The US Army. Back in Vietnam, the soldiers often bought guns and pistols other than the unreasonably shitty M14s they were given (as they jammed incessantly in the dirty Vietnam forests). Right now, US soldiers buy their own body armor. Traditionally (and still, for anything other than the standard issue peice of crap that 90% of soldiers leave at home in a locker (since loosing it is a court martial offense)), American soldiers have had to buy their own pistols if they wanted them.
Mine handles all those weird bill sizes as well. Even Home Depot receipts will get sucked through, although it has a bit of trouble with feeding multiple crumpled receipts unless they're sandwiched between thicker sheets of non-crumpled paper.
While cartoonists used cameras suspended from tables to make animiations for years, I don't really think this is what you want. A better solution would be to buy a scanner with an Automatic Document Feeder. These aren't particularly expensive and are usually worth it for other reasons. The most cost effective ones are the Laser Multifunction devices. They are basically laser printers with a USB port so they can act as a printer or scanner as well. Just make sure you get one with an ADF; it's worth it. Most also throw in fax functionality as well. My Brother MFC-7420 has lasted me over a year (still going strong) and two toner cartridges and can scan a batch of papers at 300 dpi in no time flat. While it prints B&W, it scans in color at a max of 9600 dpi, which is good enough even for pictures. It only cost me $250 and was totally worth it.
The GPL isn't quite so assholic as that. They don't necessarily have to give out the source themselves. They simply have to either make the source available at no extra charge or tell people where you can get it (though, this third party source must provide it for free and the source must be the same as you used for your binary). This is why it's quite common for people to put up patches and tell people to get the standard tarball and patch it (see udpcast for an example concerning busybox). When's the last time you could use Google's cache to find a GPL'd binary but couldn't Google up the source?
The Illinois judge wasn't trying to enforce some ridiculous law allowing spammers to spam from Chicago. The judge issued a default judgment. In our adversarial system, if you file a suit and the defendant doesn't respond, you automatically win (unless your suit was extremely ridiculous, but this was a standard defamation suit, not a suit alleging that David Letterman killed my baby with mind-rays through the TV). If the defendant can later show that he didn't know about the suit, couldn't get there for some (really good) reason or that the suit was filed in an incorrect jurisdiction, then the default judgment can and will be overturned, and the plaintiff allowed to refile.
Illinois is most certainly not trying to enforce some crazy pro-spam law. Hell, the judge probably just barely skimmed the filing when wrote the decision, and even then, just to make sure his decision made sense when read back by the plaintiff. It wouldn't surprise me if a serious amount of OCR and cut-and-paste was involved. The judge's reaction to Spamhaus's response is probably, "You go, Spamhaus. Keep stoppin those Viagra ads with yo bad self."
Maybe in Australia where debtors still go to jail and children inherit their parent's debts, but here in the US words can't be porn. In fact, all written is afforded 1st Ammendment protections regardless of subject. That's why there's so many stories involving 12-year olds getting raped in graphic detail around teh intarweb.
And in random order. Just have the first page of your registration have a reverse CAPTCHA and the second page have a real CAPTCHA. But some times have it the other way around, randomly of course. You could have the directions as part of the CAPTCHA image. For example, tell people that if the CAPTCHA starts with a number, its normal and if a letter its not. Or use chinese characters if it's not or something. This way, no script nor non-fluent English speaker would be able to pass the test.
You're bitching about the password saver in Firefox (I'm assuming Firefox and not Opera)? Lordy. You can disable that by unchecking Save Passwords in Tools -> Options -> Privacy -> Passwords. Alternatively you can tell it to never save for individual sites and save them for other sites. If you resolve to never hit "Not Now" for a week, you'll probably almost never see that again.
And garbled pages? What garbled pages? Every once in a while some retarded website will have some DHTML with a misaligned picture for which IE violates the standards to display correctly but Firefox doesn't. To copy and paste the covered text to Notepad is the quickest solution (it's not like it happens often) or copy and paste of the URL to IE, if you like waiting for the page to load and render a second time.
