From Carl Akerlof, the ROTSE investigator: "The optical brightness of this gamma ray burst is about 100 times more intense than anything we've ever seen before."
And five minutes later, after someone accidentally spilled coffee on Dr. Akerlof, angering him, he was quoted as saying... wait for it... wait for it... all together now...
Here's one that often comes up in computer security discussions:
DDoS worms, rather than directly attacking other computers from the worm creator's computer, take over other computers and then use them to perform an attack. If you're the one targetted by one of these attacks, do you have the right to defend yourself? Is it right for you to hack into an innocent person's computer because their technological ignorance is actively causing you harm? Would you and the people that depend on your network just having to sit there and accept the attack without any real defense be preferable to that? And if you have the skill to not screw it up (probably a rare skill, but still), would it be right for someone to create an "anti-worm" that deinfects computers that have become unwitting DDoS zombies?
Computer security is a field that is absolutely soaked in real life analogies, but this situation doesn't have one that anyone would ever encounter in their lives. "If a hypnotized/possessed person tried to kill you, would it be moral to hurt them in your self-defense?" isn't an analogy that provokes an instant pre-prepared answer.
It's petty theft. Some what akin to grabbing an apple from the cart, as you pass a green grocer's shop.
The problem with this is the scale of it. Almost any broadband user has way, way more bandwidth than they are going to use every day. I'd wager that almost all of them aren't even maxing out their connection every day. So rather than stealing one apple out of someone's twenty or thirty, isn't it more like taking a drink from a privately owned stream? Or using a restaurant bathroom sink to wash not only your hands, but also (God forbid!) your face? I think you can make a reasonable assumption that the person in the apartment above you isn't running on metered bandwidth unless they have an extreme amount of bandwidth, which would be pretty easy to tell. So not only is it not like stealing an object from them, but it's also a much lesser crime than stealing power from them or tapping into their phone line. It's even not just possible, but likely that they won't even have to pay an extra penny from your use of their bandwidth or feel any sort of bandwidth hit.
At what point can you say that your theft is so utterly miniscule that it isn't really stealing any more? If there's such a point, I think that "stealing" without taking anything from anyone might be it. But then again, it might not exist at all.
You're a little confused in regards to Buffy. UPN had already picked up the rights to Buffy after a long and BITTER dispute.
That's what I meant by the "at least Buffy got to continue". We knew that Buffy would be continuing, so the "Thanks for five great years (even though we're discarding you because we don't like you anymore)" was just sort of insulting, rather than a full-on "Fuck you, fanboys/girls".
I look at the WB as saying "Okay, you have your show... but try to wiggle out of THIS ending!!"
Actually, that's not the case AT ALL. The Buffy seasons are planned well in advance and The WB had nothing to do with the fifth season finale. The writers and producers of the show claim that they had a pretty solid idea of the structure of the fifth and sixth seasons by around the second or third seasons. It looked like The WB was trying to screw up the show as it left, but apparently the idea had been set in stone for some time.
I was under the impression that the budget wasn't really all that high since the filming was done in Australia. I could be wrong though.. I don't know what an average cable show costs.
I don't know the exact numbers, but whereas shows like Enterprise and Buffy the Vampire Slayer have people with a little bit of rubber on their faces and some fairly good CGI special effects, but Farscape has people in massive muppet suits, episodes where they've created and then destroyed massive sets like the season three finale arc where the in-ship lake bursts out behind Scorpius on the Commander Carrier, and much more detailed CGI, like all of the little ships that flank the Command Carriers and Scarran Strikers. So it's obviously pretty high.
Actually, now that I think about it, I think it was like $2.2 million per episode. By contrast, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a network show which films in Los Angeles and has cast members that have now had successful film careers, costs a little less than that while drawing much higher ratings due to being on a broadcast network. They've made Farscape as cheap as possible by filming it in Australia with actors that aren't well-known elsewhere, but it still came out really high.
