The post here that say, "you'll never find an unbiased source," are right on the mark. It would be more true to say, "Even if you did find an unbiased source, you'd find people out to discredit and destroy that source through any means necessary."
This doesn't matter, what matters is whether or not you believe that people have a right to bear arms or not. If people have that right, taking it away would be wrong.
The reality is, when the situation comes up that people need to bear arms (the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto) almost no one will oppose them having them. The argument that people will usually make is "well, we aren't Jews in the Warsaw ghetto. If you think we are then you are insane, and trivializing the tragedy of the Holocaust." (Oh, and the new argument which is "Well, they ended up losing anyway," which is the argument that "people would never be able to resist the U. S. armed forces for long if the government turned into a dictatorship, so that's not a good argument.")
I think really it comes down to a matter of faith in the State. People who believe that various individual freedoms stand in the way of paradise on earth through central planning will always favor gun control. I mean, what was crime like under the totalitarians? I don't know what street crime was like, but the crimes committed by agents of the State dwarf the imagination in their enormity.
On the other hand, it is true. In many cases when people attempt to resist a modern mechanized army, they end up ground into the dust. Which is better, to willingly go to a relocation camp, or resist through force of arms? It's not an easy question. What would have happened if the Japanese-Americans who ended up imprisoned at Manzanar had resisted, en masse, the unjust imprisonment and theft of their property at the hands of the State? Would they have been massacred, or would the executive order have been rescinded?
I don't trust the State. I think its agents are corrupt. You can have my gun when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.
I think that the entire book is available online already, just maybe not collated into a book with chapters. I know the "Right to Read" is already published online.
50's spaghetti western show? 50's spaghetti western show?!?! Hmm, that's so wrong, on so many levels, that I can't figure out where to begin. (It ranks up there with a radio gaff my Dad loves, "the Boston Tea Party Massacre.") 50's tv shows were not spaghetti westerns. Spaghetti western refers to Italian Westerns, which tended to have a rougher world view than American Westerns, and were created when American Westerns started to dry up in the 1960s even though the Western was still very popular in Europe.
This is not to say there weren't plenty of thoughtful, well written American Westerns, just to explain the term Spaghetti Western...
Frontier Science Fiction is a perfectly sound sub-genre of science-fiction, a lot of Heinlein's early stuff like Tunnel in the Sky dealt with it, and arguably much of Asimov's Foundation trilogy dealt with a similar theme.
Well, all Mac users aren't running Mac OS X. A good example of this is my brother. His Mac only has some version of Mac OS 9 on it. There's nothing Unixy about that. For fifteen dollars, I can theoretically install GNU/Darwin on a partition, and he can use Unix stuff without shelling out for OS X.
Hate to say it, but my Amazon profile is on target:
Hello, Obregon Weirdhat. Explore today's featured recommendations. (If you're not Obregon Weirdhat, click here.)
Book Recommendations
Oh My Goddess!
Book Description
While phoning for a pizza delivery, college student Keiichi Morisato dialed a fateful wrong number and instead received a trio of beautiful sister goddesses. But what looked like the fulfillment of a young man`s dreams quickly turned into a roller coaster ride of magic, mayhem, and madness! This... Read more | (Why was I recommended this?)
See more in Entertainment, Science Fiction & Fantasy, and other Book Recommendations
Computer & Video Game Recommendations
Jet Grind Radio
Amazon.com
In Jet Grind Radio, you play a whacked out kid who's completely torqued off about the system. It seems that the city of Tokyoto is not terribly kid-friendly and wants to keep things neat and pretty. You, the skater punk, figure that the only way to rebel is with your inline skates and a couple of... Read more | (Why was I recommended this?)
See more in Sega Dreamcast, Outlet, and other Computer & Video Game Recommendations
DVD Recommendations
Escaflowne - The Movie (Ultimate Edition 3-Disc Set)
Amazon.com
Escaflowne is a sprawling adventure saga that infuses sword-and-sorcery and mecha elements into the popular "magical girl" anime genre. The girl is Hitomi Kanzaki (voice by Kelly Sheridan), a withdrawn teenager who wishes she could just leave everything behind and vanish. When she's magically... Read more | (Why was I recommended this?)
