Then again, what is the infant and/or youth mortality rate in a shanty town? I'd bet it's higher than in a "high profile" kid's neighborhood.
In other words, the children with the weaker systems might die young, when no one seems to care about it, in poor areas. In rich areas, those types of kids are kept isolated from anything that could harm them until they are 17, 18, 19 and off to college, where their problems exacerbate and they die and make the news.
Overall, I agree that living in a world with natural (mostly harmless) diseases is better than a sterile world (or one with man-made pollutants - smog hurts everybody). But there are also some benefits for some people by living in ultra-clean environments; they get to live longer.
Yeah, this is like pets.com's brilliant marketing strategy -
"Let's make a business of selling 50-lb bags of dog food with free shipping. While we lose money on each sale, by spending $25 million on Super Bowl advertising we can make back our losses on volume."
Not only that, but they (at least used to) supplement this with random samples of additional households. Years ago (early 1990s), my family was "Nielsen" for one week. They sent us a little book, one for each TV, and we filled in by hand what was watched on each TV, and by whom (by demographic).
I expect that they continue to do things like this, to ensure that their monitored households continue to represent an appropriately balanced sampling.
1. That was a quote by el-Jacko, not by the legislature. 2. Claiming that someone is engaging in fraud is not lobbying; that is a very specific legal term which Jack should understand and only use in its legal context. When used in a fashion that cannot be proven, against a person, business, or industry intentionally to harm their reputation, it could be construed as slander. 3. Committing libel against an industry to further your own agenda impacts both honest and integrity. You cannot claim that the industry is committing fraud when there is no evidence that they have done so.
Yes, but for how long will Slashdot continue to use that icon to represent Microsoft? My guess is 2016. Place your bets now!
Re:Dungeons and Dragons Offline?
on
DDO Goes Solo
·
· Score: 4, Funny
What about us folks without a computer at home? Will they have a version for us, too?
Re:Rejection in classic transplants only possible?
on
3D Human Cells Grown
·
· Score: 1
Are there cases where a transplant has occured without rejection?
In cases where the source material is already from the recipient? Ribs reused as jaw bones, skin grafts, moving fat from stomach to breasts or bottom...
I wonder though about identical twins. Theoretically, couldn't they share organs without rejection? Of course, if one needs an organ due to a genetic disease, they probably both need it...
BTW, you guys should use Intel's new logo - it's been out since January.
Gnome updated their logo in 2003, and Slashdot still does not use it. Slashdot does not cater to corporate or marketing whim when choosing its logos - Slashdot liked the old one better, so that's the one it's gonna use!
After all, it's been years since Microsoft used the "Bill Gates is the Borg" logo for the company, since Star Trek is so out of vogue. And yet, Slashdot flat-out refuses to move to the new "Steve Ballmer is Darth Vader" logo that would reflect the company's modern marketing strategems.
Many of my friends depend on that little application for their music. Should iTunes decide to stop working for whatever reason, there wouldn't be much that the user could do. I would be worried about Apple facing RIAA lawsuits for selling music too cheap and then simply patching iTunes to charge every user another dime before they can listen to each track again. After all, didn't Apple just pull the $1 price out of their ass?
I know audiophiles will beat me over the head for this, but you know it's difficult to hear the difference when you write the music to CD, then rip it back as MP3?
The iTunes license allows you to write unencrypted files to disc. Perhaps the license prohibits re-ripping those to MP3; I don't know, having never read or agreed to it. But claiming that "should iTunes stop...there wouldn't be much that the user could do" is a little inaccurate, if the users have taken the steps that all users of any digital media should do - namely, making appropriate non-proprietary-formatted backups of all media.
Again, who among the intended audience of his blog [i]cares[/i]? Most non-technical people do understand that electronics require power, so few will assume that it runs on "zero" volts. Those that do not understand this will find out the hard way, eventually.
The 2.5 volt number used in my post was made up by me. Perhaps it works at 1.0 volt, allowing it to be powered by 1.5 V cells. (Of course, even this is a simplification, because a voltage range without a power or current rating is nearly meaningless. If the laptop requires 20 W, then supporting 1.5 V supply input yields a current draw of 13 A. This is a [i]big[/i] number for what is probably a small power jack. Not only would the 1.5 V cell drain all its power very quickly, the plastic around the laptop power jack would melt.)