Why even bother blocking porn sites? Blocker software costs money, does a poor job, and blocks too many non-porn sites to be worthwhile. Instead just glance around every once in a while to make sure no one's looking at porn.
And you're right. Don't cater to little kids. They aren't your core crowd anyway.
First, America already had this discussion twenty years ago. It was for movies. In the end, what happened is the same thing that's going to happen for video games. Porn will shunned to porno stores, and everything else will be saleable without restriction. The stores that sell games will voluntarily prohibit the sale of M games to minors just like stores and theatres voluntarily prohibit the sale or veiwing of R movies. This is because of the first ammendment and decency.
The problem that all you pro-games-prohibition nuts all fail to realize is that no big family store (read: supermarkets, walmart and blockbuster) will carry M games if they're illegal to sell to minors. As such, it will become difficult to market said games, effectively silencing the authors of those games, a violation of the first ammendment. That IS the legal logic. Read the recent ruling from Michigan on the subject if you don't beleive me. Read the court cases from the 80's concerning movies and the nineties concerning music. Truly, the law has spoken many times on this subject already. Prohibiting minors from obtaining materials protected by the first ammendment, even if they are still available to adults, is a de facto ban because of the limitations of market and venue and is therefore unconstitutional. Further argument is lame, as the Supreme Court has spoken. Twice.
Actually video editing in Linux IS somewhat easy, after you get the concepts. Try out Cinelerra (sp?) for yourself for a while, then teach somone computer savvy how to use it. After that you should be able to teach nearly anyone to use in about a day (plan for eight hours). When you're done, you'll be able to do studio quality edits (circa 2001). The satifaction your parents would have from being that good is incomparable. It's totally worth the effort.
Um, no, concerning java. While back in the 80's interpreters interpreted code one line at a time, modern interpreters compile to byte code BEFORE executing it. Java, perl, erlang, etc, all do this. In fact, I've found (through timed tests) that erlang and java code can run a shitload faster than the equivalent C, even with the same algorithm (well, not quite the same in erlang but that's because it's designed for tail-end recursion). This is because the java and erlang compilers which can inline stuff from the standard libraries into the bytecode. C compilers (excepting ICC) can't do this. If it's in a library, it must be linked in. This reduces speed greatly. This is the reason that certain library algorithms in C are implemented as macros in the headers, instead of functions. Specifically, byte order converters (little-endian to big-endian). (Note that even when you call the interpreted program straight from it's source, it's still fully compiled before running. To have this illustrated fully, try writing some good perl code that prints to the console and then some crap and see what happens when you run perl goodthencrap.pl.)
The FCC changed the rule that forced modems down to 53kbps about six months after the 56k standard was finalized, something like six years ago. Early 56k modems (both before and after the unification of x2 and k56Flex) were limited 28.8k up but later ones were able to do 33.6k up. All hardware modem manufacturers have released firmware updates to fix the 53k problem and software modem manufacturers have provided updated drivers. Same goes for the upgrade from x2 and k56Flex to the 56k standard. Most of these updates will also increase upload speed to 33.6k but not all.
There is one common adverse possession that frequently occurs. Taking possession of public land by private persons. One example happened to my dad when I was a kid. He bought some property in a popular middle class development and built a house on it. There was a small amount of woods behind this house and the houses of our neighbors. My dad decided that the woods was too big and useless to just sit there and that it would be much more useful as our lawn. So he cleared out ten foot of woods, planted grass and decorative pines and built a treefort for us kids. The neighbors, jealous, followed suit.
Eight years later, the city decided it wanted to expand a park into the woods next to what we had turned into lawn. A local ordinance required ten feet of wooded area between residences and city parks, and the city, looking at a drawing of property lines thought they were all good. When they got out there, there wasn't enough room for the park, so they decided to rewood the area we had made into lawn. My dad and his neighbors successfully got an injunction against the city as they had legally owned the land after using for more than seven years. The city promptly raised their taxes and charged them for seven years of back taxes on the newly acquired land. That sucked.