See more in Horror, Science Fiction & Fantasy, and other DVD Recommendations
Electronics Recommendations
Samsung Yepp Hip-Hop 32MB Digital Audio Player (Silver) [MP3 AUDIO]
Amazon.com Review
The Samsung Yepp Hip Hop is easily one of the coolest-looking digital audio players around, and we found ourselves offering it up like an excited kid at show-and-tell. The player's small size and its groovy translucent color never failed to impress coworkers and friends, while its excellent sound... Read more | (Why was I recommended this?)
See more in Clocks & Clock Radios, Gadgets, and other Electronics Recommendations
On the other hand, I'm also pretty happy with the results of my birthdate in the Past Life Calculator:
I do not know how you feel about it, but you were male in your last earthly incarnation.
You were born somewhere around territory of modern South of Latin America approximately on 1300.
Your profession was warrior, hunter, fisherman, executor of sacrifices.
--
Your brief psychological profile in that past life: You always liked to travel, to investigate, could have been detective or spy.
--
Lesson, that your last past life brought to present: You should develop your talent for love, happiness and enthusiasm and to distribute these feelings to all people.
I guess you need love, happiness and enthusiasm to be an executor of sacrifices in South of Latin America...
Greasy District Manager at one of the District Meetings I had to attend:
"Now, I know what your going to say, the extended warrantee on those headphones costs more that the price of the headphones themselves, so how do you convince the customer to buy it? Well, I look at it this way, when a customer has an extended warantee, he walks in here like he's a king. His headphones break, and he gets another pair. If that happens three times it more than pays for the warantee..."
Boy was that guy greasy, I think Homer would have gone crazy over him when he was in the grease collection business...
I ended up losing that job, silly me, I refused to have my family buy stuff at the store to boost my sales unlike what some of the other guys were doing...
Yesterday, I had an unsettling experience. I was in Kash and Karry shopping, buying eggnog etc. (Only a few noggy weeks before the government takes it away again.) Finally, I got to the Kash register, only to note that even though the sign said it was open, there was nobody there. I figured out that it was a robot cashier. I took my eggnog, and ran it past the scanner. A cheery female voice anounced the price, and told me to put the item on the belt, which had started moving. I did the same thing with the rest of my purchases. The I pushed the red box on the touchscreen, selected cash and put my $20.00 in the slot. The machine, then cheerily dispensed my change "Don't forget to look below the scanner for bills." I bagged up my groceries and went on my merry way without having to speak to another living soul.
Now, I'm not sure why this was unsettling. Maybe because I used to do cashier work, or maybe because the store was so deserted at the time I went. I'm sure I'll get used to it in time. I guess I've experienced my very first taste of "Future Shock." (Which in itself was unsettling for someone who would normally identify themselves as belonging to the Paranoia Pro-Tech secret society.)
At work, we aren't allowed to use anything but Windows. We can't even choose the type of Windows we use. That's not likely to change in the future, and I'm not likely to find another job at the moment.
At home I keep a Win98 partition around to play games. While I am building up a collection of Mac Games, there isn't any chance that most of the older titles I like will be ported to the OS X. I also have three Linux Games, Decent III (which doesn't work on my PC), Heroes of Might and Magic III (fun) and The Sims (which is from the Mandrake Gaming Edition and is some kind of wierd Windows game that won't run in Windows but will run in WineX). Besides that, I have Windows games that have been made multi-platform through the release of Linux (or Mac or Dreamcast or all three) clients (like DOOM, Day of the Tentacle, etc.).
Now, I'm buying Mac games instead of Windows games in the future, so in time I expect I'll have more games for Mac than Windows. I'd like to mess around more with WineX, but I haven't gotten around to it.
Hmm, what is missing in the article is the way Japanese and American society diverged on the subject of comic books due to the intervention of the State. Back in the 1950's (the time of the Cold War, the Korean War, Joe McCarthy and the like) American comic books were being squarely aimed at older teenagers and young adults. They were becoming very popular and experiencing tremendous growth. Popular titles dealt with War, Crime, Horror and Science Fiction.
What happened? Well, a status seeking psychologist by the name of Frederick Wertham wrote a book called Seduction of the Inncoent and the Senate Subcommitee on juvenile deliquancy decided to hold hearings. Certain comic book companies were practically blacklisted (E. C. Comics ended up with only Mad Magazine being available, and even that was often watched by the F.B.I.). It was a bad time to be a comic artist or writer.
