As for betting from A to B... who would use this for a daily vehicle? Recreation, definately, but recreational vehicles aren't genarally used for 'A to B' travel.
Obvious answer: People that want some recreation but don't have the money to make a distinction between "daily" and "recreational"?
I disagree. Hexapod locomotion may be easier to build, slightly easier to maintain, and maybe even cheaper, but as any person of extremely abnormal height or weight (especially dwarfs) can attest, our entire world is made for bipedal creatures that are between five and six and a half feet tall and less than two and a half or three feet wide. If robots are going to be useful in our world, they need to develop the abilities to walk up and down stairs, open doors with knobs that are of a standard height, occupy furniture that is made for human beings, and generally interact with a world that is built specifically for the average-sized human being and no one else.
Robots may not be able to do these things right now, but it's important that they develop in that direction, rather than on a path toward better hexapods.
As a software developer, I respect their ability to own their software, no matter what form it may take.
I guess that also includes the form of "Bought by a user that wants to use it in a perfectly legal way". They may own their software, but I own it after I've bought it and should be allowed to exercise my legal rights over it. Unfortunately, the MHOL (Microsoft Horde of Lawyers), a larger and stronger body of "law" enforcement than the US Department of Justice or the entire governments of many smaller countries, disagrees.
Dumping and price fixing are often illegal. I doubt they're being sold at a loss considering the legal problems they could expose themselves to. Maybe they are being sold at cost.
Every financial article ever written on the gaming industry in the last year, whether it's from Bloomberg, the Financial Times, the Economist, or just the business section of your local newspaper, disagrees with you. Microsoft loses approximately $100-$150 on each sale now. It might have gone down to $80 since their new modifications to the hardware.
you are missing the point totally... it dont matter if its lame.. its Starcraft.. man what dont you understand.. Starcraft owns.. and bascially.. this has its name and so it must own too... im gonna be forced to buy a console now.. go SC
Actually, I understand that perfectly. I also understand that because it is a horribly unoriginal game with some recognizable characters and elements tacked onto it, it will suck about as much as I expect Starfox Adventures to suck.
If it's at least as fun as MG:S, I'll count my money and my hours well spent.
Give the multitude of Tactical Rip-Off Action games that have come and gone since Metal Gear Solid, there's only a very slim chance that this game will be nearly as fun as its predecessor. SO far, none of the dozens of MGS rip-offs have come close to the original.
Spell checkers can't help with there, their, they're and they don't help me when I btucher a word so badly that it can't tell what I'm trying to say, which is more often then not.
This is a common misconception. Most word processors today not only check your spelling automatically, but also your grammar. "They went over their" may fool a spellchecker, but it won't fool the grammar checker that has been present in Microsoft Word since at least Word '97.
My response is and always has been who gives a rats ass if they cant multiply by hand, as long as they can get the correct answer with tools readily available. Since calculators are so cheap that they are given away as logo holders like pens and other knicknacks no one in this country or any other developed country will ever be unable to aquire one.
People will probably mock your post, but I couldn't help but think of it in a historical perspective. At one time, if you were unable to grow your own food or weave your own baskets, you had nothing to eat and nothing to carry goods with. Now hardly anyone has those skills because both food and bags/baskets are ubiquitous and ridiculously cheap. Similarly, understanding factories and more specifically how to work in an assembly line were once requisite skills for living a normal life, but now the average person would probably be completely confused by the inner workings of a factory and an assembly line.
I wonder if multiplication is destined to go the way, since, unlike something like reading, it can easily be done for you by cheap, ubiquitous technology.
But if you left them in your house, and forgot to lock your front door, and someone came in and took them (then left a sign by the road saying "this house is unlocked! help yourself!") then that would be a crime.
Yet another stupid house analogy in a long line of "something on internet = your residential home" arguments. As always, it does not hold water. In this case, it does not hold water because the bandwidth that's being "stolen" is freely flowing through the airwaves, thus being available to anyone in the general area that cares to use it. Thus, a more appropriate analogy would be the aforementioned "object left on the sidewalk for a few days" analogy.
