I guess that's why they flipped the wrong lever in both 2000 and 2004. Their vote ensures that we will enter WW III and vast amounts of the human population will perish in order for there to be meat for the Republican party masters, the Greys on which to feast....Democrats!!!
I guess that's why they flipped the wrong lever in both 2000 and 2004. Their votes, if they had won would have ensured that the "terrorists" would have won and the U.S. and it's allies would be rained down upon with flames by the insane terrorists. This would have provided vast amounts of meat for the Democrat party masters, the Greys on which to feast....Libertarians!!!
I guess that's why they flipped the wrong lever in both 2000 and 2004. Their votes no matter who won would have assured either of the two scenarios above, or would have given us Libertarian rule which would have gutted everything that the government provides with the exception of a few "hot dogs" who think they know how to fight an alien invasion force with an Ice Cream truck and a a "dirty bomb". After the Greys picked off our Libertarian heroes in a half an hour, we'd be at their mercy and ready to be turned into meat on which to feast.
Next U.S. election, vote sane folks. Remember your vote costs lives.
...artificial limitations imposed on technology to provide monetary benefit for a select few. So can anyone tell me why profit motive is a good thing once it's applied to stockholder beholden corporations again??? Anyone??;P
Folks, it sounds more and more like a communist state here in the good old US of A every day. We're a CAPITALIST society! The way capitalism works is that you let the market decide. Them's the basics. Now if our government is going to go getting their nose in the business of companies that are making a lot of us a lot of money, then maybe it's time to oust the government. Google or any other large tech industry business has every right to bil... err... profit in any country in the world they see fit. Grandpa Bush and IBM new that even in WWII. They didn't let little things like the holocust get in the way of profitable business deals. And why should they have? As I like to say, "ethical concerns always get in the way of progress".
So now we have the people that we put into office trying to step on the rights of companies like Google to succeed in business. We voted in people who have betrayed our trust. Instead of applauding these successful companies for their large profits and the wealth they bring to our country, they instead trample their right to profit in the name of some illusory moral concerns. If we, as a nation, had any balls we'd be voting these bufoons out of office before they start taking our guns away and throwing us in gulags.
...I had back in the late 80s. I wanted to set up a dual layer LCD that would show you 3D images as generated by a computer. But it would be a transparent LCD panel mounted on top of a box that had IR grids scanning the X, Y and Z axes. As you would move your hands, you could shape and mould "virtual clay" with my software. Sadly I never got too far with it. This is kind of like a 2D version. The main point being that you should NEVER have to use an input device where interaction with the displayed object is too far abstracted from your hands interacting with normal objects. To be honest, this kind of technology SHOULD have happened around 1990. WE were already "there" so to speak at that point. Well those of us in the Amiga, Mac and even the Atari computer circles...
Under section 55.2502 of the anti-Soviet Russia Troll act of Slashdot (2003.05.17) I hereby charge you with the crime of conceptual reversal (Yakovism). The crime in question is described by the following language:
"Any poster who knowingly takes two concepts mentioned in the parent post or main story and reverses them in order to emulate the comic stylings of Yakov Smirnoff shall be described as Yakovism".
This charge carries a sentence of one month of being ignored by the rational members of Slashdot and downmods for the next two weeks to all posts by the offending poster. Your trial by a jury of your peers (moderators who are not on crack) is to commence post-haste after completing receipt of this message. May Taco have mercy on your Slashdot soul.
I was about three years old and I was in the kitchen with a bunch of my more interesting toys. (Mostly wind up stuff) I also had a ball of string. I was using the string to connect the various I/O ports on my toys to each other and wrapping the string around the table and chair legs. My goal was to use the wind up crank motion when the toy was playing twinkle stars to reel in the string and pull the chair in under the table. I figured I could set it up so that the chairs could automatically be pulled in after dinner at the push of a button and I wouldn't have to remember to push my chair in myself. When my mom asked what on Earth I was doing, I said, "I'm building a computer". She didn't realize the import of that statement until years later.;P
I've had tons of transformers for decades and they've all seemed real enough to me. Whether they've been in "wall wart" form or the internal transformers in my electronic equipment. What's the big deal here? Are you telling me that transformers have up until now been figments of my imagination?