The effects of this assault on comics as an art form can still be felt today in the United States, and as far as I can tell a similar crackdown did not occur in Japan at any point in recent history. (At any rate, I haven't read anything in the history of manga that would suggest it.)
I don't find OS X on my TiBook slow, but then, I upgraded from my old PII. My old PII runs fairly quickly on it's Win98 Drive and slowly on it's Linux (Mandrake Gaming Edition) drive. I've assumed this is because this is 2002 and Windows 98 was designed for 1998 computers while the version of Mandrake I'm using was designed for newer machines. (Also because I've tweaked the Hell out of the Windows partition for games...)
Of course, when I was using older versions of Mandrake (or Caldera) on my PII, they ran faster, so I may just need to optimize the OS or go with a more streamlined window manager.
My roomates have a new WinXP machine, but while it seems a little faster than my Win98 PII, it doesn't seem all that fast to me. Maybe because they've loaded all this sleazeware that stays in memory to spy on them and pop-up ads when they go to Web sites. Mmmm... sleazeware...
All in all, I'd say that my TiBook runs fairly quickly. There are probably ways to optimize it so that I can get even better performance out of it, but I want to upgrade to Jaguar before I try them. (Of course, I'd rather figure out how to use the IR port on it to make it into a big universal remote... but that seems to be out of reach.)
MEMS the Word
Why Your Next Computer Display Might Be an Empty Box
By Robert X. Cringely
Re:I'm popular with AC's today, it seems.
on
Howl-o-ween
·
· Score: 2
You should know though that in the Bible-belt of the USA, there are plenty of Americans who think of Halloween as an unamerican, Satanic holiday. These people and their churches try to come up with alternatives designed primarily to prevent their kids from celebrating Halloween.
Not just in the Bible belt either, my Mom used to work in a library in New Jersey, and they had to remove the Halloween decorations because a customer complained.
Halloween was always my favorite holiday as a child, but I used to get upset when it seemed to be serving an agenda I didn't like. As a small child I had an orthodoxy about Halloween, ghosts, witches and demons were ok, firemen (except undead firemen) and flowers were not. Nobody ever paid any attention to me, of course, and as I grew older and mellowed out I realized that people were going to do exactly what they wanted to do and I couldn't force them to do what I wanted anyway. (It really made me mad when, after forcing my poor mother to work for hours on my mummy costume some kid dressed as a fire hydrant won the costume contest at school. Grrr...)
Do you have any costume holidays where you live? I mean holidays where people pick their own costumes, not holidays with particular costumes (like not like everyone dressing up as Santa Claus at Christmas.). If not, that's the problem. People like excuses to dress up in costume, I believe it is why Mardi Gras is also very popular.
Of course, I would have to figure out which stories fell into the Sonny Bono Act black hole in order to figure out which ones could be published to a Website in violation(?) of copyright law.
Lovecraft, of course, died nearly penniless, never seeing any of the money that those who later claimed copyright on his works gained.
(I'm still a little miffed that the Cthuhlu Mythos aren't in my copy of Deities and Demigods.)
Actually, if they are at all serious about this, it is more likely they will need protection from the U. S. Army, Navy, and Air Force. (But then, don't we all?)
I think there should be some kind of add-on sold by sony and Nintendo that allows people to legally play Japense games.
shows a severe lack of understanding of the import issue. Sony and Nintendo have spent a great deal of money on research to make it difficult to play games in regions which they weren't produced for. The original "mod chips" were simple things like cartridge slot extenders. In early Playstations, all that was needed was to boot an American game, and then swap it during the boot process with a Japanese game. As the protection got more complex, the modchips also got more complex.
The way you've written it, it sounds like you think that there is some need for Japanese games to be different than American games and Sony and Nintendo should just create a licensed adaptor. Why would they want to solve a problem which only exists because they've created it?
As a customer, I don't think that Sony or Nintendo are any more worthy of my money than Microsoft. I think that the current business model of the console market should end. I mean the whole protection racket which the console manufacturers have with the game publishers, "Give us a kickback or we won't let your games run on our machines." It would be better for gaming if console makers made their money from manufacturing consoles and selling them for a profit and game publishers made money from publishing games without having to give kickbacks to the console companies.
