Nice attempt at weaseling, but if you RTFA it mentions what information they contained:
"there were no Social Security numbers, no dates of birth, no personal identifiers. The documents only contained name and pay information"
Two things.
1. AOL didn't think there were any personal identifiers in the search archives they released to the public either. Yet plenty of people ended up being tracked down from what was in that data. The point being, "no personal identifiers" is not a determination that you have the right to make about somebody else's data.
2. What pay stub have you ever seen that "only contained name and pay information"? I have never seen such a pay stub.
Not to mention, let's assume "salary" is public information. Does that mean elective deductions are also? What if I choose to have 10% of my pay put into a 401(k)? Is that public information? It's on my pay stub. I would highly doubt that deduction breakdowns are included in the law making "salary" public info. If someone got my pay stub and saw a large 401(k) deduction, and that pay stub also had my name on it and other personally identifiable info (which it does, whatever this guy thinks), then somebody now knows that at my rate of pay, and assuming a period of years of work, I might now have more than $100,000 in a 401(k) account... and if he has my pay stub, he really has all the info needed to access it. (A few phone calls is all it would take.)
You still don't see the problem here? Do you actually have a job? I mean, have you ever seen an actual pay stub?
Seriously though, Russia has for many decades going back to just after WWII had a predilection for one upping the West in terms of military hardware.
I'm not sure they've really one-upped the US here.
This is a fuel-air bomb. It would be physically almost impossible for it to have the raw destructive power of the high explosives in the MOAB. Predictably, there are no actual specifications listed for the bomb in the Bloomberg article (ok, I didn't read it all the way through, but usually those things are at the top), just vague assertions like it being the "most powerful fuel air bomb" and "four times more powerful than the MOAB". That could mean a bunch of different things - it has four times the vacuum power? A four times larger radius pressure wave? (Note that fuel air bombs often have larger but slower - and therefore less destructive - pressure waves.) It doesn't mean that it has four times the explosive power of the MOAB, because that would be pretty ridiculous.
Fuel air bombs look really impressive when they explode but they don't do a hell of a lot of damage. They mostly just char a lot of stuff and clear the area of life. High explosive bombs like the MOAB, by contrast, are just the opposite - they don't look very impressive (no big mushroom cloud) but they do massive amounts of damage. If you're anywhere near a high explosive bomb when it goes off, you may not get burned, but you will end up in about a thousand different pieces, as will everything else around you that isn't buried 100 feet below the ground.
Nuclear bombs sort of combine the worst effects of both high explosive and fuel air bombs. But if you're going for destructive power in a non-nuclear bomb, a fuel air bomb is not what you want to use.
Playing the game would allow a ratings board to get a sense of context, as the article states.
Context is provided in various ways. The ratings board is not just presented a series of money shots. They're given a DVD that is "representative" of the game but also includes its most salacious content. Both of those are requirements.
If the ratings board were forced to play the games, I guarantee two things would happen:
a) It would take forever to get games rated, resulting in huge delays and potentially fewer game releases,
and
b) It would result in a lot more AO-rated titles.
Why?
First of all, understand that the ratings board is not made up of "gamers", by design. When I last dealt with the ESRB, they wouldn't tell us who was actually on the ratings board but they did tell us that one of the three people was an ordained minister and another was a middle-aged housewife. Ratings board members are always "regular" people, the idea being that you get a cross-section of the general population, not just gamers. The whole point of the ratings are to help parents determine what content they want their kids to play, not to help the kids themselves. So they want people who could be "average parents" deciding the ratings.
Given that, these people are by and large not even going to be able to figure out how to play most games, much less get anywhere in the game if they do. And since the entire point is for them to see the worst parts of the game (ie. the Manhunt kill scenes), they're either still not going to get specific context for these scenes or they're going to spend months and maybe even years playing a game to try to get to those parts. You're still going to need a DVD, meaning those specific scenes will still be out of context... and those are the scenes that matter.
As for the second point, the fact that these are regular people who might have a higher (or more prudish) moral standard than you do would suggest to me that actually playing the game and having that visceral experience would make them more, not less, likely to rate games tougher than they do now. Let's say you're homophobic. What's the root of that homophobia? The fact that you're afraid of those tendencies within yourself. So the more you're forced into an acceptance of that which you hate, the more you hate it. It's the same with violence or sex or anything else. The closer you get to it, the harsher your reaction.
I think gamers have to understand first and foremost that ESRB ratings are by nature not for them. They are for the people who have legal guardianship over them. As for AO basically being a kiss of death for a game, that's an issue between you and the console makers, not the ESRB. All they do is rate the game. It's up to the console makers what ratings can and can't show up on their systems.
Unless there's more to the story, it's pretty silly of the city to refuse.
So, in your mind, it's "silly" for a city to refuse to change their zoning and street configuration if a corporation simply offers them enough money to do it?
Next time you're elected to office, remind me to have my checkbook at the ready if I ever want something from you.
Just for one example of how nonmainstream tastes don't work this way, go find a way to legitimately buy Hank Snow's version of "Casey Jones."
