People could setup websites outside of WOW to advertise the existence of a group that they wanted to be homopobic free, and restrict membership to the same people that would otherwise join a gay-friendly guild. Make it a guild rule that the homosexuality is not talked about in the game and Blizzard can't really complain since the players wouldn't be violating the rule in game. If someone asks how to find a gay-guild, tell them to search on Google. Additionally, the group name would have to be free of any reference to what the guild was.
Any other groups that wanted to only guild with people like themselves could do so as well. Christians could do this, but they couldn't have blantant references to Christianity or Christian symbols in their names.
If this isn't good enough for either group, then it sounds like somebody is pushing an agenda, one that isn't in Blizzard's best interests, and since it's their game, everyone has to play by their rules.
They could even give give away the updates for free. How many people would buy a system that would never go out of date?
They could allow you to install on as many machines as you want. If they don't care about box sales, they could even allow you to copy the disks and distribute them yourself. Even if they don't get money, they'll make sure Microsoft won't, or at least make Microsoft change their price, support, or install policies.
They could actually support the companies that make software for Linux instead of competing with them the way Microsoft does. Sure, software makers probably won't be able to make money making an Office clone since many already exist, but you I don't think anybody will be making a free TurboTax considering the annual updates (barring a tax overhaul by Congress).
They could give their OS and support to schools and charities for free, and have the schools recommend students make their next computer purchase with Linux in mind. If a student buys a computer, their school gets a discount on their next computer purchase.
Develop wiki-e-textbooks and activity guides with the collaboration of the best teachers and writers in the country, and distribute them free to every school, so every school would have the best textbooks in the country at no cost. Have DRM-free e-books that integrate seamlessly with the school software, so that every student would have a portable copy of their books.
I'm sure the bright folks at Google could have even better ideas than these, but there is your start.
Two days late, but it was the weekend. You might check out dvortyboards.com. forTheir order page is here and they are switchable boards labeled dvorak and qwerty boards and qwerty only, but take a look at the 2030. The nav buttons are to the right of the spacebar where the Alt, Windows, and Control buttons would be. If you need the numpad, hit the numlock button at the top right, and the grey keys become your numpad. The enter and backspace keys are now in the middle of the keyboard where you can hit them with your index fingers, the caps lock is out of the way in the top center, and there is an extra shift key next to the Ctrl and Alt buttons to aid in executing keyboard commands. I don't see a windows key, but maybe that's what the start button is for.
My best friend has had an XBox since it came out. Last year, his XBox went bad, and he replaced it with another one because it was his only DVD player, and since he has a game collection, his DVD player might as well play games too. It does what he wants, plays movies and XBox games. For people with limited space, convergence is a good thing.
Well, what would be nice is if we had something like RSS, only better (ha ha) where the readers can rate the articles and you can benefit from there ratings. If your RSS reader could figure out what topics that interest you (game consoles), compile a list of all items that interest you while weeding out things that you aren't interested in (PC games, portables, etc.), and out of every article that covers a piece of news (Sony event at 3E), present the highest rated article by other people who have the same interest, and hopefully would be the best written and most informative of the available stories (release date of console, list of games at release, price, etc.). Alternatively, give the best story, plus new information others found informative (the new console will be 100% backwards compatable with both prior consoles).
If this were working, you could sit at the dining room table for breakfast, and read your web news that has been downloaded by your computer and fed to your e-paper reader, and read the best articles from around the world, and hopefully do it in a quarter of the time of sorting through your paper, magazines, and web sites that you currently do. That is the hope and promise of electronic publication, distribution, and community that you find on the web.
Likewise, RSS suffers from the opposite flaw, you can't get to information without going to the site after it drops off the RSS feed list from a site. Slashdot's feed only lists the 10 most recent items. If you miss a day and want to see what was run, you have to load the previous day's page from slashdot individually, which is fine for slashdot since everyday it's been up is still available that way. But try to get the Friday feed from Google News or any major news site that removes day old news from the feed. With emails, you can go through them just as easily as the day they first came out, and you can more easily search them for specific content that you can search websites that seem to have very poor search utilities. I'm not saying one is better than the other, I use both, and both have limitations.
