Am I the only one who thinks Olbermann is a left-wing O'Reilly?
I don't know whether he's quite such a pathological liar as O'Reilly but his whole rhetoric...
About all the/.-is-so-liberal whining:
I think you're wrong. I think based on the discussions on different kinds of stories that/. is actually very strongly libertarian.
Most people here prefer a government that is socially liberal and fiscally conservative. The reason it seems/. is overwhelmingly liberal in discussions such as this one is that people seem to assume that supporting the Dems atm is the same as being liberal. It is not. Clinton was both less obsessed with spying on you and didn't blow the budget so he could cut taxes for millionaires. He also didn't piss off just about all of your allies (notice how a few years ago, every time there was a story about the EU at least one Brit wrote a post that the UK should leave the EU and enter a closer relationship with the US? I haven't seen any of those lately =) and I think about a third of/. readers was non-US according to one of the old polls.
If I had to make a list with 10 people I'd like to see as POTUS there'd be more Reps than Dems on that list but somehow the demagogues, corrupt and stupid seem to have hijacked the GOP.
If Sony had made a deal with the DVD coalition and accepted the HD-DVD standard I think they would be in a much better position right now. They would only take part of the HD-DVD licensing profits, but it would be cash in the bank. Business is about risk, but it's also about taking the easy profits when you can.
Just about the only advantage of the HD-DVD standard is easier retooling of existing manufacturing lines. The cost of the discs probably won't be too different in the long run and is irrelevant anyway (with $60 games and $40 movies who cares whether the disc costs a penny or two?). The reason Toshiba's HD-DVD drive is so cheap is that they aren't stupid. They saw the price of the PS3 did some quick calculations and decided on the same razorblade model Sony's using, while BD manufactures use the usual approach (for consumer electronics) of first milking the super-rich and then slowly lower the price.
Imagine if you will, Sony including the only high definition format disc in their PS3. A dual layer HD-DVD has 30 gigs of storage, more than enough to hold the 22 gigs of Resistance: Fall of Man.
But still vastly less than what I can have on a BD. What do I care about the number of gigs for the PS3 I want a replacement for my DVD-R (or +R or whatever) drive and Blu-Ray is superior (also, unlike HD-DVD, it's been developed with burning discs in mind. I think every BD drive for PC you can buy atm is a BD-R while afaik there isn't even an HD-DVD-R announced).
Every single movie studio releasing their films on the only high definition format: HD-DVD.
Not important. IIRC someone developed a combined head for reading BD and HD-DVD anyway. I think within a few years most drives will support both and the cost overhead shouldn't be so bad (and if a drive then costs $18 instead of $15, so what?). This is not Betamax vs. VHS.
Sony would not be having the blue diode production problems that it is currently having.
Because they wouldn't have to manufacture 405nm diodes for Blu-Ray and 405nm diodes for HD-DVD but could focus on only one waveleng... oh wait.
Because all of the manufacturers would be focusing on only one format, costs would come down even quicker.
Manufacturing costs for discs are in no way connected to the price you pay when you buy one. The companies will charge what the market's willing to pay and a bit more regardless of what it costs to produce them. And apart from the diode shortage the biggest cost for players seems to be the hardware to decode the video which is almost identical for both anyway (as they support the same codecs and I don't think BD's Java is much worse than the thing for HDDVD MS came up with - forgot the name sorry). MS wants $199 for its add-on which probably won't lose them too much money and the lower-end PS3 which has about the same stuff as MS's higher end 360 is $100 more (but I could see Sony losing more on the lower-end model, because that's the point of the lower-end PS3: Get people to buy the more expensive one). So about $150 per drive for both at this stage. Doesn't seem too bad and I'd think the diode shortage is a bigger headache for both.
The high definition era would begin with the same unity as the DVD era. Sony would be guaranteed a huge quantity of money from licensing.
Is it too much to ask that for once the better format wins? It's not like there's much difference between them. Both license freely to 3rd parties; DRM is crappy and identical; costs aren't that different.
Instead, Sony decided that it had the Playstation brand as a magic bullet and gave the finger to the rest of the DVD coalition.
Well they weren't alone; there's Philips of course and Apple
Dell
HP
Hitachi
LG
Mitsubishi Electric
Panasonic
Pioneer
Philips
Samsung
Sharp
Sony
Sun Microsystems
TDK
Thomson
Twentieth Century Fox
Walt Disney
Warner Bros on the board of directors alone. See here
There is no wind, this is a completely theoretical argument based on idealized circumstances because noone in his right mind would blow a fan at a sail
The idea is that if you position the fan right and trim the sail correctly the sail will act like a u-tube (tube as in tube not as in webpage) put at the end of a jet-engine (look at the wikipedia article on thrust-vectoring or the Harrier).