I'd consider that a warning to never work at Alcatel! My company is far more forgiving about personal interactions at work. (Heck, I'm still at work at 7:45 on a Friday posting on Slashdot.)
I have read plenty of stories on Slashdot about companies so protective of their "secrets" that, when an employee gives his two-week notice, he is immediately terminated (with two weeks of pay) to avoid any opportunity to "steal" things. At my company, two friends are leaving soon. One announced he is leaving, and has been replaced already, but he is on a long vacation (still employed) to pack for his move. He'll be back for a while after the vacation. Another friend is going back to law school this fall - to completely change careers from software development. He told his boss a year before he planned to quit, and he's still working here.
I think it does for all music. My wife and I visited San Francisco earlier this year. While we were there, we looked for live, local music that we could enjoy. We only found a few places. To contrast, Austin has live bands playing at a score or more clubs, restaurants, or street corners almost every night. Even the grocery stores have live music. And the music varies, from rock, to country, to jazz, to folks, to blues, to bluegrass. Last week, when Clifford Antone (the owner of legendary blues club Antone's), the crowd included almost anyone associated with blues music in the country, including Doyle Bramhall, Jimmie Vaughn, and Gary Clark.
During SXSW, there are a few hundred bands that cram into those twenty clubs for five days of concerts. On top of that, there are scores of other bands that perform at venues outside of SXSW, or just set up on a street corner downtown with their amps and sound system, and play into the street.
Tonight, a non-special Friday night, I count 79 clubs and restaurants with live music in Austin, excluding those with just DJs or karaoke.
>> Okay, California is more snobby than the midwest, but California is about 1% as snobby as any place up in the Northeast.
Well, I've visited both California and the Northeast, but I did in fact grow up in the Midwest (and the South). Texas may have a big chip on its shoulder, but Austinites tend to reject traditional Texas labels.
>> Austin sounds nice, but on the other hand, your comments on it sound kind of, well, snobby.
Perhaps. I expect that people who live in California like their social scene. I found it very distasteful that people in California care so much about their clothing. In Austin, it is very acceptable to wear anything from a formal gown, to blue jeans, boots, and a cowboy hat, to a Doyle Bramhall II T-shirt and a mohawk. (Women's clothing is just as varied.)
>> Like braggin on Whole Foods. I'm glad for ya. Why would I care which is the first Whole Foods? Does that make it better?
Actually, yes, it does. It is significantly larger than any other Whole Foods in the nation, and has an amazing selection of in-store foods, products, and services. The store even has more than a dozen counter-style sit-down restaurants, where you can enjoy the food they sell, freshly prepared in front of you. (The crazy part is that I don't even shop there; I go to eat, then go up the street to the Central Market to buy groceries.)
I cannot get to the blog; it appears to be suffering from its own DOS attack at the moment.
Thus, I must assume that the blog is a general description of the product specifications, not a detailed, technical presentation. (My apologies if I am wrong.)
That said, the portion you cited is an acceptable simplification of the actual product specs, when the target audience is non-techincal. It may have been more accurate to say the following:
"The current prototype accepts input voltages from 2.25 to 23 Volts, including sources with high noise components. It can also correct for inverted supply inputs, allowing it to effectively support -2.25 to -23 Volts."
However, a non-technical person (perhaps even just a non-electrical engineer) would get little to no additional information from my quote than from his. Why should he write overly-complicated blog posts above the technical comprehension level of his intended audience?
Again, I cannot verify the blog post's intended audience, as I cannot access it. However, this is not the first time I've seen people on Slashdot react to non-technical writing by technical people, and attack those people for that writing. Instead of doing this, the correct response is to examine both the writer and his intended audience. If people on Slashdot are not the intended audience of the post, then the Slashdot reader should judge the technical level as the intended reader would, not as he or she does.
Cable is a two-way connection on the existing wire. (It is admittedly not a secure connection.) This is different than satellite services, which are absolutely one-way without telephone access.
(Though, I wouldn't be suprised to one day see either WiFi or a cell phone built into satellite receivers. The value of the viewing habits they could steal that way would be worth more than the cost of a phone call every few weeks.)
