Actually that's a big issue nowdays. I work IT in steel mill and computers are secondary to making steel. IT is not the business...but it is the glue that sticks it together.
The big "profit motive" in IT is to adapt to what the business needs as fast as possible. Waiting 3-6 months for new servers and testing software is not something most businesses have luxury for anymore. Customers demand packing and information about your product now! You can't provide it they move on. The biggest deal is creating a system that frees your business from the IT structure. It's a bit backwards when you can't change production methods without 3 months of IT work to move the parts entered from station #34 to #56 [and of course 500 other silly things]
It's not about controlling everything all the time but being able to change anything, effectively and correctly, in the shortest time possible. We're going thru SOX too and the paperwork effect is terrible. There's no way you can go to your boss and ask to double the staff for paperwork!!! Unless you can use the SOX to start implementing more agility in your IT systems you'll bring the whole company down!
I don't look at agile systems as doing your IT job for you, but rather allowing you to do your JOB which is to create new ways to use IT to improve the company as fast as the engineers and sales people need you to to get the $$$$
actually that's a great start to this "new age". Your not buying a "thing" but instructions to make a thing....therefore GPL is perfectly approperiate. That's the difference between the GPLs handling of copyright and what the software/music industry has become. GPL applies to the written source code and thru copyright's intrepetation to the binaries. That's why including the source is so very important...because the source is copyrighted the idea of "binary copyright" is a joke.
It's great idea to release such devices as blueprints and source code rather than as a "licensed product". The economy will still be there it will just be different. One thing about countries like china is they are so far behind that as stuff like this is invented there's often no equivelant market to "damage". I'm always reminded of the Star Trek/Star wars "commoners" view... most of their worlds are populated by simple farmers with just a few high tech items that do amazing things. Realize that in 5 years you'll only need 1 device to "communicate" and it will run on batteries or fuel cells [i.e. you could still your own alchol if you wanted!] Things like 3G and cellular networks remove the need for the massive infrastructure we have in the USA. When a country like China or India goes tech it will be with custom made personal devices. Those countries don't have the natural resources for 2 cars and 2500 sp ft houses for everybody! Tool like replicating machines allow you to apply all the info you get off the internet. Remember, people have to make the raw materials too! you'd have to have some exotic plasics and processor intreconnect technology in the future... Think of buying a collection of memory and CPU chips and a screen and "printing" your own PC from that! Size and shape just for you.
reminds me of the classic line in jurassic park where the mathmatician says "you patented it, slapped it on a lunch box so exicted that you could, you didn't think about if you should"
I think that's why tech people like here at slashdot tend to be anti-technology when everybody else thinks it's great....basicly we're sickos that have already explored where pervasive stuff like this goes...but we're so far out there nobody will listen to us till it's too late. The biggest "oxymoron" I've had in that department was trying to explain why this type of techo-spying is so bad for employers and workers and such to a HR manager who has a religous Phd in administration and was a baptist minister... That showed me that even the brightest most well-intentioned people really don't understand just what they're giving away in the electronic/information era! When even the most scholared religous people don't "get it" how can you expect all the grandmas and grandpas out there to understand that we may have to stop using the internet for "everything" because to make it "safe" requires giving up too much of the personal freedom and responsibility we enshrined in the Constitution. Too many people don't really understand how and why the Constitution was written...it was written by a bunch of left-wing nut jobs...even for their time... but it was that radical thinking that made it stand the test of time...remember the politicans first attemept at the US didn't work!
The real problem is that most "PC" games are fast becomming just ports of console games. PC gaming is increasingly becomming an afterthought in the "big leagues". What's really needed is for a cross platform PC/linux/mac kit to push into the mainstream. The big corps like dealing with MS...MS drops LOTS of cash and sells lots of units...WOW with 800k units sold is a "bad-to-medium" game in the Xbox world!!