Although true, there were plenty of discrimination against the Irish and Catholics in this country, like this and a strong bit of animousity between Irish immigrants and blacks because they were competing for the same bottom of the barrel jobs, and both were considered unhirable for better jobs.
They can call it a shortage if it's not on the shelf when the customer wants to pay for it on the first day. If the extra units are in a warehouse in California, they can have them on the shelf in stores in a couple of days (a week tops), in time for Christmas, and hope to be the must have item of the season that everybody's clammering for because a thousand people couldn't get them. Unfortunately, there are millions of families that can easily burn a grand on Christmas, that might make this strategy a success, although you usually see it work better on items priced under $50.
Pretty much true. The Catholic Church places final authority in the bishops, who use scripture to inform their faith, and pass their faith and authority on to new bishops.
When the Protestants decided to break with the Church, they knew that they couldn't claim authority decended through 1500 years of bishops, so Luther said that the Bible alone (sola scriptura) was the final authority of all belief and truth. Since he could not force someone to give him authority, he made the bible the final authority, he made himself its interpreter.
However sola scriptura rapidly spun into two different interpretations. Luther claimed traditional teaching was true as long as it didn't directly contradict the bible. Most other sola scriptura folks said that something had to be literally be written in the scriptures for it to be true. So Luther could profess a belief that Mary's body was taken into heaven after death, but Zwingli and Calvin said that since it wasn't in the scripture, it didn't happen. Modern fundamentalists are a further extension of the Calvinist movement, that something must be written in the bible for it to be true.
The actual Fundamentalist and Evangelical movements were spawned as a reaction against liberal (lax?) practice and theology in America in the late 1800s, with the publishing of The Fundamentals in 1909.
The divorce rate for the last hundred years has been within a couple of points of being 1/2 the rate of contracepting couples. Unfortunately, I don't have a chart with both sets of numbers on the same graph. The significant increase of usage began in the roaring 20s, and really took off with the Anglican church approval of contraception in 1929, which was wildly denounced in major news publications of the day such as the Washington Post, the NY Times, and most major newspapers. The pope's 1930 announcement was a follow up to this event. The text of that document can be found at http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/pius_xi/encyclic als/documents/hf_p-xi_enc_31121930_casti-connubii_ en.html in which he predicted the downfall of family life if contraception became wide spread.
Not possible. The teaching of papable infallibility means that if something is believed infallibly (i.e. all dogmas), then it is true, and can never be shown to be false. For a pope to attempt to reverse a dogma, either the previous or new teaching would have to be false. This has never happened, and never will. If it should ever happen, the Church would rightly close its doors and shut down opperation.
The Church is actually correct in its stance on contraceptives and abortion.
The side effects of contraception in general: 50% divorce rate A high rate of marital infidelity Significant decay of families
All of this was predicted by the pope in 1930, long before such ills came to pass.
Side effects of the pill Blood clots and heart attacks Increased chance of breast cancer 30+% of women have their libedo nearly eliminated (1/3rd of those don't get it back after they go off the pill)
The church encourages NFP which has no side effects. The divorce rate of people who use NFP is about 3%. Uneducated women in India have used NFP with an effectiveness of 99.8%. That's 1 in 500 that has difficulty, about 5 times better than the pill. NFP is nearly free (I can get the charts for one year of use for $1, which gives a lifetime cost for most women of about $20, the cost of the pill for one month). NFP is highly scientific, since a woman has to observe her symptoms (temperature and mucus), record a chart, and let her partner calculate based on a few rules whether she'd get pregnant by engaging in sex on that day. From the first non-fertile day in the cycle through the end of the cycle (10-14 days) and into the early part of the next cycle, you can forget getting pregnant, and engage in sex with more freedom and less chance of getting pregnant than with any other method of birth control. Not surprisingly NFP users tend to report higher levels of sexual satisfaction and marrital happiness than those who use contraceptives.
Hopefully, the Church will do more to teach this to the people in the congregation, because 95% of priest never talk about this. Starting in a month or two, I'm going to start doing my part to make it happen.