And you know what? This is exactly the kind of song that turns up as a "crappy B-side" on one of these singles/ringles. Hell, half the time, this is why songs like that get recorded in the first place - to help sell the single. And the death of the proper single would mean no more B-sides, which would mean no "Maggie May", no "Unchained Melody", no "Fool's Gold", no "I Will Survive". Not only are B-sides often rare gems, they just as often become hits in their own right.
People like you (and me) - real hardcore collectors of individual artists' work - should be celebrating any further opportunity to buy rare tracks, and any attempt to preserve the single. No, I doubt Hank Snow is going to be included in this ringle experiment, but you never know who the next Hank Snow is to someone years down the line.
I would, however, have to agree that if I put up a website and I depended on advertising revenue, I'd be a bit pissed off if all of my visitors started using adblock, especially if I chose non-intrusive adverts like google ads.
Well, that's the real rub. I have adblock, but I've got a bunch of sites actually whitelisted because I don't mind their ads and I don't want to have a bunch of empty space all over the place (which, without the whitelist, I'm never sure would be ads or something else I'm missing). And I wouldn't even have adblock at all if it weren't for a few really bad apples that forced me into it.
Adblock is not something that everybody just has, and that's as simple to use as flicking a switch. Remember that most people - and I don't mean most people here, I mean most people in the world - have no clue what a "Firefox Extension" even is or how to install one. You need to make an actual effort to find out about this, to download it, to install it, to configure it so that it blocks what you want it to block. Even people who have the technical ability to figure this out are not going to do it unless pushed. It's not like everybody who hits the web for the first time immediately says "ok! I'm ready to start surfing! But first, how do I block the ads?"
Look at Google's model (at least to this point). They're making plenty of money on ads, and so are all the sites that rely on them. And I guarantee you they're not having any problem with adblock. Their revenue numbers certainly don't seem to show any. Why? Because their ads are not intrusive, in fact they occasionally even border on useful. I have clicked Google ads a few times myself.
It's both funny and strange to me that people still think the way you make money on ads is to be as annoying as possible, when the biggest company on the net became as successful as they are by doing exactly the opposite. Don't people ever learn anything?
If you ask me, any site whose model is to present you with the most annoying ads possible deserves to have a user set that relies on adblock. If you've got a problem with adblock, it's because you as a webmaster brought it on yourself.
The bigger problem here involves insurance, not the devices themselves. Cell phones don't kill people in hospitals, or crash airplanes, or magically blow up at gas stations. But because we have a one-in-a-million chance of something happening, which under the worst of situations could hypothetically cause a death/crash/fire, we have insulting signs all over the place warning us to turn off the phone.
It's not nearly as rare as "one-in-a-million" - it's more like "one-in-one-point-two" (50 out of 61 cases tested), provided the network being used is GPRS-based. That's pretty damn significant. And these were life-threatening cases of interference, including ventilators being switched off and pacemakers running at the wrong rhythm.
Even if you're not using GPRS, it's not a hospital's job to go around testing different cell phone networks to see if they interfere with their equipment. Their job is to save lives, not test cell phone equipment. And to that end, I would certainly hope that they would require that all devices potentially able to disrupt hospital equipment to be switched off, regardless of whether or not you're "insulted" by the signs. Your personal feelings are not worth a hill of beans next to somebody's life.
They can also do fun things like extra Anti-aliasing, upscaling, and perhaps some other tweaks.
Apparently you're a little behind, because the hardware-back compatible 60GB model has been able to do these things with PS2 games for months now. It was just a firmware update that enabled it all.
I submit that if reduced to a single keystroke - not carpel-inducing-mousing clicks, and enlarged 4 times, one could expose the average user to 10 times the number of pixels in the same time; moreover, the pixels searched would go up 100 times as people would stay with it longer if it we're so tedious.
It is a single keystroke. You check the "automatically accept" box and it is one yes or no click on every page.
As for enlarging the images, the whole point is that the larger the image, the more likely something important is to be missed. Researchers have known about this forever, and it's a pretty common and accepted practice to break down "QA" (for lack of a better term) processes into manageable chunks. An untrained layperson is not going to take the time and care required to properly check an 800x600 image for tiny chunks of airplane. Even a trained person can miss things if the sample is too large.
By using a competitor in hos own home, he's showing that he thinks his service is inferior to the competitors service.
He's showing no such thing. First of all, how do you know he doesn't have both services? He's the CEO of a company, it's his responsibility to know what his competitors are doing. You're not going to see a cable drop from the street. Though my bet is you'd probably see several satellite dishes on top of his house too, if you walked down his driveway. He has to know what all of his competitors' services are like in comparison to his own company's.
I also looked at these photos, and they show a FiOS can over two mailboxes. Now, I had FiOS myself for a while, and I didn't have a can anywhere near my house. So this is not even proof of anything in the first place. It could just as easily be his neighbors'.
There are also countless examples through-out history of people that have died or killed themselves for their religion
Themselves and plenty of others.
It's funny how we have a "war on drugs" because of how supposedly dangerous they are, not to mention a "war on terror" because of a few thousand deaths, but there is no "war on religion" despite the hundreds of millions who have been killed over the years as a direct result of clashing religious beliefs. Clearly, if the issue is public safety, organized religion is the world's public enemy #1.