The trouble is, allowing the model to change would shift the power from the console companies to the game publishers. I think that would be a better model. I'd love to see some of the great Japanese game publisher slip the leashes that have been put on them by the console makers and operate more like PC game companies. I'd like to see what they would do with that freedom.
I've been noticing that the Dreamcast can do amazing things lately. For example, I recently downloaded FrotzDC and burned a FrotzDC disk of my entire Infocom Classics collection to play on my Dreamcast. It works amazingingly well. You can save games to the Dreamcast VMU, and it works with the official Dreamcast keyboard.
I also downloaded the Dreamcast version of SCUMMVM. Unfortunately, the only LucasArts games I own are for the Atari 800 (titles like "The Eidolon" and "Rescue on Fractalus") so I had to order "Day of the Tentacle" for testing purposes. (SCUMMVM looked pretty impressive with free demos, though.)
I haven't tried to set up a SarienDc disk (old Sierra games) for the Dreamcast yet, though I'll probably do that today.
Oh, I also burned one of the MP3 players to a disk, and can use it with an MP3 disk I made from CDs I own.
It is a lot easier to get on the Net and Read email or go to certain Web pages with a Dreamcast than with my PC or even my laptop. The ability to just turn the thing on or off as opposed to going through a long boot up process, and then a long powerdown process is a big plus.
I think that the best software upgrade for the Dreamcast that I could think of would be a fully functioning version of Mozilla. I don't mind PlanetWeb, but it has limitations as a Web browser.
People who are knocking the Dreamcast here are kind of stupid. Yes, the Dreamcast is a failed videogame system, but as a cheap hobbiest computer system it is really great. (Of course, it has a lot of great games, too, but that is besides the point.) Messing around with a Dreamcast and seeing what makes it tick is fun. Does anyone around here understand the concept of hacking for fun? I see a lot of comments that "this isn't going to help Linux/FreeBSD" destroy Microsoft, as though the entire purpose of Linux/FreeBSD were to define itself as an alternative to Microsoft.
When I was a kid, owning a personal computer was about having fun. Somewhere along the line (probably about the time IBM and Microsoft noticed "there's profit to be had") the fun got sucked out of owning a PC and the majority of PCs became clones of a single architecture. The moment that happened, for me was the day that my dad bought an "upgrade" (laugh/chortle) for my Atari 800 in the form of an 8088XT. This machine simply screamed "I am no fun," everytime I sat down to use it.
Dreamcasts are fun to hack. More fun than most of the other consoles which are backed by organizations that are actively resisting any kind of hacking. So, when ever I read people saying, "Why are you hacking a Dreamcast? Hmmph, waste of time." I get the idea of a stogy, boring person who really doesn't like computers at all but sees them as a means to some end.
I'm reminded of Penn Jillette's comments when there was one of those perennial attacks on the evils of media violence:
Penn: You know, it's funny because Penn & Teller, although we tend to be political in our private lives-- political is a bit strong, I guess, but certainly we try to be aware of what' s going on in the world around us--we aren't very publicly political. We aren't people who believe that just because we're performers our opinions on everything need to be known. As far as I'm concerned, we did not move into politics; Janet Reno moved into art. One of the things that Teller and I are obsessed with, one of the reasons that we're in magic, is the difference between fantasy and reality. That is the subject that, if you have a brain in your head, is always dealt with in magic. The smarter the tricks you're doing, the more that' s an important thing.
-- Penn Jillette -- Reason Magazine Interview
As far as I'm concerned, "geeks" did not develop some political mono-culture, politicians (and cartels) started to make a political movement out of restricting the activity of computer programmers and other technically minded people. Of course there are going to be technically minded people who sell out to the enemies of progress, that's inevitable. Those people will end up being sacrificed as soon as it is convienient to those in power.
The reason why technically minded people agree that things like Microsoft or DRM are bad is because they have had a bad experience with them, and they understand the cause of the problem. My sister did not understand it when she tried to hook her new DVD player up to a TV with no RCA jacks and the picture wouldn't work. She ended up buying a TV with RCA jacks to replace her old TV. I'm sure average people who use computers on which MS has deliberately broken some application they don't like don't necessarily blame MS any more than they do if their modem burns out in a thunderstorm.