Um, no. Allah is the same god as the Christian God in the same way that it is the god as the Jewish God. The Trinity is a construct of the Catholic church that came about during the split between the Catholics and the Orthodox church (and the Gnostics), and, as such, it is not the Christian idea of God but the Catholic(-derived, in the case of Protestants) idea of God. The Orthodox church considered Jesus to be divine and a completely separate being (no Trinity). The Gnostics (who were later wiped out) considered Jesus to be a prophet of God, fully human with no divinity. They also considered the "Virgin birth" to be a joke (literally.)
At the time of Jesus, Roman culture was much the same as ours concerning premarital sex; they considered it normal. As such, it was not uncommon for girls to get pregnant before being married. However, the Jews thought this was wrong but, "When in Rome, do as the Romans do," was a common thought in the Jewish community at the time, so a protocol of covered acceptance was created. If a Jewish girl got pregnant before marriage, and her suitor was OK with that, then they would get married anyway, and all was honky-dory. The only catch is that, by Jewish law, only virgin girls can get married, so if a marriage took place, then she must still be a "virgin." That was a kind of joke at the time. Also, at that time, the first time a couple has sex is a religious ceremony, called consumation. When Joseph and Mary got married, they were on the run and didn't have a chance to officially consumate the marriage, a difficult process when her cooter wasn't going to bleed from it being the first time (the consumation ceremony involves displaying a bloody towel after the first time and having everyone listen in on the girl's pain.). When she finally had she Jesus, she was still officially a "virgin" because the marriage hadn't been consumated yet and, if Joseph married her, she HAD to be a virgin and, if the marriage was never consumated, the she must still be a virgin. Of course, you're welcome to beleive what you want, but let it be known that one of the three major branches of Christianity held that view until they were wiped out by a Hitler-esque Pope-ordered "religious cleansing".
If you want a touch bit more evidence in the Bible for this, look to the beginning of the first Gospel (Matthew, I beleive). It has a lineage for Joseph. This lineage shows that Jesus is a direct decendant of David, thus allowing him to fulfill the prophecy of the Messiah. It is now thought that this is the lineage of Mary, since those people don't think that Jesus was the son of Joseph. That would be nice but, alas, it is false. At that time, and until about 300 CE or so, women were not considered in lineage. A woman could not pass on a line. They were just "the dirt in which men plant the seeds of human life." That lineage is, in fact, the lineage of Joseph, Jesus's father. It wasn't until about 350 CE that people began thinking of Jesus as divine anyway, so this makes perfect sense.
I'm getting completely exhausted responding to people who think they know what laws exist and what laws don't based on common sense or whatever. There is no state anywhere (in the US) that regulates the availability of any content (other than pornography) on any medium, period. End of story. And there never will be.
The dumb-ass "we know what's best for children and what's best them is best for adults" tried this twice now in the last thirty years and lost horribly both times. In the early to mid 80s they tried to make laws enforcing the MPAA ratings on theatres and (later) video rentals. All efforts were struck down as unconstitional.
Then in the late 80s early 90s they tried to do it with music, by banning swear-worded rap and enforcing parental warning requirements and prohibition of sales of parentally warned against cds to kids. All laws were overturned.
In the end, in both cases, enough of the industry voluntarily adopted policies similar enough to the original laws that morons like you assume it is actually law. In the end, the bans on games will suffer the same fate. No actual prohibition, but the industry will (and has, really) self-regulate policies similar to what the laws wanted. But no actual bans will be enforced. Ever. Now, shut up, all of you. THE GOVERNMENT CANNOT NOR WILL EVER REGULATE CONTENT AVAILABLE TO MINORS OTHER THAN PORN. PERIOD.
"Strangely, I thought it was already illegal for children under 17 to be sold rated M games... "
Um, no. There are no enforceable laws on the books that prohibit selling M-rated games to kids. There are some unenforceable ones, but since they're unconstitutional, we'll never see anyone try to enforce them. These are similar to the "you can't ever legally have anal sex" laws; they're on the books, but not legally enforceable.