That's the thing about beliefs that cannot be proved or disproved. One man's "faith" is another man's evil. And this is how people end up dying.
Who is Simon Cowell? No, really. I've heard him mentioned in commercials for American Idol... but who is he?
He's the Rick Rubin of the UK. Seriously.
People always get all uppity with him in the auditions. They complain that he's "just a judge" and not qualified to tell good singing from bad. The fact is the guy has produced some of the UK's top-selling acts, and he's currently a producer at Sony BMG. He's also famously passed on some acts that went on to great success, so it's not like he's a God. But he is a fairly successful and well-respected producer and A&R man.
He and his production company have also produced some of the UK's top TV shows. So he's probably as qualified an American Idol judge as any. He's certainly more qualified than Paula Abdul.
Like I said, their reputation has already been ruined. What website uses real media these days anyways?
Not sure you're quite getting this.
The new RealPlayer plays everything. No, that's nothing new, but given its ripping feature, what that means is that it will also *rip* anything. This is totally seamless, too - you'll be on a web site like YouTube watching an flv file and up pops a tiny little "download this video" button (you can turn that off if you want). You never even actually need to deal with the RealPlayer itself to do this. It works like a Firefox extension, and it works on anything that isn't DRM-protected (which means most video on the net, whatever the format). It's not just certain sites that work (like the YouTube FF extensions), it's *every* site. Even sites that obfuscate their file locations.
The one format I haven't tried is QuickTime... but Apple's basically become a non-player in streaming media lately anyway. It's all about flv and wmv.
If you don't want to download, it's really your loss. I was as anti-Real as you before trying this. But it really works, and it does something - for free - that nobody else does.
I'm actually a little worried about it being posted here, though. Content owners are *not* happy about this. I should know, I work for one, and this is the first application that's been able to download our video (we obfuscate our file locations). The only reason we haven't done anything about it is that the number of people using it is miniscule. As soon as it gets big, though, you can bet one of two things are going to happen:
a) Real will get sued out of business, or b) DRM will become even more pervasive in streaming video
Ugh, I wrote that in haste - obviously I'm not talking about children resulting from looking at porn on the internet. But if you accept that teens are "sexual beings", then you're not just accepting that they're looking at porn. Teens with "needs" are going to fulfill those needs for each other, not just individually. And that's where you get teen pregnancy, which is usually not a good thing for anyone (your tax dollars end up supporting some dumb kid who got knocked up and then can't support her kid, so it's not good for you either).
Indeed. To boot the story was submitted anonymously.
And of course it blames current internet whipping boy Sony and not Take-Two, who were the ones that actually chose SecureROM to protect the game and then released it with SecureROM included. Sony didn't put a gun to their heads.
Of course, we all know how Take-Two's been fighting "the man" with Manhunt 2, so we can't possibly call them out. No, let's just blame Sony.
Exactly. People are moving all up ons about HD and the next-gen optical media when nothing important has happened yet. Cable can't even carry a decent lineup of 1080p programming, much less provide sufficient HD content to justify a move.
First of all, there is no 1080p cable programming. 1080p is not an ATSC specification. You're thinking of 1080i.
And what do you consider a "decent" lineup? I have 40 HD channels, including all the major networks (CBS, ABC, Fox, NBC, CW), Discovery HD, Universal HD, HBO HD, Starz HD (Showtime is available but I don't subscribe), National Geographic HD, HGTV HD, Food Network HD, MTV HD (really MHD), the list goes on and on.
This is more HD channels than existed at all on cable only about 15 years ago.
People who still complain that there's no HD content to watch just aren't paying attention. There's been plenty of HD content on TV for years now.
It's an idiom; just as "couldn't care less" and "could care less" are synonymous.
"could care less" isn't an idiom, it's sarcasm. For some reason, most people don't get that - even a lot of people that say it. See this link, although that writer only kinda starts to get it near the end. It is definitely a Queens, New York example of sarcasm.
And it's wrong to suggest that those who say it don't know that "couldn't care less" is the correct form. However we may talk here, we're not all dumb.
btw, the proper way to say "I could care less" is with the accent on "I". How you say it makes a big difference. Even I think it sounds wrong the way a lot of people say it - I hear the accent on "less" sometimes and that's just weird.
Are there any examples of Microsoft ever participating in a mutually beneficial relationship with another company?
Ironically enough, the one instance I can think of is Apple.
MS's $500 million investment probably saved the company from bankruptcy. This was at the low point of Apple's market share, reputation and stock price. MS propped them up because they knew Apple customers were potential MS customers too, even if they didn't use their OS.
The deal also called for a new release of Office on Mac, which ended up being superior to the Windows version and no doubt made the Mac a more acceptable Windows alternative for some people. In exchange, all Apple had to do was make IE the default browser on Macs... something that's now long fallen by the wayside.
That deal has expired at this point, but Apple is now a stronger company than they were at that time, and MS is weaker. I'd say Apple actually got the better end of that deal. (So maybe it wasn't "mutually beneficial", but Apple didn't come out on the short end.)
Let's hope this means the ESRB will go the way of the National Legion of Decency. That is, maybe people will just stop paying attention.