My Dish Network receivers have never had a phone line attached. I've never missed it or any of the "services" enabled by it.
Are they charging people who use progressive.com and geico.com now, too? What is insurance but a form of wager?
With gambling, you are spending some money in exchange for the chance of a good return. Your odds are improved if you are skilled or have someone on the inside.
With the stock market, you are investing some money in exchange for the chance of a good return. Your odd are improved if you are skilled or have insider information.
With insurance, you are spending money in exchange for the possibility of a return. Your odds are improved if you know what you are doing (maintaining the correct coverage for your risk) or know something on the inside (i.e. that you plan to kill the person you just took out a policy on, or that they have a secret terminal illness!).
Terry Pratchett's first Discworld book - The Colour of Magic - has a good and humorous explanation of insurance in terms of gambling.
Austin, Texas, is known as the Silicon Hills because it has reproduced Silicon Valley, albeit on a smaller scale.
It also has a major research university (University of Texas), which might be a key component. It also has a good supply of risk takers, and plenty of money.
But, it also has a few things that Silicon Valley lacks. Namely, it has a better cultural scene for folks. I don't mean the high-class snobby rich folks that fit in well in California. I mean young folks, the kind that like to live someplace that is the live-music capital of the world, with two world-class music festivals, a world-class movie festival, site of the flagship whole foods, the state's only public nude beach, and plenty more to keep you busy every week.
So Google places a banner on their site that says "We recognize you are coming from AT&T, and you must know that this company is giving you piss poor service in an attempt to blackmail us. If you care about that, call 1-800-CALL-ATT" or something. How is this going to stop them? AT&T will tell me that "in the interest of giving you the best possible service, we have chosen select providers to guarantee high-speed access directly to our customers. For web search, we have chosen MSN Search, which is provided to you at blazingly-fast internet speeds at no extra charge."
Then do I threaten to cancel my service? I still have no where else to go...
Yeah, it's funny that the oldest surviving reference to me on the internet - from 1997 - is still the first Google hit on my name. (From the misheard lyric archive.) Fortunately it's not too bad...
The other hits are all from 2000 or later, and all of them are decently respectable.
So google.com has a internet connections coming in from AT&T, and AT&T says "You have to pay us extra because you are google". What's google going to do? They're going to call around and find someone else to provide the service.
You have the idea completely wrong. Here is the scenario as stated: 1. Google does not use AT&T for its ISP. 2. AT&T calls Google and says "We have 100,000 customers. Pay us $0.01 a packet or we will deliberately slow down or lose packets sent from you to our customers." 3. Google says "..."
This has nothing to do with service providers charging more to their own customers (who happen to be content providers). It has to do with service providers charging independent content providers a sort of "mob tax" to make sure nothing "happens" to their data on its route.
Sure if AT&T does this, AT&T's customers can move to Time Warner. Then what if Time Warner does it, too? Those are the only high-speed internet options I have. And even if there was a third-party ISP (i.e. Earthlink), they probably rent their lines from AT&T or Time Warner, and they would have the same restriction.
The only option I see is this one: 3. Google says "O Rly. Well then, we're going to take our nationwide dark fiber and roll out a low-cost high-speed nationwide ISP. When you've lost 20,000 customers, come back and apologize and we won't take your other 80,000."..but probably Google will turn evil and offer tiered service, too.
You can record songs off the radio, then play them back whenever you wish, but a radio station cannot let you call in and control exactly what plays when.
It doesn't make sense to me, either, but that's how it works. All of these legal constructs set up around so-called "intellectual properties" seem tenuous, at best.
I'd rather see them greatly weakened, or greatly strengthened, with a huge reduction in duration. I'd be ok with content providers have 100% use of their information with no fair-use rights, if after five years it fell in the public domain. Or perhaps something in the middle, with 15-year strong rights (still subject to parody and review and research fair uses), followed by public domain. Or, allow longer copyrights will virtually all not-for-profit uses allowed.
My company has ~2000 employees, and it took years for them to pay $2000 for an automated external defibrillator. I think there actually was a heart attack before they bought one.
The cost of losing just one employee is far more than that, but some people fail to properly judge the risk of an event occurence when paying for safeguards to avoid it.
