Just about any movie that lets Chris Rock go off on one of his F this F that rants. Nurse Betty is one prime example. I made the mistake of agreeing to go see it. It was a mildly amusing chickflick except for the scenes where Rock got to open his mouth. Which were very plentiful. His character could have been performed just as well if not better with a lot less of his favorite word.
Personally I don't like the idea of people trusting other people's judgment on what their kids should or shouldn't see in a movie. Seems a little Big Brother'ish.
So you don't like the rating system either? Hollywood should be allowed to release the movies without any indication as to what levels of objectional content they may have.
I can see it now. Some parent saying, "Hey kids lets go see the latest new hollywood release, "Debby does Lothlorien," hopefully it won't have anything that we as parents find unacceptable for you children. Maybe we won't have to leave in the middle of the movie like we had to last week during Toy Story 3: Buzz's new Friend"
Also the threat of "Big brother". Big brother is not necessarily bad. When my big brother says that he found a movie dumb or offensive, I tend to avoid it. I also know I can trust his judgement better than the mysterious MPAA. Why? because I know him and his values. The same issue works with these players. The "Big Brother" that you fear is nowhere to be seen. This is actually an option to stave off Government interference. Hollywood should be embracing this technology to stave off the right wing conservatives. Hollywood can now say hey we don't need FCC oversight and supervision because the consumers have the option of filtering out content they find objectionable.
Back to the concept of trusting the results the scripts will produce. At first we may not really know how and what the editing scripts will block but after a while we will come to know what to expect. My hope on this is that the system won't be closed. So that there will be an option of differeing scripts for the same movie. So if I don't like clearplays choices I can look at the choices by other groups, or even build my own scripts.
I like the options this player can potentially give me. Having served in the Army, obscene language rarely phazes me, and I like movie violence, however, I perfer not to see Nudity and sex in my movies. It's a personal choice based on my moral values. As such though I find that many of my favorite movies are unacceptable among many of my peer group, ususally because the language I don't even notice is offensive to them. It would be nice to be able to select the no language/no nudity/sex scripts and enjoy more of my movie collection with my friends.
And to stave off the trolls, I like my friends and don't plan on changing friends, just because their standards of what they tolerate are slightly more strigent than mine.
80% of home users can do just fine with that horribly old pentium III-800 (hell a 500 is just fine) running windows 98 or another efficient OS (no W2K and XP are NOT efficient in any way)
Gee, thats an interessting assertation. A couple years ago I had to load W2k onto an old 266mhz laptop(owned by Uncle Sam) (the network admins wouldn't allow any non-NT windows machines on the net) I was really dreading the performance I was going to get compared to the fairly heavily tweaked Win98 that the machine had been running. Was I amazed at the massive improvement in all aspects of operation. Faster bootup, programs opened faster, etc. etc.
Now XP's memory requirements do impact the feasibility of putting it on older machines, It's stability is also a major benefit.
W2k is in my opinion quite efficient, and basically resurrected the usefulness of an old slow laptop.
True with a proper ascent it isn't an issue but what happens when joe user gets freaked out by that eel snapping at his heel and points straight up. Also note the ScubaDoo site says absolutely nothing about what depths this device should or would be used at.
At the depth these things are designed to be used nitrogen narcosis isn't going to be an issue.
Nitrogen Narcosis no, that takes a depth of 70ft or greater. Nitrogen tissue loading, too rapid ascent and decompression sickness after being submerged for up to an hour is an issue.
Amen, I looked through the ScubaDoo site and the scariest thing there was the comment "No lengthy courses, get underwater sooner and enjoy the wonderful experience."YIKES!!!! The purpose of those "lengthy courses" is to teach you how to stay alive and unbent. Numerous/.'ers have made comments about the risk of drowning, the much greater danger is the risk of Decompression Sickness AKA the Bends. The company site gives no info on max depth or limiters on rate of ascent/decent. The first time some vacationer spends the hour the site predicts at 30 ft and then decides to shoot right to the surface, they are going to be spending time in a decompression chamber, if they are lucky.
My second main concern is the weight issue, It weighs 94 pounds. Thats nice but more importantly how buoyant is it? What happens when the very dense (non-buoyant) rider has a motor failure at depth, Can they perform a safe ascent, or is their only shot at life to blow the tanks and play polaris missile(Extremely dangerous), or is it to abandon ship and swim rapidly to the surface, which is also extremely dangerous as their instinct will be to hold their breath which will result in popping their lungs. Scuba training includes training to NEVER hold your breath.
Those are just a couple concerns and issues I see with this device. It looks very dangerous to me, and drowning is the least of my concerns.