Or, does the video game industry have enough power (read: money) yet to get government to change the rules?
The ESRB is the industry. Jesus Christ, how many times does it need to be said? The ESRB is comprised of representatives from the industry itself and is funded by dues paid by the industry. A quick glance of their web site would have confirmed this for you - what do you think "self-regulatory" means? All ESRB members are signatories of its charter and rules. That includes Rockstar, that includes Factor 5.
The ESRB has nothing whatsoever to do with government. That's why it exists; to head off government intervention.
At best, Star Trek popularized scientific theories into science fiction, leading (some) people to be more interested in science. But even then, the people who were interested in these kinds of movies (the so called "nerds", "geeks", "losers", and other anti-social labels) were the people who were interested in science to begin with. Do you really think your average 60's football jock has became interested in physics as a result of watching Star Trek?
Doesn't really matter.
Only case in point you really need to know is that the guy who invented the cell phone (and I forget his name right now, one of the engineers at Motorola) has gone on record many times as saying the cell phone would not exist today if not for Star Trek. He set out to make the Star Trek communicator and that led to the first handheld cell phone. Motorola finally got it right with the StarTAC, which led to the Razr. It all grew out of Star Trek.
There was actually a TV show on the Discovery Channel (IIRC) called "The Science of Star Trek" that talked about all this, and lots more.
There are many, many things we have today as a direct result of Star Trek, and no doubt many more we'll have in the future that would have been considered impossible even just a few years ago. NASA right now has a page up that has this to say about universal translators as seen in Star Trek:
As this is used on the Star Trek shows, it's just an automagical device to enable characters to get through the stories. It would be too tedious and repetitious in a one-hour show for the characters to overcome real language barriers in a realistic manner in every show. The way the Enterprise crew can encounter an alien spacecraft, "hail them on standard frequencies," and establish instant telecommunications on their viewscreens is a preposterous shortcut to keep the plot from faltering. We can certainly dismiss the possibility of such an invention ever being built.
I'm not sure when this was written, but nowadays we have things like babelfish and google's language tools and Amikai (not a misspelling) that do instant translation fairly well. "Babelfish" itself is not based on Star Trek but instead on another piece of Sci-Fi, the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which is itself filled with ridiculously nonsensical things. Nevertheless, babelfish now exists. The algorithms are always improving. I don't see why it's impossible to think that someday we can add voice to those algorithms and put the whole thing on a chip with a small speaker that fits in your ear. (I also don't see what NASA's problem is with "standard frequencies" - few of the aliens in Star Trek live in a vacuum, they've all been in contact with other species and are usually part of one or another galactic organizations. Only non-warp enabled aliens live in a vacuum.)
The point is, Star Trek and other shows like it did drive a lot of our current technology - it only takes one person in the right position to do it - and it continues to drive our technology in ways we never would have thought possible before.
That we prevent companies from putting down new technology that competes with cable.
That way everything stays the same.
On the other hand, take a look at your Verizon bill lately? How about your cable bill?
If you're like most people, they've gone up pretty dramatically in the last few years. Back in the 1990's, I used to pay $23 a month for phone service and $36 for cable. Now I pay a combined total for cable, phone and internet of $160 per month. That is way above inflation. Before I switched back from Verizon (which sucks for TV in my area), I was actually paying more like $180 per month total.
Yeah, Verizon advertises "$95" a month for their triple play. But you will never pay that. "Sir Charge" is in full effect with them. At least with my cable company, what they quote me is what I pay.
Cablevision in my area also laid down fiber years ago, so Verizon has no advantage. CV's going to switched digital in addition to that; supposedly they're going to have 100 HD channels by the end of the year.
Verizon has always been one of the most hated companies in the Northeast, and it's really saying something when your company's hated more than Cablevision. I swore that I'd never go back to Verizon after they took more than 3 months to get a phone line installed in my last apartment (their excuse was "there are no more lines available" even though the previous tenant had one! They apparently took his line and made a 2 line apartment out of it somewhere, leaving me with nothing for 3 months until they got around to upgrading the box). I apparently forgot about that when I signed up for FiOS, but I remembered it pretty quick when I saw all the audio and video dropouts on the HD channels, then got my first bill. Now I'm out another $100 or so for the overlap in services (last bill from Verizon, first bill from CV).
If this is what we get with competition, then we'd probably be better off without it. Competition in television providers has only resulted in increased rates and a lot of blatantly false advertising.
So? Does it give you confidence in the rest of their equipment when one misbehaving computer can bring down their entire network for nine hours?
The point is ATC is not controlled by "their equipment". The airport authority and the FAA are two wholly separate agencies.
It would be like worrying about the strength of the US Army based on the fact that a prisoner escaped from a police car owned by the NYPD. Sure, both agencies involve guys carrying guns, but they otherwise have nothing to do with each other.
The FAA's got its own problems with its computer systems, but the two systems are 100% separate. Funded, designed and built separately and through different processes, run by different people.
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Nice attempt at weaseling, but if you RTFA it mentions what information they contained:
"there were no Social Security numbers, no dates of birth, no personal identifiers. The documents only contained name and pay information"
Two things.
