Isn't it far easier and cheaper to just to plug the phone in occasionally and carry a spare battery if you have to?
In a word, no. Have you ever looked at the prices for cel phone batteries? They're generally only slightly less than the cost of the phone itself. For my $99 phone, a spare battery is $80. Some batteries are even more expensive than that.
And having to plug the phone in occasionally? Do you understand the concept of a mobile phone? How are you going to plug in a phone on your average train, plane, or automobile? (If you can do it, you generally need yet another special attachment, such as a cigarette lighter adapter. This basically defeats your point, which is that it's simpler just to plug in once in a while. It isn't.)
Energy storage in fuel cells is actually quite expensive, especially compared to electricity. The main advantage is far longer battery life. But for phones, which last for days anyway, why?
I suppose it's pointless to tell a Slashdot reader to RTFA. Battery life on 3G phones is not very long - this is their main drawback and the reason why adoption rates have been low. Lots of people have been saying it's going to take a major breakthrough in battery technology to really improve the situation for small, high-tech devices like 3G phones and even current laptop computers - fuel cell technology is that breakthrough. Eventually, we'll all be using fuel cells for our portable devices. May take 20 years for the switchover to be complete, but it'll happen. It has to, given how power-hungry we've become.
You would have rather seen that? 1080 is shit shit shit. 720p looks entirely better. There is essentially no reason for 1080i to exist at all.
(spit-take)
There is no reason for 1920x1080 resolution to exist when we have 1280x720? What the heck?
That's like saying "there's no reason for anyone to run a PC at 1024x768; 640x480 is entirely better." Oh, you mean the interlacing? Get a real TV. It's like people who complain about an LCD's 60hz refresh rate. Since an LCD's pixels are never actually blank, it's meaningless (except for frame rates in games, but there's no HDTV signal with a frame rate higher than that so the point is moot here). HDTV interlacing is also essentially meaningless if you have a decent TV set. It's not the same thing as CRT-based interlacing on an NTSC set.
1920x1080 is significantly higher resolution than 1280x720. It's obvious when you look at the real numbers - more obvious than if you just look at "720p" vs. "1080i". And it's obvious if you see 1080i material vs. 720p material on a good HDTV set.
So what gets dropped? Palm which has probably a nicer "case" style or Handspring with its less desirable case but some features you don't find on Palms."
Have you actually been following what's going on in handhelds these days? It doesn't sound like it. Palm and Handspring today make entirely different products. Palm makes PDA's; Handspring makes "communication products" - handhelds based on cel phone designs. There's no overlap - neither company has individual models comparable to the others'.
But regardless, I wouldn't buy any model from either company. Others have already mentioned the Sony Clies - I have one of these, and I bought one for my wife too (she loves it). We don't need high-end features, and in the low-end the Clies have several features that Palms don't (and Handspring doesn't even make a low-end device). Sony also is far ahead of Palm in industrial design IMO - it's akin to, say, Dell vs. Apple. I'd actually love to have one of the real high-end models but don't feel they're worth $800. The recently announced top-end Clies, though, do have a lot of useful features - including built-in wireless, a built-in keyboard, camera, and MP3 player. In other words, the best of what both Palm and Handspring offer and in a much better-looking design. But still too expensive for me.
but I don't think you'd want it for gaming and the like.
Tablet PC's - at least the majority of them - are nothing but convertible laptop computers. Nothing more, nothing less. I couldn't play games on my laptop - it's not powerful enough - but my wife sure could on hers. Stick a swivel touch-screen on our computers and bam, they're both tablet PC's. The point being, there's nothing whatsoever about the fact that a PC is a tablet PC that rules it in or out for gaming or any other computing task.
The hype for these things has gone beyond what the actual product is, and I don't think it's served the product well. I'd love to have a tablet PC - it's a laptop with a useful extra feature (especially for design work, which I do occasionally). If you want a laptop, why don't you want a laptop with this extra feature? It's like putting built-in wi-fi into a laptop (which I think is a much bigger innovation, honestly) and then giving those laptops their own product category and specialized launch. It's just a feature, and one that a lot of people would like if they actually got to use it. There's no reason to not want a laptop with this feature if you already want a laptop... maybe you don't want to pay the extra $100 or whatever (that's really about all the premium is), but eventually that won't even be a factor.
btw, I think the word "vendors" was left off the headline of this story - I read the headline and thought that a particular model of tablet PC had developed a defect. I expected to read a story about a recall based on the headline.
The only redeeming part about the MTV movie awards: the fact that, underneath it all, they're just poking fun at self-important movie stars.
Inanity is not to be confused with satire, and calling the MTV movie awards such is giving the network way too much credit. If you've ever watched one of these things, they're taken about as seriously as anything can be in their teeny-bopper mentality. Obviously it's not on the same level of seriousness (and pretentiousness) as the Academy Awards, but that in no way implies some sort of smart social commentary.
MTV has always tried to present these awards as an alternative to the Academy Awards. That's not the way you do satire - nobody reads The Onion as an alternative to the Washington Post, for example; you don't go there trying to get actual news. These awards aren't satire at all. They may be irreverent, but they're totally straight underneath it all.
And as such, they carry even less weight than if they were satire. The Academy Awards may be overblown but they're at least decided upon by people who know a little something about the subject - those both inside the industry itself as well as those who make a living commenting on it. What the hell does MTV know about movies? About enough to make and market Jackass, I guess. Next you'll tell me that's satire too.
The State of the Telecom Industry
on
Nokia 5100 Reviewed
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Everything that's wrong with the telecom industry (or at the very least, the mobile phone industry) is encapsulated in this phone. Why do I own a DVD player? To play DVD's. Why do I own an air conditioner? To cool my house. Why do I own a phone? To communicate with other people.
I need all this other garbage on this phone like I need a dishwasher on my VCR. Meanwhile, call quality has actually dropped with the increasing use of built-in antennas (like on the Nokia 5100), at the same time as all these useless new features like calorie counters have been added to the mix.
Service providers are not exempt from the same criticism (and let's face it; they're the ones who ask phone manufacturers to include or not include certain features, so the phones are partly their fault to begin with). They've spent the last several years adding new features to their services such as downloadable graphics and ring tones, video games, etc. without doing much of anything at all to increase their basic service quality itself despite an increasing number of complaints about signal strength, even in major metro areas. And let's not even talk about 3G, shall we?
The last time I bought a new phone it was because I physically destroyed my old one in a fit of anger at about my 20th lost call in a row (I threw it at the wall, and it shattered). The next time I buy a new phone will probably be the next time that happens - it certainly won't be because of any of the new features in any of these phones. The industry needs to realize that adoption rates and sales of phones to existing customers are slowing because of serious and basic issues like these, not because our phones don't have calorie counters or FM radios built in.