Anyway, you probably also thought it was illegal for movie theatres and rental places to allow a minor (under 17, 18, doesn't matter) to watch or rent rated-R movies. If you did, you'd be wrong. Those are entirely voluntary enforcements of entirely voluntary rating systems. There's nothing preventing movie theatres from selling tickets to R-rated movies to 12 year olds other than public opinion.
Well, as long as you are in the US anyhow. Other countries may have actual laws on these ratings (particularly Europe), but nowhere in the US is there any regulation of any content on any medium other than pornography. The only thing making it difficult for an 8 year old to buy Silence of the Lambs is the policy of the store she's trying to buy from.
Not true. The english Imperial system is completely different from the US customary system, even though they share the same names. For example, a US standard ton is 2000 lb, while that same measure is called a short tonne in the Imperial system. A standard Imperial tonne (also called a long tonne) weighs 2240 lb.
Another example would be the gallon, and this one will blow your mind, as its completely ridiculous and you probably had no idea. In the Imperial system, a gallon is ~4.546L, no matter what. (Regardless of gallon type, a gallon has 128 of the appropriate ounces, so a comparison requires us to use a neutral 3rd-party unit. The liter seems excellent.) A US LIQUID gallon is ~3.785L, which everyone is vaguely aware (at least in theory ("a gallon's a little smaller that two 2L pop bottles.")). A US DRY gallon is ~4.404L. I really have no idea what these differences are from, but they're there.
You've never actually used an x86_64 system, have you? Nearly every distro comes with the compatibility libs installed by default. Why? Because you can't do a whole hell of a lot Internet-media-wise without them. No acrobat reader, no flash, no mozilla plugins, no win32 codecs for mplayer. Those things are the bread and buuter of the Internet, without them an x86_64 system is practically useless as a desktop. Now, if you're making the (albeit incorrect) assumption that most x86_64 systems are used for server purposes, then you'd probably be correct. Well, maybe, but only if the sysadmin knew what he was doing enough to do it that way.
Slashdot Mirror
The US Army. Back in Vietnam, the soldiers often bought guns and pistols other than the unreasonably shitty M14s they were given (as they jammed incessantly in the dirty Vietnam forests). Right now, US soldiers buy their own body armor. Traditionally (and still, for anything other than the standard issue peice of crap that 90% of soldiers leave at home in a locker (since loosing it is a court martial offense)), American soldiers have had to buy their own pistols if they wanted them.
Mine handles all those weird bill sizes as well. Even Home Depot receipts will get sucked through, although it has a bit of trouble with feeding multiple crumpled receipts unless they're sandwiched between thicker sheets of non-crumpled paper.
While cartoonists used cameras suspended from tables to make animiations for years, I don't really think this is what you want. A better solution would be to buy a scanner with an Automatic Document Feeder. These aren't particularly expensive and are usually worth it for other reasons. The most cost effective ones are the Laser Multifunction devices. They are basically laser printers with a USB port so they can act as a printer or scanner as well. Just make sure you get one with an ADF; it's worth it. Most also throw in fax functionality as well. My Brother MFC-7420 has lasted me over a year (still going strong) and two toner cartridges and can scan a batch of papers at 300 dpi in no time flat. While it prints B&W, it scans in color at a max of 9600 dpi, which is good enough even for pictures. It only cost me $250 and was totally worth it.
The GPL isn't quite so assholic as that. They don't necessarily have to give out the source themselves. They simply have to either make the source available at no extra charge or tell people where you can get it (though, this third party source must provide it for free and the source must be the same as you used for your binary). This is why it's quite common for people to put up patches and tell people to get the standard tarball and patch it (see udpcast for an example concerning busybox). When's the last time you could use Google's cache to find a GPL'd binary but couldn't Google up the source?
Litterally. Isn't that reminder enough?
DVDA is a myth. Besides the real holy grail is DVDADO. Now that's a lot of cock.
The Illinois judge wasn't trying to enforce some ridiculous law allowing spammers to spam from Chicago. The judge issued a default judgment. In our adversarial system, if you file a suit and the defendant doesn't respond, you automatically win (unless your suit was extremely ridiculous, but this was a standard defamation suit, not a suit alleging that David Letterman killed my baby with mind-rays through the TV). If the defendant can later show that he didn't know about the suit, couldn't get there for some (really good) reason or that the suit was filed in an incorrect jurisdiction, then the default judgment can and will be overturned, and the plaintiff allowed to refile.