The warchalker, despite the Slashdot headline, is really irrelevant in this case. The chalk is simply an alternative to booting up your laptop and taking the two seconds to look for it. It's really just a nice little redundancy that saves you one minute of battery time.
Essentially, what we have here is a bunch of people putting stuff out for free and a another bunch of people putting the same thing out and not intending for anyone to take it. How is anyone supposed to tell the difference? Is the impetus on the user to try to differentiate between dozens of servers offering free bandwidth or on the servers to decide whether or not they want to give something out for free?
To me, and while I know this analogy seems strange, this seems a lot like neighborhood garbage collection. If the guys on the garbage truck see anything near the curb, they take it. They don't know the difference between someone throwing out a chair and someone accidentally leaving a small piece of furniture outside for a few minutes. It is the responsibility of the homeowner to make sure that they don't leave anything out near the curb that the garbage men might accidentally take, not the responsibility of the garbage men to walk up to everyone's door and say, "Excuse me, ma'am, do we have permission to take this? I know you probably meant for it to be thrown out, but we thought we should wake you up to make sure".
I know that hackers (in the broad sense of the word) often say that it is the responsibility of the network administrators to secure their networks rather than the responsibility fo the hackers to not invade open networks, usually with little justification, but in this rare instance, I think it really does apply. It's the responsibility of the network administrators to secure their network that looks just like the free ones and could easily be mistaken as such, just as the it's the responsibility of the homeowner that doesn't want their piece of furniture taken by the garbage men to keep it away from the street where they would mistake it for trash.
What is the Jedi doctrine? Do they even/pretend/ to adhere to it other than when filling out a Census form? Does it otherwise affect their lives in a significant way?
I really don't see a huge difference between Star Wars geeks going to Star Wars conventions, where they dress up as Jedi Knights, listen to their chosen leaders (Star Wars actors, writers, etc.), and rant and rave about how great Star Wars is, and Christians going to church, where they dress up in "proper clothing" (formal attire), listen to their chosen leaders (priests, deacons, selected speakers, etc.), and rant and rave about how great Jesus is. The only real difference that is see is that one side is adoring a film work and the other side is adoring a written work.
You're always going to have the unethical/innocent geek kid who downloads an MP3 and listens only to it since his PC, MP3 player and PDA are the only things he uses for listening to music.
You're always going to have the normal guy who doesn't care about "branded" CDs or the slight (and sometimes perceptible) quality loss of MP3s over CDs...he goes ahead and burns his MP3s to a 5-cent CDR and listens to it anyway.
Then again, isn't it questionable whether or not the people in these two examples would've bought the CDs anyway? Before MP3s, I just didn't listen to music (outside of the radio and such), and therefore didn't buy CDs. Now, I listen to a lot of songs that are released openly by the artists as MP3s and occasionally save RIAA songs... and therefore don't buy CDs. So in the case of people like me and the cheap or morally opposed people in the examples you listed, MP3s have changed how much music we listen to, but has kept the amount of music that we buy firmly at $0 per year.
In the end, I think it mostly balances out. Some of the people that used to buy CDs no longer buy CDs because of MP3s, some of the people that didn't used to buy CDs now buy CDs because they were introduced to the artists through MP3s, and some people never bought any CDs and still don't, regardless of MP3s.
The real problem with this debate, though, is that you can't really tell what's going on. There's no REAL way to tell how many people started buying CDs because of MP3s, how many people stopped buying CDs because of MP3s, how many people stopped buying CDs because of the slow ecnomy, how many people stopped buying CDs because of the prices, etc. It's all just biased statistics based on small samples, coupled with opposite views of the situation that are equally valid and logical.
Anyone know of a link to a place that would definitely handle the hazardous waste in a proper manner?