I have a Tivo and a couple of consoles. One of many things I like about the Tivo is that I can play my games and not care about what I may be missing on TV.
Anyone heard anything about whether this can record and play games at the same time?
If it's really a TiVo (and I'll bet it is - Sony does make them), then it has to have this capability. Otherwise, it does not offer the functionality TiVo advertises (TiVo units are always recording - they're never switched off) and therefore is not a TiVo.
I'm very curious to see if this is announced for the US and if so, if it will be marketed as a TiVo-compatible device. If it is, I am so there. It's no big deal that TiVo wasn't mentioned for the Japanese release - none of their other hard drive-based TV devices have been either, and several of them have made it here as TiVos.
ok... this is getting ridiculous... why should anyone that found a way to compromise security for a game be prosecuted in real life?!
For the same reason they should be prosecuted for DoS attacks in real life, because that's basically what this is. People pay for playing this game, and they're not being allowed to play because of these hackers. It's pretty much the definition of denial of service, only this time it directly affects paying customers, so it's really even worse than a standard DoS attack for end-users.
I've tried both. Both offer little in the way of visual benefits and both tend to make PSX games more buggy on the PS2 than they would be otherwise (which, in my experience, is still fairly buggy).
Texture smoothing is an insignifigant benefit next to polygon rendering at higher resolutions. Generally speaking, higher resolution is all that really separates Star Fox from Star Fox 64.
Then I guess we can all turn off bilinear (or trilinear, or anisotropic) filtering on our PC graphics cards, despite the fact that we all paid a pretty penny specifically for that feature, because that's exactly what the "texture smoothing" feature of the PS2 does. It improves the visual quality in exactly the same way as filtering does on PC graphics cards. If you don't notice it, then I guess you probably just use software rendering on your PC whenever you play games too, huh? Or at least turn off the filtering for the performance increase? Somehow I doubt it.
And yes, SF64 uses bilinear filtering, SF doesn't (in fact, if I remember right, it doesn't use textures at all - just flat-shaded polygons).
Oh, and all games I've tried texture smoothing with work perfectly. It's the "fast load" feature that some games have a problem with. Very few games are known to have problems with texture smoothing.
SEGA was founded by an American, I have not read this book- but it never says in the title that Sonic was American.
No, but it does in the review posted here. "a history of the United States' software industry." Sega may have been partially founded by two Americans, but it was founded in Japan and has always been a Japanese company (prior to its move to Japan in the 1950's, it was not called Sega and did not produce the same products - effectively, it was a different company). In fact, the original name of the company was "Service Games of Japan" - later abbreviated to Sega. (This taken right from Sega's own web site - click the "in-depth history" link.)
Regardless, Yuji Naka and Naoto Oshima were the original creators of Sonic the Hedgehog, and I don't think anybody would argue they were Americans (it's not really an arguable point). Sonic Team is and always has been based in Japan, same as Sega, though Sonic Team was "born and bred" there even if Sega itself wasn't.
If the book "reviewer" really read the book, then he should have known this - and if the book doesn't make mention of it despite Sonic being part of the title, then it's not really a book I'd consider worth reading or recommending to others. This is why it's important to get the facts straight in any book review, or to point out where the book errs if the book itself is incorrect.
The SuSE web site listed "improved wireless LAN support" as one of the selling points of 8.2. Can anyone comment on what this means exactly? I've turned up nothing in anything I've read about this version, in any reviews, or even the comments here so far. I've had a hell of a time installing wireless LAN drivers (the wlan drivers) for my Linksys WUSB12 and have never managed to get it to work with either Mandrake or Red Hat. Does SuSE come with the full suite of wlan drivers (including USB) pre-installed?
I suggest PA put the picture back up, but change the words to read "What if Strawberry Shortcake was as nasty as American Greeting's Lawyers?"
This would clearly be a parody of the material in question.
It would also be quite lame, both creatively and in humorous terms.
A lot of people are suggesting various alterations to the image that would allow it to be reposted. To me, that's even worse than its removal. What kind of statement are you making by altering a creative piece of artwork to satisfy a bunch of copyright lawyers? Removing the images show a lot more artistic integrity - you're making a statement that basically says "your attitude will lead to no art." That's a strong statement.
Both Challenger nor Columbia were caused by human error. In Challenger's case, the politicians/managers made the decision to go despite warnings from the engineers. In Columbia's case, they had the opportunity to take pictures of the shuttle in orbit, per suggestions by the engineers, but decided not to do so. (What they could have done to save the crew is a separate topic.)
No, it's not a separate topic, especially since you use the lack of cameras as a "cause" of the accident. People need to use their heads before making statements like this. What, exactly, would have taking pictures of the shuttle actually accomplished in this case? How was not taking pictures in any way contributory to the accident? The recommendation is for *future* space flights - pictures of Columbia while in space would have accomplished nothing but satisfying the morbid curiosity of people like you after the fact.
If there was damage to the leading edge of the wing from launch, Columbia was doomed, plain and simple. I don't see how having pictures confirming that ahead of time is going to make anybody feel any better about it. Great, so now the astronauts know they're going to die. How fun for them and for us. It would have been like Apollo 13 all over again, only this time without the happy ending.
It's been firmly established that there was no way to save these astronauts once they were up there. They did not have enough fuel to reach the ISS. There was not enough time to rush another shuttle up to rescue them before their food and water ran out - not even ignoring all safety rules and risking two accidents for the price of one.
Cameras may help troubleshoot and solve problems on future shuttle flights. Eventually, it will likely seem ridiculous that we don't now have exterior cameras covering all surfaces of our spacecraft, and the ability to film them from satellites as well. But on this particular flight, there is nothing anybody could have done to save these astronauts once they were up there, camera or no camera. The only helpful thing having pictures would have done would be in helping determine the cause of the accident afterwards - but we know there was a breach in the wing without them, so even that point is moot.
when the shuttle launched, a piece of debris broke off and hit the wing. Back then they said it didn't matter, then the shuttle exploded on re-entry. Now, months and months of 'careful study' they find that the wing had been damaged. No sh*t... what a useless exercise. And the recommendation: study the shuttle more carefully! Ummm. yeah, how much are they being paid for this?
A classic misinterpretation of an accident report - though this isn't even a full accident report yet, and I imagine there will be even more misinterpretation when it is finally released.