I am a former seminarian who decided to get married instead, and I agree with the Church's sexual teaching 100%. If you think that the church is wrong on this issue, maybe you should wonder why I, a sex loving man would agree, and use NFP when I have the choice of both options.
There is a fundamental difference between abortion and the death penalty. As taught by the Church, Abortion is murder (taking of an innocent life), but the death penalty is not (presumably, the person is guilty). If you read the CCC (Catechism of the Catholic Church) you find that there is no exception to allow abortion, but on the issue of the death penalty, the Church would eliminate it in all cases except where the criminal was so dangerous that the public couldn't be protected by a sentence of life in prison. But even in cases where the death penalty is not warranted, it's still not classified as murder as long as the criminal is given his day in court and was truly guilty.
Not to mention the transportation costs, and the retailer's cut. And the person buying would have to buy a DVD burner and blank disks. Maybe they can provide the disk image to be put on the cover of a LightScribe disk for another buck.
Re:Ma Bell? Yo no entiendo - SHORT VERSION
on
Ma Bell is Back
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I would say prices have gone down. In the 80's the price of long distance was over 10 cents a minute. Now, you can get plans that run about 2 cents a minute. I've even seen calling cards that give long distance for under a penny a minute. I do agree that the Bells owning the lines still impedes competition (I'd rather the local government own the infrastructure, the same way the government owns the roads), but I would say that the breakup of AT&T and the competition from Sprint, MCI, and other competitors has brought lower prices. Of course, if we had government owned lines, maybe we'd have free phone like we have mostly free roads, then again, maybe not.
Ah, the old, let (insert deity's name here) protect himself. i.e. If the stars (or whatever hides the meaning found within astrology) didn't want the little guy bashed, it/she/he probably could have made the little probe miss the comet.
That said, maybe there's some super advanced space civilizations that have been moving stars around, throwing off her predictions all this time?
Considering nobody's even taken into consideration the amount of time that he'll be administering the backups, he'll should be at 5 minutes a day within 15 minutes after he gets to work. Between making a quick check of the hardware, getting the offsite backups ready to go (after checking the backup logs), this is in no way realistic. He should be planning on 10 to 20 hours a week, minimum.
I was thinking about what would make a cool MMORPG over the weekend.
Starship Troopers. But dump the name for licencing reasons, not to mention the baggage that comes with a prewritten story.
There can be soldiers on planets fighting each other face to face, space battles between the organic alien creatures and human battlefleets. Each side could have various levels of officers played by players who give other players orders, organized as two basic official guilds, maybe with a couple of staff members working with each side. The generals are basically running the chess game portion of the world.
Then, there could be an R&D portion of the games. The humans develop new weapons by researching technology, which allows new weapons physics (moving from traditional guns to plasma), better power production, faster spacecraft, stronger armor, and decreasing the weight of older technologies to let the foot solders carry more, or reduce the size of the gun by being able to using smaller parts, which allows the soldier to move quicker.
On the other side, aliens use genetic research to enhance the creatures they put in the field.
Now to do something this strategic, some servers might run only at certain times of the day (6-8), so that people that only want to play an hour or two can play, and don't feel like they are missing time they should be in the game.
On page two of this article, one long time outspoken PETA member is claimed to have rated a health rat as more important than a sick child.
David Kupelian of World Net Daily considers PETA's official non-committal stance on abortion to be saying that an animal's life is worth saving, a human babies isn't.
I would say that PETA does consider animal life to be at least equal if not supperior to human life.
I understand that Microsoft will be adding an option to turn off flash drives as a Global Policy, even for local admins. I think it won't take effect until Longhorn comes out.
Why does everyone assume that when you time travel, your arrival destination will be relative to the nearest interstellar body mass (i.e. Earth)? What if the destination is relative to the center of the galaxy, or more likely, the center of the universe. Maybe all the time travellers from the future have been twarted by ending up in outer space, light years away from where they wanted to be. Anyway, bring at least a space suit, and hope you don't end up too close to a star.