The air is pushed forward by the fan and then turned around 180 by the sail therefore it leaves the system fan+sail backwards and therefore pushes it forward. As the whole system is far from perfect thrust is less than if you just pointed the fan backwards.
Yikes! I thought the iPod was evil because Apple didn't give me a choice...now it seems no choice is just what the doctor ordered! How stupid does Microsoft think we are?
Well, 65 million iPods and counting say we're stupid enough, not to mention the millions of people happy with Windows+Office.
Well, it looks like most gamers will be stuck with the $600 version, need it or not!
No, because "most gamers" won't buy their PS3 at launch (Because even if they wanted to there wouldn't be enough PS3s). I certainly won't buy one until the first (or most likely the second) round of slashing the price down to more sane values.
Although it's probably actually a good move for launch. They can't possibly meet demand with only 500,000 PS3s at launch, so charging as much as possible makes sense.
It just makes sense. I've yet to meet even one person who's happy that he got a 360 Core at launch but I've seen lots of people with Core systems complain that they couldn't get the Premium version.
and having to spend $500+ every year to keep up with the latest games (and be competitive in multiplayer games) as downsides of PC gaming.
WTF; I assume they compete in the "get maximum fps on the fps of the week" category. Otherwise they'd only have to upgrade (perhaps) their PCs when switching to a new game in which they try to be competitive which shouldn't happen all that often because if you really love a game and want to be the best in it you don't change games every 3 months.
And this whole cost argument is stupid. If you're the average geek you pay perhaps $200-300 more for a gaming PC than for a normal PC because apart from a high-end graphics card you'd need everything else (recent but not the latest CPU, enough RAM, whatever) anyway for work, internet, videos, etc.
No, it's not you, it's cnet having a sensationalist headline, and/. editors never read more than the headline of an article, of course
The cnet article has this to say about movie playback:
Vincent Bautista, Sony's product manager for data storage, told CNET.com.au that due to copy protection issues and lagging software development, the drive will only play user-recorded high-definition content from a digital camcorder, and not commercial movies released under the BD format.
Bautista says that one of two reasons for this is the fact that commercial content is encrypted with High-Bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP), which can only be decrypted using a HDCP-compliant graphics card that offers DVI or HDMI connections. Since there are currently no PCs for sale offering graphics chips that support HDCP, this isn't yet possible.
The second reason, according to Bautista, is that BD playback software that can decrypt HDCP isn't "released as a saleable item yet". Today, the only HDCP-supporting BD playback application is the OEM version of Intervideo WinDVD BD that's bundled with Sony's VAIO VGN-AR18GP notebook. The AR18GP also offers an HDCP-compliant HDMI connector, which makes it capable of playing commercial movies without issue.
The 21st century began 2001-01-01. The first decade of your life's over the day you've lived 10 years, i.e. your 11th birthday. Same principle applies here.
So the correct title for the article would be "The Top 100 Best-Selling-According-To-A-Metric-Accounting-For- About-20%-Of-Sales-That's-Additionally-Skewing-Res ults PC Games of this Century-and-the-last-year-of-the-last-one." But I guess the editor shortened it.
Half-Life 2
Publisher: Vivendi Games
Developer: Valve Software
Released: Nov 04
Estimated Sales: 680,000
Valve says they've sold 4 million copies of Half-Life 2 (here). This means the list's numbers are less than 20% of all sales. The rest was sold outside the US (as the parent pointed out, the PC is more important in Europe and elsewhere) and online. While Valve's Steam means that this is probably more pronounced for HL2 than for other games (otoh certain genres tend to do better in different countries, so even if HL2 is an exception, it shouldn't be the only one) it nevertheless shows that that list is pretty much worthless.
If you want to, shall we look at the way/. culture tends to normalize rather than diversify? Have you noticed that the majority smothers the minorities? What chance would a Christian have on slashdot? What chance would an outspoken republican have here?
You are aware that in most threads about stuff prone to discussions like this up to a third of modded-up comments are "Christians" and "Republicans" whining about how noone mods-up their comments (in "" because I refuse to believe that the whiners are a representative subset of those groups; although watching the news seems to indicate that they're a very vocal minority).