Actually, it was a pretty simple matter, which was verified by a lot of the TV critics that loved Farscape. The ratings were good for cable, but the budget was fucking massive for cable. Thus, the show did not create a profit. The budget could've been cut, but there was a reasonable expectation that a version of Farscape with a much lower budget would be of lower quality and would lose fans, since the show wouldn't be allowed to have any real style to it any more (fewer muppets, less special effects, no big three to six episode finales with sky-high production values). That left them with a situation where they could do absolutely nothing to make the show profitable.
I used to argue that Sci-Fi was making a mistake because Farscape was what got their little network mentioned several times a year in TV Guide, Entertainment Weekly, and other entertainment magazines, but now that Taken and Children of Dune have appeared not only in TV Guide and Entertainment Weekly, but also magazines like Time and Newsweek, there really isn't any reason for Sci-Fi to keep Farscape.
The WB did the same exact thing when they cancelled Buffy the Vampire Slayer with a cliffhanger ending. First the "previously on " with a montage of the entire series, then the little "thank you" after the credits. All while royally screwing over the cast, crew, and fans of the show.
At least Buffy got to continue, so it wasn't as grave an insult. Can't say the same for Farscape.
Nielsen and TiVo should team up, or Nielsen and TiVo should figure out a way to come together and find out what REAL people are watching.
Let's face it, if you own a TiVo, you like TV more than the regular joe, and MAYBE good shows like this (and Firefly, F'n FOX) wouldn't be cancelled so quickly.
Yeah, that's a brilliant idea. Because as we all know, techie geeks that buy things like Tivos have been begging for years for some way to have their personal habits systematically organized into marketing data for the sake of greater entertainment industry revenue. You can be confident that none of them would rip the telephone wires out of their Tivos or satellite dishes, because they have absolutely no fear of their marketing data being used by some corporation that they've never heard of to form a customer profile that includes the name, age, and address listings that they bought from some anonymous marketing company that gets most of its revenues from telemarketing and e-mail spam.
That's missing a key point... the Ambient Orb runs off a wireless network... no computer needed, and you can control it from anywhere in the world (theoretically). To manage that, you'd have to build an 802.11b -> relay interface, at least - if not a cellular one.
If you already have a computer, the wireless network aspect of this seems completely pointless. The damn thing already needs to be plugged into the wall, so is it really that big a deal if it also has to be plugged into the ethernet/serial/parallel port about a foot away from the electrical socket? It's not like it's a battery operated cloak hooked into the signal from the Atomic Clock or some sort of little wireless communication device like a Hiptop. It's already anchored, so adding another anchor isn't going to make it any less mobile.
I think that electric cars can be very efficient and clean but a major problem exists. Imagine that everyone is using an electric car. Where do we get all the electricity? We are currently building new coal power plants just to keep with demand for electricity that does not include power consumption by milions of electric cars...
I like how all of these articles that demand a hydrogen economy use the threat of Middle Eastern extremism and terrorism as a reasoning for switching completely from fossil fuels to hydrogen. Do they really think that replacing all of the power plants around us with nuclear ones and then doubling them will make us safer? Or that any local initiative to build two or three new nuclear power plants at a time wouldn't be met with enormous local grass roots resistance?
If he thinks that the board can actually understand long term economic investments, there's an easy answer for your grandfather: "We will never pay for software again." It's really that simple. At some point, never paying ridiculously expensive licenses for operating system software, office software, and all of the other Microsoft products that you need to buy to form a worthwhile Windows system, coupled with donations from this anti-Microsoft person and maybe a few others, is probably cheaper in the long run. They'll definitely feel an initial hit now, but in ten years or so it will probably work out to be cheaper than not taking that initial hit and paying Microsoft again every few years.
Also, I'm not a Linux user, but I'm told that Linux has a lot less processor overhead than Windows and can run on much slower systems. Doesn't that mean that they'll always be able to buy replacement terminals on the absolute cheapest end of the PC price curve?
If they're in financial straits, I'd say go with Microsoft, but if they can take the initial hit that they're complaining about, switching to Linux will cement their financial solvency in the future.