1. AOL didn't think there were any personal identifiers in the search archives they released to the public either. Yet plenty of people ended up being tracked down from what was in that data. The point being, "no personal identifiers" is not a determination that you have the right to make about somebody else's data.
2. What pay stub have you ever seen that "only contained name and pay information"? I have never seen such a pay stub.
Not to mention, let's assume "salary" is public information. Does that mean elective deductions are also? What if I choose to have 10% of my pay put into a 401(k)? Is that public information? It's on my pay stub. I would highly doubt that deduction breakdowns are included in the law making "salary" public info. If someone got my pay stub and saw a large 401(k) deduction, and that pay stub also had my name on it and other personally identifiable info (which it does, whatever this guy thinks), then somebody now knows that at my rate of pay, and assuming a period of years of work, I might now have more than $100,000 in a 401(k) account... and if he has my pay stub, he really has all the info needed to access it. (A few phone calls is all it would take.)
You still don't see the problem here? Do you actually have a job? I mean, have you ever seen an actual pay stub?
Seriously though, Russia has for many decades going back to just after WWII had a predilection for one upping the West in terms of military hardware.
I'm not sure they've really one-upped the US here.
This is a fuel-air bomb. It would be physically almost impossible for it to have the raw destructive power of the high explosives in the MOAB. Predictably, there are no actual specifications listed for the bomb in the Bloomberg article (ok, I didn't read it all the way through, but usually those things are at the top), just vague assertions like it being the "most powerful fuel air bomb" and "four times more powerful than the MOAB". That could mean a bunch of different things - it has four times the vacuum power? A four times larger radius pressure wave? (Note that fuel air bombs often have larger but slower - and therefore less destructive - pressure waves.) It doesn't mean that it has four times the explosive power of the MOAB, because that would be pretty ridiculous.
Fuel air bombs look really impressive when they explode but they don't do a hell of a lot of damage. They mostly just char a lot of stuff and clear the area of life. High explosive bombs like the MOAB, by contrast, are just the opposite - they don't look very impressive (no big mushroom cloud) but they do massive amounts of damage. If you're anywhere near a high explosive bomb when it goes off, you may not get burned, but you will end up in about a thousand different pieces, as will everything else around you that isn't buried 100 feet below the ground.
Nuclear bombs sort of combine the worst effects of both high explosive and fuel air bombs. But if you're going for destructive power in a non-nuclear bomb, a fuel air bomb is not what you want to use.
Playing the game would allow a ratings board to get a sense of context, as the article states.
Context is provided in various ways. The ratings board is not just presented a series of money shots. They're given a DVD that is "representative" of the game but also includes its most salacious content. Both of those are requirements.
If the ratings board were forced to play the games, I guarantee two things would happen:
a) It would take forever to get games rated, resulting in huge delays and potentially fewer game releases,
and
b) It would result in a lot more AO-rated titles.
Why?
First of all, understand that the ratings board is not made up of "gamers", by design. When I last dealt with the ESRB, they wouldn't tell us who was actually on the ratings board but they did tell us that one of the three people was an ordained minister and another was a middle-aged housewife. Ratings board members are always "regular" people, the idea being that you get a cross-section of the general population, not just gamers. The whole point of the ratings are to help parents determine what content they want their kids to play, not to help the kids themselves. So they want people who could be "average parents" deciding the ratings.
Given that, these people are by and large not even going to be able to figure out how to play most games, much less get anywhere in the game if they do. And since the entire point is for them to see the worst parts of the game (ie. the Manhunt kill scenes), they're either still not going to get specific context for these scenes or they're going to spend months and maybe even years playing a game to try to get to those parts. You're still going to need a DVD, meaning those specific scenes will still be out of context... and those are the scenes that matter.
As for the second point, the fact that these are regular people who might have a higher (or more prudish) moral standard than you do would suggest to me that actually playing the game and having that visceral experience would make them more, not less, likely to rate games tougher than they do now. Let's say you're homophobic. What's the root of that homophobia? The fact that you're afraid of those tendencies within yourself. So the more you're forced into an acceptance of that which you hate, the more you hate it. It's the same with violence or sex or anything else. The closer you get to it, the harsher your reaction.
I think gamers have to understand first and foremost that ESRB ratings are by nature not for them. They are for the people who have legal guardianship over them. As for AO basically being a kiss of death for a game, that's an issue between you and the console makers, not the ESRB. All they do is rate the game. It's up to the console makers what ratings can and can't show up on their systems.
Unless there's more to the story, it's pretty silly of the city to refuse.
So, in your mind, it's "silly" for a city to refuse to change their zoning and street configuration if a corporation simply offers them enough money to do it?
Next time you're elected to office, remind me to have my checkbook at the ready if I ever want something from you.
Just for one example of how nonmainstream tastes don't work this way, go find a way to legitimately buy Hank Snow's version of "Casey Jones."
And you know what? This is exactly the kind of song that turns up as a "crappy B-side" on one of these singles/ringles. Hell, half the time, this is why songs like that get recorded in the first place - to help sell the single. And the death of the proper single would mean no more B-sides, which would mean no "Maggie May", no "Unchained Melody", no "Fool's Gold", no "I Will Survive". Not only are B-sides often rare gems, they just as often become hits in their own right.
