital copying and distributing capabilities among the regular population has set many in the content production industries into a frenzy of attempting to fight the new reality. Nothing has changed about right and wrong. If you tell me a joke today, I am 100% free to tell that joke to someone else; such is the nature of information. Now that it has scaled up, some business models can either change, or some very large businesses can continue to fight a losing battle with their legal teams, lobbyists, senators, etc... at great expense, gaining nothing but extreme distrust and disdain from a growing segment of the population.
Generally, an advertiser wants to accomplish a couple of things: (A) make the target demographic aware of its product or service offering, or (B) raise that existing awareness... remind people about the product or service. In both cases, they are ultimately attempting to influence people who would otherwise not spend their money, to do so.
Personally, I find that motive A, if demographically appropriate, doesn't bother me that much, and in fact, has been useful to me at times. After I've seen the motive A advertisement once, subsequent viewings fall into motive B. I usually find motive B extremely annoying. Back when I watched television, I would see the same exact advertisement multiple times a day. Before I started using Mozilla and Adblock, I would add sites to my hosts file constantly. One of the few motive B advertising methods that never got on my nerves are coupons and discount offers.
Once you've gone a while without seeing virtually any advertising, your perspective changes a bit. The times when you are exposed to an annoying advertisement (on another person's computer, somewhere with a TV playing, rent a car and turn on the radio) it's even more distasteful than you recall. I think the annoying methods are crumbling fast. As Clear Channel destroyed the value and variety of radio, MP3 players rose to fill the gap; people obtain their news from website articles, sometimes using adblockers, while newspapers lose subscribers. Between independent video content, DVD collections of shows, Tivos, and piracy, people can get their episodic video fix without seeing a single commercial.
Advertisement exposure is no longer all that mandatory. The other side of this, however, is that people still want to know about products and services that interest them. As such, a person like me, who hates annoying old-school advertising, willfully signs up for deal mailing lists from my preferred hardware vendors, actively seeks out reviews and product previews on sites that cover my interests, and constantly monitors feeds of local news / reviews concerning the sorts of local businesses I like to visit. I am empowered by features like RSS, which make that kind of monitoring possible. The companies who do their best to get their products reviewed far and wide, who publish press releases, etc... will receive my attention. If they make a good product or offer a good service, that attention may have positive results for them. If advertisers wish to stay ahead of the curve (or just plain afloat), they need to start looking at this a lot more. Potential consumers are sending a pretty clear message: Be useful, or shut up.
You demonstrated two things with your answer, both of which are anathema to a lawyer considering a potential juror: a rational mindset (a percentage answer to that question), and that you've thought about these sorts of things before and came to conclusions.
Lawyers are trained to target Joe and Jane Six-pack with emotional appeals. They'd much prefer a jury populated by Joes and Janes than with individual thinkers who might not merely ignore their emotional appeals, but see through them as well.
Next time you want to be on a jury, you be "Every Man" during that phase... what answer would the fifty percentile give to this question? That is your answer.
Here in Memphis, murder gets like 3 years, tops.
they were even asking me and others questions about our siblings and what they did (maybe they were asking that because the defendant killed a sibling?
In a criminal case, they're generally going to drop potential jurors who have a close family member in law enforcement or incarcerated, etc... as that might give the potential juror a stronger-than-usual ability to identify with one side or another on the case. That much is reasonable...
If you want to be on a jury (I did, and have), especially for jury nullification purposes, be dumb and malleable during that interviewing process... not outrageously stupid, just a nodding your head in the direction the lawyers want you to sort of way; keep your eyes wide. Oh, and never admit to knowing what Jury Nullification is. The last thing you want to do is what another poster here mentioned and that is give well-reasoned, articulate answers that show you've thought about the relevant topics before and have come to conclusions. Be as much of an Every Man as you possibly can in your responses. If asked whether you agree with the laws as written, the answer is "yes." Both the prosecution and the defense want to sway you with emotion, and they want to target average Joes, because that's who they're trained to appeal to. A highly rational person is the best potential juror for justice, and the worst potential juror from a lawyer's perspective.