Yeah, it bothers me when people use the word "resistance" without referring to Ohm's Law...
Seriously, the same words have different meanings when said to different audiences, and different speakers might use words in different ways based on their own background. Use the context of the speech to identify meaning. Anytime someone speaks of a "return on investment" on Slashdot, I assume they are talking in very vauge, un-businesslike terms. When I use "(E)ROI" in a project plan, I know it means something very specific.
Industry-specific terms are important; common language is the only way any industry can work. But few industries expect their terms to be well used by the lay population. (I hope the religious "industry" doesn't complain to me about the use of their term!)
There is something to be said for having to wait for 30 minutes for a boat ride from Freeport to Butcherblock with islands to visit on the way. It keeps people more inclined to explore their current environment instead of looking for the fastest way to level up and going to the appropriate zone to do that.
Yeah, it made me say "Gee, I'm glad my wife plays a wizard and will get ports in a few levels."
I, too, want the game world to feel big. The later editions to EQ, especially the Plane of Knowledge ports, really shrunk the world, leaving large areas unserved by ports completely decimated. That's a really bad thing. Instantaneous portals just make the work too small.
But at the same time, sitting in one place for a long time isn't fun, either. There's a reason I bought a second computer while playing EQ, and it wasn't to run my second account most of the time. It's because I could get in a few good hours of 'net reading each night while played. And I also despised how helpless I felt as a paladin when traveling in some places. I had to be escorted like a kid, because I could not survive any other way due to my lack of self-invis or aggro-dropping abilities. (In the post-Brad era my AA horse solved a lot of that, and I also took to playing a monk alt.)
Instead, what I'd like is travel that takes time, shows how big the world really is, but doesn't involve tedious repetitive interactive travel, or sitting around in one place for too long then "missing the boat," so to speak. Guess what? WoW had this spot on with gryphons. I thought they implemented that very well. If WoW hadn't fraked up the paladin class so badly (replacing it with pseudo cleric crap), I'd still be playing it.
Vanguard sounds like they are designing the paladin class exactly as I want to play it. But most everything else I hear from the game is disappointing.
Slashdot Mirror
Then again, what is the infant and/or youth mortality rate in a shanty town? I'd bet it's higher than in a "high profile" kid's neighborhood.
In other words, the children with the weaker systems might die young, when no one seems to care about it, in poor areas. In rich areas, those types of kids are kept isolated from anything that could harm them until they are 17, 18, 19 and off to college, where their problems exacerbate and they die and make the news.
Overall, I agree that living in a world with natural (mostly harmless) diseases is better than a sterile world (or one with man-made pollutants - smog hurts everybody). But there are also some benefits for some people by living in ultra-clean environments; they get to live longer.
Yeah, this is like pets.com's brilliant marketing strategy -
"Let's make a business of selling 50-lb bags of dog food with free shipping. While we lose money on each sale, by spending $25 million on Super Bowl advertising we can make back our losses on volume."
Not only that, but they (at least used to) supplement this with random samples of additional households. Years ago (early 1990s), my family was "Nielsen" for one week. They sent us a little book, one for each TV, and we filled in by hand what was watched on each TV, and by whom (by demographic).
I expect that they continue to do things like this, to ensure that their monitored households continue to represent an appropriately balanced sampling.
1. That was a quote by el-Jacko, not by the legislature.
2. Claiming that someone is engaging in fraud is not lobbying; that is a very specific legal term which Jack should understand and only use in its legal context. When used in a fashion that cannot be proven, against a person, business, or industry intentionally to harm their reputation, it could be construed as slander.
3. Committing libel against an industry to further your own agenda impacts both honest and integrity. You cannot claim that the industry is committing fraud when there is no evidence that they have done so.
Reagan Republicans being true Republicans? What about Lincoln Republicans?
Yes, but for how long will Slashdot continue to use that icon to represent Microsoft? My guess is 2016. Place your bets now!
What about us folks without a computer at home? Will they have a version for us, too?
Are there cases where a transplant has occured without rejection?
In cases where the source material is already from the recipient? Ribs reused as jaw bones, skin grafts, moving fat from stomach to breasts or bottom...