At least you HAVE decent programmes. Here in the US we're stuck with crap for morons like Survivor, American Idol, Desperate Housewives, and a ton of ultra-right "news" programs. TV sucks here in the states. At least you've got options on regular over the air broadcasts like Green Wing, The Mighty Boosh, Murder in Mind, Waking the Dead, Midsomer Murders, and Doctor Who (the new series). Say what you want about your own programmes, if you had to live with what we are stuck with in the US, your brain would bleed at just how stupid television can be.
I don't think so since it's not as hard as a lot of you seem to think it is. Once you've put the work into building your base custom distro it's a simple matter of keeping them up to date off of a central internal server. THAT box is where all the maintenance happens and the other boxes are simply slaves to it. The check for updates is a simple script that watches the source code base for the software I've deployed and when there are changes, I'm notified. Then it's up to me to decide if the upgrade is important or not. Contrary to popular belief this is NOT a full time job. Yes, there are busy periods when several packages may update simultaneously, but there are also other very slow times when nothing is happening. IT's not that hard folks. Don't let the naysayers scare you. Again, I use Gentoo to do all of this but if it were LFS, I'd only have to do a little more work initially. Once it's set up, it's very easy to maintain. The only thing keeping most people from doing this regularly is their lazy natures. Point and click is nice, but you really are p shit creek when something breaks and you have to call support. Support is almost NEVER staffed with competent people who can answer any question in a matter of an hour. I've almost never had a decent experience with any support company. They can sometimes take up to 24 hours to get an answer back to you. How much business sense does that make when your box can't be down any more than 30 minutes at a time. I don't care what level of support you buy with a big distro vendor, you always have to wind your way through the low level techs and waste the first few calls or conversations with the wrong people. I've gotten so used to dealing with it that I can typically tell the tech to get me someone else within five minutes into the call. And at the end of the day what really matters is that you keep your boxes running. While the Windows guys are running around like chickens with their heads cut off and people on Slashdot are griping about the latest distro license problems, I'm sitting here with working boxes, high reliability and enough time to post on Slashdot every so often.
And apparently all of you folks that just turned 20 years old have no experience. I'm nearly 40 and my Unix skills have served me well in understanding that many times you're much better off if you had a hand in compiling your OS youself. Prepackaged distros are simply a convenience and nothing more. If you really want your systems to hum, build from the ground up. If you can't, that's fine. But don't assume that prepackaged distros will give you the best of the best. They won't. They'll only give you good enough. And sometimes "good enough" isn't.
Unfortunately, it sounds like you're dealing with people who have already closed their minds to the option of Linux. I plan to implement a lot of Gentoo installations in our server room since I'm a bit annoyed with the big name, for profit distros myself. And if it came down to it, I'd even go the route of Linux from Scratch, because if a company isn't willing to employ people who can build their own distros, then they're not worth working for.:)
And we all know how well anti-trust suits work against companies that have enough money to pay the right people off... I don't think MS will be quaking in their boots anytime soon over antitrust. They've been there before and they know how to game the system. The way to get them to quake in their boots is to make them obsolete. I think free/open source software has done a good deal of work toward that goal.:)
Ummm... you totally misread that. You'll note I put "too poor" in quotes because this has nothing to do with me being actually poor. No "entitlement" as you put it. Yes there are people who need food. But what does this have to do with my point? It's idiotic to think that people should just start dropping conveniences from their lives for economic reasons that are being forced on them by artificially inflated prices. To support your line of thinking, one would have to actually justify what these companies are charging for their products. And now that they have gotten away with such highway robbery, they've blazed the trail for the utilities and foods industires to do the same thing. When you're paying $500 a week for groceries and $2500 a month for heating gas in the winter in a decade or two, will you still be defending the outrageous overinflation of product and service prices by these thieves?