The reason that the comments are in the minority is hardly that all/. readers are atheist commie liberals, there are lots of religious-but-not-in-your-fscking-face people around (i.e. me) and I think the general political stance tends to be libertarian (i.e. fiscally conservative and socially do-whatever-you-want), it's that the GOP and religious right are seriously out of whack.
In the case of evolution, there's more than enough room for God in the theory of evolution (just do some research on the stance of the Catholic Church), but instead we have people that honestly believe the earth's 6000 years old and continously misrepresent the definition of theory in a scientific context to squeeze in their pseudo-science that is a complete waste of money because it can never ever produce anything useful by its very definition.
jm2c
But, Civ 4 is a lot better than Civ 3 in terms of opportunites for less clicking and scrolling. I really don't see the point in bitching about the interface of a ~5 year old game...
Oh yeah Mr Know-it-all? So he plays the current instead of the previous incarnation of the game, he sees that someone had the same idea he had but years ago and more or less fixed it, he now can't write a 6-page article for his site, which doesn't get/.ed and therefore doesn't get all those people clicking on ads, gets into financial troubles and decides to fire that guy who didn't write articles just because they were superfluous.
To be fair he mentions Civ4 but just to assert that it isn't any better than Civ3 with the same attitude my physics professor used for those parts of proofs that contradicted basic maths (it's a venerable tradition in physics and called proof by obvious obviousity =)
If being able to look at yourself in the mirror was a proper incentive, communism would have worked.
Face it, if people have to choose between lying in a relatively minor case (honestly, what was the damage in this case? I wager all of them would have bought Leopard anyway and they'd have used their new-found knowledge just for hyping the product, the very foundation of Apple's success =) and losing their job they will lie. Many bankruptcies and large accidents are the result of people lying in cases of major misconduct to keep their job.
Why don't these people who complain about non-user-friendlyness just use Ubuntu.
Because the last time I tried to install it (today in fact) the installer crashed while trying to do a fsck on my fat32 partitions, something I don't know how to deactivate because I don't see the option anywhere in the partitioner?
Although the live-cd finally gives me more than 60Hz without editing the xorg.conf. One step forward, two steps back.
If the leaks are as bad as the GP said and it's really the html engine either Apple inserted the leak themselves or it's a bug that's been fixed in khtml for a long time.
I haven't seen a leak in konqueror since KDE 3.3.
Perhaps Apple's decision to fork khtml instead of contributing to the mainline version wasn't so clever after all.
You'll want MkvToolNix. It's gui's called mmg (and is part of the package).
Create an avi with video and audio in dvd::rip, have it extract the vobsub file. Then use mmg to merge the avi and the vobsub file (mmg can split the files too, so don't do it in dvd::rip).
If you're ready to invest more time you might look at how to create a x264 video (if you got the horsepower for playback that is) because it's much better than even XviD.
Yes, there is./. had an article about it (linking to an article on arstechnica iirc) a few weeks ago where everyone was bitching about the security implications.
I'm not sure whether imdb's accurate but from what I know the idea to do this movie and with this storyline is from Abrams. Now, "Hey, let's redo the story of X, Y and Z...but with them as kids!!!" might seem like the oldest cliche in the book but for now I trust Abrams. He's shown that he can do character-driven and action shows, Ron Moore showed that you can do serious and superior versions of old shows and with Abrams coming mostly from a TV background perhaps we get not only a great movie but a great new TV show too.
OTOH it could be a disaster but after Star Trek IX&X and Enterprise we'd just continue to boldly suck like no roll of film's sucked before (well, not really, one of the advantages of working in the film business is that there's always something worse than your pile of sh*t) =P
a) There's only so much inventory a retailer's going to have lying around. If the PSP didn't sell no retailer would order more from Sony.
b) If Nintendo doesn't want people to compare Sony's shipped versus their sold figures all they have to do is publish their own shipped figures. They just have to add it as an afterthought to the sold figures (20 million sold and over 768 million shipped).
And it's not only HOPE. The FBI or perhaps the NSA reads/. and regularly takes down the pages the stories link to. Probably to censor them as a few hours/days later their often back online.
I think a lot of this is to do with the (deserved) hatred associated with terrorism by the general public. An eye for an eye, effectively; they don't treat us as humans, so why should we do the same for them? As difficult as it is for me to believe, I think there are people who think this is an adequate way of doing things. In my opinion, though, we can't lower ourselves to their level.