What the investigators have actually determined is really nothing. What they have determined probably happened is that there was pre-existing corrosion to the frame of the wing's leading edge, which weakened it to the point where the foam strike caused something to break. This pre-existing corrosion should have been caught and fixed by NASA, and if finally proven as fact, would be the root cause of the accident. The foam hit was not the cause of the accident, the corrosion was. Assuming they stick to this theory, of course.
I've said before that almost all accidents are a series of events, some preventable, some not, most benign by themselves. It's that particularly series of events and the way they unfold that causes the accident. Without the corrosion, the foam hit would have done nothing. It's happened so many times before without incident, and the shuttles were built to take punishment - these are vehicles designed for repeated launch and re-entry, for God's sake - the G-forces, shock and vibration they're built to withstand are almost ridiculous, and they've been hit by multiple objects at launch, in orbit and during re-entry before without incident. The facts seem to suggest that Columbia was no longer in like-new condition - that it was fatally weakened even before its last launch. If it wasn't for this foam hit, it would have been something else that would have brought it down eventually. The foam was just a catalyst.
What I find shocking is the apparent deriliction of maintenance on the part of NASA, and the budget cuts really need to be looked at as a contributing factor to the accident. There's no way these shuttles should be allowed to have this kind of corrosion, and Columbia was just refitted a couple of years ago - the wings were taken completely apart, they should have seen any damage like this. Even if they didn't, though, they should be doing MRI's or whatever they need to every 6 months or a year to check the interior structures of all critical structures.
Just one final comment - someone suggested doing 2 "pre-flight" checks, one before launch and one before re-entry. This doesn't make any sense whatsoever. The poster used commercial airliners as an example - well, this would be like doing a "pre-flight" check both before takeoff and before landing. First of all, the pre-flight on a commercial airliner is usually nothing more than a walk-around by the pilot and a systems check while taxiing (many airplanes spend 30 minutes or less at the gate before pushback). The space shuttle sits in a hangar for 6 months being looked over with a fine tooth comb before launch - it's much more thorough than anything a commercial airliner goes through. Second, there's no "pre-flight" before a plane lands - that would not be feasible or even necessary. There's no reason why a space shuttle would need such a check either if the vehicle itself is in good working condition - which should be established while it's on the ground, not in space. If you establish the fact that the foam hitting the wing was not catastrophic in and of itself but that it was corrosion to the interior structure of the wing's leading edge that weakened it and led to the break when the foam hit - that's something that should be caught before it even gets to the launch pad. It's not something you should worry about in flight.
Anyone who would give up essential freedom for a little bit of security deserves neither.
The kind of person who would make a statement like this is the kind of person who has never faced death at the hands of another. I and many others have.
The most essential freedom is the freedom to live. The only question is how best to guarantee that most essential freedom of all, without unduly affecting other, less essential freedoms (yes, I'm sorry, but not all freedoms are created equal). Now, sometimes you can't help but lessen some freedoms to guarantee others, as often one person's personal freedom infringes upon another's - it's simply a balancing act, like anything else in life. Should I be free to kill you? Is my freedom to kill you more essential than - or even as essential as - your right to live? I don't think anyone would argue that it is. That's an extreme example but the government - along with every individual in this country and around the world - makes similar choices on a smaller scale (as well as a larger scale) every minute of every day. This is why we have laws to prevent people from doing certain things that they'd otherwise be "free" to do, and this is why we have a police force to enforce those laws.
Security and freedom are not mutually exclusive, and it's naive to think they are. Security is a very important part of being free - without security, there is no freedom. Without our own personal security we'd all be locked in our homes, afraid to go outside. Is that freedom? Most certainly not.
Again, I'm using extremes to prove my point, but there is a lot of middle ground here, and where you draw the line between what's "essential" freedom and what isn't is a lot harder to define than you seem to think it is.
The government are happy to jail someone who sells a piece of kit that allows people to copy games, whilst trying to pass laws [bbc.co.uk] that protect gun manufacturers from being sued if their guns are used in a crime.
Ah, hypocrisy. Similar to "irony" in its misunderstanding these days - just as it's not actually irony if it rains on your wedding day, it's not actually hypocrisy for the government to enact laws inconsistently. What would be hypocrisy would be for the government to sell these mod chips themselves but still arrest others for doing the same thing, and I don't see them doing that.
You can accuse the government of being a lot of things in this case - stupid, overzealous, bull-headed, whatever... but there's no hypocrisy here that I can see. They're just enforcing the law as it's written, and it's not a hypocritical law at all. A dumb law, an overreaching law, but not a hypocritical one.
On a side note, digital (and regular) modifications are the rule rather than the exception for photographers. They take inches off of those models legs, add this, remove that. One interesting trick is that they dilate the pupils of models to make them look sexier. Am I missing the importance of this?
You're only missing the obvious difference between fashion photography and photo-journalism.
One thing I don't think anybody's brought up yet, and the thing that worries me the most, is that the real potential to kill Tivo (and the entire concept behind it) would be when Mystro eventually and inevitably becomes standard cable. Look at DTV - it's practically a requirement here in NYC now, and if you go to Time Warner's web site, I challenge you to find any information at all on their analog cable offerings. Mystro will eventually become the standard cable service which will render Tivo not just unnecessary, but useless. In order to use the two together you'd have to select a TV show to watch on cable, then manually record it on Tivo - which basically puts Tivo in "boat anchor" mode; the Tivo service itself does nothing.
And of course, along the way you lose any real choice about the TV shows you want to watch or when you want to watch them, since there may only be a certain window of time a show is available, for example (this is true of Tivo by default as well, though you can always tell Tivo to keep a program "until I delete it").
My problem is not with this service being available, as I see no reason to switch from my Tivo. But it's silly to dismiss this as an idea that won't work. All AOL has to do is make it part of the standard cable service and boom - no more Tivo for anyone. It's not as if there's any actual competition among cable providers. (There's satellite, yeah, but as I know first-hand as an unfortunately former DirecTV subsriber, satellite is not always available to apartment dwellers. And this is a city of apartments.)
As far as i know the human eye can only see about 30fps, and from playing Counter-Strike a lot, people seem to be generally pleased as long as they have above 60fps. Does he really mean he's getting 2000 frames per second? Someone explain please!
It's a myth that the human eye can only see 30, or 24, or whatever arbitrarily low number of frames per second you want to come up with. First of all, the limiter is not the eye, it's the brain. So the more accurate phraseology would be "the human brain can only perceive X frames per second" rather than "the human eye can only see X frames per second". More importantly, though, is that there is no hard and fast number of frames per second a human can perceive - it's different for everyone, but for almost everybody it's well beyond 30.