There needs to be an PC game industry wide wake-up call before the consoles completely shut down gaming. Let's face it, the PC gaming industry has only Linux and Mac left. MS is bent on mobiles and pockets and Xboxes.... PC gaming is just a R&D test for them... Personally, I think MS is getting ready to draw "a line in the sand" so to speak, to put the final lockdown on the industry before the next OS comes out [they're locking out FAT32, Win98, etc all the old compatibility things]...my bet is that the DIY PC market [and hence the gaming market] is going to be dead with MS's next OS.
Needless to say, I'm "drinking the Kool-aid" and working to get all my kids' favorite stuff up on a Ubuntu box!
But when was the last time a little girl you knew begged for something really interesting of Barbie? "Barbie" as a US company has taken to selling more expensive stuff to fewer and fewer little girl fans. The key is that the little girls of today see Barbie as just another over-marketed toy...not as a part of growing up. They won't be getting the next-generation market like they have this one. If you're 30, your parents and grandparents worshiped Barbie as little girls...often they kept them to hand down. Today's little girls have so much meaningless junk that they won't pass it on to their kids...
Once the court confirms it's soley in the Congress' hands, then we can work on getting the public to understand the need to change the laws...and after this we'll know it'll stick!
Catch is that we've got to get Grandma involved...somehow get the "simple" people to understand what they've lost.
percisely, Intel wanted the midrange market of 5-10K servers so it could create it all to itself....rather than evolving the community as before. Itanium came out not compatible with ANYTHING...the 32bit support was "hacked" on only in the second version of the chip.
Intel's real problem was relying on Microsoft as the sole support for the chip. They pretty much blew off Linux as an also-ran until MS screwed them over with an overpriced and undersupported version... funny how that happens!
That's the internal type information that's supposed to be pertinant to a department...like instructions within the FBI on how to investigate a case. Unfortunately, the Ashcroft-ians have taken
"secrecy" to an art lately. They want a paper trail when it's convinent, but want to ignore it when it makes them look bad. John was right because under the american system you can only take a federal law to court by breaking it...there's no middle ground for him to make his case.
Dell is the biggest PC vendor only because the "bend over" to whatever the MS/intel douopoly wants. To Intel or Microsoft Dell is a nice marketing outsourcing unit, but if they go rouge, both companies will make an "example" of Dell. Dell is a truely competitve company...anybody can replace them overnight. If anybody's hurt by MS & intel's practices it's Dell, because they can't choose their products freely...deviate too much and their toast. But of course, Dell can't say anything... because then they'd instantly be paying "retail" price for windows...or be told to stop selling it. Same with Intel, Dell is "gauranteed" to always get first cut of the chips... they could be "punished" by intel simply missing a shipment of "latest and greatest" causing all the gearheads to buy compaqs instead.
In the Lessing case, the Supreme Court said Congress has the consitiutional right to set copyrights.... Lessing argued there had to be "limits" from "common sense"... The court disagreed.
The Law gives, the law takes away" was the court's basic argument.... It will be really funny to find out what happens when the Congress wants to "take away" This could be good or bad, after all, When We want to get copyright back under control we'll have the same basic argument again by the *IAA's...
Hopefully the court will keep tooting it's horn!! This jsut the IP trap we need to get the IP situation under control... then all we have to do is convice lawmakers... their decisions will stick.
True, windows is easy to install by itself, but only if you have easily supported hardware. If you expect to easily play Doom3 you can hang it up... between getting windows "safe" for being online, downloading all the necessary 3d drivers, and then the patches for the actual application you want to run, you can pretty much waste a whole 8-hour evening [not like most slashdotters have anything better to do!]. Heaven forbid you have "difficult" hardware such as on-board raid, or very new stuff...nothing like hunting for a required driver off a floppy, even worse when you've got a legasy-free PC when XP will execpt ONLY a floppy for some stupid hardware. [wasted a day-and-a-half on that one!]
The only benifit windows has over linux is that once you get a hold of the windows drivers they generally take less work to get going!!!
Hey! George is an independant film-maker too. He is technically making the movie out of his owm pockets...Their very deep pockets, but at heart he's what all the little people at Canes dream of being.