That's not even the real problem. The real problem is how should we know whether those guys we got are terrorists we shouldn't treat as humans or innocent bystanders we should unless we want to become like the terrorists ourselves.
A argument, that's -IME- been reasonably successful with red-blooded Americans and upstanding citizens recently, is to ask them whether Bush releasing Guantanamo prisoners in troves means he's letting murderers back on the streets to kill innocent children or if he locked up innocent people for years without any rights. Unfortunatly some see "but they're from Afghanistan" as a valid counter-argument and it's hard to argue against (because it reveals a completely screwed-up set of values which would require long and hard work to correct =/ )
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know whether he's quite such a pathological liar as O'Reilly but his whole rhetoric...
About all the /.-is-so-liberal whining:
I think you're wrong. I think based on the discussions on different kinds of stories that /. is actually very strongly libertarian.
Most people here prefer a government that is socially liberal and fiscally conservative. The reason it seems /. is overwhelmingly liberal in discussions such as this one is that people seem to assume that supporting the Dems atm is the same as being liberal. It is not. Clinton was both less obsessed with spying on you and didn't blow the budget so he could cut taxes for millionaires. He also didn't piss off just about all of your allies (notice how a few years ago, every time there was a story about the EU at least one Brit wrote a post that the UK should leave the EU and enter a closer relationship with the US? I haven't seen any of those lately =) and I think about a third of /. readers was non-US according to one of the old polls.
If I had to make a list with 10 people I'd like to see as POTUS there'd be more Reps than Dems on that list but somehow the demagogues, corrupt and stupid seem to have hijacked the GOP.
Just about the only advantage of the HD-DVD standard is easier retooling of existing manufacturing lines. The cost of the discs probably won't be too different in the long run and is irrelevant anyway (with $60 games and $40 movies who cares whether the disc costs a penny or two?). The reason Toshiba's HD-DVD drive is so cheap is that they aren't stupid. They saw the price of the PS3 did some quick calculations and decided on the same razorblade model Sony's using, while BD manufactures use the usual approach (for consumer electronics) of first milking the super-rich and then slowly lower the price.
Imagine if you will, Sony including the only high definition format disc in their PS3. A dual layer HD-DVD has 30 gigs of storage, more than enough to hold the 22 gigs of Resistance: Fall of Man.
But still vastly less than what I can have on a BD. What do I care about the number of gigs for the PS3 I want a replacement for my DVD-R (or +R or whatever) drive and Blu-Ray is superior (also, unlike HD-DVD, it's been developed with burning discs in mind. I think every BD drive for PC you can buy atm is a BD-R while afaik there isn't even an HD-DVD-R announced).
Every single movie studio releasing their films on the only high definition format: HD-DVD.
Not important. IIRC someone developed a combined head for reading BD and HD-DVD anyway. I think within a few years most drives will support both and the cost overhead shouldn't be so bad (and if a drive then costs $18 instead of $15, so what?). This is not Betamax vs. VHS.
Sony would not be having the blue diode production problems that it is currently having.
Because they wouldn't have to manufacture 405nm diodes for Blu-Ray and 405nm diodes for HD-DVD but could focus on only one waveleng... oh wait.
Because all of the manufacturers would be focusing on only one format, costs would come down even quicker.
Manufacturing costs for discs are in no way connected to the price you pay when you buy one. The companies will charge what the market's willing to pay and a bit more regardless of what it costs to produce them. And apart from the diode shortage the biggest cost for players seems to be the hardware to decode the video which is almost identical for both anyway (as they support the same codecs and I don't think BD's Java is much worse than the thing for HDDVD MS came up with - forgot the name sorry). MS wants $199 for its add-on which probably won't lose them too much money and the lower-end PS3 which has about the same stuff as MS's higher end 360 is $100 more (but I could see Sony losing more on the lower-end model, because that's the point of the lower-end PS3: Get people to buy the more expensive one). So about $150 per drive for both at this stage. Doesn't seem too bad and I'd think the diode shortage is a bigger headache for both.
The high definition era would begin with the same unity as the DVD era. Sony would be guaranteed a huge quantity of money from licensing.
Is it too much to ask that for once the better format wins? It's not like there's much difference between them. Both license freely to 3rd parties; DRM is crappy and identical; costs aren't that different.
Instead, Sony decided that it had the Playstation brand as a magic bullet and gave the finger to the rest of the DVD coalition.