Further, how are the laws of conservation not broken if you are able to go back in time. If you are on planet earth, moving through space, and you end up on earth, but at a time when earth is moving in a different direction than when you left, maybe you'll be flattend by a pancake or flung into space.
In theory, time travel is interesting, but not actually likely to be a success.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh no, do you think my kids will be bored with games they've never played before?
Any other groups that wanted to only guild with people like themselves could do so as well. Christians could do this, but they couldn't have blantant references to Christianity or Christian symbols in their names.
If this isn't good enough for either group, then it sounds like somebody is pushing an agenda, one that isn't in Blizzard's best interests, and since it's their game, everyone has to play by their rules.
They could allow you to install on as many machines as you want. If they don't care about box sales, they could even allow you to copy the disks and distribute them yourself. Even if they don't get money, they'll make sure Microsoft won't, or at least make Microsoft change their price, support, or install policies.
They could actually support the companies that make software for Linux instead of competing with them the way Microsoft does. Sure, software makers probably won't be able to make money making an Office clone since many already exist, but you I don't think anybody will be making a free TurboTax considering the annual updates (barring a tax overhaul by Congress).
They could give their OS and support to schools and charities for free, and have the schools recommend students make their next computer purchase with Linux in mind. If a student buys a computer, their school gets a discount on their next computer purchase.
Develop wiki-e-textbooks and activity guides with the collaboration of the best teachers and writers in the country, and distribute them free to every school, so every school would have the best textbooks in the country at no cost. Have DRM-free e-books that integrate seamlessly with the school software, so that every student would have a portable copy of their books.
I'm sure the bright folks at Google could have even better ideas than these, but there is your start.
Two days late, but it was the weekend. You might check out dvortyboards.com. forTheir order page is here and they are switchable boards labeled dvorak and qwerty boards and qwerty only, but take a look at the 2030. The nav buttons are to the right of the spacebar where the Alt, Windows, and Control buttons would be. If you need the numpad, hit the numlock button at the top right, and the grey keys become your numpad. The enter and backspace keys are now in the middle of the keyboard where you can hit them with your index fingers, the caps lock is out of the way in the top center, and there is an extra shift key next to the Ctrl and Alt buttons to aid in executing keyboard commands. I don't see a windows key, but maybe that's what the start button is for.
My best friend has had an XBox since it came out. Last year, his XBox went bad, and he replaced it with another one because it was his only DVD player, and since he has a game collection, his DVD player might as well play games too. It does what he wants, plays movies and XBox games. For people with limited space, convergence is a good thing.
Well, what would be nice is if we had something like RSS, only better (ha ha) where the readers can rate the articles and you can benefit from there ratings. If your RSS reader could figure out what topics that interest you (game consoles), compile a list of all items that interest you while weeding out things that you aren't interested in (PC games, portables, etc.), and out of every article that covers a piece of news (Sony event at 3E), present the highest rated article by other people who have the same interest, and hopefully would be the best written and most informative of the available stories (release date of console, list of games at release, price, etc.). Alternatively, give the best story, plus new information others found informative (the new console will be 100% backwards compatable with both prior consoles). If this were working, you could sit at the dining room table for breakfast, and read your web news that has been downloaded by your computer and fed to your e-paper reader, and read the best articles from around the world, and hopefully do it in a quarter of the time of sorting through your paper, magazines, and web sites that you currently do. That is the hope and promise of electronic publication, distribution, and community that you find on the web.
Likewise, RSS suffers from the opposite flaw, you can't get to information without going to the site after it drops off the RSS feed list from a site. Slashdot's feed only lists the 10 most recent items. If you miss a day and want to see what was run, you have to load the previous day's page from slashdot individually, which is fine for slashdot since everyday it's been up is still available that way. But try to get the Friday feed from Google News or any major news site that removes day old news from the feed. With emails, you can go through them just as easily as the day they first came out, and you can more easily search them for specific content that you can search websites that seem to have very poor search utilities. I'm not saying one is better than the other, I use both, and both have limitations.
And if you keep the plan beyond the original agreement, they get to pocket that amount every month you keep paying for the same plan.