People like you (and me) - real hardcore collectors of individual artists' work - should be celebrating any further opportunity to buy rare tracks, and any attempt to preserve the single. No, I doubt Hank Snow is going to be included in this ringle experiment, but you never know who the next Hank Snow is to someone years down the line.
I would, however, have to agree that if I put up a website and I depended on advertising revenue, I'd be a bit pissed off if all of my visitors started using adblock, especially if I chose non-intrusive adverts like google ads.
Well, that's the real rub. I have adblock, but I've got a bunch of sites actually whitelisted because I don't mind their ads and I don't want to have a bunch of empty space all over the place (which, without the whitelist, I'm never sure would be ads or something else I'm missing). And I wouldn't even have adblock at all if it weren't for a few really bad apples that forced me into it.
Adblock is not something that everybody just has, and that's as simple to use as flicking a switch. Remember that most people - and I don't mean most people here, I mean most people in the world - have no clue what a "Firefox Extension" even is or how to install one. You need to make an actual effort to find out about this, to download it, to install it, to configure it so that it blocks what you want it to block. Even people who have the technical ability to figure this out are not going to do it unless pushed. It's not like everybody who hits the web for the first time immediately says "ok! I'm ready to start surfing! But first, how do I block the ads?"
Look at Google's model (at least to this point). They're making plenty of money on ads, and so are all the sites that rely on them. And I guarantee you they're not having any problem with adblock. Their revenue numbers certainly don't seem to show any. Why? Because their ads are not intrusive, in fact they occasionally even border on useful. I have clicked Google ads a few times myself.
It's both funny and strange to me that people still think the way you make money on ads is to be as annoying as possible, when the biggest company on the net became as successful as they are by doing exactly the opposite. Don't people ever learn anything?
If you ask me, any site whose model is to present you with the most annoying ads possible deserves to have a user set that relies on adblock. If you've got a problem with adblock, it's because you as a webmaster brought it on yourself.
The bigger problem here involves insurance, not the devices themselves. Cell phones don't kill people in hospitals, or crash airplanes, or magically blow up at gas stations. But because we have a one-in-a-million chance of something happening, which under the worst of situations could hypothetically cause a death/crash/fire, we have insulting signs all over the place warning us to turn off the phone.
Apparently you missed this.
It's not nearly as rare as "one-in-a-million" - it's more like "one-in-one-point-two" (50 out of 61 cases tested), provided the network being used is GPRS-based. That's pretty damn significant. And these were life-threatening cases of interference, including ventilators being switched off and pacemakers running at the wrong rhythm.
Even if you're not using GPRS, it's not a hospital's job to go around testing different cell phone networks to see if they interfere with their equipment. Their job is to save lives, not test cell phone equipment. And to that end, I would certainly hope that they would require that all devices potentially able to disrupt hospital equipment to be switched off, regardless of whether or not you're "insulted" by the signs. Your personal feelings are not worth a hill of beans next to somebody's life.
They can also do fun things like extra Anti-aliasing, upscaling, and perhaps some other tweaks.
Apparently you're a little behind, because the hardware-back compatible 60GB model has been able to do these things with PS2 games for months now. It was just a firmware update that enabled it all.
I submit that if reduced to a single keystroke - not carpel-inducing-mousing clicks, and enlarged 4 times,
one could expose the average user to 10 times the number of pixels in the same time; moreover, the pixels searched would go up 100 times as people would stay with it longer if it we're so tedious.
It is a single keystroke. You check the "automatically accept" box and it is one yes or no click on every page.
As for enlarging the images, the whole point is that the larger the image, the more likely something important is to be missed. Researchers have known about this forever, and it's a pretty common and accepted practice to break down "QA" (for lack of a better term) processes into manageable chunks. An untrained layperson is not going to take the time and care required to properly check an 800x600 image for tiny chunks of airplane. Even a trained person can miss things if the sample is too large.
In other words, stop your whining.
By using a competitor in hos own home, he's showing that he thinks his service is inferior to the competitors service.
He's showing no such thing. First of all, how do you know he doesn't have both services? He's the CEO of a company, it's his responsibility to know what his competitors are doing. You're not going to see a cable drop from the street. Though my bet is you'd probably see several satellite dishes on top of his house too, if you walked down his driveway. He has to know what all of his competitors' services are like in comparison to his own company's.
I also looked at these photos, and they show a FiOS can over two mailboxes. Now, I had FiOS myself for a while, and I didn't have a can anywhere near my house. So this is not even proof of anything in the first place. It could just as easily be his neighbors'.
Complete non-story.
There are also countless examples through-out history of people that have died or killed themselves for their religion
Themselves and plenty of others.
It's funny how we have a "war on drugs" because of how supposedly dangerous they are, not to mention a "war on terror" because of a few thousand deaths, but there is no "war on religion" despite the hundreds of millions who have been killed over the years as a direct result of clashing religious beliefs. Clearly, if the issue is public safety, organized religion is the world's public enemy #1.
That's the thing about beliefs that cannot be proved or disproved. One man's "faith" is another man's evil. And this is how people end up dying.