Well they weren't alone; there's Philips of course and Apple Dell HP Hitachi LG Mitsubishi Electric Panasonic Pioneer Philips Samsung Sharp Sony Sun Microsystems TDK Thomson Twentieth Century Fox Walt Disney Warner Bros on the board of directors alone. See here
The idea is that if you position the fan right and trim the sail correctly the sail will act like a u-tube (tube as in tube not as in webpage) put at the end of a jet-engine (look at the wikipedia article on thrust-vectoring or the Harrier).
The air is pushed forward by the fan and then turned around 180 by the sail therefore it leaves the system fan+sail backwards and therefore pushes it forward. As the whole system is far from perfect thrust is less than if you just pointed the fan backwards.
Well, 65 million iPods and counting say we're stupid enough, not to mention the millions of people happy with Windows+Office.
No, because "most gamers" won't buy their PS3 at launch (Because even if they wanted to there wouldn't be enough PS3s). I certainly won't buy one until the first (or most likely the second) round of slashing the price down to more sane values.
Although it's probably actually a good move for launch. They can't possibly meet demand with only 500,000 PS3s at launch, so charging as much as possible makes sense.
It just makes sense. I've yet to meet even one person who's happy that he got a 360 Core at launch but I've seen lots of people with Core systems complain that they couldn't get the Premium version.
WTF; I assume they compete in the "get maximum fps on the fps of the week" category. Otherwise they'd only have to upgrade (perhaps) their PCs when switching to a new game in which they try to be competitive which shouldn't happen all that often because if you really love a game and want to be the best in it you don't change games every 3 months.
And this whole cost argument is stupid. If you're the average geek you pay perhaps $200-300 more for a gaming PC than for a normal PC because apart from a high-end graphics card you'd need everything else (recent but not the latest CPU, enough RAM, whatever) anyway for work, internet, videos, etc.
Just take a look at its design. It has EmotionEngine on steroids written all over it.
The cnet article has this to say about movie playback:
Vincent Bautista, Sony's product manager for data storage, told CNET.com.au that due to copy protection issues and lagging software development, the drive will only play user-recorded high-definition content from a digital camcorder, and not commercial movies released under the BD format.
Bautista says that one of two reasons for this is the fact that commercial content is encrypted with High-Bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP), which can only be decrypted using a HDCP-compliant graphics card that offers DVI or HDMI connections. Since there are currently no PCs for sale offering graphics chips that support HDCP, this isn't yet possible.
The second reason, according to Bautista, is that BD playback software that can decrypt HDCP isn't "released as a saleable item yet". Today, the only HDCP-supporting BD playback application is the OEM version of Intervideo WinDVD BD that's bundled with Sony's VAIO VGN-AR18GP notebook. The AR18GP also offers an HDCP-compliant HDMI connector, which makes it capable of playing commercial movies without issue.
The 21st century began 2001-01-01. The first decade of your life's over the day you've lived 10 years, i.e. your 11th birthday. Same principle applies here.
So the correct title for the article would be "The Top 100 Best-Selling-According-To-A-Metric-Accounting-For- About-20%-Of-Sales-That's-Additionally-Skewing-Res ults PC Games of this Century-and-the-last-year-of-the-last-one." But I guess the editor shortened it.
Half-Life 2
Publisher: Vivendi Games
Developer: Valve Software
Released: Nov 04
Estimated Sales: 680,000
Valve says they've sold 4 million copies of Half-Life 2 (here). This means the list's numbers are less than 20% of all sales. The rest was sold outside the US (as the parent pointed out, the PC is more important in Europe and elsewhere) and online. While Valve's Steam means that this is probably more pronounced for HL2 than for other games (otoh certain genres tend to do better in different countries, so even if HL2 is an exception, it shouldn't be the only one) it nevertheless shows that that list is pretty much worthless.
Oops, the page checks out your referrer, sry. The button's right below the article
It's less about whether the PS3 will be dominating like the PS2 and more about the ridiculous doom and gloom on /. and other gaming blogs.
Personally I think his selection wasn't too bad, I'm especially sick of the "PC games are dead" chant we get at the beginning of every console cycle.
Btw. here's the print version on one page instead of 324
You are aware that in most threads about stuff prone to discussions like this up to a third of modded-up comments are "Christians" and "Republicans" whining about how noone mods-up their comments (in "" because I refuse to believe that the whiners are a representative subset of those groups; although watching the news seems to indicate that they're a very vocal minority).
