If you can figure out a way to get sugarcane to grow in the flyover states, I bet you could convince a lot of people to switch to cane sugar. The corn lobby may have helped, but a bigger reason for our preference towards corn sugar is that it can be grown in great quantities in the country instead of imported from Carribean countries.
Well here's the thing though... in the states, the fastest residential broadband we offer is 7Mbps,,,
Tell that to the 30mbps/5mbps FiOS line that runs to my home. $55 a month no less. Unless you're talking about upstream bandwidth, in which case you're probably right, I've never heard of any residental access that has more than 5mbps of upstream bandwidth.
With respect to personal property, the general view is that an owner may not commit an assault or battery upon the wrongdoer in order to recover property. A majority of jurisdictions recognize the right of an owner in hot pursuit of stolen property to use a reasonable amount of force to retrieve it.
I think we might have differing definitions of "force" in this context. If by "force" you mean "chase down and tackle the guy" then yeah, that's generally allowed. However, threating people with weapons, beating them up, or any of the stuff normally associated with "force" in the courtroom are not allowed, not even in the reddest of states. This is the sort of thing that a Jury is likely to be leniant on, but the law clearly places the value of human life over the value of property. You cannot risk the life of the theif to get your property back without some extenuating circumstances.
I've always thought that was extra retarded though. Who is going to illegally copy the software to a system that requires a million dollar piece of equipment attached to it to do anything? The dongle is a useless nusance plain and simple.
You have a cite for that? As far as I know the use of force is never permitted for the return of property. If you use force your life or the life of someone else had better have been in danger.
Hmm, I guess my previous post was a bit more than 30 seconds.
I wanted to mention one more thing, there is an in-game combat system should you so desire such a thing, however it is kind of retarded because you can also make your own guns. Imagine if you will your average online shooting game. What do you think would happen if you allowed players to specify how powerful their guns are and what kind of armor they can ignore and if they can home in on every other player on the map automatically ignoring all cover and terrain? That's what combat in Secondlife is like. The first person to click their mouse wins. There are some players who have specific servers set up with sane weapons rules and limits, but those are all gentlemen's rules, there's nothing in the game enforcing them.
When you first sign up, you have a beginners account. This account cannot buy land, I don't think free accounts get a stipend anymore because people abused it like crazy, but you do get a signing bonus. The build system is integrated into the game, and it's pretty easy to use once you get the hang of it. There are some areas ingame that have good tutorials on how to use it. Anyway, you can build anything you want most anywhere, however it is considered bad manners to build stuff on other people's land, and some people have building turned off on their land (although this is uncommon). You can also go to one of many sandboxes around the world and build stuff, however every few hours everything in the sandbox is returned automatically so you can't leave a permanent structure up. You can however save your work in your inventory and then bring it back out to work on it later.
If you want to leave your work up permanently, you need to either buy or rent some land. To buy land you need to upgrade your account. The upgraded account costs $10/month, but comes with a weekly stipend that you can convert into real $ to help offset the cost of the account. You can also buy a small plot of land that will let you leave a small structure (the complexity of your builds is limited by the size of your plot) up permanently. Renting is similar except that you can do it with a basic account and it can sometimes be cheaper monthly than buying. You lose out on any land appreciation, although that tends to be very low in Secondlife because new land is added all of the time. Landords can offer you land cheaper than buying because there are large bulk discounts for owning huge amounts of land. Landlords make a profit off of the difference.
Building is fairly simple. You start out with basic shapes called Primitives or Prims (Cube, Torus, Sphere, etc...) that you can deform, stack together, and texture to make whatever you like. While it is easy to make something in the system, it is somewhat difficult to make something that looks good. Like all artistic creations, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. A reasonably powerful scripting language is also available that can add a lot of life to your creations.
You also have a lot of flexibility in your avatar's appearance. This is one reason the furry community has taken to Secondlife, it is not overly difficult to turn your avatar into an animal shape. The skeletal model the game uses more or less requires that you make your avatar bipedal if you want realistic movement, but other than that it's quite flexible. There is a big market in-game for new clothes and accessories for your avatar.
It doesn't help that GW occasionally penalizes people who are willing to go out on a limb and play one of the "lesser" races like the Squats by completely obsoleting their army and telling the players to pick a better faction next time.
Unless the split happened very early in the deveopment cycle I'm going to say this is a myth. The backstory for WoW is clearly based on Blizzard's own Warcraft, Warcraft II, and Warcraft III. Parallels to Warhammer Fantasy are there, but one gets the feeling that they are mostly due to similar source material (Lord of the Rings for example).