I've only been diving for a couple years, any other, more experienced divers care to add their $0.02?
The last two laptops I've purchased (the first two for that matter) Were Dell Inspirion 8k series machines that I chose specifically for their ability to play games. I chose he first one, a Inspirion 8000, because at the time (late 2000) it was the only laptop available that offered a video card with 32megs of ram.
The same reasoning was why I went with the 8200 (with 64mb video ram) a year and a half later when I bought the second one.
Why did I choose Laptops? Because both times I was preparing to be deployed overseas with the US Army (Kosovo in 2001 and Bosnia in 2002). I certainly wouldn't be able to take a desktop with me on those trips. However, I knew I have ample extra time while off duty to need a game machine.
As I went shopping for laptops, only one other company (I think it was hp) offered even 16 megs of video ram. Dell had not only the 16 but also the 32.
When I was notified I was going again in 2002 I decided to get another new machine, this time Dell was the only laptop provider with 64 Megs of video ram (major provider that is, I could have gotten one custom made at a local laptop builder but at almost twice the cost.)
I also purchased a multimedia projector when I bought the second laptop, and can thus have as big a screen as I want when I game. It's also great for impromptu movie nights.
Now I intend to get another box to run a server on, but other than that I don't see any reason to own such a bulky space hog, and will stick to laptops. I do everything on my laptop, and when I need the space where it happens to be sitting, I just fold it up and put it in my travel case. When I get a box to use as a server, I'll find a closet or similar out of the way place and put it there, but don't plan on accessing it very often.
I've also used my Laptops to DJ church dances, and just did a rather resource heavy slideshow presentation for my brother's wedding. And for both events it's alot easier to cart in a high performance laptop or two than it would be to cart in a desktop.
To conclude, I use my laptop for serious Gaming as well as everything else. If obtain employment where I need to keep things seperate, I'll just utilize a seperate HD caddy and swap HD's between work and everything else.
I agree, Dish has put a new music channel in place called FUSE to replace the missing MTV MTV2 and VH1, and it has far more music than those channels combined.
It's not the only scam they're trying to run, I'm just counting down the days until my current contract runs out and I'm moving to another service. But in the Last week I've recieved the same incredible offer from AT&T twice. I can get a one time 29.95 credit on my account if I agree to another one year contract. Wow! NOT!!!! The catch is that the contract includes a $175 penalty for canceling early.
Actually "Pull this pin and release" would work better. Your version would have the occasional moron who would, out of sheer stupidity, sit and hold the grenade in such a manner as to keep the spoon in place. Thus preventing the pretty fireworks from occuring.
Back to the main topic though, I ran across that virus today, and after disconnecting from the net, I opened the zip file, and tried to extract it to a folder. Norton caught it on the spot. Which is what I was expecting. I was just trying to determine the exact variant. Norton provided that info.
Honestly, I often wonder how the heck these virii and worms manage to spread. I Use OUTLOOK EXPRESS as my mail client just to make life more interesting, and my system has yet to get infected by anything (other than M$ products that is.) Some efforts at social engineering make sense and I can see how the stuff spreads. for example the annakornikova virus, hit while I was deployed overseas with the Army. Guess what, an email promising nude photos of a famous pretty girl took down that base's network (and probably the entire.mil system as well) in just minutes.
Contrast this with Beagle.K which actually requires the victim to help it by entering a password. And it still is spreading like crazy.
But then I learned all about "Users" back when I did tech support for AOHell.
We had the same situation today on my family domain. My younger brother quickly guessed the email had a virus when it came addressed from the "Team" at our domain. The "Team" is our older brother. And no he doesn't habitually refer to himself in the plural.
Gee, Guess we'll be seeing you back in Utah in a couple years. FYI many of the cities involved have promised the financial backing needed to guarentee the bond.
A plan that was set up by the previous govenor without informing anyone else about it. The current govenor pulled out as soon as she heard about it. Get your facts straight, before you accues the state as a whole of wanting to surrender all privacy rights.
Also the company isn't called Matrix, that is the name of the program/database in question.
If anything this probably prompted the passing of the bill this thread is discussing. The Matrix flack brought the issue of privacy rights to the front of everybody's minds, so when someone proposed a bill to "protect the privacy rights" the legislators were probably trying to climb over each other to be the first to vote for the bill.
I'd like to add to my previous rant that the School districts where I live are now under attack by the state legislature for using funds, allocated by the state for textbooks, for other costs, such as cheerleader uniforms and similar costs. So even when the state started allocating funding specifically for books on top of the book fees students must pay, the school districts just spent the money elsewhere.