Geeks have their eyes open, and they can't pretend un-learn things just because they are inconvienient to the **AA. The philosophy of the cartels and MS is often similar, and it boils down to, "Yes, we made that broke on purpose and if you want to fix it, we'll sick the law on you."
Oh, and plenty of geeks draw distinctions between illegal and legal uses for stuff like P2P. In fact, I'm sure that some originally thought, "Copying songs and ripping off the publisher is wrong, but that doesn't mean there aren't legitimate uses for this cool technology," but gave up that stance when they realized that the cartels might want to shut down P2P if it offered a competing business that was not illegal even more than they would shut down the illegal uses of P2P. Look at the history, the movie industry versus television, the movie industry versus the VCR and portions of the movie industry against DVD (and favoring Divx).
If you love technolgy, you will fight people who think the status quo is fine and want to destroy anything that shakes things up, even if robbing society of some knew technology will harm society as a whole.
If you don't love technology, then you are probably the kind of geek who eats broken glass or bites the heads off of chickens at a carnival blow-off and not a geek in the sense the author is. If you do love technology, then you will passionately hate attempts to restrict or suppress it. That's where a political "monoculture" comes from.
I never obey laws that I don't like unless I'm coerced by being frightened of the consequences of disobeying those laws. If an idiotic law is passed that doesn't make any sense is passed then the State must do two things to get me to obey it:
1. They have to actually enforce it.
2. They have to attach scary penalties to it.
I don't disobey very many laws, if any (far be it from me to admit to illegal activities in a public forum). However, when I do, it is because they are laws that any thinking person knows are either nonsense or evil.
When I was child there was this game that was popular among some of the kids, it was called Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. I was in a group that would meet once in a while at the library where we could use a room in the basement to play. Now, you would think that everyone had the same goals while playing this game, but you would be wrong. I for example was not interested in the "role-playing" aspects of AD&D, which is why I later started collecting fantasy themed board games. I was interested in it as a game, with an interesting story attached to it.
Other people in the group though, had a different agenda. Their agenda boiled down to, "Making myself feel like a big man." (There were no girls in the group, and if there had been I doubt they would have put up with the juvenile, sexist boys in the group for long.) They had 50th level characters, and were related to gods and demon lords. For them, trinkets like the Wand of Orcus were a dime a dozen, and sporting events involved feeding lawful good 6th level magic-users to gelatonous cubes (well they tried, but I just pretended it didn't happen.)
I learned an important lesson from these people (some of whom were low enough to steal from a public library), which was choose the people you hang out with in your leisure time.
Of course, I promptly forgot this important lesson when the Internet came along and I discovered MUCKing. However, that lapse only served to reinforce what I had learned off-line.
This is the problem with being in an AD&D group sponsered by a public library, chatting on a public MUCK, or playing a MMRP where the only barriers to entry are monetary.
Thanks for mentioning Leigh Brackett, I was a huge fan of her short fiction as a child, and now I've remembered her, I'll buy some of her novels and some books of short stories by her.
I had no idea that she was responsible for Empire, that explains quite a bit....
First, an aside: For the sake of this discussion, I've considered only the history gleaned from the actual Star Wars films, not the Expanded Universe. If you know what the Expanded Universe is and want to argue that no discussion of Star Wars can be complete without considering material outside the canon, that's fine. However, it's always been my view that the comic books and novels largely serve to clean up Lucas's narrative and philosophical messes. Therefore, discussions of intrinsic intent must necessarily revolve around the movies alone. You may disagree, but please don't e-mail me about it.
If you don't know what the Expanded Universe is, well, uh, neither do I.
Slashdot Mirror
This doesn't matter, what matters is whether or not you believe that people have a right to bear arms or not. If people have that right, taking it away would be wrong.
The reality is, when the situation comes up that people need to bear arms (the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto) almost no one will oppose them having them. The argument that people will usually make is "well, we aren't Jews in the Warsaw ghetto. If you think we are then you are insane, and trivializing the tragedy of the Holocaust." (Oh, and the new argument which is "Well, they ended up losing anyway," which is the argument that "people would never be able to resist the U. S. armed forces for long if the government turned into a dictatorship, so that's not a good argument.")