The IDSA seems to be on a roll when it comes to stupid cease and desist letters. Lik-Sang's ISP recently received a letter from the IDSA alleging that they had "a good faith belief" that Lik-Sang was violating the DMCA (and apparently the DMCA applies to Hong Kong now?) because their prices were too cheap and that meant that they must be pirating the discs and selling them just above cost.
Lik-Sang, of course, went absolutely wild over it. They found it to be pretty hilarious and saw "So cheap, the IDSA finds it suspicious!" to be a brilliant selling point for their new "Price Crusher" promotion.
Getting paid != getting rich. What the parent poster meant was that instead of becoming a musician so that they can become a millionaire rock star, people will have to choose it for the same reasons that someone chooses to become a cartoonist or a painter or an accountant: they want to do it and they can make a modest living from it.
This is certainly a different business model than the one in Europe and the US. Is it better? Perhaps: the artists still get paid and consumers get free or very cheap music. But it may have a downside. Instead of the economic power being in the hands of the people who want the music it is transfered to large corporations.
In a lot of ways, though not currently in music, it actually gives the consumer a much better deal than what they get in the United States. Look at NASCAR, for instance. The cars are covered in advertising, the drivers are covered in advertising, the announcers are spewing advertising, the broadcast rights are bought by a cable channel and contain not only commercials but also sponsorships from whoever pays the most money, etc. But yet, are the tickets to the events free? Is the food and merchandise at the events priced reasonably? Hell no. The consumer pays far more than a fair price and still has to deal with all of the annoyances of corporate subsidization, because two business models are more profitable than one.
The poster, in my opinion, makes painfully stupid arguments. His argument basically comes down to, "I'm not using it, so NO ONE is using it; It's useless to me, so get rid of it." Maybe he has no use for a tilde key, but a lot of us do. And maybe he has no use for a Scroll Lock and wants something else, but some of us certainly have uses for it and don't mind having Undo set to Ctrl + Something.
However, this gave me an idea. Some of us need a tilde key, some of us don't. Some of us need scroll lock, some of us don't. So why not just use the same keys that are already set up in a near-perfect fashion for other things? Personally, I've never had any use for the Numpad (it's faster for me to use the numbers above the letters), so I have Internet Explorer, AIM, Winamp, etc. set as Windows hotkeys on Numpad 1, 2, 3, etc. But what about Scroll Lock? Do Linux, Windows, or any specific programs for them let you set something permanently on or off by having Scroll Lock set on or off? And what about setting keys like the tilde key to other things within the OS besides hotkeys, such as resetting it to Ctrl + C for Copy, Ctrl + V for Paste, or setting it to whatever combination of keys Undo or other specific commands is set to in programs like Photoshop? I haven't used Windows XP or Linux yet, so I'm not really sure if either of them has this capability built-in.
I agree that the writing has gone downhill, but I don't really think that Conan O'Brian had much to do with it. According to www.snpp.com, Conan only wrote 3 episodes (New Kid on the Block, Marge vs. the Monorail, Homer Goes to College) and 1 part of Treehouse of Horrors IV (Wraparounds).
According to all of the stuff that I've read about the process behind The Simpsons in the past, putting a writer's name on any given episode is kind of pointless. The writer is just the person that came up with the very rough concept of the episode and the episode itself was actually "written" by eight or so guys around an office table, including Conan O'Brien, George Meyer, Matt Groening, and anybody else with any writing credits for the show over its duration. Quantifying a writer's contribution to the show by writing credits is therefore way off the mark.
Consider tho, that $170 for 36 hours of gameplay is ~$4.72/hour. Pretty cheap compared to many alternatives.
Compared to what? Not to 30-50 (Hell, even 80 or 100 in some cases) hour console RPGs. Not to free MUDs. Not to Battle.net games. Not to games with user-supported multiplayer like Counter-Strike, Quake, Unreal, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, etc. Not to anything on X-Box Live. Not to anything can be expanded by the users like Neverwinter Nights, Warcraft III, or Half-Life.