Last time I looked, for the cost of a cheap PC, you can buy dozens, if not hundreds, of books.
Hmm I beg to differ. I paid over $100 for a single trig textbook this semester (and it's not even that thick of a book, unlike the calculus book I'll be looking at next fall. Considering what Wal-mart is charging for their Lind--s machines ($199 is the starting price) your claim does not stack up.
This claim of not being able to get enough or new books was made a few years ago by the teachers in my area as part of their otherwise very justified demands for more funding.
The district quashed that argument very quickly with a statement explaining that there were well defined procedures for ordering new books. The procedures were little more than filling in an order form for the books. In addition the district had literally millions sitting in a dedicated account. This money came from the book fees every secondary student had to pay each year. The money was there, the system to utilize it was there, simple and well documented. The teachers just weren't using it.
The next year most of the texbooks my sister brought home were brandnew.
And as with the textbook I purchased this semester, as a college student, I wish books would be allowed to get to be several years old before being replaced. But then/. has thrashed over that scam many times.
As to the computers not getting used. Talk to a teacher why don't you. I'm no teacher myself but I know, and occasionally date, several. These lovely ladies cover the full range from kindergarten through jr High and Highschool teachers. I've helped one scrounge for and install network cards for old computers she scrounged from her family so her students could more fully utilize some excellent educational programs she uses.
In my opinion, if the teachers are lacking money, more often than not it's to be found in the marble coated District offices, overpaid "administrators" and other support staff who get paid better than the teachers. Recently another friend who is a teacher was telling me about how the head janitor at his jr. High makes over $60,000 a year, more than double what he makes. The other full time janitors pull in around $40K How are the services of a Janitor worth more than those we entrust with the teaching and building of our youth?
Then of course there is also the very expensive legal staff every school district has to maintain now days. People will drop a lawsuit on a school for the smallest things. And those suits have to be well fought or the schools will lose even more money that should be going to the students and the real educators.
I totally agree with you. My dish only pixelates when snow starts building up on the dish. I can either go out and brush it off, or if the snow builds up while I'm not watching tv, once the layer of snow is solid, the signal is back.
Then there is my Grandmothers experience. She had cable but it was often subject to interference, and the last straw was when she got a cable guy out to try to fix the problem, he told her the problem was interference from a 100+ year old tree across the street. He claimed that the tree was blocking the signal from the mountain top where the regular TV repeater antannae are located.
Even 80 year old Gandma was smart enough to see through that line of BS. Especially since she still had her TV antanna on the roof and was able to switch to it on the spot and show him that at that particular moment she could get some of the broadcast channels to come in clearer than the cable was at the moment, and that in spite of this supposedly signal blocking tree. Of course the brodcast signal in that location is very suceptible to interference from adverse weather, solar storms, forest fire(6 years ago a fire took out the power line to the repeaters for nearly two weeks), etc...
I really hope they can do it. Like that scene where they approach Magrathea, and the book steps in to tell the audience that noone will get hurt in the impending rocket attack. It's as un-hollywoodish as can be. And I love them for it.
Like you I really hope they can do it, but will they really be able to show, or even attempt to show the short life of an ICBW(Intercontinental Ballistic Whale). I can hear the complaints from PETA already.
Regardless I'll be in the theater with my towel in hand.
I know how you feel I worked Tech support at AOHell about the same time and nothing could start me banging my head on the walls faster than a Packard Hell.
I think the best story I remember is they had a combo sound card/modem on some models, and the cards would have IRQ conflicts with themselves.
and Bravo for steering your customers away from the junk. Too many sales people will do anything just to get the sale regardless of the crap they are selling.
Gee no wonder it developed such a bad reputation as it was introduced before the first oilwell was drilled (Titusville PA 1859). What did it use for fuel?;)
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Just about any movie that lets Chris Rock go off on one of his F this F that rants. Nurse Betty is one prime example. I made the mistake of agreeing to go see it. It was a mildly amusing chickflick except for the scenes where Rock got to open his mouth. Which were very plentiful. His character could have been performed just as well if not better with a lot less of his favorite word.
I can see it now. Some parent saying, "Hey kids lets go see the latest new hollywood release, "Debby does Lothlorien," hopefully it won't have anything that we as parents find unacceptable for you children. Maybe we won't have to leave in the middle of the movie like we had to last week during Toy Story 3: Buzz's new Friend"
Also the threat of "Big brother". Big brother is not necessarily bad. When my big brother says that he found a movie dumb or offensive, I tend to avoid it. I also know I can trust his judgement better than the mysterious MPAA. Why? because I know him and his values. The same issue works with these players. The "Big Brother" that you fear is nowhere to be seen. This is actually an option to stave off Government interference. Hollywood should be embracing this technology to stave off the right wing conservatives. Hollywood can now say hey we don't need FCC oversight and supervision because the consumers have the option of filtering out content they find objectionable.