I think really it comes down to a matter of faith in the State. People who believe that various individual freedoms stand in the way of paradise on earth through central planning will always favor gun control. I mean, what was crime like under the totalitarians? I don't know what street crime was like, but the crimes committed by agents of the State dwarf the imagination in their enormity.
On the other hand, it is true. In many cases when people attempt to resist a modern mechanized army, they end up ground into the dust. Which is better, to willingly go to a relocation camp, or resist through force of arms? It's not an easy question. What would have happened if the Japanese-Americans who ended up imprisoned at Manzanar had resisted, en masse, the unjust imprisonment and theft of their property at the hands of the State? Would they have been massacred, or would the executive order have been rescinded?
I don't trust the State. I think its agents are corrupt. You can have my gun when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.
It's not the story that's confusing. It's reality
Since I haven't read the book, I can't be sure...
Although I can't be sure that any of the creators of the movie were directly inspired by H.P.L.
This is not to say there weren't plenty of thoughtful, well written American Westerns, just to explain the term Spaghetti Western...
Frontier Science Fiction is a perfectly sound sub-genre of science-fiction, a lot of Heinlein's early stuff like Tunnel in the Sky dealt with it, and arguably much of Asimov's Foundation trilogy dealt with a similar theme.
Of course, I always thought the same thing about The Prisoner because the last episode was so wierd...
Well, all Mac users aren't running Mac OS X. A good example of this is my brother. His Mac only has some version of Mac OS 9 on it. There's nothing Unixy about that. For fifteen dollars, I can theoretically install GNU/Darwin on a partition, and he can use Unix stuff without shelling out for OS X.
Of course, I eventually erased the hard drive and now I use it for games, because getting rootless X working was enough for me.
"Now, I know what your going to say, the extended warrantee on those headphones costs more that the price of the headphones themselves, so how do you convince the customer to buy it? Well, I look at it this way, when a customer has an extended warantee, he walks in here like he's a king. His headphones break, and he gets another pair. If that happens three times it more than pays for the warantee..."
Boy was that guy greasy, I think Homer would have gone crazy over him when he was in the grease collection business...
I ended up losing that job, silly me, I refused to have my family buy stuff at the store to boost my sales unlike what some of the other guys were doing...
Now, I'm not sure why this was unsettling. Maybe because I used to do cashier work, or maybe because the store was so deserted at the time I went. I'm sure I'll get used to it in time. I guess I've experienced my very first taste of "Future Shock." (Which in itself was unsettling for someone who would normally identify themselves as belonging to the Paranoia Pro-Tech secret society.)
At home I keep a Win98 partition around to play games. While I am building up a collection of Mac Games, there isn't any chance that most of the older titles I like will be ported to the OS X. I also have three Linux Games, Decent III (which doesn't work on my PC), Heroes of Might and Magic III (fun) and The Sims (which is from the Mandrake Gaming Edition and is some kind of wierd Windows game that won't run in Windows but will run in WineX). Besides that, I have Windows games that have been made multi-platform through the release of Linux (or Mac or Dreamcast or all three) clients (like DOOM, Day of the Tentacle, etc.).
Now, I'm buying Mac games instead of Windows games in the future, so in time I expect I'll have more games for Mac than Windows. I'd like to mess around more with WineX, but I haven't gotten around to it.
What happened? Well, a status seeking psychologist by the name of Frederick Wertham wrote a book called Seduction of the Inncoent and the Senate Subcommitee on juvenile deliquancy decided to hold hearings. Certain comic book companies were practically blacklisted (E. C. Comics ended up with only Mad Magazine being available, and even that was often watched by the F.B.I.). It was a bad time to be a comic artist or writer.
The effects of this assault on comics as an art form can still be felt today in the United States, and as far as I can tell a similar crackdown did not occur in Japan at any point in recent history. (At any rate, I haven't read anything in the history of manga that would suggest it.)
Of course, when I was using older versions of Mandrake (or Caldera) on my PII, they ran faster, so I may just need to optimize the OS or go with a more streamlined window manager.