Interestingly enough, that's pretty much with all new players have to do, since you don't start out with a home and the newbie plots are generally all grabbed up by unscrupulus land speculators with tons of alt accounts.
Chances are it was a birth that produced the 300,000,000th American, because international flights that bring in new immigrants don't tend to arrive in the early morning.
I've always thought that "building bigger roads just causes more people to move there" argument was flawed myself. Those people didn't appear out of nowhere, they were going to have to live somewhere, the fact that they filled in the area just as the road expanded probably doesn't mean that much either, since road expansions are often correlated with new housing developments anyway.
It drives me nuts when the anti-suburban-sprawl types try to argue that everybody should live in the city along the mass transit lines when nobody can actually afford to do that, and they can't afford to do that because the new housing growth has been choked up so much that demand far outstrips supply and the prices skyrocket. Couple that with the fact that renting is a losing proposition monetarily and your choices for living in the city are basically nonexistant.
It worked really well from what I saw. The purchase of new SUVs took a nose dive over the summer. A lot of the crying you hear from American auto makers right now comes from the fact that their high margin SUVs didn't sell for crap for several months over the summer, and still havn't rebounded very much.
Yeah, financially speaking it doesn't make much sense yet. Your 250W power supply is probably not even going to be sufficent in 5-8 years--even if you buy low power computer equipment, the specs on the power supply change, like from AT to ATX and the extra pins added (and dropped! We'll miss you -5V, and your little ISA bus too) over time.
I think the grandparent poster is right on that this should be thought of as a medium-long term goal. Get all of the manufacturers to switch over soon, and let natural attrition shrink the "old power supply" pool while increasing the efficent pool. Eco-hippies can be early adopters if they like, but from a financal standpoint it will take a rather large increase in the cost of power or a significant drop in the cost of efficent power supplies to make this worthwhile.
That's not how the hype went though. The idea with VRML is that you'd load a page with your VRML enabled browser and insead of looking at a big wall of text and pictures, you would be dropped into a 3D environment that would be better somehow. It was the Net, but in 3D. Secondlife is actually much the same way (you can click on a secondlife:// URL and get dropped into a specific place in the game), but it actually works on hardware that doesn't cost $10,000, so it does have a leg up there. Still, it's another case of 3D that's fun, but ultimately kinda useless.
SL is not so much a game as it is a toy. You can chat and roleplay if you want, but you can do that on IRC just about as well, and the IRC client is a lot lighter than SL. Where it really shines is when you start playing around with creating the most artistic and astetically pleasing objects/structures that you can. If you're really good at it, you can make stuff pretty enough to pay off your monthly game fee (or rental costs if you don't want to become a paying member and instead just rent mall space). You can also fly around and look at what everybody else has done, which can be fun too, even if most of it is crap. There are a small number of people who make real money on the game, but they're almost all in the land speculation business.
For a MMO with such a small playerbase, SL seems to grab a lot of headlines. I can't help but compare it to VRML from a few years ago, although SL is way better implemented than VRML. On the other hand, SL is still seriously clunky, especially if you make something that's actually popular.
I has iTunes Music Store, that's what. It also has good comptuer side software (which was a major problem with many early MP3 players), enough storage to be useful (although the Nomad wasn't in this camp, many of its contemporaries were), and it has an easy to use interface that doesn't require you to be a geek to understand.
It also doesn't have many of the features those other players have, but on the other hand many of those features were ones an average person is never going to use anyway.
That's not to say the iPod is perfect. At the very least iTunes is highly deficent in the lack of an ability to synchronize music libraries between two different computers that are both authorized for the same account. This makes it a PITA to buy music on iTMS and then load it onto a laptop, or vice versa. Worse, you can only sync an iPod to one comptuer, so unless you are very careful to only buy the music on that one computer, you will have to transfer the files manually. What should be a very simple operation turns out to be really really annoying. Shame on Apple for making this so difficult.
If someone was a "fanboy" up until the point that the competition got better, I don't think they qualify as a Fanboy. Right now if I were to build a system I'd use a Core2Duo no doubt. I always go for the best price/performance ratio that's still reasonably fast. Right now that's Intel, so I would go with them. If AMD edges ahead again with some (as far as I can tell unannounced) new technology, then I'll use AMD again. I think people are too quick to label other people "fanboys".
On the other hand, some of the near incoherent posts above me do point to some bad cases of fanboyism.