I know of a place. It's called "your local dump". You put your old parts in the car, you drive it over there, and they'll direct you to the hazardous waste pile (which is not as horrifying as it sounds, because most of it isn't hazardous until burned or placed in soil or drinking water). You can probably trust that it will not be going to China because the Chinese probably get their monitors in bulk from "hardware recycling companies", rather than by picking a monitor or two out of a bulk shipment of toxic materials including paint, motor oil, cleaning chemicals, old appliances, etc.
Why even use the real world analogy? How many of us wouldn't be pissed if we got an e-mail saying, "Hi, I cracked your security and got into your computer via --some exploit--. You might want to patch that. Also, some of your financial records are inaccurate, and the girl in 'sylvia_saint_fucking_and_sucking.avi' in the 'C:\Private\GodIHopeMyWifeDoesn'tSeeThis' directory isn't Sylvia Saint, but actually a lesser known porn star. Nice collection, BTW."
I'd want the guy prosecuted for breaking into my personal property and I believe that a lot of you would, too. Why do we expect a lenient, "please, invade our property some more, sir" attitude from anyone else?
Hi, I'm Bob Robertson, and I'd like to tell you a little bit about my campaign for --insert your state here--'s senatorial seat in 2002.
Over the years, my competitor, Mike Jones, has fucked a lot of whores and raised taxes by an astoundingly high 0.00001%. He's also poisoned our well water, seceded our state from the United States on two seperate occasions, and invited several known child molesters to his fundraising banquets, during which he has served dead puppies as the main course. In short, he's a scumbag, and he's evil.
Don't vote for him. Vote for me. Because he sucks.
Paid for by the Friends of Bob Robertson, who absolutely fucking hate that bastard Mike Jones. Burn in Hell, Mike.
I can't wait to see, hear, and read this shit not only on my TV, on my radio, in front of people's houses, on the subway, in my mail, in front of schools, in front of public buildings, at every public event in every town in the state, AND on my computer! I just can't get enough of hearing about how the politician that has less money and can't run as many commercials is the antichrist!
Sorry, but in this case I have to pull out my free market cap. The correct price for an entertainment product is whatever the customer is willing to pay.
Exactly. CD sales are going down because they are not at the price that the customer is willing to pay, i.e. the incorrect price. However, the entire problem here is that the RIAA is trying to recoup its losses by blaming their lack of sales on piracy and getting a piece of somebody else's action through levies and court settlements because of it.
Wait a minute. Share with friends and family members? So if I sit down and watch a $40 movie once a week with my family for 25 weeks, I get a year of jail time?
This is just another example of the fact that if you look deep enough into US law, you'll find that you don't have any rights at all. Every right that you think that you have, including sharing what you've bought with family members in your own home on the same computer, has been covered by some half-assed law that was rushed through congress and quickly forgotten about five or ten years ago.
So again, my question: what is so fundamentally different between DVD's and CD's that I can space-shift one legally, but not the other?
This may sound cynical, insulting, and typical of/., but I think it's the true answer to your question:
The advent of each new content medium is an opportunity for the media companies to re-fight a battle that they've already lost. Because the space shifting of CDs and the space shifting DVDs has a one word difference, judges and congressmen, out of willingness, stupidity, or an error in the legal system, do not simply brush off the **AAs' complaints by saying that the courts have already ruled that such activities are legal. This seems stupid when you look at it from the perspective of the average/. geek that is highly educated on the histories of copyright, fair use, and the like. However, from the perspective of a congressman that handles hundreds of different votes on a huge variety of subjects each year, the fact that the courts have already covered the subject matter of the bill in front of him a decade or so ago isn't so obvious. (Note that I'm talking about the average congressmen that vote on the copyright or technology bills that are introduced, not the paid stooges that are writing and introducing them.)
I think encourageing your son to sit in the hotel room and play video games is just wrong. Instead this kid should be encouraged to get out of the hotel room to see the town and meet his fencing peers.