Consider motion picture film. Initially, film was shot at roughly 16-18 frames per second. This was later standardized at 24 fps when it became clear that at 18 flicker was still clearly visible. 24 fps is the minimum at which flicker was determined to not be a distraction, and this minimum was used for economic reasons (not because it was the highest number of frames per second people could perceive, but because it was the lowest number of frames per second at which they would not be distracted by flicker, and this helped keep film stock costs down to the minimum while maintaining the increasingly sophisticated audience's interest).
Now, you may wonder why I'm using 24fps as an example when you're talking 30. Simple, really - a film strip that's being projected at 24 frames per second is actually showing 48 images per second, it's just that half of those images are blank. Now, next time you go to a film I want you to look at a bright scene and tell me you do not perceive any flicker at all. You probably won't be distracted by it, but you'll see it if you look for it. And this is at a real 48 "frames" (images) per second - well higher than the 30 you mention. Clearly the brain is capable of perceiving even higher than the 48 images per second projected in motion picture theaters.
I think people get confused by the concept of persistence of vision. Persistence of vision is what allows us to assign motion to static images when they're projected in sequence fast enough for our brains to be tricked. However - and this is the most important thing - the speed of projected images at which our brains can be tricked into perceiving motion and the speed of projected images at which our brains lose the ability to perceive those individual images are not the same. There are two different areas of the brain at work here - one processes raw images, and the other assigns meaning to them. They work together but are independent of each other.
It may be easier to understand this through a musical example. Imagine a piece of music that you've never heard before, but one that makes auditory sense (ie. it's not just a bunch of noise, it follows a pattern your brain has heard before and expects). Now imagine that three times per second there is a period of silence in that music. You will likely still be able to hear the music itself and understand it to be music and follow along with it - but you will still hear the silences as well and it will be annoying. Obviously, as you ramp up the sample rate there is a point at which you first will be able to tolerate those silences (perceiving them to be nothing but degraded sound quality) and then eventually lose the ability to perceive those silences at all, but that point is at a fairly high sample rate. This is obviously the theory behind the CD, which is broken up into 44,000 samples per second.
It's a bit of a moot point in this case because we're talking extremely high frame rates (there would be no perceived difference between 2500 and 2100 frames per second), but it's a pet peeve of mine when I see it stated that 24 or 30 fps are "all the human eye can see" so I thought I should correct it. In the case of
Do people really think government agencies are sitting there for 25 years trying to figure out what documents to declassify? When a document is released, that someone gets assigned to it specifically to determine the precise point at which it can be declassified? Of course not - it'd be a complete and utter waste of resources. These reviews are done periodically and cover reams and reams of documents that can't simply be glanced at and passed through - they must be studied down to the individual words used. No doubt it takes quite a while.
But I guess, since we're dealing with Bush, there must be some nefarious governmental conspiracy behind it, right? It can't possibly be that it just takes a while to do the work properly, can it? "No more documents for oil!"
Re:Not a troll: How many civilians died last time?
on
Strike on Iraq
·
· Score: 1
Most anti-war people I hear talk about all the civilian casualties resulting from this war, but I'm somehow not sure I should take their word for it.
More important, it seems to me, are the civilian casualties that will occur if we do not go to war. Saddam Hussein has killed 100,000-150,000 of his own people with chemical weapons, and that's not including his "executions" or those who have died in prison captivity during torture sessions. This is what gets forgotten when people talk about civilian casualties as the result of war. It may sound callous to say it, but what's the lesser of two evils here?
Does anyone here know the read civilian death toll from the last Iraqi war?
The estimates I saw at the time said between 2,000 and 3,000. Quite a lot fewer than Saddam has killed himself, and quite a lot fewer than the 100,000 Iraqi soldiers estimated to have died (terrible in itself, as most of them did not choose to be in the military, as our guys have the luxury of doing).
The relative quality of your experiences does not change the fact that for the vast majority of the population, it is perceived that one has no option but to pay for Windows. Therefore, it's a tax. (Emphasis added.)
No, therefore it is perceived as a tax by some people around here. It's like saying I pay the "McDonalds tax" because I perceive that I'm forced to eat at McDonalds rather than growing my own food for "free". Well, the simple fact is it's my choice to take the easy way out and eat at McDonalds vs. planting seeds and raising animals and growing everything I need to sustain myself. In our modern world it may seem impossible to us to do anything else, but plenty of people do.
Similarly, it's a choice if you choose to purchase a computer with Windows pre-installed. Neither of my PC's came with it installed - I built my desktop PC and I bought my laptop second-hand (w/ no OS installed due to licensing issues). In both cases I did not pay MS until I *chose* to purchase their OS. I do not consider this a tax; I could just as easily have chosen to install Linux and paid nothing (in fact, I do run Linux on a dual boot).
I think some Slashdotters just expect everything to be free, and consider it "a tax" when it's not, even when they themselves choose to pay that "tax". Well, certain things are free and certain things aren't, and you can choose to use only free things or you can choose to only pay for things or you can mix it up. But if you do choose to pay for something, it's obviously because of some sort of added value you perceived in the product, whether it's allowing you to use certain software you need or the fonts look better or whatever. That's pretty much the way capitalist society works; people pay for things if they're worth paying for (or if they're perceived to be worth paying for). So don't go around whining about a "tax" that you yourself chose to pay because the commercial product does things for you that Linux won't.
At the moment, the single person who has the potential to kill the most human beings through coldly calculated, profit motivated war would be the leader of the United States of America.
You mean as opposed to simply for the thrill of it, like Saddam Hussein?
I often wonder how people would react if George Bush killed 150,000 New Yorkers with mustard gas because we were getting on his nerves. Protesting against the war? Hit 'em with some VX!
How long do you think Bush would last in power? About 5 minutes. How long has Saddam Hussein lasted? 15 or more years since he did it. He did it to the Iranians as well as to his own people too. And the only reason he didn't do it to us is because we threatened to nuke Baghdad if he did. Sounds harsh, but that's war. It saved a lot of American lives in the end.
You're trying to tell us all that George Bush is more dangerous than Saddam Hussein. I'm sorry, but much as I hate Bush (and I did not vote for him, nor would I again), that is simply offensive. Completely offensive. Not just as an American, but as a human being. People who use mustard gas on their own countrymen are not to be defended, however much you dislike their enemy's policies. Saddam Hussein is not the lesser of two evils.
And this whole oil argument was used in 1991 too. Try to come up with something original. The results of that war should have been pretty conclusive proof that it's not about oil - we wouldn't even let him sell it afterwards. Use your freakin' head.