Illinois is most certainly not trying to enforce some crazy pro-spam law. Hell, the judge probably just barely skimmed the filing when wrote the decision, and even then, just to make sure his decision made sense when read back by the plaintiff. It wouldn't surprise me if a serious amount of OCR and cut-and-paste was involved. The judge's reaction to Spamhaus's response is probably, "You go, Spamhaus. Keep stoppin those Viagra ads with yo bad self."
Prior Art
Maybe in Australia where debtors still go to jail and children inherit their parent's debts, but here in the US words can't be porn. In fact, all written is afforded 1st Ammendment protections regardless of subject. That's why there's so many stories involving 12-year olds getting raped in graphic detail around teh intarweb.
And in random order. Just have the first page of your registration have a reverse CAPTCHA and the second page have a real CAPTCHA. But some times have it the other way around, randomly of course. You could have the directions as part of the CAPTCHA image. For example, tell people that if the CAPTCHA starts with a number, its normal and if a letter its not. Or use chinese characters if it's not or something. This way, no script nor non-fluent English speaker would be able to pass the test.
You're bitching about the password saver in Firefox (I'm assuming Firefox and not Opera)? Lordy. You can disable that by unchecking Save Passwords in Tools -> Options -> Privacy -> Passwords. Alternatively you can tell it to never save for individual sites and save them for other sites. If you resolve to never hit "Not Now" for a week, you'll probably almost never see that again.
And garbled pages? What garbled pages? Every once in a while some retarded website will have some DHTML with a misaligned picture for which IE violates the standards to display correctly but Firefox doesn't. To copy and paste the covered text to Notepad is the quickest solution (it's not like it happens often) or copy and paste of the URL to IE, if you like waiting for the page to load and render a second time.
Why even bother blocking porn sites? Blocker software costs money, does a poor job, and blocks too many non-porn sites to be worthwhile. Instead just glance around every once in a while to make sure no one's looking at porn.
And you're right. Don't cater to little kids. They aren't your core crowd anyway.
First, America already had this discussion twenty years ago. It was for movies. In the end, what happened is the same thing that's going to happen for video games. Porn will shunned to porno stores, and everything else will be saleable without restriction. The stores that sell games will voluntarily prohibit the sale of M games to minors just like stores and theatres voluntarily prohibit the sale or veiwing of R movies. This is because of the first ammendment and decency.
The problem that all you pro-games-prohibition nuts all fail to realize is that no big family store (read: supermarkets, walmart and blockbuster) will carry M games if they're illegal to sell to minors. As such, it will become difficult to market said games, effectively silencing the authors of those games, a violation of the first ammendment. That IS the legal logic. Read the recent ruling from Michigan on the subject if you don't beleive me. Read the court cases from the 80's concerning movies and the nineties concerning music. Truly, the law has spoken many times on this subject already. Prohibiting minors from obtaining materials protected by the first ammendment, even if they are still available to adults, is a de facto ban because of the limitations of market and venue and is therefore unconstitutional. Further argument is lame, as the Supreme Court has spoken. Twice.
Actually video editing in Linux IS somewhat easy, after you get the concepts. Try out Cinelerra (sp?) for yourself for a while, then teach somone computer savvy how to use it. After that you should be able to teach nearly anyone to use in about a day (plan for eight hours). When you're done, you'll be able to do studio quality edits (circa 2001). The satifaction your parents would have from being that good is incomparable. It's totally worth the effort.