...with his criticism of Moravec. Simply because I have concrete proof that uploading yourself to a computer will work. I will put forth the concept of virtualization as the prime proof.
1. You have a real physical server with an OS and a set of application based services on it. 2. You copy the entire OS and those application based services to a virtual drive on a virtual server utilizing technology like VMWare or Xen. 3. You take down the physical server and bring up the virtual one to replace it. It "just works" identically to the physical server.
So how is that any different from writing software to emulate a blank human brain in a virtual space and uploading every memory and experience that you contain into it? For all intents and purposes, you would have an identical copy of yourself living in your computer in some kind of virtual space. Considering that the virtual space might seem startling to your copy if it's not exactly like the space you inhabit in reality, I expect your copy would be very confused and worried. So the big question... is it conscious and is it alive? Anyway, I just thought I'd put this out here to clarify any possible confusion on the subject.
Oh. I see. It was a joke. Hmmm... I don't get it.;P
The fact is that while people will accept those prices it doesn't mean they can afford them. I have my limits and when certain thigs are out of my price range, I don't buy them. However, that means in certain cases I have to completely bypass something I actually want. My DirecTV subscription is an example. It's currently in the neighborhood of $46 a month. My limit is $50 a month because I think it's insane to pay that much for TV. So I will be pulling the plug on the DirecTV subscription should it hit that range (unless we're talking vastly expanded service like HDTV or a ton of new channels that appeal to me). Sadly, this means my life would be a little less brighter because I would no longer have access to BBC America which is about the only channel that has programs I enjoy these days. Sure, I could read a book, rent a movie, talk to my wife, post on Slashdot intead. But... I'd have one less option. One less option that is actually a very nice option when we're talking BBC America. Are we saying that it's OK that I'm "too poor" to be able to afford some simple entertainment because the industry keeps jacking up the prices with no justification other than lining their pockets?
And I'm not talking about prices going down here. Consider this:
In 1984 I could buy a brand new record with up to 40 minutes of music for $7.00. When CDs first came out they were around $36.00 a pop for the same album at my local retailers. Of course people griped saying "how are we ever going to afford to buy those"? But then the prices dropped until you could buy the same 40 minute album on a brand new CD for $15.00 in 1988. Since then the average price of CDs has gone up and you are typically paiying $19-21 per new CD. Of course none of the arguments that the industry used at the time ("we need to make up for the cost of retooling from making records to making CDs") hold any water today. They're just greedy fuckers. But, the buying public, while they might moan and groan about it are still going to pay the price when they want the latest pap that and RIAA conjured "artist" puts out. There is one thing missing in the original CD Audio spec. DRM.
Enter BluRay and other DRM controlled forms of media. After reading the Slashdot article on CableCard and DCAS the other day (end-to-end encryption for cable television), you better believe devices to play HD DVDs will be no different. Not only will you be completely lubed up and owned by the MPAA, but if you really want to watch their products you'll have to pay the money they ask. No matter how high or unfair the pricing. Welcome to corporate fascism. The price today might be in the $25.00 neighborhood. They'll say, "we need to amortize our investment in this new technology and then the prices will come down as the market grows". And the prices will go down temporarily. But in ten year's time, you'll be paying $30 a disc and likely will just accept it instead of raging at these assholes like I do.
Now, add to this element that the only people who read Slashdot that count (in my book) are the so-called hobbyists... and that we are targetted as "undesirable crackpots", well you see where this is going. The funny thing is that there was a time in America when the guy who built his own electronic equipment at home was looked at as a neighborhood hero or potential "genius". Today, we're looked at like the Unabomber. We're told by these corporations and their brainwashed customers, "Why don't you just do what any other normal person does and just buy a damn HD DVD player fer christ sakes"! We do't want to do this because the commercial products are typically lacking in base functionality that we would prefer to have. For example, you SHOULD be able to skip the advertisting at the beginning of the DVD and get straight to the film. However, the MPAA doesn't want you doing that so commercial players aren't supposed to be able to do this. It's not a technical limitation (although they might try to make it seem like one), it's an artificial limitation calculated to benefit them. And it's unfair. Fortunately, players like Xine and MPlayer allow you to bypass these tracks altogether since they usually add nothing to your viewing experience. That's just a single example of the crippling that the MPAA forces on consumer devices. And it's only going to get worse.