But yeah, compared to some of the crappiest, most overpriced games I've ever played, Everquest is a GREAT deal. It really kicks the crap out of $40-$50 oddities that last two hours like Strider 2. At least they can be proud of that.
I thought this was an error at first too, but when I reread it I noticed that they were saying that it was expected to achieve the WORLD of Tetsuwan Atom and then went on to explain in a sort of Engrish-y way that the show took place in a world where human beings and cute little robots lived in peaceful coexistence. So rather than inferring that it looked like Tetsuwan Atom, they were inferring that its functionality and relative affordability (by comparison to previous robots with similar functionality) could usher in a world where everyone owns a somewhat sophisticated robot.
My problem with that analogy (SP?) is the internet is not your house and neither is your internet connection.
The fact that the internet is not your house and neither is your internet connection is sort of the point of an analogy. Rather than one thing BEING another, that thing is ANALOGOUS to another.
The Anonymous Coward that replied to your post was right on the mark...
It's sort of like what happened with the PS2. The PS2 was going to have a DVD drive for DVD-ROM PS2 games, so someone thought, "Hey, as long as we have a DVD drive here, why not put in a small program to play DVD movies?". And thus some new functionality was born at a very cheap price. Similarly, the Xbox already has a hard drive and a network adapter for saves, patches, online play, and new game features like the Official Xbox Magazine disc that let you upgrade DOA3 to an English version of DOA3j, so they probably figured that they might as well give it all of the functionality that it's capable of.
But we need a way to identify people, and if you think that driver's licenses and social security numbers aren't already doing this, you're just closing your eyes to it.
I always love this argument, regardless of what it's applied to. "They're already halfway up your ass, why not just push in all the way?"
If our freedom was simply degenerating and we could never become more free than we are right now, those of us that weren't slaves or indentured servants would be regularly appearing in front of government panels to assert that we are not and never have been communist sympathizers.
This CCTV thing is a typical Slashdot knee-jerk response to any "civil liberties" issue in the UK. It applies to shopping centres and places like that. There's no CCTV in my street, my neighbourhood, my house, my garage, my desk....
So are you saying that there isn't way, WAY more CCTV in the UK created and monitored by the government than there is in the US? It may not be in your neighborhood or on your street, but you've clearly crossed one big civil liberties barrier that we have not. You have no expectation not to have government eyes on you at all times when you are outside of your home, and the reason that there are not cameras in your neighborhood and on your street is not because of a law against it, but rather because it just hasn't become practical yet.
It's it more important that MS SQL server shouldent be exposed to the internet directly in the first place.
If a burglar walks right into my house because the front door lock didn't work and he could just turn the knob and walk in, is it my fault for not having a deadbolt to reinforce the faulty lock, or the lock maker's fault for making the faulty lock in the first place?
Of course I should have a deadbolt. EVERYONE should have a deadbolt, and an alarm system on top of that is a pretty good idea, too. However, that does not absolve a faulty lock maker of the the responsibility for selling me a faulty lock. Ethically (though possibly not legally), it should also not absolve them of liability for the damages that their faulty lock caused me, such as having everything in my house stolen.
Re:Big legal mistake...
on
Kazaa Fights Back
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· Score: 4, Insightful
1) Establishing itself (at least in part...even a part as small as an office building) as a business in the United States.
Actually, AFAIK, Kazaa does not have and has not had any part of its business in the United States. A judge in the RIAA vs. Kazaa suit ruled, however, that because Kazaa's software was "available in the United States" (translation: available on the internet, regardless of where in the world the business or server is), it can be sued in the United States.
Personally, I wouldn't be surprised if they could eventually find a sympathetic judge to overturn that. That's a rather disturbing precedent, especially if it works both ways, because if everyone that uses the internet is subject to all of the laws of planet Earth, then everyone that's even touched a computer is probably a candidate for execution somewhere.
And, of course, we can't forget price fixing and the uncalculatable affect of independent music now being freely available on the internet to compete with mainstream music.