Personally, if any of the pre-press is telling us what's going on, George may finally be willing to make a PG-13 movie..and have to make a movie that can make it with the increased rating.
There's only 5 major music "sellers" out there. As far as I know one or two are still holding out cross-licensing their stuff to Apple... Unfortunately, this is corperate warfare here... the battle for digital music is Apple, real, and MS...versus the media companies. Everybody else in "competition" are just pawns in a winner take all race. Of all the companies in the business, Apple is the smallest, with the most to loose, therefore they have the most interest in taking care of you the customer. Even venerable Napster and MusicMatch are both "owned" behind the scenes by labels trying to jump on digital music late. There's no "innocent" parties here. the only competitor to apple in the closest sense is Sony...but they've had 10 years to get digital music right and can't seem to do better than the CD without trying to include worse controls than apple and MS combine!!
First, the State govt is not who deals with software patents and outrageous copyrights...although they have much more influence on the Feds than any OSS fans could ever hope for.
The real goal of govt "profits" for patents and such is to benifit the public...the State using OSS is a prime example of that technology comming back to benifit everybody. The state's interest is in benifiting people...not generating some kind of cash flow! If the state can do the same work with OSS and not have to pay a private company millions of dollars they can use that money for other things...again, the state's interest is in acomplishing the goals to help people [collect taxes, child support, protect environment, etc] It's a misguided history of the govt paying for everything from private companies to the exclusion of other voluanteer or public interest groups. The current administration's tendency to "outsource" everything under the sun demeans the true purpose of govenrment.
Right now domain names are treated like "phone numbers" where exact spelling is all that is maintained without expensive legal process. imagine the fall-out if somebody was allowed to "choose" a phone number "1-digit off" from a church for a porn line! While it happens by phone company paperwork, they do try hard to prevent it...
The situation is compounded when the domain registers are actively registering the domain names like yours for a profit! It's the equivelant of your phone company actively choosing all the misdialed numbers for your church and choosing to put porn on those numbers... and then voulanteering to "sell" you those extra lines for exorberant fees. It would never be tolerated in "normal" circumstance but because it's "internet" for some mistaken reason it's OK.
It's much the same as why Google is being sued in France. They're profiting from selling ad space to other people's tradmarks... Imaging googling for "slashdot.org" and having two pages of advertizing before you got to "slashdot.org"! I google's case it's a little more murky because you don't HAVE to use their private service..but in the case of Verisign and such you are buying the "name" with expectation that YOU will profit from it....and they are taking your money, AND profiting from the dilution of what they sold you!!
The "geek"lure of iTunes is that you CAN take all your songs out of iTunes and put them to normal, standard playing CDs if you want to. Apple has DRM to keep sloppy people from being stupid and sharing everything on line, but normal "fair-use" is mostly supported.... so Apple's store makes up for the DRM with convinenance of per-song purchasing in your 'jammies during a blizzard....
The "magic" of Open source is that essentially MS has "completed" it's self-proclaimed goal of delivering computing to everybody. now that they've fufilled that goal the only thing left is to "take over the world" but that's not really possible. Basically all they sell is "information" and it's not incredibly earth shattering any more.
MS is in the same position as IBM was in 1990. Bill's whole fortune is built on marketing the next big MS "thing". That's the dirty little secret of the whole MS success. They make lots of money but in the grand scheme of things they've squandered most if it trying to "take over the world". Bill's absolute worst fear is to be "IBM'd" [IBM is still really powerful, but they're not "cool" anymore. Steve Jobs & apple on the other hand, are basking in "coolness" right now!] MS will always be a multi-billion dollar company, but if they have to play by "normal" business rules they won't be movers-and-shakers anymore...the whole stock scheme will crash. When that happens, Businesses will start looking at things like licensing, performance and cost of software... When MS' bubble pops. The "golden glasses" will come off alot of people and MS gold will tarnish fast. That's why they're so intent on doing like IBM and creating a position to be the "gatekeeper" of technology...the Wall street loves companies with a "lock" on the market.
exactly, children are still Citizens...even if below legal age. There comes a point where we have to treat older children like the adults we expect them to be...or they'll never learn how to be adults...what's next, RFID on dorm rooms? After all, That's where most underaged drinking and wasting valuable parent's money happens!