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't it far easier and cheaper to just to plug the phone in occasionally and carry a spare battery if you have to?
In a word, no. Have you ever looked at the prices for cel phone batteries? They're generally only slightly less than the cost of the phone itself. For my $99 phone, a spare battery is $80. Some batteries are even more expensive than that.
And having to plug the phone in occasionally? Do you understand the concept of a mobile phone? How are you going to plug in a phone on your average train, plane, or automobile? (If you can do it, you generally need yet another special attachment, such as a cigarette lighter adapter. This basically defeats your point, which is that it's simpler just to plug in once in a while. It isn't.)
Energy storage in fuel cells is actually quite expensive, especially compared to electricity. The main advantage is far longer battery life. But for phones, which last for days anyway, why?
I suppose it's pointless to tell a Slashdot reader to RTFA. Battery life on 3G phones is not very long - this is their main drawback and the reason why adoption rates have been low. Lots of people have been saying it's going to take a major breakthrough in battery technology to really improve the situation for small, high-tech devices like 3G phones and even current laptop computers - fuel cell technology is that breakthrough. Eventually, we'll all be using fuel cells for our portable devices. May take 20 years for the switchover to be complete, but it'll happen. It has to, given how power-hungry we've become.
You would have rather seen that? 1080 is shit shit shit. 720p looks entirely better. There is essentially no reason for 1080i to exist at all.
(spit-take)
There is no reason for 1920x1080 resolution to exist when we have 1280x720? What the heck?
That's like saying "there's no reason for anyone to run a PC at 1024x768; 640x480 is entirely better." Oh, you mean the interlacing? Get a real TV. It's like people who complain about an LCD's 60hz refresh rate. Since an LCD's pixels are never actually blank, it's meaningless (except for frame rates in games, but there's no HDTV signal with a frame rate higher than that so the point is moot here). HDTV interlacing is also essentially meaningless if you have a decent TV set. It's not the same thing as CRT-based interlacing on an NTSC set.
1920x1080 is significantly higher resolution than 1280x720. It's obvious when you look at the real numbers - more obvious than if you just look at "720p" vs. "1080i". And it's obvious if you see 1080i material vs. 720p material on a good HDTV set.
So what gets dropped? Palm which has probably a nicer "case" style or Handspring with its less desirable case but some features you don't find on Palms."
Have you actually been following what's going on in handhelds these days? It doesn't sound like it. Palm and Handspring today make entirely different products. Palm makes PDA's; Handspring makes "communication products" - handhelds based on cel phone designs. There's no overlap - neither company has individual models comparable to the others'.
But regardless, I wouldn't buy any model from either company. Others have already mentioned the Sony Clies - I have one of these, and I bought one for my wife too (she loves it). We don't need high-end features, and in the low-end the Clies have several features that Palms don't (and Handspring doesn't even make a low-end device). Sony also is far ahead of Palm in industrial design IMO - it's akin to, say, Dell vs. Apple. I'd actually love to have one of the real high-end models but don't feel they're worth $800. The recently announced top-end Clies, though, do have a lot of useful features - including built-in wireless, a built-in keyboard, camera, and MP3 player. In other words, the best of what both Palm and Handspring offer and in a much better-looking design. But still too expensive for me.
but I don't think you'd want it for gaming and the like.
Tablet PC's - at least the majority of them - are nothing but convertible laptop computers. Nothing more, nothing less. I couldn't play games on my laptop - it's not powerful enough - but my wife sure could on hers. Stick a swivel touch-screen on our computers and bam, they're both tablet PC's. The point being, there's nothing whatsoever about the fact that a PC is a tablet PC that rules it in or out for gaming or any other computing task.
The hype for these things has gone beyond what the actual product is, and I don't think it's served the product well. I'd love to have a tablet PC - it's a laptop with a useful extra feature (especially for design work, which I do occasionally). If you want a laptop, why don't you want a laptop with this extra feature? It's like putting built-in wi-fi into a laptop (which I think is a much bigger innovation, honestly) and then giving those laptops their own product category and specialized launch. It's just a feature, and one that a lot of people would like if they actually got to use it. There's no reason to not want a laptop with this feature if you already want a laptop... maybe you don't want to pay the extra $100 or whatever (that's really about all the premium is), but eventually that won't even be a factor.
btw, I think the word "vendors" was left off the headline of this story - I read the headline and thought that a particular model of tablet PC had developed a defect. I expected to read a story about a recall based on the headline.
The only redeeming part about the MTV movie awards: the fact that, underneath it all, they're just poking fun at self-important movie stars.
Inanity is not to be confused with satire, and calling the MTV movie awards such is giving the network way too much credit. If you've ever watched one of these things, they're taken about as seriously as anything can be in their teeny-bopper mentality. Obviously it's not on the same level of seriousness (and pretentiousness) as the Academy Awards, but that in no way implies some sort of smart social commentary.
MTV has always tried to present these awards as an alternative to the Academy Awards. That's not the way you do satire - nobody reads The Onion as an alternative to the Washington Post, for example; you don't go there trying to get actual news. These awards aren't satire at all. They may be irreverent, but they're totally straight underneath it all.
And as such, they carry even less weight than if they were satire. The Academy Awards may be overblown but they're at least decided upon by people who know a little something about the subject - those both inside the industry itself as well as those who make a living commenting on it. What the hell does MTV know about movies? About enough to make and market Jackass, I guess. Next you'll tell me that's satire too.
Everything that's wrong with the telecom industry (or at the very least, the mobile phone industry) is encapsulated in this phone. Why do I own a DVD player? To play DVD's. Why do I own an air conditioner? To cool my house. Why do I own a phone? To communicate with other people.
I need all this other garbage on this phone like I need a dishwasher on my VCR. Meanwhile, call quality has actually dropped with the increasing use of built-in antennas (like on the Nokia 5100), at the same time as all these useless new features like calorie counters have been added to the mix.
Service providers are not exempt from the same criticism (and let's face it; they're the ones who ask phone manufacturers to include or not include certain features, so the phones are partly their fault to begin with). They've spent the last several years adding new features to their services such as downloadable graphics and ring tones, video games, etc. without doing much of anything at all to increase their basic service quality itself despite an increasing number of complaints about signal strength, even in major metro areas. And let's not even talk about 3G, shall we?
The last time I bought a new phone it was because I physically destroyed my old one in a fit of anger at about my 20th lost call in a row (I threw it at the wall, and it shattered). The next time I buy a new phone will probably be the next time that happens - it certainly won't be because of any of the new features in any of these phones. The industry needs to realize that adoption rates and sales of phones to existing customers are slowing because of serious and basic issues like these, not because our phones don't have calorie counters or FM radios built in.