My roomates have a new WinXP machine, but while it seems a little faster than my Win98 PII, it doesn't seem all that fast to me. Maybe because they've loaded all this sleazeware that stays in memory to spy on them and pop-up ads when they go to Web sites. Mmmm... sleazeware...
All in all, I'd say that my TiBook runs fairly quickly. There are probably ways to optimize it so that I can get even better performance out of it, but I want to upgrade to Jaguar before I try them. (Of course, I'd rather figure out how to use the IR port on it to make it into a big universal remote... but that seems to be out of reach.)
Why Your Next Computer Display Might Be an Empty Box
By Robert X. Cringely
Not just in the Bible belt either, my Mom used to work in a library in New Jersey, and they had to remove the Halloween decorations because a customer complained.
Halloween was always my favorite holiday as a child, but I used to get upset when it seemed to be serving an agenda I didn't like. As a small child I had an orthodoxy about Halloween, ghosts, witches and demons were ok, firemen (except undead firemen) and flowers were not. Nobody ever paid any attention to me, of course, and as I grew older and mellowed out I realized that people were going to do exactly what they wanted to do and I couldn't force them to do what I wanted anyway. (It really made me mad when, after forcing my poor mother to work for hours on my mummy costume some kid dressed as a fire hydrant won the costume contest at school. Grrr...)
Do you have any costume holidays where you live? I mean holidays where people pick their own costumes, not holidays with particular costumes (like not like everyone dressing up as Santa Claus at Christmas.). If not, that's the problem. People like excuses to dress up in costume, I believe it is why Mardi Gras is also very popular.
Regarding Copyrights...
Of course, I would have to figure out which stories fell into the Sonny Bono Act black hole in order to figure out which ones could be published to a Website in violation(?) of copyright law.
Lovecraft, of course, died nearly penniless, never seeing any of the money that those who later claimed copyright on his works gained.
(I'm still a little miffed that the Cthuhlu Mythos aren't in my copy of Deities and Demigods.)
Actually, if they are at all serious about this, it is more likely they will need protection from the U. S. Army, Navy, and Air Force. (But then, don't we all?)
The way you've written it, it sounds like you think that there is some need for Japanese games to be different than American games and Sony and Nintendo should just create a licensed adaptor. Why would they want to solve a problem which only exists because they've created it?
As a customer, I don't think that Sony or Nintendo are any more worthy of my money than Microsoft. I think that the current business model of the console market should end. I mean the whole protection racket which the console manufacturers have with the game publishers, "Give us a kickback or we won't let your games run on our machines." It would be better for gaming if console makers made their money from manufacturing consoles and selling them for a profit and game publishers made money from publishing games without having to give kickbacks to the console companies.
The trouble is, allowing the model to change would shift the power from the console companies to the game publishers. I think that would be a better model. I'd love to see some of the great Japanese game publisher slip the leashes that have been put on them by the console makers and operate more like PC game companies. I'd like to see what they would do with that freedom.
I also downloaded the Dreamcast version of SCUMMVM. Unfortunately, the only LucasArts games I own are for the Atari 800 (titles like "The Eidolon" and "Rescue on Fractalus") so I had to order "Day of the Tentacle" for testing purposes. (SCUMMVM looked pretty impressive with free demos, though.)
I haven't tried to set up a SarienDc disk (old Sierra games) for the Dreamcast yet, though I'll probably do that today.
Oh, I also burned one of the MP3 players to a disk, and can use it with an MP3 disk I made from CDs I own.
It is a lot easier to get on the Net and Read email or go to certain Web pages with a Dreamcast than with my PC or even my laptop. The ability to just turn the thing on or off as opposed to going through a long boot up process, and then a long powerdown process is a big plus.
I think that the best software upgrade for the Dreamcast that I could think of would be a fully functioning version of Mozilla. I don't mind PlanetWeb, but it has limitations as a Web browser.
People who are knocking the Dreamcast here are kind of stupid. Yes, the Dreamcast is a failed videogame system, but as a cheap hobbiest computer system it is really great. (Of course, it has a lot of great games, too, but that is besides the point.) Messing around with a Dreamcast and seeing what makes it tick is fun. Does anyone around here understand the concept of hacking for fun? I see a lot of comments that "this isn't going to help Linux/FreeBSD" destroy Microsoft, as though the entire purpose of Linux/FreeBSD were to define itself as an alternative to Microsoft.
