The first time one of your "new ideas" breaks your company's CAD software and your call to support goes unanswered because you were using an unsupported modification, thereby rendering thousands of dollars worth of both hardware and software pretty much useless, I expect your company will change their tune.
Companies that have been around long enough have usually learned the hard way that it pays to do things above board. Murphy's Law exists for a reason. Any failure point, given a long enough gestation period, *will* fail. And using an unsupported modification in a professional setting is, if nothing else, a failure point.
Nice quote. I had no idea RR had such mastery of subtlety.
Makes you wonder if he also said anything to the effect of "wars are advocated only by persons who have not been killed in one" or "capital punishment is advocated only by persons who have not been executed." Somehow I doubt it.
Goes to show that eloquence and logic don't always go hand in hand.
No evidence? No body? No murder weapon? Who cares! The prosecutor used Power Point in his closing.. The defendant is "weird".
Did you bother to RTFA? There was plenty of evidence. A body is not required to arrest and convict somebody of murder. Otherwise all anybody would have to do would be to cremate the body and poof! No crime!
The article gives just a couple of examples, but they're obviously examples of many. The guy spent 11 full days on the stand. The one pretty incriminating example of evidence cited in the article is the fact that he removed the passenger seat of his car just after his wife's disappearance, then hosed down the interior and left an inch of standing water on the floor boards. Now, you tell me why any average person has reason to do that. I can tell you that in 20 years of car ownership and six different cars, I have never once taken the passenger seat out of my car, thrown it away and then hosed down the interior, and I don't know anyone else who has either. His explanation was that he liked to sleep in the car and wanted the extra room. Does this sound plausible to you?
So, let's just look at this *one* piece of evidence. Guy's wife disappears. He then immediately removes the seat from his car, which is never seen again, and he hoses down the interior of the car. That doesn't paint a picture for you? Now, let's say you ask the guy why he did that and he gives you a laughably ridiculous explanation. And let's say this goes on for 11 days as the prosecution asks him to explain every other piece of evidence, and his explanations are no less ridiculous in each case.
The standard for guilt or innocence is proof beyond a reasonable doubt. That doesn't mean *any* doubt, and that's the mistake people often make. It's *reasonable* doubt. Is it reasonable to assume he was telling the truth about that car seat? Would any reasonable person do what he did with that car seat? And if all his other explanations about the evidence presented were similar, is it reasonable to assume he was telling the truth about anything?
The whole EULA system is based on circumstance. MS (and the judicial system, I guess) would assume the following: I installed the software in question, therefore I agreed to the EULA. No other way about it. That's 100% circumstantial if I ever saw it.
That's only partially the point. The main point is that a EULA is only as enforceable as its contents are legal in and of themselves. I'm not convinced that it's legal to sell somebody something, then revoke their ability to use it. Imagine buying a car, and the seller puts a clause in the contract that says "I reserve the right to come to your house at a time of my own choosing and shoot the car full of buckshot. I will face no repercussions for this." That would never hold up in court because the act itself is 100% illegal; in fact it would break several laws, not just one (vandalism, defacement, trespassing, wreckless endangerment, weapons violations, noise ordinances, etc). Simply put, the right for the seller to shoot a shotgun at a car in a driveway is not legally the buyer's to give.
It's the same principle by which a store putting up a sign saying "not responsible for lost or stolen articles" does not mean they're *actually* not responsible. They may in fact be responsible. The sign itself doesn't give them any legal shielding. All a sign can do is advise people of what the store's responsibilities actually are, but it can't change or cancel those responsibilities.
A contract has to be a legal contract to be binding - it has to follow the law. Every EULA is different so while some EULA's are probably enforceable, others no doubt aren't. I've seen EULA's that had obviously been written with no legal counsel whatsoever, they were so ridiculous. The bottom line is you cannot sign away your basic rights as either a citizen or as a consumer with a contract. If a seller is obligated by law to act in a certain way, they can't get out of that with a EULA.
I haven't read the MSN Music EULA, but this idea that people don't actually own what they've paid for and that they acknowledge that in a EULA has not really been tested in court to my knowledge. Generally speaking, even for a *legal* contract to be valid, both parties have to know what they're agreeing to. So MS would have a pretty high burden in any court case - they would have to prove first of all that every part of the EULA was legally enforceable (which I doubt is the case), then they would have to prove that their customers actually understood what they were agreeing to (which I know is *not* the case).