I wonder though about identical twins. Theoretically, couldn't they share organs without rejection? Of course, if one needs an organ due to a genetic disease, they probably both need it...
BTW, you guys should use Intel's new logo - it's been out since January.
Gnome updated their logo in 2003, and Slashdot still does not use it. Slashdot does not cater to corporate or marketing whim when choosing its logos - Slashdot liked the old one better, so that's the one it's gonna use!
After all, it's been years since Microsoft used the "Bill Gates is the Borg" logo for the company, since Star Trek is so out of vogue. And yet, Slashdot flat-out refuses to move to the new "Steve Ballmer is Darth Vader" logo that would reflect the company's modern marketing strategems.
Many of my friends depend on that little application for their music. Should iTunes decide to stop working for whatever reason, there wouldn't be much that the user could do. I would be worried about Apple facing RIAA lawsuits for selling music too cheap and then simply patching iTunes to charge every user another dime before they can listen to each track again. After all, didn't Apple just pull the $1 price out of their ass?
I know audiophiles will beat me over the head for this, but you know it's difficult to hear the difference when you write the music to CD, then rip it back as MP3?
The iTunes license allows you to write unencrypted files to disc. Perhaps the license prohibits re-ripping those to MP3; I don't know, having never read or agreed to it. But claiming that "should iTunes stop...there wouldn't be much that the user could do" is a little inaccurate, if the users have taken the steps that all users of any digital media should do - namely, making appropriate non-proprietary-formatted backups of all media.
Again, who among the intended audience of his blog [i]cares[/i]? Most non-technical people do understand that electronics require power, so few will assume that it runs on "zero" volts. Those that do not understand this will find out the hard way, eventually.
The 2.5 volt number used in my post was made up by me. Perhaps it works at 1.0 volt, allowing it to be powered by 1.5 V cells. (Of course, even this is a simplification, because a voltage range without a power or current rating is nearly meaningless. If the laptop requires 20 W, then supporting 1.5 V supply input yields a current draw of 13 A. This is a [i]big[/i] number for what is probably a small power jack. Not only would the 1.5 V cell drain all its power very quickly, the plastic around the laptop power jack would melt.)
I'd consider that a warning to never work at Alcatel! My company is far more forgiving about personal interactions at work. (Heck, I'm still at work at 7:45 on a Friday posting on Slashdot.)
I have read plenty of stories on Slashdot about companies so protective of their "secrets" that, when an employee gives his two-week notice, he is immediately terminated (with two weeks of pay) to avoid any opportunity to "steal" things. At my company, two friends are leaving soon. One announced he is leaving, and has been replaced already, but he is on a long vacation (still employed) to pack for his move. He'll be back for a while after the vacation. Another friend is going back to law school this fall - to completely change careers from software development. He told his boss a year before he planned to quit, and he's still working here.
I think it does for all music. My wife and I visited San Francisco earlier this year. While we were there, we looked for live, local music that we could enjoy. We only found a few places. To contrast, Austin has live bands playing at a score or more clubs, restaurants, or street corners almost every night. Even the grocery stores have live music. And the music varies, from rock, to country, to jazz, to folks, to blues, to bluegrass. Last week, when Clifford Antone (the owner of legendary blues club Antone's), the crowd included almost anyone associated with blues music in the country, including Doyle Bramhall, Jimmie Vaughn, and Gary Clark.
During SXSW, there are a few hundred bands that cram into those twenty clubs for five days of concerts. On top of that, there are scores of other bands that perform at venues outside of SXSW, or just set up on a street corner downtown with their amps and sound system, and play into the street.
Tonight, a non-special Friday night, I count 79 clubs and restaurants with live music in Austin, excluding those with just DJs or karaoke.
>> Have you ever been anywhere?
Yes
>> Okay, California is more snobby than the midwest, but California is about 1% as snobby as any place up in the Northeast.
Well, I've visited both California and the Northeast, but I did in fact grow up in the Midwest (and the South). Texas may have a big chip on its shoulder, but Austinites tend to reject traditional Texas labels.
>> Austin sounds nice, but on the other hand, your comments on it sound kind of, well, snobby.