Why does everyone assume that he'll be playing alone? For a lot of people, video games are a group activity, just like any other game or sport. They don't make four player console games so that you can operate four different controllers by yourself, you know...
These days, if the kid doesn't bring his gaming system he won't be able to socialize because everyone else will be be playing Unreal Tournament between fencing tournament matches. They wouldn't know how to socialize without the proper hardware interface.
Don't you feel old?
He shouldn't feel old. In a group setting, I'm sure there were times as a child/teenager when he couldn't socialize without the proper hardware interface, either, such as a ball, a bat, a hockey stick, a chess set, etc. Many games require more hardware that just a single ball and the favored way for young men and many young women to socialize is to play games.
Then again, many adults can't socialize without the proper chemical interface, which many of them are far more dependent on.
It's just Adobe's 3D chat program, Atmosphere, with a Counter-Strike theme. Am I missing some part of this that makes it important, interesting, or even vaguely original.
Security measures such as firewalls and anonymous browsing would still be needed, but I'm sure that much more educated individuals could point you toward good solutions for that. I just wanted to bring up the idea of an OS on a CD-ROM. It leaves no records and viruses and worms cannot be installed on it, because it cannot be written to. It's a security solution for both Big Brother and the stupid, worm-downloading idiots that he watches over.
Does anyone really think that the privacy to look up whatever info you want is important enough to justify the fact that that privacy WILL be used by someone somewhere to take lives?
Given the general interest among US citizens about Islam, terrorism, and methods of terroism that has been shown through the packed classes on all three at colleges and the huge amount of hits that such websites are getting, I seriously doubt that we can say that that privacy WILL be used to take lives. What the Justice Department is doing here is policing the freedom of information and stifling an interest in the unknown and relevant. If there's a piece of evidence that will prove that someone is a terrorist, it won't be found in what books they checked out or what website they went to in the local library. And if such evidence were admissable in court, then a whole lot of curious, middle class white Americans would be heading for the slammer.
Slashdot Mirror
As for betting from A to B... who would use this for a daily vehicle? Recreation, definately, but recreational vehicles aren't genarally used for 'A to B' travel.
Obvious answer: People that want some recreation but don't have the money to make a distinction between "daily" and "recreational"?
I disagree. Hexapod locomotion may be easier to build, slightly easier to maintain, and maybe even cheaper, but as any person of extremely abnormal height or weight (especially dwarfs) can attest, our entire world is made for bipedal creatures that are between five and six and a half feet tall and less than two and a half or three feet wide. If robots are going to be useful in our world, they need to develop the abilities to walk up and down stairs, open doors with knobs that are of a standard height, occupy furniture that is made for human beings, and generally interact with a world that is built specifically for the average-sized human being and no one else.
Robots may not be able to do these things right now, but it's important that they develop in that direction, rather than on a path toward better hexapods.
As a software developer, I respect their ability to own their software, no matter what form it may take.
I guess that also includes the form of "Bought by a user that wants to use it in a perfectly legal way". They may own their software, but I own it after I've bought it and should be allowed to exercise my legal rights over it. Unfortunately, the MHOL (Microsoft Horde of Lawyers), a larger and stronger body of "law" enforcement than the US Department of Justice or the entire governments of many smaller countries, disagrees.
Dumping and price fixing are often illegal. I doubt they're being sold at a loss considering the legal problems they could expose themselves to. Maybe they are being sold at cost.
Every financial article ever written on the gaming industry in the last year, whether it's from Bloomberg, the Financial Times, the Economist, or just the business section of your local newspaper, disagrees with you. Microsoft loses approximately $100-$150 on each sale now. It might have gone down to $80 since their new modifications to the hardware.
you are missing the point totally... it dont matter if its lame.. its Starcraft.. man what dont you understand.. Starcraft owns.. and bascially.. this has its name and so it must own too... im gonna be forced to buy a console now.. go SC
Actually, I understand that perfectly. I also understand that because it is a horribly unoriginal game with some recognizable characters and elements tacked onto it, it will suck about as much as I expect Starfox Adventures to suck.