High heat will damage hard drives and fans by breaking down the oil used in them. In particular Hard Drives are susceptable to high temperatures (which is annoying because the drive bays are invariably the worst cooled part of any case). The cheap electrolytic capacitors that motherboard manufactuerers use don't like high temperatures either.
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Most farmers don't consider sugar beets to be economically viable however. The infrastructure just isn't there for it.
If you can figure out a way to get sugarcane to grow in the flyover states, I bet you could convince a lot of people to switch to cane sugar. The corn lobby may have helped, but a bigger reason for our preference towards corn sugar is that it can be grown in great quantities in the country instead of imported from Carribean countries.
Alexa also rewards webmasters who write badly broken IE only webpages, forcing people who normally use Firefox to switch over to IE for that webpage.
I've always thought that was extra retarded though. Who is going to illegally copy the software to a system that requires a million dollar piece of equipment attached to it to do anything? The dongle is a useless nusance plain and simple.
You have a cite for that? As far as I know the use of force is never permitted for the return of property. If you use force your life or the life of someone else had better have been in danger.
Hmm, I guess my previous post was a bit more than 30 seconds.
I wanted to mention one more thing, there is an in-game combat system should you so desire such a thing, however it is kind of retarded because you can also make your own guns. Imagine if you will your average online shooting game. What do you think would happen if you allowed players to specify how powerful their guns are and what kind of armor they can ignore and if they can home in on every other player on the map automatically ignoring all cover and terrain? That's what combat in Secondlife is like. The first person to click their mouse wins. There are some players who have specific servers set up with sane weapons rules and limits, but those are all gentlemen's rules, there's nothing in the game enforcing them.
Here's the 30 second primer on Secondlife.
When you first sign up, you have a beginners account. This account cannot buy land, I don't think free accounts get a stipend anymore because people abused it like crazy, but you do get a signing bonus. The build system is integrated into the game, and it's pretty easy to use once you get the hang of it. There are some areas ingame that have good tutorials on how to use it. Anyway, you can build anything you want most anywhere, however it is considered bad manners to build stuff on other people's land, and some people have building turned off on their land (although this is uncommon). You can also go to one of many sandboxes around the world and build stuff, however every few hours everything in the sandbox is returned automatically so you can't leave a permanent structure up. You can however save your work in your inventory and then bring it back out to work on it later.
If you want to leave your work up permanently, you need to either buy or rent some land. To buy land you need to upgrade your account. The upgraded account costs $10/month, but comes with a weekly stipend that you can convert into real $ to help offset the cost of the account. You can also buy a small plot of land that will let you leave a small structure (the complexity of your builds is limited by the size of your plot) up permanently. Renting is similar except that you can do it with a basic account and it can sometimes be cheaper monthly than buying. You lose out on any land appreciation, although that tends to be very low in Secondlife because new land is added all of the time. Landords can offer you land cheaper than buying because there are large bulk discounts for owning huge amounts of land. Landlords make a profit off of the difference.
Building is fairly simple. You start out with basic shapes called Primitives or Prims (Cube, Torus, Sphere, etc...) that you can deform, stack together, and texture to make whatever you like. While it is easy to make something in the system, it is somewhat difficult to make something that looks good. Like all artistic creations, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. A reasonably powerful scripting language is also available that can add a lot of life to your creations.
You also have a lot of flexibility in your avatar's appearance. This is one reason the furry community has taken to Secondlife, it is not overly difficult to turn your avatar into an animal shape. The skeletal model the game uses more or less requires that you make your avatar bipedal if you want realistic movement, but other than that it's quite flexible. There is a big market in-game for new clothes and accessories for your avatar.
It doesn't help that GW occasionally penalizes people who are willing to go out on a limb and play one of the "lesser" races like the Squats by completely obsoleting their army and telling the players to pick a better faction next time.
Unless the split happened very early in the deveopment cycle I'm going to say this is a myth. The backstory for WoW is clearly based on Blizzard's own Warcraft, Warcraft II, and Warcraft III. Parallels to Warhammer Fantasy are there, but one gets the feeling that they are mostly due to similar source material (Lord of the Rings for example).
Interestingly enough, that's pretty much with all new players have to do, since you don't start out with a home and the newbie plots are generally all grabbed up by unscrupulus land speculators with tons of alt accounts.
Chances are it was a birth that produced the 300,000,000th American, because international flights that bring in new immigrants don't tend to arrive in the early morning.