Personally, this will bite the districts in the ass when some 14 year old girl skips class with a 18 year old boy. [and ends up knocked-up to boot!] To date the schools have always had the fallback that "we can't watch them all"... If the new policies are properly enforced, the school now be just as negligent in letting a 14 year old leave campus at ANY time as your baby sitter would be letting your 6 year old out in the street. My local district has had problems in the past of kids parents dropping them at the front door...then they just walk out the back and skip school. If I can prove my 14 year-old daughter walked thru the first RFID scanner at the door, it was the schools responsibility to "protect" her..and the administrators should be personally, criminally liable for "damage" done to my minor child "property"...if that's how their treating kids now. They can't blame "accidents" if they implemented the means to track kids everywhere in the school!
I can't wait till my kids are in school so I can nail some poor adminmistrator!!!
Sidious is playing his ememies against each other so he can take ultimate power. "Sidious" is the friend of the powerful guilds...the only indepependants with enough collective power to form a new government. "Palpatine" is the "hero" of the republic...benifiting politically from the havoc that "Sidious" and Dooku are sowing.
Frankly, I think there's more to it than just "Palpatine" == "Sidious" I think one is a clone of the other... Sidious is a foot shorter and much older than Palpatine...
The goal is that the Emperor will have wiped out the Trade Federation, and depleted the Old Republic of it's forces. The Trade Federation will wipe out all means of cloning, the Republic army will wipe out the droid armies, leaving the Emperor's loyalist in charge with no opposition. It's a "classic" plot, but George just doesn't have the writing chops to pull it off like it should be...but it will LOOK cool!
General Grievous is the "ultimate" battle droid. The pic you posted was from the last episode of the Clone Wars cartoon on Cartoon network...just before Grievous wipes out Ki-a-Munid...jedi master.
From Star Wars books you know Lord Vader keeps droid lighsaber fighers for "practice"...several models newer than Grievous. [see the opening of Shadows of the Empire...happens to be lucasfilm cannon:(] Also, from the news articles on SW the intent of Lord Vader is to one-up Grievous by being both robot and Jedi.
Because we all know that our robot overlords will only have one wheel...duh. Finally, we could build an army of killer robots to take over the universe, or we could build a proper robot housekeeper.
hint: most cartoon robots have only 1 wheel. not important, but we're nerds!
Turn it around and think of how scary it is that you'd HAVE to use your insurance for every perscription so they could "track" you!
person one was saving his insurance money by paying for his scripts "out of pocket"... it's actually quite common. Many common perscriptions [prozac, penicillin, ibprophen, etc] actually cost much less than people's copays. Why should you the consumer pay a $15 copay for a $5 item? My insurance company has up to $30 copay depending on the "list" not the "price". Also, many name-brand meds are not covered at any price. If your insurance company refuses to pay for the drug, why should you have to even claim it? espically if you can get a deal on-line or thru some other discount program?
Thanks but No, but you've just hit on WHY this is such scary stuff!!!
How was BeOS lacking? The only thing lacking was their legal team couldn't break MS monopoly contracts. BeOS is a much cleaner platform for the internet age than just about anything else [except maybe amegia]. The way everything could just "work" together would have completely revolutionized the software industry... Although the BeOS model is much better for OSS development than properitary. It's extremely modular, that's the whole point of the OSS working to recreate it one module at a time!!!
Seriously though, BeOS had features in 1999 that MS and Apple are braging about "innovating" in their OS NEXT YEAR!!! Of course Apple has hired some of those BeOS programmers to add the feature to tiger...so in a way they are getting their kudos.