When I was a kid, owning a personal computer was about having fun. Somewhere along the line (probably about the time IBM and Microsoft noticed "there's profit to be had") the fun got sucked out of owning a PC and the majority of PCs became clones of a single architecture. The moment that happened, for me was the day that my dad bought an "upgrade" (laugh/chortle) for my Atari 800 in the form of an 8088XT. This machine simply screamed "I am no fun," everytime I sat down to use it.
Dreamcasts are fun to hack. More fun than most of the other consoles which are backed by organizations that are actively resisting any kind of hacking. So, when ever I read people saying, "Why are you hacking a Dreamcast? Hmmph, waste of time." I get the idea of a stogy, boring person who really doesn't like computers at all but sees them as a means to some end.
As far as I'm concerned, "geeks" did not develop some political mono-culture, politicians (and cartels) started to make a political movement out of restricting the activity of computer programmers and other technically minded people. Of course there are going to be technically minded people who sell out to the enemies of progress, that's inevitable. Those people will end up being sacrificed as soon as it is convienient to those in power.
The reason why technically minded people agree that things like Microsoft or DRM are bad is because they have had a bad experience with them, and they understand the cause of the problem. My sister did not understand it when she tried to hook her new DVD player up to a TV with no RCA jacks and the picture wouldn't work. She ended up buying a TV with RCA jacks to replace her old TV. I'm sure average people who use computers on which MS has deliberately broken some application they don't like don't necessarily blame MS any more than they do if their modem burns out in a thunderstorm.
Geeks have their eyes open, and they can't pretend un-learn things just because they are inconvienient to the **AA. The philosophy of the cartels and MS is often similar, and it boils down to, "Yes, we made that broke on purpose and if you want to fix it, we'll sick the law on you."
Oh, and plenty of geeks draw distinctions between illegal and legal uses for stuff like P2P. In fact, I'm sure that some originally thought, "Copying songs and ripping off the publisher is wrong, but that doesn't mean there aren't legitimate uses for this cool technology," but gave up that stance when they realized that the cartels might want to shut down P2P if it offered a competing business that was not illegal even more than they would shut down the illegal uses of P2P. Look at the history, the movie industry versus television, the movie industry versus the VCR and portions of the movie industry against DVD (and favoring Divx).
If you love technolgy, you will fight people who think the status quo is fine and want to destroy anything that shakes things up, even if robbing society of some knew technology will harm society as a whole.
If you don't love technology, then you are probably the kind of geek who eats broken glass or bites the heads off of chickens at a carnival blow-off and not a geek in the sense the author is. If you do love technology, then you will passionately hate attempts to restrict or suppress it. That's where a political "monoculture" comes from.
1. They have to actually enforce it.
2. They have to attach scary penalties to it.
I don't disobey very many laws, if any (far be it from me to admit to illegal activities in a public forum). However, when I do, it is because they are laws that any thinking person knows are either nonsense or evil.
We used to have some really wonderful laws in this country like The Fugitive Slave Act or the Executive order which required the Internment of Japanese Americans. These laws were evil. People who didn't help enforce them and actively disobeyed them were brave and noble.
You seem to have substituted a sense of right and wrong for blind State-worship.
Other people in the group though, had a different agenda. Their agenda boiled down to, "Making myself feel like a big man." (There were no girls in the group, and if there had been I doubt they would have put up with the juvenile, sexist boys in the group for long.) They had 50th level characters, and were related to gods and demon lords. For them, trinkets like the Wand of Orcus were a dime a dozen, and sporting events involved feeding lawful good 6th level magic-users to gelatonous cubes (well they tried, but I just pretended it didn't happen.)
I learned an important lesson from these people (some of whom were low enough to steal from a public library), which was choose the people you hang out with in your leisure time.
Of course, I promptly forgot this important lesson when the Internet came along and I discovered MUCKing. However, that lapse only served to reinforce what I had learned off-line.
This is the problem with being in an AD&D group sponsered by a public library, chatting on a public MUCK, or playing a MMRP where the only barriers to entry are monetary.
I had no idea that she was responsible for Empire, that explains quite a bit....