Although true, there were plenty of discrimination against the Irish and Catholics in this country, like this and a strong bit of animousity between Irish immigrants and blacks because they were competing for the same bottom of the barrel jobs, and both were considered unhirable for better jobs.
They can call it a shortage if it's not on the shelf when the customer wants to pay for it on the first day. If the extra units are in a warehouse in California, they can have them on the shelf in stores in a couple of days (a week tops), in time for Christmas, and hope to be the must have item of the season that everybody's clammering for because a thousand people couldn't get them. Unfortunately, there are millions of families that can easily burn a grand on Christmas, that might make this strategy a success, although you usually see it work better on items priced under $50.
Pretty much true. The Catholic Church places final authority in the bishops, who use scripture to inform their faith, and pass their faith and authority on to new bishops.
When the Protestants decided to break with the Church, they knew that they couldn't claim authority decended through 1500 years of bishops, so Luther said that the Bible alone (sola scriptura) was the final authority of all belief and truth. Since he could not force someone to give him authority, he made the bible the final authority, he made himself its interpreter.
However sola scriptura rapidly spun into two different interpretations. Luther claimed traditional teaching was true as long as it didn't directly contradict the bible. Most other sola scriptura folks said that something had to be literally be written in the scriptures for it to be true. So Luther could profess a belief that Mary's body was taken into heaven after death, but Zwingli and Calvin said that since it wasn't in the scripture, it didn't happen. Modern fundamentalists are a further extension of the Calvinist movement, that something must be written in the bible for it to be true.
The actual Fundamentalist and Evangelical movements were spawned as a reaction against liberal (lax?) practice and theology in America in the late 1800s, with the publishing of The Fundamentals in 1909.
The divorce rate for the last hundred years has been within a couple of points of being 1/2 the rate of contracepting couples. Unfortunately, I don't have a chart with both sets of numbers on the same graph. The significant increase of usage began in the roaring 20s, and really took off with the Anglican church approval of contraception in 1929, which was wildly denounced in major news publications of the day such as the Washington Post, the NY Times, and most major newspapers. The pope's 1930 announcement was a follow up to this event. The text of that document can be found at http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/pius_xi/encyclic als/documents/hf_p-xi_enc_31121930_casti-connubii_ en.html in which he predicted the downfall of family life if contraception became wide spread.
Not possible. The teaching of papable infallibility means that if something is believed infallibly (i.e. all dogmas), then it is true, and can never be shown to be false. For a pope to attempt to reverse a dogma, either the previous or new teaching would have to be false. This has never happened, and never will. If it should ever happen, the Church would rightly close its doors and shut down opperation.
The Church is actually correct in its stance on contraceptives and abortion.
The side effects of contraception in general:
50% divorce rate
A high rate of marital infidelity
Significant decay of families
All of this was predicted by the pope in 1930, long before such ills came to pass.
Side effects of the pill
Blood clots and heart attacks
Increased chance of breast cancer
30+% of women have their libedo nearly eliminated (1/3rd of those don't get it back after they go off the pill)
The church encourages NFP which has no side effects. The divorce rate of people who use NFP is about 3%. Uneducated women in India have used NFP with an effectiveness of 99.8%. That's 1 in 500 that has difficulty, about 5 times better than the pill. NFP is nearly free (I can get the charts for one year of use for $1, which gives a lifetime cost for most women of about $20, the cost of the pill for one month). NFP is highly scientific, since a woman has to observe her symptoms (temperature and mucus), record a chart, and let her partner calculate based on a few rules whether she'd get pregnant by engaging in sex on that day. From the first non-fertile day in the cycle through the end of the cycle (10-14 days) and into the early part of the next cycle, you can forget getting pregnant, and engage in sex with more freedom and less chance of getting pregnant than with any other method of birth control. Not surprisingly NFP users tend to report higher levels of sexual satisfaction and marrital happiness than those who use contraceptives.
Hopefully, the Church will do more to teach this to the people in the congregation, because 95% of priest never talk about this. Starting in a month or two, I'm going to start doing my part to make it happen.