Of course, some of this does depend on where the case is tried. Contract laws differ from state to state and individual judges may have different interpretations of those laws. But the basic fact is that EULA's can't make laws; they can only serve as an enforcer of existing laws, and both sides have to understand any contract that they enter into.
Actually before the unveiling of the F-117 there was MUCH speculation as to the existence of a secret stealth fighter.
Yeah, we all knew about it for years beforehand. It was probably the military's worst-kept secret.
Some of it may have been intentional. It's possible that some stories were leaked to put our enemies in a tizzy. There was already no shortage of paranoia on both sides of the Cold War. I was young at the time so I didn't consider this, but most people knew there was some big secret program going on involving black jets that only came out at night.
The cat was pretty much out of the bag when one of them crashed into a hill in California. I remember seeing news footage and there was just a lot of black wreckage. It was not really definable, but it was clearly odd looking. And the news media immediately made the connection that this must be one of those top-secret black planes flying around that everybody had been talking about. I think the military finally announced the program soon after.
I wonder were it not for that crash if the Air Force would have been content to just go the entire length of the program without announcing it. The Iraqis and Serbs would never have even known what was hitting them. It may have saved that one from getting shot down over Serbia, since they knew what to look for by then (the radar signature with the bomb bay doors open).
Anyway, this is the first major military aircraft that I've now lived through the entire development, operation and now retirement of. Makes me feel old. But also interesting that other aircraft like the F-15 and F-16 are even older and still going (though not for much longer).
All the talk of terraforming mars is hot air, unless somebody is going to clue me in on how we're going to magically make mars geologically active again, so it would have a magnetosphere to protect us from the suns radiation.
The reason why it's not geologically active is that the entire planet is too cool - it's basically a frozen rock. Once it's terraformed, the surface temperature will rise enough that hot gases will be released and the planet will become geologically active again naturally.
Not to mention that any moon colony is going to have plenty of the best fertilizer in existence available, in a basically limitless supply. As long as people are there, anyway.
Had to be pointed out. There are going to be some adjustments in thinking needed if we're ever going to do anything worthwhile on the moon...
the medium is CG or cel animation. anime is the genre of japanese animation.
There is no genre called "japanese animation", anymore than there is a genre called "Hollywood movies" or "silent films". These are not genres.
A genre describes a work's "aboutness". It's a broad category that describes a set of themes. "Japanese animation" does not do that, and hence it is not a genre. All you know if somebody tells you a work is Japanese animation is that it was produced in Japan and if there is spoken dialogue, it's probably in Japanese. You know nothing of what the themes or aesthetics might be.
The Simpsons is animated in Korea. Does that makes the series' genre "Korean Animation"?
This is film theory 101. (Literally. That's the class I learned it in, 15 years ago.)
That's true. (Well.. it IS a Mamoru Oshii movie..) BUT! SAC ist way more true to Shirow's style than anything else.
Well, the original movie really was not like Shirow's style at all - the manga does not have that surreal "Twilight Zone" feel in the slightest. It's very dense and packed with info and it's one of those graphic novels where you've got to sort of immerse yourself in this world that he's created and consider all the problems we're going to come up against in the future and that's what makes it interesting.
Oshii's film is interesting in a totally different way, in that it's less about the world itself and more about this larger question of what life actually is. The world is only really featured as much as it needs to be to support that question and present arguments. That question was there in the manga too, but it was just one of many issues the manga raised. Oshii boiled down the manga to what he thought was the central question, and he stripped everything out that he thought got in the way of that. And that's what left him room to sort of explore the inner workings of the characters a little bit more and create that surrealness, which of course only served to support the theme too.
The second movie, though, was terrible. That was more like masturbation on Oshii's part. I don't think I've ever seen a sci-fi film that's more slowly paced... and that includes 2001: a Space Odyssey (which Oshii clearly uses for inspiration).