Let me guess... former marketroid?;P To a lot of us it's not about the image or name or other superficial properties. It just comes down to a simple question: "Does it work for me"? I worked for someone once who objected to using the 'blat' SMTP agent simply because they didn't want something called "blat" to be used in their organization. Silly reasoning.
Has anyone else noticed more questionable science being reported in the media? Although this research is potentially intriguing and may result in a new understanding of the interaction between the biological entities of mother and child, just reporting it the way NPR has makes it a tad more hopeful than is necessary. Why didn't they instead report it thusly;
"There are cells that a child leaves behind in the host body after being expelled. New research shows that these cells may actually linger in the host body for decades. How these cells affect the host body is a large and unanswered question right now. It's possible that these cells may give rise to various diseases in the host. It's also possible that they my just float around within the body dormant. And finally, there is a very slight chance that they may actually benefit the host. At this time it's too early to say and researchers are reserving comment until more data is available".
It's certainly less intersting when written that way, but it's more honest.
Re:Yes, 'cuz that's what teenaged music fans want.
on
Songbird Flies Today
·
· Score: 0
Obviously we have some teenaged music fans with mod points. More mature mods, please fix my original post. For the "thick" mods in the audience, I was talking about teens who latch onto the most popular music with not a clue about what good music actually is. There are teens out there who have an ear for quality and do listen to music with a real message (other than "partay!!!") or artistic merit. My original post was not targetted at them. Hence the qualifier in the original post.
Re:Yes, 'cuz that's what teenaged music fans want.
on
Songbird Flies Today
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
Yes. But who gives a crap about teenaged (schlock) music fans? They're well served by their corporate masters. We're talking about people with real musical taste here who want more than they can get from the corporate teat. Live music can only go so far... There's nothing better than a really well done recording of an obscure and creative artist. And that is what Songbird promises.
Slashdot Mirror
...Republicans!!!
...Democrats!!!
...Libertarians!!!
I guess that's why they flipped the wrong lever in both 2000 and 2004. Their vote ensures that we will enter WW III and vast amounts of the human population will perish in order for there to be meat for the Republican party masters, the Greys on which to feast.
I guess that's why they flipped the wrong lever in both 2000 and 2004. Their votes, if they had won would have ensured that the "terrorists" would have won and the U.S. and it's allies would be rained down upon with flames by the insane terrorists. This would have provided vast amounts of meat for the Democrat party masters, the Greys on which to feast.
I guess that's why they flipped the wrong lever in both 2000 and 2004. Their votes no matter who won would have assured either of the two scenarios above, or would have given us Libertarian rule which would have gutted everything that the government provides with the exception of a few "hot dogs" who think they know how to fight an alien invasion force with an Ice Cream truck and a a "dirty bomb". After the Greys picked off our Libertarian heroes in a half an hour, we'd be at their mercy and ready to be turned into meat on which to feast.
Next U.S. election, vote sane folks. Remember your vote costs lives.
...artificial limitations imposed on technology to provide monetary benefit for a select few. So can anyone tell me why profit motive is a good thing once it's applied to stockholder beholden corporations again??? Anyone?? ;P
So now we have the people that we put into office trying to step on the rights of companies like Google to succeed in business. We voted in people who have betrayed our trust. Instead of applauding these successful companies for their large profits and the wealth they bring to our country, they instead trample their right to profit in the name of some illusory moral concerns. If we, as a nation, had any balls we'd be voting these bufoons out of office before they start taking our guns away and throwing us in gulags.