As for "getting out of" jury duty vs. trying to get in... consider that it is one of the few and only ways an individual citizen can make a significant difference in how the government treats its citizens, in the face of massive lobbying efforts, emotionally manipulated masses, etc... having a stranglehold on the legislative branch, and massive bureaucratic inertia on the executive branch.
GP's point is that most people are confused about the television business model, mistaking themselves as the customers and entertaining content as the product... The real model being that viewers' attention is the product being sold to advertisers is really something most people miss. This model is the true model for all television, including "News" channels, "Science Fiction" channels, "Music" channels, etc... For media in general, especially large, older, corporate-run media, the model is pretty much the same, and GP isn't musing that Facebook might be trying to make money as a business, but rather musing on who are Facebook's actual customers and what is the true business model. Like with TV, I bet most Facebook users mistakenly believe that they are also Facebook's customers.
... I mean that seriously. I kinda wish the mainstream media would use similar statements to headline their articles and news blurbs:
I might actually tune in if they were dead-pan ridiculously honest about the crap they shovel.
So... let's consider why Saudi nationals are not included in the mandatory extra screening... possibilities:
I read the PDF and glossed right over that list of nationalities... Excellent question, Ralph Spoilsport. I don't buy into most of the 9/11 alternate theories, but this actually disturbs me more than most related data.
A specific example of this were the aquarium filters made by Marineland. The Walmart ones were exactly the same as ones found in stores and online for usually about $10 more... Walmart's lower price was due to the lack of a spinning, cylindrical biofilter, and instead just a plastic mesh one.
That said, those filters were indeed branded differently with different product names, etc... but the plastic molds and most of the parts were exactly the same. I've not seen examples where something at Walmart was truly identified as the same model as something that's higher quality elsewhere, but I also haven't bought appliances or electronics there for many years.
I concur. My girlfriend and I spent last weekend hunting down old games we played as kids and the non-PC platform versions were often much richer in sounds, graphical detail, etc... Hard Hat Mac was best on the Apple ][+, Agent USA best on the C64, etc... The PC at the time was a CGA (4 color including black) machine. I remember looking at the back of game boxes in computer stores as a kid, wishing I had a C64 or Amiga instead of an Apple and a PC. Now we can emulate anything we want. On our phones and living room consoles, for that matter. :-)
Count your columns again. :-)
The term 4x4 used here indicates the number of rows and columns on phone technician devices or specialty home-made phreaking tools...
So many of these stupid laws talk about hands free being the way to go. FAIL. When I built my first car PC and onward, I focused on safety by making my interfaces eyes free. A handheld MP3 player that reads out directory names as you switch, etc... is safer than an in-dash, traditional radio.
If your local Target still has any, grab a Zipit Z2 (warning: horrible flash and music). My girlfriend got one on clearance for $12.50; I got one for $25... We're running Debian on one and Angstrom on the other currently. Check out this guy's tutorials. It's got a 312MHz ARM chip, wifi, querty keyboard, MiniSD slot, and a 320x240 color screen. I'm currently attempting to tune Angstrom to the point that I get all the stuff I had on my old Zaurus.
Also, you may want to check out the Pandora, which is nearing release. The unofficial blog has a lot of recent info. I was about to buy an N810 when my OQO died, but saw that the Pandora was getting less vapory and pre-ordered that instead.
Shock G's alter ego Humpty will never get caught by this system. Perhaps we all need to adopt these
I object... I consider myself quite a nerd and everyone who attended the first party I threw (who can recall much of it) considers it the best party they ever attended.
Here's how real nerds party: There was an excellent selection of quality alcohol, Nyotaimori(nsfw), Darth Vader reading the bible continuously in the "relaxing" room, and a ceremony involving Ritz Crackers, Easy Cheese, 40s of Miller High Life, and through the magic of transubstantiation, a surprise, posthumous, celebrity visit from Ol' Dirty Bastard.