Back to the concept of trusting the results the scripts will produce. At first we may not really know how and what the editing scripts will block but after a while we will come to know what to expect. My hope on this is that the system won't be closed. So that there will be an option of differeing scripts for the same movie. So if I don't like clearplays choices I can look at the choices by other groups, or even build my own scripts.
I like the options this player can potentially give me. Having served in the Army, obscene language rarely phazes me, and I like movie violence, however, I perfer not to see Nudity and sex in my movies. It's a personal choice based on my moral values. As such though I find that many of my favorite movies are unacceptable among many of my peer group, ususally because the language I don't even notice is offensive to them. It would be nice to be able to select the no language/no nudity/sex scripts and enjoy more of my movie collection with my friends.
And to stave off the trolls, I like my friends and don't plan on changing friends, just because their standards of what they tolerate are slightly more strigent than mine.
Now XP's memory requirements do impact the feasibility of putting it on older machines, It's stability is also a major benefit.
W2k is in my opinion quite efficient, and basically resurrected the usefulness of an old slow laptop.
I am, I've been certified for two years now
True with a proper ascent it isn't an issue but what happens when joe user gets freaked out by that eel snapping at his heel and points straight up. Also note the ScubaDoo site says absolutely nothing about what depths this device should or would be used at.
My second main concern is the weight issue, It weighs 94 pounds. Thats nice but more importantly how buoyant is it? What happens when the very dense (non-buoyant) rider has a motor failure at depth, Can they perform a safe ascent, or is their only shot at life to blow the tanks and play polaris missile(Extremely dangerous), or is it to abandon ship and swim rapidly to the surface, which is also extremely dangerous as their instinct will be to hold their breath which will result in popping their lungs. Scuba training includes training to NEVER hold your breath.
Those are just a couple concerns and issues I see with this device. It looks very dangerous to me, and drowning is the least of my concerns.
I've only been diving for a couple years, any other, more experienced divers care to add their $0.02?
The same reasoning was why I went with the 8200 (with 64mb video ram) a year and a half later when I bought the second one.
Why did I choose Laptops? Because both times I was preparing to be deployed overseas with the US Army (Kosovo in 2001 and Bosnia in 2002). I certainly wouldn't be able to take a desktop with me on those trips. However, I knew I have ample extra time while off duty to need a game machine.
As I went shopping for laptops, only one other company (I think it was hp) offered even 16 megs of video ram. Dell had not only the 16 but also the 32.
When I was notified I was going again in 2002 I decided to get another new machine, this time Dell was the only laptop provider with 64 Megs of video ram (major provider that is, I could have gotten one custom made at a local laptop builder but at almost twice the cost.)
I also purchased a multimedia projector when I bought the second laptop, and can thus have as big a screen as I want when I game. It's also great for impromptu movie nights.
Now I intend to get another box to run a server on, but other than that I don't see any reason to own such a bulky space hog, and will stick to laptops. I do everything on my laptop, and when I need the space where it happens to be sitting, I just fold it up and put it in my travel case. When I get a box to use as a server, I'll find a closet or similar out of the way place and put it there, but don't plan on accessing it very often.
I've also used my Laptops to DJ church dances, and just did a rather resource heavy slideshow presentation for my brother's wedding. And for both events it's alot easier to cart in a high performance laptop or two than it would be to cart in a desktop.
To conclude, I use my laptop for serious Gaming as well as everything else. If obtain employment where I need to keep things seperate, I'll just utilize a seperate HD caddy and swap HD's between work and everything else.
I agree, Dish has put a new music channel in place called FUSE to replace the missing MTV MTV2 and VH1, and it has far more music than those channels combined.
It's not the only scam they're trying to run, I'm just counting down the days until my current contract runs out and I'm moving to another service. But in the Last week I've recieved the same incredible offer from AT&T twice. I can get a one time 29.95 credit on my account if I agree to another one year contract. Wow!
NOT!!!! The catch is that the contract includes a $175 penalty for canceling early.
Step 1: Profit!!
Step 2: ???
Step3: In Soviet Russia a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods imagines you!
Well I for one welcome our Ironically posting "I for one welcome our evolved-rat overlords," Overlords.
Back to the main topic though, I ran across that virus today, and after disconnecting from the net, I opened the zip file, and tried to extract it to a folder. Norton caught it on the spot. Which is what I was expecting. I was just trying to determine the exact variant. Norton provided that info.