Slashdot Mirror
From Carl Akerlof, the ROTSE investigator: "The optical brightness of this gamma ray burst is about 100 times more intense than anything we've ever seen before."
And five minutes later, after someone accidentally spilled coffee on Dr. Akerlof, angering him, he was quoted as saying... wait for it... wait for it... all together now...
HULK SMASH!!!
Let the painfully immature gamma ray jokes begin.
Here's one that often comes up in computer security discussions:
DDoS worms, rather than directly attacking other computers from the worm creator's computer, take over other computers and then use them to perform an attack. If you're the one targetted by one of these attacks, do you have the right to defend yourself? Is it right for you to hack into an innocent person's computer because their technological ignorance is actively causing you harm? Would you and the people that depend on your network just having to sit there and accept the attack without any real defense be preferable to that? And if you have the skill to not screw it up (probably a rare skill, but still), would it be right for someone to create an "anti-worm" that deinfects computers that have become unwitting DDoS zombies?
Computer security is a field that is absolutely soaked in real life analogies, but this situation doesn't have one that anyone would ever encounter in their lives. "If a hypnotized/possessed person tried to kill you, would it be moral to hurt them in your self-defense?" isn't an analogy that provokes an instant pre-prepared answer.
It's petty theft. Some what akin to grabbing an apple from the cart, as you pass a green grocer's shop.
The problem with this is the scale of it. Almost any broadband user has way, way more bandwidth than they are going to use every day. I'd wager that almost all of them aren't even maxing out their connection every day. So rather than stealing one apple out of someone's twenty or thirty, isn't it more like taking a drink from a privately owned stream? Or using a restaurant bathroom sink to wash not only your hands, but also (God forbid!) your face? I think you can make a reasonable assumption that the person in the apartment above you isn't running on metered bandwidth unless they have an extreme amount of bandwidth, which would be pretty easy to tell. So not only is it not like stealing an object from them, but it's also a much lesser crime than stealing power from them or tapping into their phone line. It's even not just possible, but likely that they won't even have to pay an extra penny from your use of their bandwidth or feel any sort of bandwidth hit.
At what point can you say that your theft is so utterly miniscule that it isn't really stealing any more? If there's such a point, I think that "stealing" without taking anything from anyone might be it. But then again, it might not exist at all.
You're a little confused in regards to Buffy. UPN had already picked up the rights to Buffy after a long and BITTER dispute.
That's what I meant by the "at least Buffy got to continue". We knew that Buffy would be continuing, so the "Thanks for five great years (even though we're discarding you because we don't like you anymore)" was just sort of insulting, rather than a full-on "Fuck you, fanboys/girls".
I look at the WB as saying "Okay, you have your show... but try to wiggle out of THIS ending!!"
Actually, that's not the case AT ALL. The Buffy seasons are planned well in advance and The WB had nothing to do with the fifth season finale. The writers and producers of the show claim that they had a pretty solid idea of the structure of the fifth and sixth seasons by around the second or third seasons. It looked like The WB was trying to screw up the show as it left, but apparently the idea had been set in stone for some time.
I was under the impression that the budget wasn't really all that high since the filming was done in Australia. I could be wrong though.. I don't know what an average cable show costs.
I don't know the exact numbers, but whereas shows like Enterprise and Buffy the Vampire Slayer have people with a little bit of rubber on their faces and some fairly good CGI special effects, but Farscape has people in massive muppet suits, episodes where they've created and then destroyed massive sets like the season three finale arc where the in-ship lake bursts out behind Scorpius on the Commander Carrier, and much more detailed CGI, like all of the little ships that flank the Command Carriers and Scarran Strikers. So it's obviously pretty high.
Actually, now that I think about it, I think it was like $2.2 million per episode. By contrast, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a network show which films in Los Angeles and has cast members that have now had successful film careers, costs a little less than that while drawing much higher ratings due to being on a broadcast network. They've made Farscape as cheap as possible by filming it in Australia with actors that aren't well-known elsewhere, but it still came out really high.