Whenever somebody talks about doing a new adaptation of GitS, the question is always whether they'll adapt the manga or the original film. I personally think the manga is basically unfilmable (as a standalone feature film) and whatever film is made then has to basically do what Oshii did and take one element out and focus on that. Maybe there's a different element that can be pulled out than the original film did, but I don't think Shirow's manga can ever really be boiled down to a 2 hour movie. It's probably a mistake to try, and luckily Oshii saw that and made something original and unique on its own. Hopefully Spielberg is that smart.
I find a glossy display gives better blacks and dark colours,
That is the idea.
It's very easy to make a cheap LCD screen extremely bright - brighter than you would ever need (or could even tolerate). It is not easy to make a cheap LCD screen with a decent black level.
So these glossy screens act as a sort of neutral density filter. They lower the black level at the expense of some of the unusable white level on the other end of the spectrum.
But these filters are always being used to mask flaws (poor black level and contrast) in cheap screens. It is still obviously better to just buy a better screen capable of better black levels.
I have a laptop with a glossy screen and I hate it. I bought it because it was cheap. Next time, I'll spend a little more and buy a laptop with a decent screen that doesn't require tricks to get it to look good at the expense of glare.
At work, I have two non-coated screens and it's such a pleasure to work with them by comparison.
Remember people they are not a bank. They are just some people holding onto your money. How would you trust someone you dont know to hold your money?
Maybe you think my story is isolated but read online. Paypal routinely freezes peoples accounts only to never let them have their money.
But why would you let them "hold onto" your money?
I have a PayPal account and use it fairly often. I don't keep any money in there. What point is there in doing so? If I want to pay for something, I have PayPal take the money off my credit card. (They cannot do so without authorization, by law.) If I'm being paid for something, I wait until I have the payment notice and then I immediately have that money transferred to my bank account.
Even if you're a bulk seller, I can't see how it's all that difficult to just go in there once a day and transfer the balance to a bank account. It takes less than one minute.
PayPal should be seen as a conduit between buyers and sellers; that's it. If you use it that way (and it is the proper way to use it), then their service is fine. There's no reason to leave a bunch of money in your PayPal account. You may as well give it to some guy on the street and ask him to hold it for you.
It's a particular type of signal being generated on a particular (popular) cell phone frequency that's the problem. I believe it's actually 800mhz GSM where the interference occurs. It's the same frequency that also messes with hospital equipment.
From what I've read, the EU has required extra shielding on planes that need it in order to implement cell phone calls. I would think that'd be kind of a nightmare for planes that do double-duty domestic and international (or for planes that *could* do both - it'd limit an airline's sub inventory if an otherwise perfectly capable plane didn't have the proper shielding for domestic duty).
Also, airliners don't seem to have a problem even if they're unshielded as long as the wiring is in good condition. The problem is a lot of older airliners might have wiring that's starting to fray and insulation that's worn. 20+ years of vibration and rubbing can take the insulation off of any wire. Wiring is supposed to be inspected at regular intervals but a lot of it is tough to get to and it's in bundles, so you can't really see every individual wire over its entire length.
So yeah, it *is* more dangerous to fly with cell phones on than without, and it's more dangerous than wi-fi cards that operate on a different frequency (and not in "burst" mode, or whatever these GSM phones do).
So because you don't LIKE it, it should be ILLEGAL and punishable by a court of law?
Uh, yeah?
That's why all laws exist. Enough people don't like something and it gets outlawed.
People don't *like* being robbed on the street. People don't *like* being stabbed. People don't *like* having their homes burglarized. Hence, all of these things are illegal.
If a large majority of people don't like hearing others yapping in their cell phones on a flight, then yes, it should be illegal too for that reason alone.
While still reliable given their age, it was no longer cost effective maintaining them. At a certain point, it becomes more affordable to buy new cars than to keep maintaining the old ones. These cars would bankrupt any city that couldn't afford to buy new cars. If a city can't afford to buy new cars, then they couldn't afford to maintain these ones.
They were also just not very nice anymore by any standard. They were at least 40 years old and had several million miles on them. The ride quality was similar to a soapbox racer. Seat comfort was an oxymoron. They lacked safety features such as electronic door obstruction indicators, which resulted in several well-publicized draggings down subway platforms and one or two near fatalities in just the last few years of service life. (The MTA actually flat-out refused to fix this problem towards the end, because they knew they were retiring these cars and saw no point in spending the money for the upgrade.)