I have a Tivo and a couple of consoles. One of many things I like about the Tivo is that I can play my games and not care about what I may be missing on TV.
Anyone heard anything about whether this can record and play games at the same time?
If it's really a TiVo (and I'll bet it is - Sony does make them), then it has to have this capability. Otherwise, it does not offer the functionality TiVo advertises (TiVo units are always recording - they're never switched off) and therefore is not a TiVo.
I'm very curious to see if this is announced for the US and if so, if it will be marketed as a TiVo-compatible device. If it is, I am so there. It's no big deal that TiVo wasn't mentioned for the Japanese release - none of their other hard drive-based TV devices have been either, and several of them have made it here as TiVos.
ok... this is getting ridiculous... why should anyone that found a way to compromise security for a game be prosecuted in real life?!
For the same reason they should be prosecuted for DoS attacks in real life, because that's basically what this is. People pay for playing this game, and they're not being allowed to play because of these hackers. It's pretty much the definition of denial of service, only this time it directly affects paying customers, so it's really even worse than a standard DoS attack for end-users.
I've tried both. Both offer little in the way of visual benefits and both tend to make PSX games more buggy on the PS2 than they would be otherwise (which, in my experience, is still fairly buggy).
Texture smoothing is an insignifigant benefit next to polygon rendering at higher resolutions. Generally speaking, higher resolution is all that really separates Star Fox from Star Fox 64.
Then I guess we can all turn off bilinear (or trilinear, or anisotropic) filtering on our PC graphics cards, despite the fact that we all paid a pretty penny specifically for that feature, because that's exactly what the "texture smoothing" feature of the PS2 does. It improves the visual quality in exactly the same way as filtering does on PC graphics cards. If you don't notice it, then I guess you probably just use software rendering on your PC whenever you play games too, huh? Or at least turn off the filtering for the performance increase? Somehow I doubt it.
And yes, SF64 uses bilinear filtering, SF doesn't (in fact, if I remember right, it doesn't use textures at all - just flat-shaded polygons).
Oh, and all games I've tried texture smoothing with work perfectly. It's the "fast load" feature that some games have a problem with. Very few games are known to have problems with texture smoothing.
SEGA was founded by an American, I have not read this book- but it never says in the title that Sonic was American.
No, but it does in the review posted here. "a history of the United States' software industry." Sega may have been partially founded by two Americans, but it was founded in Japan and has always been a Japanese company (prior to its move to Japan in the 1950's, it was not called Sega and did not produce the same products - effectively, it was a different company). In fact, the original name of the company was "Service Games of Japan" - later abbreviated to Sega. (This taken right from Sega's own web site - click the "in-depth history" link.)
Regardless, Yuji Naka and Naoto Oshima were the original creators of Sonic the Hedgehog, and I don't think anybody would argue they were Americans (it's not really an arguable point). Sonic Team is and always has been based in Japan, same as Sega, though Sonic Team was "born and bred" there even if Sega itself wasn't.
If the book "reviewer" really read the book, then he should have known this - and if the book doesn't make mention of it despite Sonic being part of the title, then it's not really a book I'd consider worth reading or recommending to others. This is why it's important to get the facts straight in any book review, or to point out where the book errs if the book itself is incorrect.
Ummm...
That doesn't look very American to me.
The SuSE web site listed "improved wireless LAN support" as one of the selling points of 8.2. Can anyone comment on what this means exactly? I've turned up nothing in anything I've read about this version, in any reviews, or even the comments here so far. I've had a hell of a time installing wireless LAN drivers (the wlan drivers) for my Linksys WUSB12 and have never managed to get it to work with either Mandrake or Red Hat. Does SuSE come with the full suite of wlan drivers (including USB) pre-installed?
I suggest PA put the picture back up, but change the words to read "What if Strawberry Shortcake was as nasty as American Greeting's Lawyers?"
This would clearly be a parody of the material in question.
It would also be quite lame, both creatively and in humorous terms.
A lot of people are suggesting various alterations to the image that would allow it to be reposted. To me, that's even worse than its removal. What kind of statement are you making by altering a creative piece of artwork to satisfy a bunch of copyright lawyers? Removing the images show a lot more artistic integrity - you're making a statement that basically says "your attitude will lead to no art." That's a strong statement.
Both Challenger nor Columbia were caused by human error. In Challenger's case, the politicians/managers made the decision to go despite warnings from the engineers. In Columbia's case, they had the opportunity to take pictures of the shuttle in orbit, per suggestions by the engineers, but decided not to do so. (What they could have done to save the crew is a separate topic.)
No, it's not a separate topic, especially since you use the lack of cameras as a "cause" of the accident. People need to use their heads before making statements like this. What, exactly, would have taking pictures of the shuttle actually accomplished in this case? How was not taking pictures in any way contributory to the accident? The recommendation is for *future* space flights - pictures of Columbia while in space would have accomplished nothing but satisfying the morbid curiosity of people like you after the fact.
If there was damage to the leading edge of the wing from launch, Columbia was doomed, plain and simple. I don't see how having pictures confirming that ahead of time is going to make anybody feel any better about it. Great, so now the astronauts know they're going to die. How fun for them and for us. It would have been like Apollo 13 all over again, only this time without the happy ending.
It's been firmly established that there was no way to save these astronauts once they were up there. They did not have enough fuel to reach the ISS. There was not enough time to rush another shuttle up to rescue them before their food and water ran out - not even ignoring all safety rules and risking two accidents for the price of one.
Cameras may help troubleshoot and solve problems on future shuttle flights. Eventually, it will likely seem ridiculous that we don't now have exterior cameras covering all surfaces of our spacecraft, and the ability to film them from satellites as well. But on this particular flight, there is nothing anybody could have done to save these astronauts once they were up there, camera or no camera. The only helpful thing having pictures would have done would be in helping determine the cause of the accident afterwards - but we know there was a breach in the wing without them, so even that point is moot.
when the shuttle launched, a piece of debris broke off and hit the wing. Back then they said it didn't matter, then the shuttle exploded on re-entry. Now, months and months of 'careful study' they find that the wing had been damaged. No sh*t... what a useless exercise. And the recommendation: study the shuttle more carefully! Ummm. yeah, how much are they being paid for this?
A classic misinterpretation of an accident report - though this isn't even a full accident report yet, and I imagine there will be even more misinterpretation when it is finally released.