Actually, it was a pretty simple matter, which was verified by a lot of the TV critics that loved Farscape. The ratings were good for cable, but the budget was fucking massive for cable. Thus, the show did not create a profit. The budget could've been cut, but there was a reasonable expectation that a version of Farscape with a much lower budget would be of lower quality and would lose fans, since the show wouldn't be allowed to have any real style to it any more (fewer muppets, less special effects, no big three to six episode finales with sky-high production values). That left them with a situation where they could do absolutely nothing to make the show profitable.
I used to argue that Sci-Fi was making a mistake because Farscape was what got their little network mentioned several times a year in TV Guide, Entertainment Weekly, and other entertainment magazines, but now that Taken and Children of Dune have appeared not only in TV Guide and Entertainment Weekly, but also magazines like Time and Newsweek, there really isn't any reason for Sci-Fi to keep Farscape.
The WB did the same exact thing when they cancelled Buffy the Vampire Slayer with a cliffhanger ending. First the "previously on " with a montage of the entire series, then the little "thank you" after the credits. All while royally screwing over the cast, crew, and fans of the show.
At least Buffy got to continue, so it wasn't as grave an insult. Can't say the same for Farscape.
Nielsen and TiVo should team up, or Nielsen and TiVo should figure out a way to come together and find out what REAL people are watching.
Let's face it, if you own a TiVo, you like TV more than the regular joe, and MAYBE good shows like this (and Firefly, F'n FOX) wouldn't be cancelled so quickly.
Yeah, that's a brilliant idea. Because as we all know, techie geeks that buy things like Tivos have been begging for years for some way to have their personal habits systematically organized into marketing data for the sake of greater entertainment industry revenue. You can be confident that none of them would rip the telephone wires out of their Tivos or satellite dishes, because they have absolutely no fear of their marketing data being used by some corporation that they've never heard of to form a customer profile that includes the name, age, and address listings that they bought from some anonymous marketing company that gets most of its revenues from telemarketing and e-mail spam.
Uh-huh. Right. Yeah. That's a good one, AC.
That's missing a key point... the Ambient Orb runs off a wireless network... no computer needed, and you can control it from anywhere in the world (theoretically). To manage that, you'd have to build an 802.11b -> relay interface, at least - if not a cellular one.
If you already have a computer, the wireless network aspect of this seems completely pointless. The damn thing already needs to be plugged into the wall, so is it really that big a deal if it also has to be plugged into the ethernet/serial/parallel port about a foot away from the electrical socket? It's not like it's a battery operated cloak hooked into the signal from the Atomic Clock or some sort of little wireless communication device like a Hiptop. It's already anchored, so adding another anchor isn't going to make it any less mobile.
I think that electric cars can be very efficient and clean but a major problem exists. Imagine that everyone is using an electric car. Where do we get all the electricity? We are currently building new coal power plants just to keep with demand for electricity that does not include power consumption by milions of electric cars...
I like how all of these articles that demand a hydrogen economy use the threat of Middle Eastern extremism and terrorism as a reasoning for switching completely from fossil fuels to hydrogen. Do they really think that replacing all of the power plants around us with nuclear ones and then doubling them will make us safer? Or that any local initiative to build two or three new nuclear power plants at a time wouldn't be met with enormous local grass roots resistance?
If he thinks that the board can actually understand long term economic investments, there's an easy answer for your grandfather: "We will never pay for software again." It's really that simple. At some point, never paying ridiculously expensive licenses for operating system software, office software, and all of the other Microsoft products that you need to buy to form a worthwhile Windows system, coupled with donations from this anti-Microsoft person and maybe a few others, is probably cheaper in the long run. They'll definitely feel an initial hit now, but in ten years or so it will probably work out to be cheaper than not taking that initial hit and paying Microsoft again every few years.
Also, I'm not a Linux user, but I'm told that Linux has a lot less processor overhead than Windows and can run on much slower systems. Doesn't that mean that they'll always be able to buy replacement terminals on the absolute cheapest end of the PC price curve?