If it's at least as fun as MG:S, I'll count my money and my hours well spent.
Give the multitude of Tactical Rip-Off Action games that have come and gone since Metal Gear Solid, there's only a very slim chance that this game will be nearly as fun as its predecessor. SO far, none of the dozens of MGS rip-offs have come close to the original.
Spell checkers can't help with there, their, they're and they don't help me when I btucher a word so badly that it can't tell what I'm trying to say, which is more often then not.
This is a common misconception. Most word processors today not only check your spelling automatically, but also your grammar. "They went over their" may fool a spellchecker, but it won't fool the grammar checker that has been present in Microsoft Word since at least Word '97.
My response is and always has been who gives a rats ass if they cant multiply by hand, as long as they can get the correct answer with tools readily available. Since calculators are so cheap that they are given away as logo holders like pens and other knicknacks no one in this country or any other developed country will ever be unable to aquire one.
People will probably mock your post, but I couldn't help but think of it in a historical perspective. At one time, if you were unable to grow your own food or weave your own baskets, you had nothing to eat and nothing to carry goods with. Now hardly anyone has those skills because both food and bags/baskets are ubiquitous and ridiculously cheap. Similarly, understanding factories and more specifically how to work in an assembly line were once requisite skills for living a normal life, but now the average person would probably be completely confused by the inner workings of a factory and an assembly line.
I wonder if multiplication is destined to go the way, since, unlike something like reading, it can easily be done for you by cheap, ubiquitous technology.
But if you left them in your house, and forgot to lock your front door, and someone came in and took them (then left a sign by the road saying "this house is unlocked! help yourself!") then that would be a crime.
Yet another stupid house analogy in a long line of "something on internet = your residential home" arguments. As always, it does not hold water. In this case, it does not hold water because the bandwidth that's being "stolen" is freely flowing through the airwaves, thus being available to anyone in the general area that cares to use it. Thus, a more appropriate analogy would be the aforementioned "object left on the sidewalk for a few days" analogy.
The warchalker, despite the Slashdot headline, is really irrelevant in this case. The chalk is simply an alternative to booting up your laptop and taking the two seconds to look for it. It's really just a nice little redundancy that saves you one minute of battery time.
Essentially, what we have here is a bunch of people putting stuff out for free and a another bunch of people putting the same thing out and not intending for anyone to take it. How is anyone supposed to tell the difference? Is the impetus on the user to try to differentiate between dozens of servers offering free bandwidth or on the servers to decide whether or not they want to give something out for free?
To me, and while I know this analogy seems strange, this seems a lot like neighborhood garbage collection. If the guys on the garbage truck see anything near the curb, they take it. They don't know the difference between someone throwing out a chair and someone accidentally leaving a small piece of furniture outside for a few minutes. It is the responsibility of the homeowner to make sure that they don't leave anything out near the curb that the garbage men might accidentally take, not the responsibility of the garbage men to walk up to everyone's door and say, "Excuse me, ma'am, do we have permission to take this? I know you probably meant for it to be thrown out, but we thought we should wake you up to make sure".
I know that hackers (in the broad sense of the word) often say that it is the responsibility of the network administrators to secure their networks rather than the responsibility fo the hackers to not invade open networks, usually with little justification, but in this rare instance, I think it really does apply. It's the responsibility of the network administrators to secure their network that looks just like the free ones and could easily be mistaken as such, just as the it's the responsibility of the homeowner that doesn't want their piece of furniture taken by the garbage men to keep it away from the street where they would mistake it for trash.
What is the Jedi doctrine? Do they even /pretend/ to adhere to it other than when filling out a Census form? Does it otherwise affect their lives in a significant way?