They were "refurbished" in the 1980's but all that did was put them mostly back to the way they were in the 1960's. They did get air conditioning at that time, but by the end, it seemed like most cars' air conditioners were broken and the MTA again specifically declined to spend the energy fixing any problems that didn't result in trains being taken out of service. Keep in mind a broken air conditioner in these cars meant *hot* air was being blown into the car, not regular air or no air. A redbird with a broken air conditioner in summer is probably the last place on Earth I'd want to be. I'd be surprised if temperatures didn't reach 125 degrees on a regular basis in those cars.
At this point, 20 years on from their last refurbishment (and a couple million miles), they would have required another one to keep going. It costs about half as much to refurbish a car as it does to buy a new one.
So these "free" cars would have really only saved about 50% up front for any city that wanted them, then would have required a lot of ongoing maintenance. After probably only 3-4 years, that city would be behind where they would have been had they just bought new cars. And they'd be stuck with cars that were a borderline embarrassment and on which nobody wanted to ride. (New Yorkers rode them because we had to, not because we liked them.)
The vast majority of Deloreans ever made are still on the road, driving, in good condition. I'd call these the Yugos of the deep instead.
Many of the redbirds were more than 50 years old when retired and all had around 10 million miles on them. Even at the end of their lives, they traveled 30,000 miles in between maintenance stops.
Come talk to me when either a Yugo *or* a Delorean is that reliable.
I'm surprised they aren't selling them for scrap. A common automobile crushes at more than 200 dollars.
A common automobile can be cheaply towed to a junkyard and crushed.
A subway car? Not so easy to transport.
The city went through a period of several years when it could not get rid of these subway cars. Nobody wanted them because the expense of transporting them and then tearing them down outweighed any financial gain from the scrap metal. So a decision was made to offer them for free. Still, for a while there were no takers. Finally, someone came up with the bright idea of just dumping them in the ocean at city expense. From there grew the artificial reef idea, which would at least take the dumping expenses off the city's hands. Still, there were skeptics who didn't think it would work. The whole point of this article is that it has worked so well that now the city can't supply enough old cars to meet demand.
I doubt the city will ever try charging money for this because that removes the one real incentive over, say, just sinking a bunch of junked cars. And anyway, it wouldn't matter because the city's running out of subway cars. If you can't buy one at any price, what's the point of even having an asking price? It's like putting a sign on your car that says "$6,000" and when somebody calls you to ask about it, you say "yes, it's $6,000, but it's not for sale."
Most Redbirds were phased out from 2001 to 2003 and replaced by the new R142 and R142A cars.
I would correct this on Wikipedia but I'm sure some jerk would just revert it back.
The R-142's were not a direct replacement for the redbirds. (btw, "redbird" is a generic term - these cars did have contract number designations, but at least five different car types were painted red and called redbirds.) On the 7 line, R-62's actually replaced the redbirds. The R-142's then replaced the R-62's moved from the 2 and 3 lines.
The Wikipedia article makes it sound like the lines running old cars are now running new cars. They're not; they're just running not-quite-as-old cars.
It is interesting that only a few of the photos in the New York Times article actually show redbirds. The main photo at the top of the story (at least when I looked at it) shows a much newer R-62 being dumped in the water. I didn't realize any of those had actually been retired.
You and everyone else who has posted similar things below you are arguing semantics and missing the point.
How many public roads lead directly *into* a person's garage? At some point, the road changes from public to private property. Would you think the safer assumption would be that the private property begins at the threshold of the garage or somewhere earlier? It's quite rare to buy a house without buying the lot around it. If you assume that the property line does begin somewhere before the garage, where would you naturally assume that to be? Well, luckily you have an obvious line between gravel and pavement to tell you.
I can understand these guys mistakenly driving down this family's driveway and then having nowhere to turn around until they got to the garage area. But then you've gotta delete the photos. You can't tell me these guys didn't know they were on private property at *some* point, and the obvious line is where the road changes from gravel to paved.
The local city or county authority knows who you are by your billing information, water usage, electric usage, and cars registered to your address.
The only one of those that my local government knows anything about me from (and remember, local != federal) is my car registration. And the only thing I gave them on that form was make, model, mileage and address. So if their purpose is to know how many Jeep Grand Cherokees there are in the country, well, I guess they've got it covered.