Perhaps. I expect that people who live in California like their social scene. I found it very distasteful that people in California care so much about their clothing. In Austin, it is very acceptable to wear anything from a formal gown, to blue jeans, boots, and a cowboy hat, to a Doyle Bramhall II T-shirt and a mohawk. (Women's clothing is just as varied.)
>> Like braggin on Whole Foods. I'm glad for ya. Why would I care which is the first Whole Foods? Does that make it better?
Actually, yes, it does. It is significantly larger than any other Whole Foods in the nation, and has an amazing selection of in-store foods, products, and services. The store even has more than a dozen counter-style sit-down restaurants, where you can enjoy the food they sell, freshly prepared in front of you. (The crazy part is that I don't even shop there; I go to eat, then go up the street to the Central Market to buy groceries.)
I cannot get to the blog; it appears to be suffering from its own DOS attack at the moment.
Thus, I must assume that the blog is a general description of the product specifications, not a detailed, technical presentation. (My apologies if I am wrong.)
That said, the portion you cited is an acceptable simplification of the actual product specs, when the target audience is non-techincal. It may have been more accurate to say the following:
"The current prototype accepts input voltages from 2.25 to 23 Volts, including sources with high noise components. It can also correct for inverted supply inputs, allowing it to effectively support -2.25 to -23 Volts."
However, a non-technical person (perhaps even just a non-electrical engineer) would get little to no additional information from my quote than from his. Why should he write overly-complicated blog posts above the technical comprehension level of his intended audience?
Again, I cannot verify the blog post's intended audience, as I cannot access it. However, this is not the first time I've seen people on Slashdot react to non-technical writing by technical people, and attack those people for that writing. Instead of doing this, the correct response is to examine both the writer and his intended audience. If people on Slashdot are not the intended audience of the post, then the Slashdot reader should judge the technical level as the intended reader would, not as he or she does.
Cable is a two-way connection on the existing wire. (It is admittedly not a secure connection.) This is different than satellite services, which are absolutely one-way without telephone access.
(Though, I wouldn't be suprised to one day see either WiFi or a cell phone built into satellite receivers. The value of the viewing habits they could steal that way would be worth more than the cost of a phone call every few weeks.)
My Dish Network receivers have never had a phone line attached. I've never missed it or any of the "services" enabled by it.
Are they charging people who use progressive.com and geico.com now, too? What is insurance but a form of wager?
With gambling, you are spending some money in exchange for the chance of a good return. Your odds are improved if you are skilled or have someone on the inside.
With the stock market, you are investing some money in exchange for the chance of a good return. Your odd are improved if you are skilled or have insider information.
With insurance, you are spending money in exchange for the possibility of a return. Your odds are improved if you know what you are doing (maintaining the correct coverage for your risk) or know something on the inside (i.e. that you plan to kill the person you just took out a policy on, or that they have a secret terminal illness!).
Terry Pratchett's first Discworld book - The Colour of Magic - has a good and humorous explanation of insurance in terms of gambling.
Austin, Texas, is known as the Silicon Hills because it has reproduced Silicon Valley, albeit on a smaller scale.
It also has a major research university (University of Texas), which might be a key component. It also has a good supply of risk takers, and plenty of money.
But, it also has a few things that Silicon Valley lacks. Namely, it has a better cultural scene for folks. I don't mean the high-class snobby rich folks that fit in well in California. I mean young folks, the kind that like to live someplace that is the live-music capital of the world, with two world-class music festivals, a world-class movie festival, site of the flagship whole foods, the state's only public nude beach, and plenty more to keep you busy every week.
So Google places a banner on their site that says "We recognize you are coming from AT&T, and you must know that this company is giving you piss poor service in an attempt to blackmail us. If you care about that, call 1-800-CALL-ATT" or something.
How is this going to stop them? AT&T will tell me that "in the interest of giving you the best possible service, we have chosen select providers to guarantee high-speed access directly to our customers. For web search, we have chosen MSN Search, which is provided to you at blazingly-fast internet speeds at no extra charge."
Then do I threaten to cancel my service? I still have no where else to go...
Yeah, it's funny that the oldest surviving reference to me on the internet - from 1997 - is still the first Google hit on my name. (From the misheard lyric archive.) Fortunately it's not too bad...