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The big "profit motive" in IT is to adapt to what the business needs as fast as possible. Waiting 3-6 months for new servers and testing software is not something most businesses have luxury for anymore. Customers demand packing and information about your product now! You can't provide it they move on. The biggest deal is creating a system that frees your business from the IT structure. It's a bit backwards when you can't change production methods without 3 months of IT work to move the parts entered from station #34 to #56 [and of course 500 other silly things]
It's not about controlling everything all the time but being able to change anything, effectively and correctly, in the shortest time possible. We're going thru SOX too and the paperwork effect is terrible. There's no way you can go to your boss and ask to double the staff for paperwork!!! Unless you can use the SOX to start implementing more agility in your IT systems you'll bring the whole company down!
I don't look at agile systems as doing your IT job for you, but rather allowing you to do your JOB which is to create new ways to use IT to improve the company as fast as the engineers and sales people need you to to get the $$$$
It's great idea to release such devices as blueprints and source code rather than as a "licensed product". The economy will still be there it will just be different. One thing about countries like china is they are so far behind that as stuff like this is invented there's often no equivelant market to "damage". I'm always reminded of the Star Trek/Star wars "commoners" view... most of their worlds are populated by simple farmers with just a few high tech items that do amazing things. Realize that in 5 years you'll only need 1 device to "communicate" and it will run on batteries or fuel cells [i.e. you could still your own alchol if you wanted!] Things like 3G and cellular networks remove the need for the massive infrastructure we have in the USA. When a country like China or India goes tech it will be with custom made personal devices. Those countries don't have the natural resources for 2 cars and 2500 sp ft houses for everybody! Tool like replicating machines allow you to apply all the info you get off the internet. Remember, people have to make the raw materials too! you'd have to have some exotic plasics and processor intreconnect technology in the future... Think of buying a collection of memory and CPU chips and a screen and "printing" your own PC from that! Size and shape just for you.
they've got pictures of them on the interweb!
I think that's why tech people like here at slashdot tend to be anti-technology when everybody else thinks it's great....basicly we're sickos that have already explored where pervasive stuff like this goes...but we're so far out there nobody will listen to us till it's too late. The biggest "oxymoron" I've had in that department was trying to explain why this type of techo-spying is so bad for employers and workers and such to a HR manager who has a religous Phd in administration and was a baptist minister... That showed me that even the brightest most well-intentioned people really don't understand just what they're giving away in the electronic/information era! When even the most scholared religous people don't "get it" how can you expect all the grandmas and grandpas out there to understand that we may have to stop using the internet for "everything" because to make it "safe" requires giving up too much of the personal freedom and responsibility we enshrined in the Constitution. Too many people don't really understand how and why the Constitution was written...it was written by a bunch of left-wing nut jobs...even for their time... but it was that radical thinking that made it stand the test of time...remember the politicans first attemept at the US didn't work!
There needs to be an PC game industry wide wake-up call before the consoles completely shut down gaming. Let's face it, the PC gaming industry has only Linux and Mac left. MS is bent on mobiles and pockets and Xboxes.... PC gaming is just a R&D test for them... Personally, I think MS is getting ready to draw "a line in the sand" so to speak, to put the final lockdown on the industry before the next OS comes out [they're locking out FAT32, Win98, etc all the old compatibility things] ...my bet is that the DIY PC market [and hence the gaming market] is going to be dead with MS's next OS.
Needless to say, I'm "drinking the Kool-aid" and working to get all my kids' favorite stuff up on a Ubuntu box!
But when was the last time a little girl you knew begged for something really interesting of Barbie? "Barbie" as a US company has taken to selling more expensive stuff to fewer and fewer little girl fans. The key is that the little girls of today see Barbie as just another over-marketed toy...not as a part of growing up. They won't be getting the next-generation market like they have this one. If you're 30, your parents and grandparents worshiped Barbie as little girls...often they kept them to hand down. Today's little girls have so much meaningless junk that they won't pass it on to their kids...