Who is Simon Cowell? No, really. I've heard him mentioned in commercials for American Idol... but who is he?
He's the Rick Rubin of the UK. Seriously.
People always get all uppity with him in the auditions. They complain that he's "just a judge" and not qualified to tell good singing from bad. The fact is the guy has produced some of the UK's top-selling acts, and he's currently a producer at Sony BMG. He's also famously passed on some acts that went on to great success, so it's not like he's a God. But he is a fairly successful and well-respected producer and A&R man.
He and his production company have also produced some of the UK's top TV shows. So he's probably as qualified an American Idol judge as any. He's certainly more qualified than Paula Abdul.
This is the difference between US and Canada?
More like the difference between the US and the rest of the world.
(btw, I'm from the US.)
Like I said, their reputation has already been ruined. What website uses real media these days anyways?
Not sure you're quite getting this.
The new RealPlayer plays everything. No, that's nothing new, but given its ripping feature, what that means is that it will also *rip* anything. This is totally seamless, too - you'll be on a web site like YouTube watching an flv file and up pops a tiny little "download this video" button (you can turn that off if you want). You never even actually need to deal with the RealPlayer itself to do this. It works like a Firefox extension, and it works on anything that isn't DRM-protected (which means most video on the net, whatever the format). It's not just certain sites that work (like the YouTube FF extensions), it's *every* site. Even sites that obfuscate their file locations.
The one format I haven't tried is QuickTime... but Apple's basically become a non-player in streaming media lately anyway. It's all about flv and wmv.
If you don't want to download, it's really your loss. I was as anti-Real as you before trying this. But it really works, and it does something - for free - that nobody else does.
I'm actually a little worried about it being posted here, though. Content owners are *not* happy about this. I should know, I work for one, and this is the first application that's been able to download our video (we obfuscate our file locations). The only reason we haven't done anything about it is that the number of people using it is miniscule. As soon as it gets big, though, you can bet one of two things are going to happen:
a) Real will get sued out of business,
or
b) DRM will become even more pervasive in streaming video
or both.
Ugh, I wrote that in haste - obviously I'm not talking about children resulting from looking at porn on the internet. But if you accept that teens are "sexual beings", then you're not just accepting that they're looking at porn. Teens with "needs" are going to fulfill those needs for each other, not just individually. And that's where you get teen pregnancy, which is usually not a good thing for anyone (your tax dollars end up supporting some dumb kid who got knocked up and then can't support her kid, so it's not good for you either).
When are people going to accept that teenagers are sexual beings too.
How about when teens start having the financial means to support the resulting children?
Indeed. To boot the story was submitted anonymously.
And of course it blames current internet whipping boy Sony and not Take-Two, who were the ones that actually chose SecureROM to protect the game and then released it with SecureROM included. Sony didn't put a gun to their heads.
Of course, we all know how Take-Two's been fighting "the man" with Manhunt 2, so we can't possibly call them out. No, let's just blame Sony.
Exactly. People are moving all up ons about HD and the next-gen optical media when nothing important has happened yet. Cable can't even carry a decent lineup of 1080p programming, much less provide sufficient HD content to justify a move.
First of all, there is no 1080p cable programming. 1080p is not an ATSC specification. You're thinking of 1080i.
And what do you consider a "decent" lineup? I have 40 HD channels, including all the major networks (CBS, ABC, Fox, NBC, CW), Discovery HD, Universal HD, HBO HD, Starz HD (Showtime is available but I don't subscribe), National Geographic HD, HGTV HD, Food Network HD, MTV HD (really MHD), the list goes on and on.
This is more HD channels than existed at all on cable only about 15 years ago.
People who still complain that there's no HD content to watch just aren't paying attention. There's been plenty of HD content on TV for years now.
It's an idiom; just as "couldn't care less" and "could care less" are synonymous.
"could care less" isn't an idiom, it's sarcasm. For some reason, most people don't get that - even a lot of people that say it. See this link, although that writer only kinda starts to get it near the end. It is definitely a Queens, New York example of sarcasm.
And it's wrong to suggest that those who say it don't know that "couldn't care less" is the correct form. However we may talk here, we're not all dumb.
btw, the proper way to say "I could care less" is with the accent on "I". How you say it makes a big difference. Even I think it sounds wrong the way a lot of people say it - I hear the accent on "less" sometimes and that's just weird.
That's not the kind of URGE that a music store can help you with.
Yeah, a psychiatrist would probably be a better option.
Are there any examples of Microsoft ever participating in a mutually beneficial relationship with another company?
Ironically enough, the one instance I can think of is Apple.
MS's $500 million investment probably saved the company from bankruptcy. This was at the low point of Apple's market share, reputation and stock price. MS propped them up because they knew Apple customers were potential MS customers too, even if they didn't use their OS.
The deal also called for a new release of Office on Mac, which ended up being superior to the Windows version and no doubt made the Mac a more acceptable Windows alternative for some people. In exchange, all Apple had to do was make IE the default browser on Macs... something that's now long fallen by the wayside.
That deal has expired at this point, but Apple is now a stronger company than they were at that time, and MS is weaker. I'd say Apple actually got the better end of that deal. (So maybe it wasn't "mutually beneficial", but Apple didn't come out on the short end.)