Water and electric usage are handled by private companies. Ditto for gas. This information is not available to the government without a subpoena. (Oh sure, they could probably get it under the Patriot Act or something, but it's not like there's a big browseable database residing on some CIA computer showing the number of times residents of Nassau County, NY watered their lawns last year.)
Additionally, what information is not known about you from your ISP can usually be garnered from the telephone people (they hear everything you know).
Provided you have a traditional telephone. More and more people don't. There are reasons why the cell phone providers weren't implicated in the whole FISA thing...
We use building permits to know how much activity is happening in new homes and home modifications and real estate records for sales of existing homes.
Again, controlled by local governments. As anyone who's tried to get these records will tell you, obtaining even *one* is a major chore. You think the feds have gotten every city and county in the nation on board to just email them all these records every day? Ha! Talk about a conspiracy theory... the JFK and 9/11 theories would be nothing compared to that! Cities and counties just voluntarily sending real estate records! Oh, that's rich.
Put all that together with tax records, medical and insurance records and about the only thing we don't know about you is who at the last fucking piece of pizza (I wanted that for breakfast).
Tax records are the only records you've so far mentioned that the federal government has fairly easy access to.
Insurance records are no easier for the government to get than any other private purchase. And not that they'll tell them much anyway.
P.S. Governments are responsible for schools in the same way that they are responsible for ensuring enough public transportation. Insurance industries can tell us how many beds will be profitable and that has NOTHING to do with the number of people in the area.
Wait... schools have beds now? It's been a long time since I was in school, I guess...
Talk about a mixed message. I don't even know what you're trying to say here.
Not sure where you are from, but around here I don't imagine that too many illegals actually participate in the census taking.
They get counted whether they want to be or not. I'm guessing you're not old enough to remember the last census, or you didn't live in New York at the time (as you seem to imply you do now).
Census takers will go door to door and count heads manually if they have to. They'll keep going back until somebody answers.
Yes, there's probably an undercount, but there's probably an undercount of everybody until we get statistical sampling. Proportionally, illegals probably aren't undercounted anymore than legals.
I take your point that there's all this data floating around out there about us now. But the thing that you and other conspiracy theorists fail to take into account is that humans have to do something with all that data. And when you're talking about a government, you're talking about a big, disorganized bureaucracy that's already comprised of imperfect human beings. There is simply no way the federal government would be able to get much of anything useful out of all this data that's out there, coming from different agencies in different formats, much of which i
Why is that so upsetting to you? Gross estimations of your ethnicity can be made by simply looking at you; if you leave your house, your ethnicity is essentially public information, right? I pretty much agree. I can't figure out why you'd get so bent out of shape about being asked your race on a form unless it's some misguided application of a politically correct agenda... or you're for some reason embarrassed by your race, in which case you've got other problems. Just asking a person's race is not racist, anymore than asking a person what country they're from is xenophobic. (And I'm the kind of person that thinks you don't need to be conscious of being a racist to be a racist. But as Freud said, "sometimes a cigar is just a cigar". Not every question about race carries implied racism behind it.)
I also agree that it's useful knowledge for the government to know the demographic makeup of its citizens. Immigration patterns, for example. If you know that 1 million Chinese passed through the port of New York between 2000 and 2010, and 400,000 of them still live in New York while 600,000 of them live elsewhere on the east coast, then that can tell you what sorts of immigration patterns you might see in the near future. And that will help aid in city planning.
And this is not kept secret; everyone has access to census info, and it's probably actually *more* useful for others outside the government to have this info.
Regardless, on the US forms, while it doesn't seem to be specified anywhere, I don't think it's strictly required that you answer anything other than your name and address. I could be wrong on that, but the Constitution simply says that every person must be counted; demographics aren't mentioned anywhere.
Thanks for the clarification. I was sitting here and thinking to myself, "That can't bee right. 6-bits of color is how much my RGB Amiga 500 used in 1987 (64 colors)."
No offense intended, but I can't believe in this day and age that people who are otherwise generally well-versed in computers and computer peripherals are still not even aware of this specification for LCD screens - which is probably the most important one.