I really don't see a huge difference between Star Wars geeks going to Star Wars conventions, where they dress up as Jedi Knights, listen to their chosen leaders (Star Wars actors, writers, etc.), and rant and rave about how great Star Wars is, and Christians going to church, where they dress up in "proper clothing" (formal attire), listen to their chosen leaders (priests, deacons, selected speakers, etc.), and rant and rave about how great Jesus is. The only real difference that is see is that one side is adoring a film work and the other side is adoring a written work.
You're always going to have the unethical/innocent geek kid who downloads an MP3 and listens only to it since his PC, MP3 player and PDA are the only things he uses for listening to music.
You're always going to have the normal guy who doesn't care about "branded" CDs or the slight (and sometimes perceptible) quality loss of MP3s over CDs...he goes ahead and burns his MP3s to a 5-cent CDR and listens to it anyway.
Then again, isn't it questionable whether or not the people in these two examples would've bought the CDs anyway? Before MP3s, I just didn't listen to music (outside of the radio and such), and therefore didn't buy CDs. Now, I listen to a lot of songs that are released openly by the artists as MP3s and occasionally save RIAA songs... and therefore don't buy CDs. So in the case of people like me and the cheap or morally opposed people in the examples you listed, MP3s have changed how much music we listen to, but has kept the amount of music that we buy firmly at $0 per year.
In the end, I think it mostly balances out. Some of the people that used to buy CDs no longer buy CDs because of MP3s, some of the people that didn't used to buy CDs now buy CDs because they were introduced to the artists through MP3s, and some people never bought any CDs and still don't, regardless of MP3s.
The real problem with this debate, though, is that you can't really tell what's going on. There's no REAL way to tell how many people started buying CDs because of MP3s, how many people stopped buying CDs because of MP3s, how many people stopped buying CDs because of the slow ecnomy, how many people stopped buying CDs because of the prices, etc. It's all just biased statistics based on small samples, coupled with opposite views of the situation that are equally valid and logical.
Anyone know of a link to a place that would definitely handle the hazardous waste in a proper manner?
I know of a place. It's called "your local dump". You put your old parts in the car, you drive it over there, and they'll direct you to the hazardous waste pile (which is not as horrifying as it sounds, because most of it isn't hazardous until burned or placed in soil or drinking water). You can probably trust that it will not be going to China because the Chinese probably get their monitors in bulk from "hardware recycling companies", rather than by picking a monitor or two out of a bulk shipment of toxic materials including paint, motor oil, cleaning chemicals, old appliances, etc.
Why even use the real world analogy? How many of us wouldn't be pissed if we got an e-mail saying, "Hi, I cracked your security and got into your computer via --some exploit--. You might want to patch that. Also, some of your financial records are inaccurate, and the girl in 'sylvia_saint_fucking_and_sucking.avi' in the 'C:\Private\GodIHopeMyWifeDoesn'tSeeThis' directory isn't Sylvia Saint, but actually a lesser known porn star. Nice collection, BTW."
I'd want the guy prosecuted for breaking into my personal property and I believe that a lot of you would, too. Why do we expect a lenient, "please, invade our property some more, sir" attitude from anyone else?
Hi, I'm Bob Robertson, and I'd like to tell you a little bit about my campaign for --insert your state here--'s senatorial seat in 2002.
Over the years, my competitor, Mike Jones, has fucked a lot of whores and raised taxes by an astoundingly high 0.00001%. He's also poisoned our well water, seceded our state from the United States on two seperate occasions, and invited several known child molesters to his fundraising banquets, during which he has served dead puppies as the main course. In short, he's a scumbag, and he's evil.
Don't vote for him. Vote for me. Because he sucks.
Paid for by the Friends of Bob Robertson, who absolutely fucking hate that bastard Mike Jones. Burn in Hell, Mike.
I can't wait to see, hear, and read this shit not only on my TV, on my radio, in front of people's houses, on the subway, in my mail, in front of schools, in front of public buildings, at every public event in every town in the state, AND on my computer! I just can't get enough of hearing about how the politician that has less money and can't run as many commercials is the antichrist!
Sorry, but in this case I have to pull out my free market cap. The correct price for an entertainment product is whatever the customer is willing to pay.