I am a former seminarian who decided to get married instead, and I agree with the Church's sexual teaching 100%. If you think that the church is wrong on this issue, maybe you should wonder why I, a sex loving man would agree, and use NFP when I have the choice of both options.
There is a fundamental difference between abortion and the death penalty. As taught by the Church, Abortion is murder (taking of an innocent life), but the death penalty is not (presumably, the person is guilty). If you read the CCC (Catechism of the Catholic Church) you find that there is no exception to allow abortion, but on the issue of the death penalty, the Church would eliminate it in all cases except where the criminal was so dangerous that the public couldn't be protected by a sentence of life in prison. But even in cases where the death penalty is not warranted, it's still not classified as murder as long as the criminal is given his day in court and was truly guilty.
Not to mention the transportation costs, and the retailer's cut. And the person buying would have to buy a DVD burner and blank disks. Maybe they can provide the disk image to be put on the cover of a LightScribe disk for another buck.
I would say prices have gone down. In the 80's the price of long distance was over 10 cents a minute. Now, you can get plans that run about 2 cents a minute. I've even seen calling cards that give long distance for under a penny a minute. I do agree that the Bells owning the lines still impedes competition (I'd rather the local government own the infrastructure, the same way the government owns the roads), but I would say that the breakup of AT&T and the competition from Sprint, MCI, and other competitors has brought lower prices. Of course, if we had government owned lines, maybe we'd have free phone like we have mostly free roads, then again, maybe not.
Once they use it and become familiar with it, it will be much easier to get them to consider using it.
Ah, the old, let (insert deity's name here) protect himself. i.e. If the stars (or whatever hides the meaning found within astrology) didn't want the little guy bashed, it/she/he probably could have made the little probe miss the comet. That said, maybe there's some super advanced space civilizations that have been moving stars around, throwing off her predictions all this time?
Considering nobody's even taken into consideration the amount of time that he'll be administering the backups, he'll should be at 5 minutes a day within 15 minutes after he gets to work. Between making a quick check of the hardware, getting the offsite backups ready to go (after checking the backup logs), this is in no way realistic. He should be planning on 10 to 20 hours a week, minimum.
I was thinking about what would make a cool MMORPG over the weekend. Starship Troopers. But dump the name for licencing reasons, not to mention the baggage that comes with a prewritten story. There can be soldiers on planets fighting each other face to face, space battles between the organic alien creatures and human battlefleets. Each side could have various levels of officers played by players who give other players orders, organized as two basic official guilds, maybe with a couple of staff members working with each side. The generals are basically running the chess game portion of the world. Then, there could be an R&D portion of the games. The humans develop new weapons by researching technology, which allows new weapons physics (moving from traditional guns to plasma), better power production, faster spacecraft, stronger armor, and decreasing the weight of older technologies to let the foot solders carry more, or reduce the size of the gun by being able to using smaller parts, which allows the soldier to move quicker. On the other side, aliens use genetic research to enhance the creatures they put in the field. Now to do something this strategic, some servers might run only at certain times of the day (6-8), so that people that only want to play an hour or two can play, and don't feel like they are missing time they should be in the game.
David Kupelian of World Net Daily considers PETA's official non-committal stance on abortion to be saying that an animal's life is worth saving, a human babies isn't.
I would say that PETA does consider animal life to be at least equal if not supperior to human life.
I understand that Microsoft will be adding an option to turn off flash drives as a Global Policy, even for local admins. I think it won't take effect until Longhorn comes out.
Why does everyone assume that when you time travel, your arrival destination will be relative to the nearest interstellar body mass (i.e. Earth)? What if the destination is relative to the center of the galaxy, or more likely, the center of the universe. Maybe all the time travellers from the future have been twarted by ending up in outer space, light years away from where they wanted to be. Anyway, bring at least a space suit, and hope you don't end up too close to a star.
Further, how are the laws of conservation not broken if you are able to go back in time. If you are on planet earth, moving through space, and you end up on earth, but at a time when earth is moving in a different direction than when you left, maybe you'll be flattend by a pancake or flung into space.
In theory, time travel is interesting, but not actually likely to be a success.
http://www.onrpg.com/mmorpg-free-games3.html