What the investigators have actually determined is really nothing. What they have determined probably happened is that there was pre-existing corrosion to the frame of the wing's leading edge, which weakened it to the point where the foam strike caused something to break. This pre-existing corrosion should have been caught and fixed by NASA, and if finally proven as fact, would be the root cause of the accident. The foam hit was not the cause of the accident, the corrosion was. Assuming they stick to this theory, of course.
I've said before that almost all accidents are a series of events, some preventable, some not, most benign by themselves. It's that particularly series of events and the way they unfold that causes the accident. Without the corrosion, the foam hit would have done nothing. It's happened so many times before without incident, and the shuttles were built to take punishment - these are vehicles designed for repeated launch and re-entry, for God's sake - the G-forces, shock and vibration they're built to withstand are almost ridiculous, and they've been hit by multiple objects at launch, in orbit and during re-entry before without incident. The facts seem to suggest that Columbia was no longer in like-new condition - that it was fatally weakened even before its last launch. If it wasn't for this foam hit, it would have been something else that would have brought it down eventually. The foam was just a catalyst.
What I find shocking is the apparent deriliction of maintenance on the part of NASA, and the budget cuts really need to be looked at as a contributing factor to the accident. There's no way these shuttles should be allowed to have this kind of corrosion, and Columbia was just refitted a couple of years ago - the wings were taken completely apart, they should have seen any damage like this. Even if they didn't, though, they should be doing MRI's or whatever they need to every 6 months or a year to check the interior structures of all critical structures.
Just one final comment - someone suggested doing 2 "pre-flight" checks, one before launch and one before re-entry. This doesn't make any sense whatsoever. The poster used commercial airliners as an example - well, this would be like doing a "pre-flight" check both before takeoff and before landing. First of all, the pre-flight on a commercial airliner is usually nothing more than a walk-around by the pilot and a systems check while taxiing (many airplanes spend 30 minutes or less at the gate before pushback). The space shuttle sits in a hangar for 6 months being looked over with a fine tooth comb before launch - it's much more thorough than anything a commercial airliner goes through. Second, there's no "pre-flight" before a plane lands - that would not be feasible or even necessary. There's no reason why a space shuttle would need such a check either if the vehicle itself is in good working condition - which should be established while it's on the ground, not in space. If you establish the fact that the foam hitting the wing was not catastrophic in and of itself but that it was corrosion to the interior structure of the wing's leading edge that weakened it and led to the break when the foam hit - that's something that should be caught before it even gets to the launch pad. It's not something you should worry about in flight.
Anyone who would give up essential freedom for a little bit of security deserves neither.
The kind of person who would make a statement like this is the kind of person who has never faced death at the hands of another. I and many others have.
The most essential freedom is the freedom to live. The only question is how best to guarantee that most essential freedom of all, without unduly affecting other, less essential freedoms (yes, I'm sorry, but not all freedoms are created equal). Now, sometimes you can't help but lessen some freedoms to guarantee others, as often one person's personal freedom infringes upon another's - it's simply a balancing act, like anything else in life. Should I be free to kill you? Is my freedom to kill you more essential than - or even as essential as - your right to live? I don't think anyone would argue that it is. That's an extreme example but the government - along with every individual in this country and around the world - makes similar choices on a smaller scale (as well as a larger scale) every minute of every day. This is why we have laws to prevent people from doing certain things that they'd otherwise be "free" to do, and this is why we have a police force to enforce those laws.
Security and freedom are not mutually exclusive, and it's naive to think they are. Security is a very important part of being free - without security, there is no freedom. Without our own personal security we'd all be locked in our homes, afraid to go outside. Is that freedom? Most certainly not.
Again, I'm using extremes to prove my point, but there is a lot of middle ground here, and where you draw the line between what's "essential" freedom and what isn't is a lot harder to define than you seem to think it is.
The government are happy to jail someone who sells a piece of kit that allows people to copy games, whilst trying to pass laws [bbc.co.uk] that protect gun manufacturers from being sued if their guns are used in a crime.
Ah, hypocrisy. Similar to "irony" in its misunderstanding these days - just as it's not actually irony if it rains on your wedding day, it's not actually hypocrisy for the government to enact laws inconsistently. What would be hypocrisy would be for the government to sell these mod chips themselves but still arrest others for doing the same thing, and I don't see them doing that.
You can accuse the government of being a lot of things in this case - stupid, overzealous, bull-headed, whatever... but there's no hypocrisy here that I can see. They're just enforcing the law as it's written, and it's not a hypocritical law at all. A dumb law, an overreaching law, but not a hypocritical one.
On a side note, digital (and regular) modifications are the rule rather than the exception for photographers. They take inches off of those models legs, add this, remove that. One interesting trick is that they dilate the pupils of models to make them look sexier. Am I missing the importance of this?
You're only missing the obvious difference between fashion photography and photo-journalism.
One thing I don't think anybody's brought up yet, and the thing that worries me the most, is that the real potential to kill Tivo (and the entire concept behind it) would be when Mystro eventually and inevitably becomes standard cable. Look at DTV - it's practically a requirement here in NYC now, and if you go to Time Warner's web site, I challenge you to find any information at all on their analog cable offerings. Mystro will eventually become the standard cable service which will render Tivo not just unnecessary, but useless. In order to use the two together you'd have to select a TV show to watch on cable, then manually record it on Tivo - which basically puts Tivo in "boat anchor" mode; the Tivo service itself does nothing.
And of course, along the way you lose any real choice about the TV shows you want to watch or when you want to watch them, since there may only be a certain window of time a show is available, for example (this is true of Tivo by default as well, though you can always tell Tivo to keep a program "until I delete it").
My problem is not with this service being available, as I see no reason to switch from my Tivo. But it's silly to dismiss this as an idea that won't work. All AOL has to do is make it part of the standard cable service and boom - no more Tivo for anyone. It's not as if there's any actual competition among cable providers. (There's satellite, yeah, but as I know first-hand as an unfortunately former DirecTV subsriber, satellite is not always available to apartment dwellers. And this is a city of apartments.)
As far as i know the human eye can only see about 30fps, and from playing Counter-Strike a lot, people seem to be generally pleased as long as they have above 60fps. Does he really mean he's getting 2000 frames per second? Someone explain please!
It's a myth that the human eye can only see 30, or 24, or whatever arbitrarily low number of frames per second you want to come up with. First of all, the limiter is not the eye, it's the brain. So the more accurate phraseology would be "the human brain can only perceive X frames per second" rather than "the human eye can only see X frames per second". More importantly, though, is that there is no hard and fast number of frames per second a human can perceive - it's different for everyone, but for almost everybody it's well beyond 30.