Honestly, I often wonder how the heck these virii and worms manage to spread. I Use OUTLOOK EXPRESS as my mail client just to make life more interesting, and my system has yet to get infected by anything (other than M$ products that is.) Some efforts at social engineering make sense and I can see how the stuff spreads. for example the annakornikova virus, hit while I was deployed overseas with the Army. .mil system as well) in just minutes.
Guess what, an email promising nude photos of a famous pretty girl took down that base's network (and probably the entire
Contrast this with Beagle.K which actually requires the victim to help it by entering a password. And it still is spreading like crazy.
But then I learned all about "Users" back when I did tech support for AOHell.
We had the same situation today on my family domain. My younger brother quickly guessed the email had a virus when it came addressed from the "Team" at our domain. The "Team" is our older brother. And no he doesn't habitually refer to himself in the plural.
Gee, Guess we'll be seeing you back in Utah in a couple years. FYI many of the cities involved have promised the financial backing needed to guarentee the bond.
Also the company isn't called Matrix, that is the name of the program/database in question.
If anything this probably prompted the passing of the bill this thread is discussing. The Matrix flack brought the issue of privacy rights to the front of everybody's minds, so when someone proposed a bill to "protect the privacy rights" the legislators were probably trying to climb over each other to be the first to vote for the bill.
I'd like to add to my previous rant that the School districts where I live are now under attack by the state legislature for using funds, allocated by the state for textbooks, for other costs, such as cheerleader uniforms and similar costs. So even when the state started allocating funding specifically for books on top of the book fees students must pay, the school districts just spent the money elsewhere.
Good question. However I'm sure the competition for that job will be intense. Imagine a job where you have to stay legally drunk eight hours a day.
This claim of not being able to get enough or new books was made a few years ago by the teachers in my area as part of their otherwise very justified demands for more funding.
The district quashed that argument very quickly with a statement explaining that there were well defined procedures for ordering new books. The procedures were little more than filling in an order form for the books. In addition the district had literally millions sitting in a dedicated account. This money came from the book fees every secondary student had to pay each year. The money was there, the system to utilize it was there, simple and well documented. The teachers just weren't using it.
The next year most of the texbooks my sister brought home were brandnew.
And as with the textbook I purchased this semester, as a college student, I wish books would be allowed to get to be several years old before being replaced. But then /. has thrashed over that scam many times.
As to the computers not getting used. Talk to a teacher why don't you. I'm no teacher myself but I know, and occasionally date, several. These lovely ladies cover the full range from kindergarten through jr High and Highschool teachers. I've helped one scrounge for and install network cards for old computers she scrounged from her family so her students could more fully utilize some excellent educational programs she uses.
In my opinion, if the teachers are lacking money, more often than not it's to be found in the marble coated District offices, overpaid "administrators" and other support staff who get paid better than the teachers. Recently another friend who is a teacher was telling me about how the head janitor at his jr. High makes over $60,000 a year, more than double what he makes. The other full time janitors pull in around $40K How are the services of a Janitor worth more than those we entrust with the teaching and building of our youth?
Then of course there is also the very expensive legal staff every school district has to maintain now days. People will drop a lawsuit on a school for the smallest things. And those suits have to be well fought or the schools will lose even more money that should be going to the students and the real educators.
Then there is my Grandmothers experience. She had cable but it was often subject to interference, and the last straw was when she got a cable guy out to try to fix the problem, he told her the problem was interference from a 100+ year old tree across the street. He claimed that the tree was blocking the signal from the mountain top where the regular TV repeater antannae are located.
Even 80 year old Gandma was smart enough to see through that line of BS. Especially since she still had her TV antanna on the roof and was able to switch to it on the spot and show him that at that particular moment she could get some of the broadcast channels to come in clearer than the cable was at the moment, and that in spite of this supposedly signal blocking tree. Of course the brodcast signal in that location is very suceptible to interference from adverse weather, solar storms, forest fire(6 years ago a fire took out the power line to the repeaters for nearly two weeks), etc...
She now has dish and loves it.
Regardless I'll be in the theater with my towel in hand.
Linus, don't hold back, let us know how you really feel about those litigious bastards?
I think the best story I remember is they had a combo sound card/modem on some models, and the cards would have IRQ conflicts with themselves.
and Bravo for steering your customers away from the junk. Too many sales people will do anything just to get the sale regardless of the crap they are selling.
But then I was just pointing out how the latest ratings avail from CR were totally opposite from what the poster said CR was reporting.
On the other hand what was wrong with /Packard Hell/ computers? Oh, Did you actually expect them to be usable?