Exactly. CD sales are going down because they are not at the price that the customer is willing to pay, i.e. the incorrect price. However, the entire problem here is that the RIAA is trying to recoup its losses by blaming their lack of sales on piracy and getting a piece of somebody else's action through levies and court settlements because of it.
Wait a minute. Share with friends and family members? So if I sit down and watch a $40 movie once a week with my family for 25 weeks, I get a year of jail time?
This is just another example of the fact that if you look deep enough into US law, you'll find that you don't have any rights at all. Every right that you think that you have, including sharing what you've bought with family members in your own home on the same computer, has been covered by some half-assed law that was rushed through congress and quickly forgotten about five or ten years ago.
So again, my question: what is so fundamentally different between DVD's and CD's that I can space-shift one legally, but not the other?
/., but I think it's the true answer to your question:
/. geek that is highly educated on the histories of copyright, fair use, and the like. However, from the perspective of a congressman that handles hundreds of different votes on a huge variety of subjects each year, the fact that the courts have already covered the subject matter of the bill in front of him a decade or so ago isn't so obvious. (Note that I'm talking about the average congressmen that vote on the copyright or technology bills that are introduced, not the paid stooges that are writing and introducing them.)
This may sound cynical, insulting, and typical of
The advent of each new content medium is an opportunity for the media companies to re-fight a battle that they've already lost. Because the space shifting of CDs and the space shifting DVDs has a one word difference, judges and congressmen, out of willingness, stupidity, or an error in the legal system, do not simply brush off the **AAs' complaints by saying that the courts have already ruled that such activities are legal. This seems stupid when you look at it from the perspective of the average
I think encourageing your son to sit in the hotel room and play video games is just wrong. Instead this kid should be encouraged to get out of the hotel room to see the town and meet his fencing peers.
Why does everyone assume that he'll be playing alone? For a lot of people, video games are a group activity, just like any other game or sport. They don't make four player console games so that you can operate four different controllers by yourself, you know...
These days, if the kid doesn't bring his gaming system he won't be able to socialize because everyone else will be be playing Unreal Tournament between fencing tournament matches. They wouldn't know how to socialize without the proper hardware interface.
Don't you feel old?
He shouldn't feel old. In a group setting, I'm sure there were times as a child/teenager when he couldn't socialize without the proper hardware interface, either, such as a ball, a bat, a hockey stick, a chess set, etc. Many games require more hardware that just a single ball and the favored way for young men and many young women to socialize is to play games.
Then again, many adults can't socialize without the proper chemical interface, which many of them are far more dependent on.
I completely agree, but you forgot the goddamn Thais repeating "kuy" over and over.
It's just Adobe's 3D chat program, Atmosphere, with a Counter-Strike theme. Am I missing some part of this that makes it important, interesting, or even vaguely original.
Throw dissidents in jail and torture them - a billion Chinese can't be wrong
Security measures such as firewalls and anonymous browsing would still be needed, but I'm sure that much more educated individuals could point you toward good solutions for that. I just wanted to bring up the idea of an OS on a CD-ROM. It leaves no records and viruses and worms cannot be installed on it, because it cannot be written to. It's a security solution for both Big Brother and the stupid, worm-downloading idiots that he watches over.
Does anyone really think that the privacy to look up whatever info you want is important enough to justify the fact that that privacy WILL be used by someone somewhere to take lives?
Given the general interest among US citizens about Islam, terrorism, and methods of terroism that has been shown through the packed classes on all three at colleges and the huge amount of hits that such websites are getting, I seriously doubt that we can say that that privacy WILL be used to take lives. What the Justice Department is doing here is policing the freedom of information and stifling an interest in the unknown and relevant. If there's a piece of evidence that will prove that someone is a terrorist, it won't be found in what books they checked out or what website they went to in the local library. And if such evidence were admissable in court, then a whole lot of curious, middle class white Americans would be heading for the slammer.