Consider motion picture film. Initially, film was shot at roughly 16-18 frames per second. This was later standardized at 24 fps when it became clear that at 18 flicker was still clearly visible. 24 fps is the minimum at which flicker was determined to not be a distraction, and this minimum was used for economic reasons (not because it was the highest number of frames per second people could perceive, but because it was the lowest number of frames per second at which they would not be distracted by flicker, and this helped keep film stock costs down to the minimum while maintaining the increasingly sophisticated audience's interest).
Now, you may wonder why I'm using 24fps as an example when you're talking 30. Simple, really - a film strip that's being projected at 24 frames per second is actually showing 48 images per second, it's just that half of those images are blank. Now, next time you go to a film I want you to look at a bright scene and tell me you do not perceive any flicker at all. You probably won't be distracted by it, but you'll see it if you look for it. And this is at a real 48 "frames" (images) per second - well higher than the 30 you mention. Clearly the brain is capable of perceiving even higher than the 48 images per second projected in motion picture theaters.
I think people get confused by the concept of persistence of vision. Persistence of vision is what allows us to assign motion to static images when they're projected in sequence fast enough for our brains to be tricked. However - and this is the most important thing - the speed of projected images at which our brains can be tricked into perceiving motion and the speed of projected images at which our brains lose the ability to perceive those individual images are not the same. There are two different areas of the brain at work here - one processes raw images, and the other assigns meaning to them. They work together but are independent of each other.
It may be easier to understand this through a musical example. Imagine a piece of music that you've never heard before, but one that makes auditory sense (ie. it's not just a bunch of noise, it follows a pattern your brain has heard before and expects). Now imagine that three times per second there is a period of silence in that music. You will likely still be able to hear the music itself and understand it to be music and follow along with it - but you will still hear the silences as well and it will be annoying. Obviously, as you ramp up the sample rate there is a point at which you first will be able to tolerate those silences (perceiving them to be nothing but degraded sound quality) and then eventually lose the ability to perceive those silences at all, but that point is at a fairly high sample rate. This is obviously the theory behind the CD, which is broken up into 44,000 samples per second.
It's a bit of a moot point in this case because we're talking extremely high frame rates (there would be no perceived difference between 2500 and 2100 frames per second), but it's a pet peeve of mine when I see it stated that 24 or 30 fps are "all the human eye can see" so I thought I should correct it. In the case of
Do people really think government agencies are sitting there for 25 years trying to figure out what documents to declassify? When a document is released, that someone gets assigned to it specifically to determine the precise point at which it can be declassified? Of course not - it'd be a complete and utter waste of resources. These reviews are done periodically and cover reams and reams of documents that can't simply be glanced at and passed through - they must be studied down to the individual words used. No doubt it takes quite a while.
But I guess, since we're dealing with Bush, there must be some nefarious governmental conspiracy behind it, right? It can't possibly be that it just takes a while to do the work properly, can it? "No more documents for oil!"
Most anti-war people I hear talk about all the civilian casualties resulting from this war, but I'm somehow not sure I should take their word for it.
More important, it seems to me, are the civilian casualties that will occur if we do not go to war. Saddam Hussein has killed 100,000-150,000 of his own people with chemical weapons, and that's not including his "executions" or those who have died in prison captivity during torture sessions. This is what gets forgotten when people talk about civilian casualties as the result of war. It may sound callous to say it, but what's the lesser of two evils here?
Does anyone here know the read civilian death toll from the last Iraqi war?
The estimates I saw at the time said between 2,000 and 3,000. Quite a lot fewer than Saddam has killed himself, and quite a lot fewer than the 100,000 Iraqi soldiers estimated to have died (terrible in itself, as most of them did not choose to be in the military, as our guys have the luxury of doing).
The relative quality of your experiences does not change the fact that for the vast majority of the population, it is perceived that one has no option but to pay for Windows. Therefore, it's a tax. (Emphasis added.)
No, therefore it is perceived as a tax by some people around here. It's like saying I pay the "McDonalds tax" because I perceive that I'm forced to eat at McDonalds rather than growing my own food for "free". Well, the simple fact is it's my choice to take the easy way out and eat at McDonalds vs. planting seeds and raising animals and growing everything I need to sustain myself. In our modern world it may seem impossible to us to do anything else, but plenty of people do.
Similarly, it's a choice if you choose to purchase a computer with Windows pre-installed. Neither of my PC's came with it installed - I built my desktop PC and I bought my laptop second-hand (w/ no OS installed due to licensing issues). In both cases I did not pay MS until I *chose* to purchase their OS. I do not consider this a tax; I could just as easily have chosen to install Linux and paid nothing (in fact, I do run Linux on a dual boot).
I think some Slashdotters just expect everything to be free, and consider it "a tax" when it's not, even when they themselves choose to pay that "tax". Well, certain things are free and certain things aren't, and you can choose to use only free things or you can choose to only pay for things or you can mix it up. But if you do choose to pay for something, it's obviously because of some sort of added value you perceived in the product, whether it's allowing you to use certain software you need or the fonts look better or whatever. That's pretty much the way capitalist society works; people pay for things if they're worth paying for (or if they're perceived to be worth paying for). So don't go around whining about a "tax" that you yourself chose to pay because the commercial product does things for you that Linux won't.
This version does not work on Windows XP (only the Rockstar Classics release does) and it requires a subscription to download.
At the moment, the single person who has the potential to kill the most human beings through coldly calculated, profit motivated war would be the leader of the United States of America.
You mean as opposed to simply for the thrill of it, like Saddam Hussein?
I often wonder how people would react if George Bush killed 150,000 New Yorkers with mustard gas because we were getting on his nerves. Protesting against the war? Hit 'em with some VX!
How long do you think Bush would last in power? About 5 minutes. How long has Saddam Hussein lasted? 15 or more years since he did it. He did it to the Iranians as well as to his own people too. And the only reason he didn't do it to us is because we threatened to nuke Baghdad if he did. Sounds harsh, but that's war. It saved a lot of American lives in the end.
You're trying to tell us all that George Bush is more dangerous than Saddam Hussein. I'm sorry, but much as I hate Bush (and I did not vote for him, nor would I again), that is simply offensive. Completely offensive. Not just as an American, but as a human being. People who use mustard gas on their own countrymen are not to be defended, however much you dislike their enemy's policies. Saddam Hussein is not the lesser of two evils.
And this whole oil argument was used in 1991 too. Try to come up with something original. The results of that war should have been pretty conclusive proof that it's not about oil - we wouldn't even let him sell it afterwards. Use your freakin' head.