Everybody gets so fixated on response times and viewing angles, but none of that amounts to a hill of beans without color rendition and accuracy. The most important specs to look at on any LCD screen are bits per pixel and gamut. Contrast is also useful to know if you also know black level threshold. Without that, though, contrast ratio is useless because it's much easier to make an LCD screen brighter than it is to make one darker, and LCD screens these days are by and large capable of much more brightness than would ever be usable. A contrast ratio of 10,000:1 is meaningless without knowing the starting point for that range.
Unfortunately, most manufacturers make the specs that are actually important almost impossible to find. Even a lot of manufacturers who could brag about these things - because their screens do all the right things in color rendition and accuracy - choose not to. Dell, for example, is probably the largest manufacturer of 8bpp Super-IPS screens with wide color gamuts. Their higher-end screens, which are still pretty cheap relative to most screens marketed towards professionals, are among the more capable out there. But I have never seen Dell actually try to make this argument - I have never seen them argue that colors on their monitors are more vibrant and true-to-life (to use the marketing-speak that they'd probably go with), even though they could.
The reason is that people don't seem to know or care. And they should. You're looking at a screen in some cases almost every waking hour you have (if you're like me and work on computers, then go home and switch on your laptop), and many people are using them for things like photo editing or home video production. People should be demanding good color rendition.
It's almost shocking that Apple, of all companies, does not provide 8bpp panels across their entire line. At the very least, given their reputation as a manufacturer of computers for creative professionals, they should be making it clear which screens are 8bpp panels and which ones aren't. And they should be publishing their screens' gamut as well.
I have FIOS and get the same 20/5 every time I check it.
Big whoop. I have 20/5 with Cablevision and that's their bottom tier. And I just tested it and yes, that's what I'm actually getting.
I had FIOS for a few months and was severely disappointed. The Actiontec router they force upon you is a complete piece of junk - the thing went down on me at least once a day, and in searching around the net I discovered that any app that had more than something like eight sockets open at a time would crash it. That would be no big deal if they allowed you to use your own router, but they don't. They say it's because most routers "can't handle the speeds" that they offer. Yeah, right. My 5 year old Linksys WRT54G is working just fine with Cablevision at higher speeds than FIOS offered (they were 15/2 at the time) and it doesn't ever crash.
I also got all sorts of audio dropouts on my TV with FIOS. And I got nickel and dimed to death - they quoted me $127 as a monthly total over the phone, but my bill was always about $165. I'm paying $124 per month with Cablevision now, and I have more channels and some premium channels that I didn't have with FIOS. And my service is stable.
The Japanese have an irrational acceptance of authority and conformism.
What's so irrational about it? They didn't always have such an acceptance. This is a country that has existed for thousands of years, the first couple thousand of which were spent in a state of near-constant civil war without any centralized government. It was only after a strong central government was formed - and further refined with our help - that they became a prosperous, peaceful country with one of the highest standards of living in the world.
Acceptance of authority and conformism has brought them peace, prosperity, high educational standards, low crime, good health and long life expectancy. They are no less "free" than we are, either. Their government does not wiretap their citizens' phone calls or endorse torture, and their taxes do not go to supporting a massive military industrial complex or a set of oil cartels. So in what way is their culture "irrational"? Especially in comparison to ours?
Accept the fact that not everybody thinks the way Americans do. We are not the center of the universe and the way we think is not the "right" way.
This article is dead on and people are smart for doing this. Don't hate because someone knows a good thing when they see it. I just bought 10 HD DVD's for $50. And at a later point I will rip them onto my computer then burn them to a Blu-Ray disc.
And play them on what? They won't play on any BD player currently in existence, or likely in existence in the future (by design).
Then there's the media. How cheap are you expecting dual-layer Blu-Ray discs to be? Go look up the price of a dual-layer recordable DVD. And those have been out for five years or so. Right now, single layer Blu-Ray recordable discs are about $10 each. They'll come down eventually, but it will take a while, as it did with DVD.
In the end, you'll probably have spent about $15 total per burned Blu-Ray disc - which by that time will be more than you could have bought the real thing for used. (On a lot of Blu-Ray titles, it's *already* more than you'd pay for them, in some cases new.) I guarantee you 100%, without any doubt in my mind, that you're going to end up re-buying all these movies rather than burning them and watching them on a Blu-Ray player.