The reason that the comments are in the minority is hardly that all /. readers are atheist commie liberals, there are lots of religious-but-not-in-your-fscking-face people around (i.e. me) and I think the general political stance tends to be libertarian (i.e. fiscally conservative and socially do-whatever-you-want), it's that the GOP and religious right are seriously out of whack.
In the case of evolution, there's more than enough room for God in the theory of evolution (just do some research on the stance of the Catholic Church), but instead we have people that honestly believe the earth's 6000 years old and continously misrepresent the definition of theory in a scientific context to squeeze in their pseudo-science that is a complete waste of money because it can never ever produce anything useful by its very definition. jm2c
Oh yeah Mr Know-it-all? So he plays the current instead of the previous incarnation of the game, he sees that someone had the same idea he had but years ago and more or less fixed it, he now can't write a 6-page article for his site, which doesn't get /.ed and therefore doesn't get all those people clicking on ads, gets into financial troubles and decides to fire that guy who didn't write articles just because they were superfluous.
To be fair he mentions Civ4 but just to assert that it isn't any better than Civ3 with the same attitude my physics professor used for those parts of proofs that contradicted basic maths (it's a venerable tradition in physics and called proof by obvious obviousity =)
Face it, if people have to choose between lying in a relatively minor case (honestly, what was the damage in this case? I wager all of them would have bought Leopard anyway and they'd have used their new-found knowledge just for hyping the product, the very foundation of Apple's success =) and losing their job they will lie. Many bankruptcies and large accidents are the result of people lying in cases of major misconduct to keep their job.
Because the last time I tried to install it (today in fact) the installer crashed while trying to do a fsck on my fat32 partitions, something I don't know how to deactivate because I don't see the option anywhere in the partitioner?
Although the live-cd finally gives me more than 60Hz without editing the xorg.conf. One step forward, two steps back.
I haven't seen a leak in konqueror since KDE 3.3.
Perhaps Apple's decision to fork khtml instead of contributing to the mainline version wasn't so clever after all.
You'll want MkvToolNix. It's gui's called mmg (and is part of the package).
Create an avi with video and audio in dvd::rip, have it extract the vobsub file. Then use mmg to merge the avi and the vobsub file (mmg can split the files too, so don't do it in dvd::rip).
If you're ready to invest more time you might look at how to create a x264 video (if you got the horsepower for playback that is) because it's much better than even XviD.
Yes, there is. /. had an article about it (linking to an article on arstechnica iirc) a few weeks ago where everyone was bitching about the security implications.
Also, what he obviously meant by "took" was #9 of the definitions of take:
So the real question is who that initiative person was and whether she (he?!) was of legal age/willing.I'm not sure whether imdb's accurate but from what I know the idea to do this movie and with this storyline is from Abrams. Now, "Hey, let's redo the story of X, Y and Z...but with them as kids!!!" might seem like the oldest cliche in the book but for now I trust Abrams. He's shown that he can do character-driven and action shows, Ron Moore showed that you can do serious and superior versions of old shows and with Abrams coming mostly from a TV background perhaps we get not only a great movie but a great new TV show too.
OTOH it could be a disaster but after Star Trek IX&X and Enterprise we'd just continue to boldly suck like no roll of film's sucked before (well, not really, one of the advantages of working in the film business is that there's always something worse than your pile of sh*t) =P
a) There's only so much inventory a retailer's going to have lying around. If the PSP didn't sell no retailer would order more from Sony.
b) If Nintendo doesn't want people to compare Sony's shipped versus their sold figures all they have to do is publish their own shipped figures. They just have to add it as an afterthought to the sold figures (20 million sold and over 768 million shipped).
And it's not only HOPE. The FBI or perhaps the NSA reads /. and regularly takes down the pages the stories link to. Probably to censor them as a few hours/days later their often back online.
That's not even the real problem. The real problem is how should we know whether those guys we got are terrorists we shouldn't treat as humans or innocent bystanders we should unless we want to become like the terrorists ourselves.
A argument, that's -IME- been reasonably successful with red-blooded Americans and upstanding citizens recently, is to ask them whether Bush releasing Guantanamo prisoners in troves means he's letting murderers back on the streets to kill innocent children or if he locked up innocent people for years without any rights. Unfortunatly some see "but they're from Afghanistan" as a valid counter-argument and it's hard to argue against (because it reveals a completely screwed-up set of values which would require long and hard work to correct =/ )
Go Microsoft! Delivering 2003's technology really Zune!