Um, no, concerning java. While back in the 80's interpreters interpreted code one line at a time, modern interpreters compile to byte code BEFORE executing it. Java, perl, erlang, etc, all do this. In fact, I've found (through timed tests) that erlang and java code can run a shitload faster than the equivalent C, even with the same algorithm (well, not quite the same in erlang but that's because it's designed for tail-end recursion). This is because the java and erlang compilers which can inline stuff from the standard libraries into the bytecode. C compilers (excepting ICC) can't do this. If it's in a library, it must be linked in. This reduces speed greatly. This is the reason that certain library algorithms in C are implemented as macros in the headers, instead of functions. Specifically, byte order converters (little-endian to big-endian). (Note that even when you call the interpreted program straight from it's source, it's still fully compiled before running. To have this illustrated fully, try writing some good perl code that prints to the console and then some crap and see what happens when you run perl goodthencrap.pl.)
The FCC changed the rule that forced modems down to 53kbps about six months after the 56k standard was finalized, something like six years ago. Early 56k modems (both before and after the unification of x2 and k56Flex) were limited 28.8k up but later ones were able to do 33.6k up. All hardware modem manufacturers have released firmware updates to fix the 53k problem and software modem manufacturers have provided updated drivers. Same goes for the upgrade from x2 and k56Flex to the 56k standard. Most of these updates will also increase upload speed to 33.6k but not all.
There is one common adverse possession that frequently occurs. Taking possession of public land by private persons. One example happened to my dad when I was a kid. He bought some property in a popular middle class development and built a house on it. There was a small amount of woods behind this house and the houses of our neighbors. My dad decided that the woods was too big and useless to just sit there and that it would be much more useful as our lawn. So he cleared out ten foot of woods, planted grass and decorative pines and built a treefort for us kids. The neighbors, jealous, followed suit.
Eight years later, the city decided it wanted to expand a park into the woods next to what we had turned into lawn. A local ordinance required ten feet of wooded area between residences and city parks, and the city, looking at a drawing of property lines thought they were all good. When they got out there, there wasn't enough room for the park, so they decided to rewood the area we had made into lawn. My dad and his neighbors successfully got an injunction against the city as they had legally owned the land after using for more than seven years. The city promptly raised their taxes and charged them for seven years of back taxes on the newly acquired land. That sucked.
Don't forget about mini-images, which work for most games. And patches which usually screw up cracks.
Why bother? Haven't you heard of DaemonScript and Alcohol 52% (or 120%)?
True, but then again, I am a fag...
Um, no. Allah is the same god as the Christian God in the same way that it is the god as the Jewish God. The Trinity is a construct of the Catholic church that came about during the split between the Catholics and the Orthodox church (and the Gnostics), and, as such, it is not the Christian idea of God but the Catholic(-derived, in the case of Protestants) idea of God. The Orthodox church considered Jesus to be divine and a completely separate being (no Trinity). The Gnostics (who were later wiped out) considered Jesus to be a prophet of God, fully human with no divinity. They also considered the "Virgin birth" to be a joke (literally.)
At the time of Jesus, Roman culture was much the same as ours concerning premarital sex; they considered it normal. As such, it was not uncommon for girls to get pregnant before being married. However, the Jews thought this was wrong but, "When in Rome, do as the Romans do," was a common thought in the Jewish community at the time, so a protocol of covered acceptance was created. If a Jewish girl got pregnant before marriage, and her suitor was OK with that, then they would get married anyway, and all was honky-dory. The only catch is that, by Jewish law, only virgin girls can get married, so if a marriage took place, then she must still be a "virgin." That was a kind of joke at the time. Also, at that time, the first time a couple has sex is a religious ceremony, called consumation. When Joseph and Mary got married, they were on the run and didn't have a chance to officially consumate the marriage, a difficult process when her cooter wasn't going to bleed from it being the first time (the consumation ceremony involves displaying a bloody towel after the first time and having everyone listen in on the girl's pain.). When she finally had she Jesus, she was still officially a "virgin" because the marriage hadn't been consumated yet and, if Joseph married her, she HAD to be a virgin and, if the marriage was never consumated, the she must still be a virgin. Of course, you're welcome to beleive what you want, but let it be known that one of the three major branches of Christianity held that view until they were wiped out by a Hitler-esque Pope-ordered "religious cleansing".