I've always thought that "building bigger roads just causes more people to move there" argument was flawed myself. Those people didn't appear out of nowhere, they were going to have to live somewhere, the fact that they filled in the area just as the road expanded probably doesn't mean that much either, since road expansions are often correlated with new housing developments anyway.
It drives me nuts when the anti-suburban-sprawl types try to argue that everybody should live in the city along the mass transit lines when nobody can actually afford to do that, and they can't afford to do that because the new housing growth has been choked up so much that demand far outstrips supply and the prices skyrocket. Couple that with the fact that renting is a losing proposition monetarily and your choices for living in the city are basically nonexistant.
It worked really well from what I saw. The purchase of new SUVs took a nose dive over the summer. A lot of the crying you hear from American auto makers right now comes from the fact that their high margin SUVs didn't sell for crap for several months over the summer, and still havn't rebounded very much.
Yeah, financially speaking it doesn't make much sense yet. Your 250W power supply is probably not even going to be sufficent in 5-8 years--even if you buy low power computer equipment, the specs on the power supply change, like from AT to ATX and the extra pins added (and dropped! We'll miss you -5V, and your little ISA bus too) over time.
I think the grandparent poster is right on that this should be thought of as a medium-long term goal. Get all of the manufacturers to switch over soon, and let natural attrition shrink the "old power supply" pool while increasing the efficent pool. Eco-hippies can be early adopters if they like, but from a financal standpoint it will take a rather large increase in the cost of power or a significant drop in the cost of efficent power supplies to make this worthwhile.
That's not how the hype went though. The idea with VRML is that you'd load a page with your VRML enabled browser and insead of looking at a big wall of text and pictures, you would be dropped into a 3D environment that would be better somehow. It was the Net, but in 3D. Secondlife is actually much the same way (you can click on a secondlife:// URL and get dropped into a specific place in the game), but it actually works on hardware that doesn't cost $10,000, so it does have a leg up there. Still, it's another case of 3D that's fun, but ultimately kinda useless.
Yep, although woe be to you if you want some fast 3D support in OpenBSD.
It's also the version without GL support. Without GL support you might as well have a Mach64 in there.
SL is not so much a game as it is a toy. You can chat and roleplay if you want, but you can do that on IRC just about as well, and the IRC client is a lot lighter than SL. Where it really shines is when you start playing around with creating the most artistic and astetically pleasing objects/structures that you can. If you're really good at it, you can make stuff pretty enough to pay off your monthly game fee (or rental costs if you don't want to become a paying member and instead just rent mall space). You can also fly around and look at what everybody else has done, which can be fun too, even if most of it is crap. There are a small number of people who make real money on the game, but they're almost all in the land speculation business.
For a MMO with such a small playerbase, SL seems to grab a lot of headlines. I can't help but compare it to VRML from a few years ago, although SL is way better implemented than VRML. On the other hand, SL is still seriously clunky, especially if you make something that's actually popular.
I has iTunes Music Store, that's what. It also has good comptuer side software (which was a major problem with many early MP3 players), enough storage to be useful (although the Nomad wasn't in this camp, many of its contemporaries were), and it has an easy to use interface that doesn't require you to be a geek to understand.
It also doesn't have many of the features those other players have, but on the other hand many of those features were ones an average person is never going to use anyway.
That's not to say the iPod is perfect. At the very least iTunes is highly deficent in the lack of an ability to synchronize music libraries between two different computers that are both authorized for the same account. This makes it a PITA to buy music on iTMS and then load it onto a laptop, or vice versa. Worse, you can only sync an iPod to one comptuer, so unless you are very careful to only buy the music on that one computer, you will have to transfer the files manually. What should be a very simple operation turns out to be really really annoying. Shame on Apple for making this so difficult.
If someone was a "fanboy" up until the point that the competition got better, I don't think they qualify as a Fanboy. Right now if I were to build a system I'd use a Core2Duo no doubt. I always go for the best price/performance ratio that's still reasonably fast. Right now that's Intel, so I would go with them. If AMD edges ahead again with some (as far as I can tell unannounced) new technology, then I'll use AMD again. I think people are too quick to label other people "fanboys".
On the other hand, some of the near incoherent posts above me do point to some bad cases of fanboyism.
High heat will damage hard drives and fans by breaking down the oil used in them. In particular Hard Drives are susceptable to high temperatures (which is annoying because the drive bays are invariably the worst cooled part of any case). The cheap electrolytic capacitors that motherboard manufactuerers use don't like high temperatures either.