HD-DVD proponents really need to just let this whole thing go. What makes sense at this point is to either stick with DVD, which is fine, or buy a Blu-Ray player. It does not make sense to buy an HD-DVD player at any price. It is a dead format with a tiny library that's not going to get any bigger. Sure, the players can upscale DVD's, but so can pretty much every regular $40 DVD player these days. HD-DVD isn't even worth that $35 premium to play the few good HD-DVD titles that exist, especially when you factor in having to re-buy them for Blu-Ray (unless you see a need to keep two players hooked up, one of which will be for no other reason than to play the few HD-DVD's you actually own).
Save that $35 for buying your first couple Blu-Ray movies or paying for a couple months of Netflix.
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The first time one of your "new ideas" breaks your company's CAD software and your call to support goes unanswered because you were using an unsupported modification, thereby rendering thousands of dollars worth of both hardware and software pretty much useless, I expect your company will change their tune.
Companies that have been around long enough have usually learned the hard way that it pays to do things above board. Murphy's Law exists for a reason. Any failure point, given a long enough gestation period, *will* fail. And using an unsupported modification in a professional setting is, if nothing else, a failure point.
Nice quote. I had no idea RR had such mastery of subtlety.
Makes you wonder if he also said anything to the effect of "wars are advocated only by persons who have not been killed in one" or "capital punishment is advocated only by persons who have not been executed." Somehow I doubt it.
Goes to show that eloquence and logic don't always go hand in hand.
No evidence? No body? No murder weapon? Who cares! The prosecutor used Power Point in his closing.. The defendant is "weird".
Did you bother to RTFA? There was plenty of evidence. A body is not required to arrest and convict somebody of murder. Otherwise all anybody would have to do would be to cremate the body and poof! No crime!
The article gives just a couple of examples, but they're obviously examples of many. The guy spent 11 full days on the stand. The one pretty incriminating example of evidence cited in the article is the fact that he removed the passenger seat of his car just after his wife's disappearance, then hosed down the interior and left an inch of standing water on the floor boards. Now, you tell me why any average person has reason to do that. I can tell you that in 20 years of car ownership and six different cars, I have never once taken the passenger seat out of my car, thrown it away and then hosed down the interior, and I don't know anyone else who has either. His explanation was that he liked to sleep in the car and wanted the extra room. Does this sound plausible to you?
So, let's just look at this *one* piece of evidence. Guy's wife disappears. He then immediately removes the seat from his car, which is never seen again, and he hoses down the interior of the car. That doesn't paint a picture for you? Now, let's say you ask the guy why he did that and he gives you a laughably ridiculous explanation. And let's say this goes on for 11 days as the prosecution asks him to explain every other piece of evidence, and his explanations are no less ridiculous in each case.
The standard for guilt or innocence is proof beyond a reasonable doubt. That doesn't mean *any* doubt, and that's the mistake people often make. It's *reasonable* doubt. Is it reasonable to assume he was telling the truth about that car seat? Would any reasonable person do what he did with that car seat? And if all his other explanations about the evidence presented were similar, is it reasonable to assume he was telling the truth about anything?
The whole EULA system is based on circumstance. MS (and the judicial system, I guess) would assume the following: I installed the software in question, therefore I agreed to the EULA. No other way about it. That's 100% circumstantial if I ever saw it.
That's only partially the point. The main point is that a EULA is only as enforceable as its contents are legal in and of themselves. I'm not convinced that it's legal to sell somebody something, then revoke their ability to use it. Imagine buying a car, and the seller puts a clause in the contract that says "I reserve the right to come to your house at a time of my own choosing and shoot the car full of buckshot. I will face no repercussions for this." That would never hold up in court because the act itself is 100% illegal; in fact it would break several laws, not just one (vandalism, defacement, trespassing, wreckless endangerment, weapons violations, noise ordinances, etc). Simply put, the right for the seller to shoot a shotgun at a car in a driveway is not legally the buyer's to give.
It's the same principle by which a store putting up a sign saying "not responsible for lost or stolen articles" does not mean they're *actually* not responsible. They may in fact be responsible. The sign itself doesn't give them any legal shielding. All a sign can do is advise people of what the store's responsibilities actually are, but it can't change or cancel those responsibilities.