...I had back in the late 80s. I wanted to set up a dual layer LCD that would show you 3D images as generated by a computer. But it would be a transparent LCD panel mounted on top of a box that had IR grids scanning the X, Y and Z axes. As you would move your hands, you could shape and mould "virtual clay" with my software. Sadly I never got too far with it. This is kind of like a 2D version. The main point being that you should NEVER have to use an input device where interaction with the displayed object is too far abstracted from your hands interacting with normal objects. To be honest, this kind of technology SHOULD have happened around 1990. WE were already "there" so to speak at that point. Well those of us in the Amiga, Mac and even the Atari computer circles...
Under section 55.2502 of the anti-Soviet Russia Troll act of Slashdot (2003.05.17) I hereby charge you with the crime of conceptual reversal (Yakovism). The crime in question is described by the following language:
"Any poster who knowingly takes two concepts mentioned in the parent post or main story and reverses them in order to emulate the comic stylings of Yakov Smirnoff shall be described as Yakovism".
This charge carries a sentence of one month of being ignored by the rational members of Slashdot and downmods for the next two weeks to all posts by the offending poster. Your trial by a jury of your peers (moderators who are not on crack) is to commence post-haste after completing receipt of this message. May Taco have mercy on your Slashdot soul.
I was about three years old and I was in the kitchen with a bunch of my more interesting toys. (Mostly wind up stuff) I also had a ball of string. I was using the string to connect the various I/O ports on my toys to each other and wrapping the string around the table and chair legs. My goal was to use the wind up crank motion when the toy was playing twinkle stars to reel in the string and pull the chair in under the table. I figured I could set it up so that the chairs could automatically be pulled in after dinner at the push of a button and I wouldn't have to remember to push my chair in myself. When my mom asked what on Earth I was doing, I said, "I'm building a computer". She didn't realize the import of that statement until years later. ;P
I've had tons of transformers for decades and they've all seemed real enough to me. Whether they've been in "wall wart" form or the internal transformers in my electronic equipment. What's the big deal here? Are you telling me that transformers have up until now been figments of my imagination?
At least you HAVE decent programmes. Here in the US we're stuck with crap for morons like Survivor, American Idol, Desperate Housewives, and a ton of ultra-right "news" programs. TV sucks here in the states. At least you've got options on regular over the air broadcasts like Green Wing, The Mighty Boosh, Murder in Mind, Waking the Dead, Midsomer Murders, and Doctor Who (the new series). Say what you want about your own programmes, if you had to live with what we are stuck with in the US, your brain would bleed at just how stupid television can be.
Thinly veiled threats? I wasn't threatening anyone. I was asserting my comedic streak per my Slashdot. profile. (Hint: look at the bottom)
I don't think so since it's not as hard as a lot of you seem to think it is. Once you've put the work into building your base custom distro it's a simple matter of keeping them up to date off of a central internal server. THAT box is where all the maintenance happens and the other boxes are simply slaves to it. The check for updates is a simple script that watches the source code base for the software I've deployed and when there are changes, I'm notified. Then it's up to me to decide if the upgrade is important or not. Contrary to popular belief this is NOT a full time job. Yes, there are busy periods when several packages may update simultaneously, but there are also other very slow times when nothing is happening. IT's not that hard folks. Don't let the naysayers scare you. Again, I use Gentoo to do all of this but if it were LFS, I'd only have to do a little more work initially. Once it's set up, it's very easy to maintain. The only thing keeping most people from doing this regularly is their lazy natures. Point and click is nice, but you really are p shit creek when something breaks and you have to call support. Support is almost NEVER staffed with competent people who can answer any question in a matter of an hour. I've almost never had a decent experience with any support company. They can sometimes take up to 24 hours to get an answer back to you. How much business sense does that make when your box can't be down any more than 30 minutes at a time. I don't care what level of support you buy with a big distro vendor, you always have to wind your way through the low level techs and waste the first few calls or conversations with the wrong people. I've gotten so used to dealing with it that I can typically tell the tech to get me someone else within five minutes into the call. And at the end of the day what really matters is that you keep your boxes running. While the Windows guys are running around like chickens with their heads cut off and people on Slashdot are griping about the latest distro license problems, I'm sitting here with working boxes, high reliability and enough time to post on Slashdot every so often.