If you want a touch bit more evidence in the Bible for this, look to the beginning of the first Gospel (Matthew, I beleive). It has a lineage for Joseph. This lineage shows that Jesus is a direct decendant of David, thus allowing him to fulfill the prophecy of the Messiah. It is now thought that this is the lineage of Mary, since those people don't think that Jesus was the son of Joseph. That would be nice but, alas, it is false. At that time, and until about 300 CE or so, women were not considered in lineage. A woman could not pass on a line. They were just "the dirt in which men plant the seeds of human life." That lineage is, in fact, the lineage of Joseph, Jesus's father. It wasn't until about 350 CE that people began thinking of Jesus as divine anyway, so this makes perfect sense.
I'm getting completely exhausted responding to people who think they know what laws exist and what laws don't based on common sense or whatever. There is no state anywhere (in the US) that regulates the availability of any content (other than pornography) on any medium, period. End of story. And there never will be.
The dumb-ass "we know what's best for children and what's best them is best for adults" tried this twice now in the last thirty years and lost horribly both times. In the early to mid 80s they tried to make laws enforcing the MPAA ratings on theatres and (later) video rentals. All efforts were struck down as unconstitional.
Then in the late 80s early 90s they tried to do it with music, by banning swear-worded rap and enforcing parental warning requirements and prohibition of sales of parentally warned against cds to kids. All laws were overturned.
In the end, in both cases, enough of the industry voluntarily adopted policies similar enough to the original laws that morons like you assume it is actually law. In the end, the bans on games will suffer the same fate. No actual prohibition, but the industry will (and has, really) self-regulate policies similar to what the laws wanted. But no actual bans will be enforced. Ever. Now, shut up, all of you. THE GOVERNMENT CANNOT NOR WILL EVER REGULATE CONTENT AVAILABLE TO MINORS OTHER THAN PORN. PERIOD.
"Strangely, I thought it was already illegal for children under 17 to be sold rated M games... "
Um, no. There are no enforceable laws on the books that prohibit selling M-rated games to kids. There are some unenforceable ones, but since they're unconstitutional, we'll never see anyone try to enforce them. These are similar to the "you can't ever legally have anal sex" laws; they're on the books, but not legally enforceable.
Anyway, you probably also thought it was illegal for movie theatres and rental places to allow a minor (under 17, 18, doesn't matter) to watch or rent rated-R movies. If you did, you'd be wrong. Those are entirely voluntary enforcements of entirely voluntary rating systems. There's nothing preventing movie theatres from selling tickets to R-rated movies to 12 year olds other than public opinion.
Well, as long as you are in the US anyhow. Other countries may have actual laws on these ratings (particularly Europe), but nowhere in the US is there any regulation of any content on any medium other than pornography. The only thing making it difficult for an 8 year old to buy Silence of the Lambs is the policy of the store she's trying to buy from.
Not true. The english Imperial system is completely different from the US customary system, even though they share the same names. For example, a US standard ton is 2000 lb, while that same measure is called a short tonne in the Imperial system. A standard Imperial tonne (also called a long tonne) weighs 2240 lb.
p erial_and_US_customary_systems
Another example would be the gallon, and this one will blow your mind, as its completely ridiculous and you probably had no idea. In the Imperial system, a gallon is ~4.546L, no matter what. (Regardless of gallon type, a gallon has 128 of the appropriate ounces, so a comparison requires us to use a neutral 3rd-party unit. The liter seems excellent.) A US LIQUID gallon is ~3.785L, which everyone is vaguely aware (at least in theory ("a gallon's a little smaller that two 2L pop bottles.")). A US DRY gallon is ~4.404L. I really have no idea what these differences are from, but they're there.
Checkout http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_the_Im
You've never actually used an x86_64 system, have you? Nearly every distro comes with the compatibility libs installed by default. Why? Because you can't do a whole hell of a lot Internet-media-wise without them. No acrobat reader, no flash, no mozilla plugins, no win32 codecs for mplayer. Those things are the bread and buuter of the Internet, without them an x86_64 system is practically useless as a desktop. Now, if you're making the (albeit incorrect) assumption that most x86_64 systems are used for server purposes, then you'd probably be correct. Well, maybe, but only if the sysadmin knew what he was doing enough to do it that way.