If they're in financial straits, I'd say go with Microsoft, but if they can take the initial hit that they're complaining about, switching to Linux will cement their financial solvency in the future.
The IDSA seems to be on a roll when it comes to stupid cease and desist letters. Lik-Sang's ISP recently received a letter from the IDSA alleging that they had "a good faith belief" that Lik-Sang was violating the DMCA (and apparently the DMCA applies to Hong Kong now?) because their prices were too cheap and that meant that they must be pirating the discs and selling them just above cost.
Lik-Sang, of course, went absolutely wild over it. They found it to be pretty hilarious and saw "So cheap, the IDSA finds it suspicious!" to be a brilliant selling point for their new "Price Crusher" promotion.
Getting paid != getting rich. What the parent poster meant was that instead of becoming a musician so that they can become a millionaire rock star, people will have to choose it for the same reasons that someone chooses to become a cartoonist or a painter or an accountant: they want to do it and they can make a modest living from it.
This is certainly a different business model than the one in Europe and the US. Is it better? Perhaps: the artists still get paid and consumers get free or very cheap music. But it may have a downside. Instead of the economic power being in the hands of the people who want the music it is transfered to large corporations.
In a lot of ways, though not currently in music, it actually gives the consumer a much better deal than what they get in the United States. Look at NASCAR, for instance. The cars are covered in advertising, the drivers are covered in advertising, the announcers are spewing advertising, the broadcast rights are bought by a cable channel and contain not only commercials but also sponsorships from whoever pays the most money, etc. But yet, are the tickets to the events free? Is the food and merchandise at the events priced reasonably? Hell no. The consumer pays far more than a fair price and still has to deal with all of the annoyances of corporate subsidization, because two business models are more profitable than one.
The poster, in my opinion, makes painfully stupid arguments. His argument basically comes down to, "I'm not using it, so NO ONE is using it; It's useless to me, so get rid of it." Maybe he has no use for a tilde key, but a lot of us do. And maybe he has no use for a Scroll Lock and wants something else, but some of us certainly have uses for it and don't mind having Undo set to Ctrl + Something.
However, this gave me an idea. Some of us need a tilde key, some of us don't. Some of us need scroll lock, some of us don't. So why not just use the same keys that are already set up in a near-perfect fashion for other things? Personally, I've never had any use for the Numpad (it's faster for me to use the numbers above the letters), so I have Internet Explorer, AIM, Winamp, etc. set as Windows hotkeys on Numpad 1, 2, 3, etc. But what about Scroll Lock? Do Linux, Windows, or any specific programs for them let you set something permanently on or off by having Scroll Lock set on or off? And what about setting keys like the tilde key to other things within the OS besides hotkeys, such as resetting it to Ctrl + C for Copy, Ctrl + V for Paste, or setting it to whatever combination of keys Undo or other specific commands is set to in programs like Photoshop? I haven't used Windows XP or Linux yet, so I'm not really sure if either of them has this capability built-in.
I agree that the writing has gone downhill, but I don't really think that Conan O'Brian had much to do with it. According to www.snpp.com, Conan only wrote 3 episodes (New Kid on the Block, Marge vs. the Monorail, Homer Goes to College) and 1 part of Treehouse of Horrors IV (Wraparounds).
According to all of the stuff that I've read about the process behind The Simpsons in the past, putting a writer's name on any given episode is kind of pointless. The writer is just the person that came up with the very rough concept of the episode and the episode itself was actually "written" by eight or so guys around an office table, including Conan O'Brien, George Meyer, Matt Groening, and anybody else with any writing credits for the show over its duration. Quantifying a writer's contribution to the show by writing credits is therefore way off the mark.
Consider tho, that $170 for 36 hours of gameplay is ~$4.72/hour. Pretty cheap compared to many alternatives.
Compared to what? Not to 30-50 (Hell, even 80 or 100 in some cases) hour console RPGs. Not to free MUDs. Not to Battle.net games. Not to games with user-supported multiplayer like Counter-Strike, Quake, Unreal, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, etc. Not to anything on X-Box Live. Not to anything can be expanded by the users like Neverwinter Nights, Warcraft III, or Half-Life.