Catch is that we've got to get Grandma involved...somehow get the "simple" people to understand what they've lost.
They want a paper trail for YOU...not them... get it!
Intel's real problem was relying on Microsoft as the sole support for the chip. They pretty much blew off Linux as an also-ran until MS screwed them over with an overpriced and undersupported version... funny how that happens!
That's the internal type information that's supposed to be pertinant to a department...like instructions within the FBI on how to investigate a case. Unfortunately, the Ashcroft-ians have taken "secrecy" to an art lately. They want a paper trail when it's convinent, but want to ignore it when it makes them look bad. John was right because under the american system you can only take a federal law to court by breaking it...there's no middle ground for him to make his case.
Dell is the biggest PC vendor only because the "bend over" to whatever the MS/intel douopoly wants. To Intel or Microsoft Dell is a nice marketing outsourcing unit, but if they go rouge, both companies will make an "example" of Dell. Dell is a truely competitve company...anybody can replace them overnight. If anybody's hurt by MS & intel's practices it's Dell, because they can't choose their products freely...deviate too much and their toast. But of course, Dell can't say anything... because then they'd instantly be paying "retail" price for windows...or be told to stop selling it. Same with Intel, Dell is "gauranteed" to always get first cut of the chips... they could be "punished" by intel simply missing a shipment of "latest and greatest" causing all the gearheads to buy compaqs instead.
The Law gives, the law takes away" was the court's basic argument.... It will be really funny to find out what happens when the Congress wants to "take away" This could be good or bad, after all, When We want to get copyright back under control we'll have the same basic argument again by the *IAA's...
Hopefully the court will keep tooting it's horn!! This jsut the IP trap we need to get the IP situation under control... then all we have to do is convice lawmakers... their decisions will stick.
The only benifit windows has over linux is that once you get a hold of the windows drivers they generally take less work to get going!!!
Personally, if any of the pre-press is telling us what's going on, George may finally be willing to make a PG-13 movie..and have to make a movie that can make it with the increased rating.
There's only 5 major music "sellers" out there. As far as I know one or two are still holding out cross-licensing their stuff to Apple... Unfortunately, this is corperate warfare here... the battle for digital music is Apple, real, and MS...versus the media companies. Everybody else in "competition" are just pawns in a winner take all race. Of all the companies in the business, Apple is the smallest, with the most to loose, therefore they have the most interest in taking care of you the customer. Even venerable Napster and MusicMatch are both "owned" behind the scenes by labels trying to jump on digital music late. There's no "innocent" parties here. the only competitor to apple in the closest sense is Sony...but they've had 10 years to get digital music right and can't seem to do better than the CD without trying to include worse controls than apple and MS combine!!
The real goal of govt "profits" for patents and such is to benifit the public...the State using OSS is a prime example of that technology comming back to benifit everybody. The state's interest is in benifiting people...not generating some kind of cash flow! If the state can do the same work with OSS and not have to pay a private company millions of dollars they can use that money for other things...again, the state's interest is in acomplishing the goals to help people [collect taxes, child support, protect environment, etc] It's a misguided history of the govt paying for everything from private companies to the exclusion of other voluanteer or public interest groups. The current administration's tendency to "outsource" everything under the sun demeans the true purpose of govenrment.
Right now domain names are treated like "phone numbers" where exact spelling is all that is maintained without expensive legal process. imagine the fall-out if somebody was allowed to "choose" a phone number "1-digit off" from a church for a porn line! While it happens by phone company paperwork, they do try hard to prevent it...
The situation is compounded when the domain registers are actively registering the domain names like yours for a profit! It's the equivelant of your phone company actively choosing all the misdialed numbers for your church and choosing to put porn on those numbers... and then voulanteering to "sell" you those extra lines for exorberant fees. It would never be tolerated in "normal" circumstance but because it's "internet" for some mistaken reason it's OK.