Let's hope this means the ESRB will go the way of the National Legion of Decency. That is, maybe people will just stop paying attention.
Or, does the video game industry have enough power (read: money) yet to get government to change the rules?
The ESRB is the industry. Jesus Christ, how many times does it need to be said? The ESRB is comprised of representatives from the industry itself and is funded by dues paid by the industry. A quick glance of their web site would have confirmed this for you - what do you think "self-regulatory" means? All ESRB members are signatories of its charter and rules. That includes Rockstar, that includes Factor 5.
The ESRB has nothing whatsoever to do with government. That's why it exists; to head off government intervention.
At best, Star Trek popularized scientific theories into science fiction, leading (some) people to be more interested in science. But even then, the people who were interested in these kinds of movies (the so called "nerds", "geeks", "losers", and other anti-social labels) were the people who were interested in science to begin with. Do you really think your average 60's football jock has became interested in physics as a result of watching Star Trek?
Doesn't really matter.
Only case in point you really need to know is that the guy who invented the cell phone (and I forget his name right now, one of the engineers at Motorola) has gone on record many times as saying the cell phone would not exist today if not for Star Trek. He set out to make the Star Trek communicator and that led to the first handheld cell phone. Motorola finally got it right with the StarTAC, which led to the Razr. It all grew out of Star Trek.
There was actually a TV show on the Discovery Channel (IIRC) called "The Science of Star Trek" that talked about all this, and lots more.
There are many, many things we have today as a direct result of Star Trek, and no doubt many more we'll have in the future that would have been considered impossible even just a few years ago. NASA right now has a page up that has this to say about universal translators as seen in Star Trek:
As this is used on the Star Trek shows, it's just an automagical device to enable characters to get through the stories. It would be too tedious and repetitious in a one-hour show for the characters to overcome real language barriers in a realistic manner in every show. The way the Enterprise crew can encounter an alien spacecraft, "hail them on standard frequencies," and establish instant telecommunications on their viewscreens is a preposterous shortcut to keep the plot from faltering. We can certainly dismiss the possibility of such an invention ever being built.
I'm not sure when this was written, but nowadays we have things like babelfish and google's language tools and Amikai (not a misspelling) that do instant translation fairly well. "Babelfish" itself is not based on Star Trek but instead on another piece of Sci-Fi, the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which is itself filled with ridiculously nonsensical things. Nevertheless, babelfish now exists. The algorithms are always improving. I don't see why it's impossible to think that someday we can add voice to those algorithms and put the whole thing on a chip with a small speaker that fits in your ear. (I also don't see what NASA's problem is with "standard frequencies" - few of the aliens in Star Trek live in a vacuum, they've all been in contact with other species and are usually part of one or another galactic organizations. Only non-warp enabled aliens live in a vacuum.)
The point is, Star Trek and other shows like it did drive a lot of our current technology - it only takes one person in the right position to do it - and it continues to drive our technology in ways we never would have thought possible before.
That we prevent companies from putting down new technology that competes with cable.
That way everything stays the same.
On the other hand, take a look at your Verizon bill lately? How about your cable bill?
If you're like most people, they've gone up pretty dramatically in the last few years. Back in the 1990's, I used to pay $23 a month for phone service and $36 for cable. Now I pay a combined total for cable, phone and internet of $160 per month. That is way above inflation. Before I switched back from Verizon (which sucks for TV in my area), I was actually paying more like $180 per month total.
Yeah, Verizon advertises "$95" a month for their triple play. But you will never pay that. "Sir Charge" is in full effect with them. At least with my cable company, what they quote me is what I pay.
Cablevision in my area also laid down fiber years ago, so Verizon has no advantage. CV's going to switched digital in addition to that; supposedly they're going to have 100 HD channels by the end of the year.
Verizon has always been one of the most hated companies in the Northeast, and it's really saying something when your company's hated more than Cablevision. I swore that I'd never go back to Verizon after they took more than 3 months to get a phone line installed in my last apartment (their excuse was "there are no more lines available" even though the previous tenant had one! They apparently took his line and made a 2 line apartment out of it somewhere, leaving me with nothing for 3 months until they got around to upgrading the box). I apparently forgot about that when I signed up for FiOS, but I remembered it pretty quick when I saw all the audio and video dropouts on the HD channels, then got my first bill. Now I'm out another $100 or so for the overlap in services (last bill from Verizon, first bill from CV).
If this is what we get with competition, then we'd probably be better off without it. Competition in television providers has only resulted in increased rates and a lot of blatantly false advertising.
So? Does it give you confidence in the rest of their equipment when one misbehaving computer can bring down their entire network for nine hours?
The point is ATC is not controlled by "their equipment". The airport authority and the FAA are two wholly separate agencies.
It would be like worrying about the strength of the US Army based on the fact that a prisoner escaped from a police car owned by the NYPD. Sure, both agencies involve guys carrying guns, but they otherwise have nothing to do with each other.
The FAA's got its own problems with its computer systems, but the two systems are 100% separate. Funded, designed and built separately and through different processes, run by different people.