And apparently all of you folks that just turned 20 years old have no experience. I'm nearly 40 and my Unix skills have served me well in understanding that many times you're much better off if you had a hand in compiling your OS youself. Prepackaged distros are simply a convenience and nothing more. If you really want your systems to hum, build from the ground up. If you can't, that's fine. But don't assume that prepackaged distros will give you the best of the best. They won't. They'll only give you good enough. And sometimes "good enough" isn't.
Give me your home address and we'll have a little chat. I think you'll be convinced after hearing what I have to say. ;P
Unfortunately, it sounds like you're dealing with people who have already closed their minds to the option of Linux. I plan to implement a lot of Gentoo installations in our server room since I'm a bit annoyed with the big name, for profit distros myself. And if it came down to it, I'd even go the route of Linux from Scratch, because if a company isn't willing to employ people who can build their own distros, then they're not worth working for. :)
And we all know how well anti-trust suits work against companies that have enough money to pay the right people off... I don't think MS will be quaking in their boots anytime soon over antitrust. They've been there before and they know how to game the system. The way to get them to quake in their boots is to make them obsolete. I think free/open source software has done a good deal of work toward that goal. :)
Ummm... you totally misread that. You'll note I put "too poor" in quotes because this has nothing to do with me being actually poor. No "entitlement" as you put it. Yes there are people who need food. But what does this have to do with my point? It's idiotic to think that people should just start dropping conveniences from their lives for economic reasons that are being forced on them by artificially inflated prices. To support your line of thinking, one would have to actually justify what these companies are charging for their products. And now that they have gotten away with such highway robbery, they've blazed the trail for the utilities and foods industires to do the same thing. When you're paying $500 a week for groceries and $2500 a month for heating gas in the winter in a decade or two, will you still be defending the outrageous overinflation of product and service prices by these thieves?
More like "off broadway musicals". ;P
Holy crap that's frightening! I'm no economist, but that means we're in deep shit, right?
...with his criticism of Moravec. Simply because I have concrete proof that uploading yourself to a computer will work. I will put forth the concept of virtualization as the prime proof.
;P
1. You have a real physical server with an OS and a set of application based services on it.
2. You copy the entire OS and those application based services to a virtual drive on a virtual server utilizing technology like VMWare or Xen.
3. You take down the physical server and bring up the virtual one to replace it. It "just works" identically to the physical server.
So how is that any different from writing software to emulate a blank human brain in a virtual space and uploading every memory and experience that you contain into it? For all intents and purposes, you would have an identical copy of yourself living in your computer in some kind of virtual space. Considering that the virtual space might seem startling to your copy if it's not exactly like the space you inhabit in reality, I expect your copy would be very confused and worried. So the big question... is it conscious and is it alive? Anyway, I just thought I'd put this out here to clarify any possible confusion on the subject.
Oh. I see. It was a joke. Hmmm... I don't get it.
The fact is that while people will accept those prices it doesn't mean they can afford them. I have my limits and when certain thigs are out of my price range, I don't buy them. However, that means in certain cases I have to completely bypass something I actually want. My DirecTV subscription is an example. It's currently in the neighborhood of $46 a month. My limit is $50 a month because I think it's insane to pay that much for TV. So I will be pulling the plug on the DirecTV subscription should it hit that range (unless we're talking vastly expanded service like HDTV or a ton of new channels that appeal to me). Sadly, this means my life would be a little less brighter because I would no longer have access to BBC America which is about the only channel that has programs I enjoy these days. Sure, I could read a book, rent a movie, talk to my wife, post on Slashdot intead. But... I'd have one less option. One less option that is actually a very nice option when we're talking BBC America. Are we saying that it's OK that I'm "too poor" to be able to afford some simple entertainment because the industry keeps jacking up the prices with no justification other than lining their pockets?