It's much the same as why Google is being sued in France. They're profiting from selling ad space to other people's tradmarks... Imaging googling for "slashdot.org" and having two pages of advertizing before you got to "slashdot.org"! I google's case it's a little more murky because you don't HAVE to use their private service..but in the case of Verisign and such you are buying the "name" with expectation that YOU will profit from it....and they are taking your money, AND profiting from the dilution of what they sold you!!
The "geek"lure of iTunes is that you CAN take all your songs out of iTunes and put them to normal, standard playing CDs if you want to. Apple has DRM to keep sloppy people from being stupid and sharing everything on line, but normal "fair-use" is mostly supported.... so Apple's store makes up for the DRM with convinenance of per-song purchasing in your 'jammies during a blizzard....
MS is in the same position as IBM was in 1990. Bill's whole fortune is built on marketing the next big MS "thing". That's the dirty little secret of the whole MS success. They make lots of money but in the grand scheme of things they've squandered most if it trying to "take over the world". Bill's absolute worst fear is to be "IBM'd" [IBM is still really powerful, but they're not "cool" anymore. Steve Jobs & apple on the other hand, are basking in "coolness" right now!] MS will always be a multi-billion dollar company, but if they have to play by "normal" business rules they won't be movers-and-shakers anymore...the whole stock scheme will crash. When that happens, Businesses will start looking at things like licensing, performance and cost of software... When MS' bubble pops. The "golden glasses" will come off alot of people and MS gold will tarnish fast. That's why they're so intent on doing like IBM and creating a position to be the "gatekeeper" of technology...the Wall street loves companies with a "lock" on the market.
Personally, this will bite the districts in the ass when some 14 year old girl skips class with a 18 year old boy. [and ends up knocked-up to boot!] To date the schools have always had the fallback that "we can't watch them all" ... If the new policies are properly enforced, the school now be just as negligent in letting a 14 year old leave campus at ANY time as your baby sitter would be letting your 6 year old out in the street. My local district has had problems in the past of kids parents dropping them at the front door...then they just walk out the back and skip school. If I can prove my 14 year-old daughter walked thru the first RFID scanner at the door, it was the schools responsibility to "protect" her..and the administrators should be personally, criminally liable for "damage" done to my minor child "property"...if that's how their treating kids now. They can't blame "accidents" if they implemented the means to track kids everywhere in the school!
I can't wait till my kids are in school so I can nail some poor adminmistrator!!!
Frankly, I think there's more to it than just "Palpatine" == "Sidious" I think one is a clone of the other... Sidious is a foot shorter and much older than Palpatine...
The goal is that the Emperor will have wiped out the Trade Federation, and depleted the Old Republic of it's forces. The Trade Federation will wipe out all means of cloning, the Republic army will wipe out the droid armies, leaving the Emperor's loyalist in charge with no opposition. It's a "classic" plot, but George just doesn't have the writing chops to pull it off like it should be...but it will LOOK cool!
From Star Wars books you know Lord Vader keeps droid lighsaber fighers for "practice"...several models newer than Grievous. [see the opening of Shadows of the Empire...happens to be lucasfilm cannon:(] Also, from the news articles on SW the intent of Lord Vader is to one-up Grievous by being both robot and Jedi.
hint: most cartoon robots have only 1 wheel. not important, but we're nerds!
person one was saving his insurance money by paying for his scripts "out of pocket"... it's actually quite common. Many common perscriptions [prozac, penicillin, ibprophen, etc] actually cost much less than people's copays. Why should you the consumer pay a $15 copay for a $5 item? My insurance company has up to $30 copay depending on the "list" not the "price". Also, many name-brand meds are not covered at any price. If your insurance company refuses to pay for the drug, why should you have to even claim it? espically if you can get a deal on-line or thru some other discount program?
Thanks but No, but you've just hit on WHY this is such scary stuff!!!
Seriously though, BeOS had features in 1999 that MS and Apple are braging about "innovating" in their OS NEXT YEAR!!! Of course Apple has hired some of those BeOS programmers to add the feature to tiger...so in a way they are getting their kudos.