But yeah, compared to some of the crappiest, most overpriced games I've ever played, Everquest is a GREAT deal. It really kicks the crap out of $40-$50 oddities that last two hours like Strider 2. At least they can be proud of that.
I thought this was an error at first too, but when I reread it I noticed that they were saying that it was expected to achieve the WORLD of Tetsuwan Atom and then went on to explain in a sort of Engrish-y way that the show took place in a world where human beings and cute little robots lived in peaceful coexistence. So rather than inferring that it looked like Tetsuwan Atom, they were inferring that its functionality and relative affordability (by comparison to previous robots with similar functionality) could usher in a world where everyone owns a somewhat sophisticated robot.
My problem with that analogy (SP?) is the internet is not your house and neither is your internet connection.
The fact that the internet is not your house and neither is your internet connection is sort of the point of an analogy. Rather than one thing BEING another, that thing is ANALOGOUS to another.
The Anonymous Coward that replied to your post was right on the mark...
It's sort of like what happened with the PS2. The PS2 was going to have a DVD drive for DVD-ROM PS2 games, so someone thought, "Hey, as long as we have a DVD drive here, why not put in a small program to play DVD movies?". And thus some new functionality was born at a very cheap price. Similarly, the Xbox already has a hard drive and a network adapter for saves, patches, online play, and new game features like the Official Xbox Magazine disc that let you upgrade DOA3 to an English version of DOA3j, so they probably figured that they might as well give it all of the functionality that it's capable of.
But we need a way to identify people, and if you think that driver's licenses and social security numbers aren't already doing this, you're just closing your eyes to it.
I always love this argument, regardless of what it's applied to. "They're already halfway up your ass, why not just push in all the way?"
If our freedom was simply degenerating and we could never become more free than we are right now, those of us that weren't slaves or indentured servants would be regularly appearing in front of government panels to assert that we are not and never have been communist sympathizers.
This CCTV thing is a typical Slashdot knee-jerk response to any "civil liberties" issue in the UK. It applies to shopping centres and places like that. There's no CCTV in my street, my neighbourhood, my house, my garage, my desk....
So are you saying that there isn't way, WAY more CCTV in the UK created and monitored by the government than there is in the US? It may not be in your neighborhood or on your street, but you've clearly crossed one big civil liberties barrier that we have not. You have no expectation not to have government eyes on you at all times when you are outside of your home, and the reason that there are not cameras in your neighborhood and on your street is not because of a law against it, but rather because it just hasn't become practical yet.
It's it more important that MS SQL server shouldent be exposed to the internet directly in the first place.
If a burglar walks right into my house because the front door lock didn't work and he could just turn the knob and walk in, is it my fault for not having a deadbolt to reinforce the faulty lock, or the lock maker's fault for making the faulty lock in the first place?
Of course I should have a deadbolt. EVERYONE should have a deadbolt, and an alarm system on top of that is a pretty good idea, too. However, that does not absolve a faulty lock maker of the the responsibility for selling me a faulty lock. Ethically (though possibly not legally), it should also not absolve them of liability for the damages that their faulty lock caused me, such as having everything in my house stolen.
1) Establishing itself (at least in part...even a part as small as an office building) as a business in the United States.
Actually, AFAIK, Kazaa does not have and has not had any part of its business in the United States. A judge in the RIAA vs. Kazaa suit ruled, however, that because Kazaa's software was "available in the United States" (translation: available on the internet, regardless of where in the world the business or server is), it can be sued in the United States.
Personally, I wouldn't be surprised if they could eventually find a sympathetic judge to overturn that. That's a rather disturbing precedent, especially if it works both ways, because if everyone that uses the internet is subject to all of the laws of planet Earth, then everyone that's even touched a computer is probably a candidate for execution somewhere.
And, of course, we can't forget price fixing and the uncalculatable affect of independent music now being freely available on the internet to compete with mainstream music.