And I'm not talking about prices going down here. Consider this:
In 1984 I could buy a brand new record with up to 40 minutes of music for $7.00. When CDs first came out they were around $36.00 a pop for the same album at my local retailers. Of course people griped saying "how are we ever going to afford to buy those"? But then the prices dropped until you could buy the same 40 minute album on a brand new CD for $15.00 in 1988. Since then the average price of CDs has gone up and you are typically paiying $19-21 per new CD. Of course none of the arguments that the industry used at the time ("we need to make up for the cost of retooling from making records to making CDs") hold any water today. They're just greedy fuckers. But, the buying public, while they might moan and groan about it are still going to pay the price when they want the latest pap that and RIAA conjured "artist" puts out. There is one thing missing in the original CD Audio spec. DRM.
Enter BluRay and other DRM controlled forms of media. After reading the Slashdot article on CableCard and DCAS the other day (end-to-end encryption for cable television), you better believe devices to play HD DVDs will be no different. Not only will you be completely lubed up and owned by the MPAA, but if you really want to watch their products you'll have to pay the money they ask. No matter how high or unfair the pricing. Welcome to corporate fascism. The price today might be in the $25.00 neighborhood. They'll say, "we need to amortize our investment in this new technology and then the prices will come down as the market grows". And the prices will go down temporarily. But in ten year's time, you'll be paying $30 a disc and likely will just accept it instead of raging at these assholes like I do.
Now, add to this element that the only people who read Slashdot that count (in my book) are the so-called hobbyists... and that we are targetted as "undesirable crackpots", well you see where this is going. The funny thing is that there was a time in America when the guy who built his own electronic equipment at home was looked at as a neighborhood hero or potential "genius". Today, we're looked at like the Unabomber. We're told by these corporations and their brainwashed customers, "Why don't you just do what any other normal person does and just buy a damn HD DVD player fer christ sakes"! We do't want to do this because the commercial products are typically lacking in base functionality that we would prefer to have. For example, you SHOULD be able to skip the advertisting at the beginning of the DVD and get straight to the film. However, the MPAA doesn't want you doing that so commercial players aren't supposed to be able to do this. It's not a technical limitation (although they might try to make it seem like one), it's an artificial limitation calculated to benefit them. And it's unfair. Fortunately, players like Xine and MPlayer allow you to bypass these tracks altogether since they usually add nothing to your viewing experience. That's just a single example of the crippling that the MPAA forces on consumer devices. And it's only going to get worse.
I bet that thing would really make Halo feel realistic... ;P
Let me guess... former marketroid? ;P To a lot of us it's not about the image or name or other superficial properties. It just comes down to a simple question: "Does it work for me"? I worked for someone once who objected to using the 'blat' SMTP agent simply because they didn't want something called "blat" to be used in their organization. Silly reasoning.
Has anyone else noticed more questionable science being reported in the media? Although this research is potentially intriguing and may result in a new understanding of the interaction between the biological entities of mother and child, just reporting it the way NPR has makes it a tad more hopeful than is necessary. Why didn't they instead report it thusly;
"There are cells that a child leaves behind in the host body after being expelled. New research shows that these cells may actually linger in the host body for decades. How these cells affect the host body is a large and unanswered question right now. It's possible that these cells may give rise to various diseases in the host. It's also possible that they my just float around within the body dormant. And finally, there is a very slight chance that they may actually benefit the host. At this time it's too early to say and researchers are reserving comment until more data is available".
It's certainly less intersting when written that way, but it's more honest.
Obviously we have some teenaged music fans with mod points. More mature mods, please fix my original post. For the "thick" mods in the audience, I was talking about teens who latch onto the most popular music with not a clue about what good music actually is. There are teens out there who have an ear for quality and do listen to music with a real message (other than "partay!!!") or artistic merit. My original post was not targetted at them. Hence the qualifier in the original post.
Yes. But who gives a crap about teenaged (schlock) music fans? They're well served by their corporate masters. We're talking about people with real musical taste here who want more than they can get from the corporate teat. Live music can only go so far... There's nothing better than a really well done recording of an obscure and creative artist. And that is what Songbird promises.