The other hits are all from 2000 or later, and all of them are decently respectable.
So google.com has a internet connections coming in from AT&T, and AT&T says "You have to pay us extra because you are google". What's google going to do? They're going to call around and find someone else to provide the service.
..but probably Google will turn evil and offer tiered service, too.
You have the idea completely wrong. Here is the scenario as stated:
1. Google does not use AT&T for its ISP.
2. AT&T calls Google and says "We have 100,000 customers. Pay us $0.01 a packet or we will deliberately slow down or lose packets sent from you to our customers."
3. Google says "..."
This has nothing to do with service providers charging more to their own customers (who happen to be content providers). It has to do with service providers charging independent content providers a sort of "mob tax" to make sure nothing "happens" to their data on its route.
Sure if AT&T does this, AT&T's customers can move to Time Warner. Then what if Time Warner does it, too? Those are the only high-speed internet options I have. And even if there was a third-party ISP (i.e. Earthlink), they probably rent their lines from AT&T or Time Warner, and they would have the same restriction.
The only option I see is this one:
3. Google says "O Rly. Well then, we're going to take our nationwide dark fiber and roll out a low-cost high-speed nationwide ISP. When you've lost 20,000 customers, come back and apologize and we won't take your other 80,000."
You can record songs off the radio, then play them back whenever you wish, but a radio station cannot let you call in and control exactly what plays when.
It doesn't make sense to me, either, but that's how it works. All of these legal constructs set up around so-called "intellectual properties" seem tenuous, at best.
I'd rather see them greatly weakened, or greatly strengthened, with a huge reduction in duration. I'd be ok with content providers have 100% use of their information with no fair-use rights, if after five years it fell in the public domain. Or perhaps something in the middle, with 15-year strong rights (still subject to parody and review and research fair uses), followed by public domain. Or, allow longer copyrights will virtually all not-for-profit uses allowed.
My company has ~2000 employees, and it took years for them to pay $2000 for an automated external defibrillator. I think there actually was a heart attack before they bought one.
The cost of losing just one employee is far more than that, but some people fail to properly judge the risk of an event occurence when paying for safeguards to avoid it.
Yeah, it bothers me when people use the word "resistance" without referring to Ohm's Law...
Seriously, the same words have different meanings when said to different audiences, and different speakers might use words in different ways based on their own background. Use the context of the speech to identify meaning. Anytime someone speaks of a "return on investment" on Slashdot, I assume they are talking in very vauge, un-businesslike terms. When I use "(E)ROI" in a project plan, I know it means something very specific.
Industry-specific terms are important; common language is the only way any industry can work. But few industries expect their terms to be well used by the lay population. (I hope the religious "industry" doesn't complain to me about the use of their term!)
There is something to be said for having to wait for 30 minutes for a boat ride from Freeport to Butcherblock with islands to visit on the way. It keeps people more inclined to explore their current environment instead of looking for the fastest way to level up and going to the appropriate zone to do that.
Yeah, it made me say "Gee, I'm glad my wife plays a wizard and will get ports in a few levels."
I, too, want the game world to feel big. The later editions to EQ, especially the Plane of Knowledge ports, really shrunk the world, leaving large areas unserved by ports completely decimated. That's a really bad thing. Instantaneous portals just make the work too small.
But at the same time, sitting in one place for a long time isn't fun, either. There's a reason I bought a second computer while playing EQ, and it wasn't to run my second account most of the time. It's because I could get in a few good hours of 'net reading each night while played. And I also despised how helpless I felt as a paladin when traveling in some places. I had to be escorted like a kid, because I could not survive any other way due to my lack of self-invis or aggro-dropping abilities. (In the post-Brad era my AA horse solved a lot of that, and I also took to playing a monk alt.)
Instead, what I'd like is travel that takes time, shows how big the world really is, but doesn't involve tedious repetitive interactive travel, or sitting around in one place for too long then "missing the boat," so to speak. Guess what? WoW had this spot on with gryphons. I thought they implemented that very well. If WoW hadn't fraked up the paladin class so badly (replacing it with pseudo cleric crap), I'd still be playing it.
Vanguard sounds like they are designing the paladin class exactly as I want to play it. But most everything else I hear from the game is disappointing.