A contract has to be a legal contract to be binding - it has to follow the law. Every EULA is different so while some EULA's are probably enforceable, others no doubt aren't. I've seen EULA's that had obviously been written with no legal counsel whatsoever, they were so ridiculous. The bottom line is you cannot sign away your basic rights as either a citizen or as a consumer with a contract. If a seller is obligated by law to act in a certain way, they can't get out of that with a EULA.
I haven't read the MSN Music EULA, but this idea that people don't actually own what they've paid for and that they acknowledge that in a EULA has not really been tested in court to my knowledge. Generally speaking, even for a *legal* contract to be valid, both parties have to know what they're agreeing to. So MS would have a pretty high burden in any court case - they would have to prove first of all that every part of the EULA was legally enforceable (which I doubt is the case), then they would have to prove that their customers actually understood what they were agreeing to (which I know is *not* the case).
Of course, some of this does depend on where the case is tried. Contract laws differ from state to state and individual judges may have different interpretations of those laws. But the basic fact is that EULA's can't make laws; they can only serve as an enforcer of existing laws, and both sides have to understand any contract that they enter into.
Actually before the unveiling of the F-117 there was MUCH speculation as to the existence of a secret stealth fighter.
Yeah, we all knew about it for years beforehand. It was probably the military's worst-kept secret.
Some of it may have been intentional. It's possible that some stories were leaked to put our enemies in a tizzy. There was already no shortage of paranoia on both sides of the Cold War. I was young at the time so I didn't consider this, but most people knew there was some big secret program going on involving black jets that only came out at night.
The cat was pretty much out of the bag when one of them crashed into a hill in California. I remember seeing news footage and there was just a lot of black wreckage. It was not really definable, but it was clearly odd looking. And the news media immediately made the connection that this must be one of those top-secret black planes flying around that everybody had been talking about. I think the military finally announced the program soon after.
I wonder were it not for that crash if the Air Force would have been content to just go the entire length of the program without announcing it. The Iraqis and Serbs would never have even known what was hitting them. It may have saved that one from getting shot down over Serbia, since they knew what to look for by then (the radar signature with the bomb bay doors open).
Anyway, this is the first major military aircraft that I've now lived through the entire development, operation and now retirement of. Makes me feel old. But also interesting that other aircraft like the F-15 and F-16 are even older and still going (though not for much longer).
All the talk of terraforming mars is hot air, unless somebody is going to clue me in on how we're going to magically make mars geologically active again, so it would have a magnetosphere to protect us from the suns radiation.
The reason why it's not geologically active is that the entire planet is too cool - it's basically a frozen rock. Once it's terraformed, the surface temperature will rise enough that hot gases will be released and the planet will become geologically active again naturally.
Not to mention that any moon colony is going to have plenty of the best fertilizer in existence available, in a basically limitless supply. As long as people are there, anyway.
Had to be pointed out. There are going to be some adjustments in thinking needed if we're ever going to do anything worthwhile on the moon...
the medium is CG or cel animation. anime is the genre of japanese animation.
There is no genre called "japanese animation", anymore than there is a genre called "Hollywood movies" or "silent films". These are not genres.
A genre describes a work's "aboutness". It's a broad category that describes a set of themes. "Japanese animation" does not do that, and hence it is not a genre. All you know if somebody tells you a work is Japanese animation is that it was produced in Japan and if there is spoken dialogue, it's probably in Japanese. You know nothing of what the themes or aesthetics might be.
The Simpsons is animated in Korea. Does that makes the series' genre "Korean Animation"?
This is film theory 101. (Literally. That's the class I learned it in, 15 years ago.)
That's true. (Well.. it IS a Mamoru Oshii movie..) BUT! SAC ist way more true to Shirow's style than anything else.
Well, the original movie really was not like Shirow's style at all - the manga does not have that surreal "Twilight Zone" feel in the slightest. It's very dense and packed with info and it's one of those graphic novels where you've got to sort of immerse yourself in this world that he's created and consider all the problems we're going to come up against in the future and that's what makes it interesting.
Oshii's film is interesting in a totally different way, in that it's less about the world itself and more about this larger question of what life actually is. The world is only really featured as much as it needs to be to support that question and present arguments. That question was there in the manga too, but it was just one of many issues the manga raised. Oshii boiled down the manga to what he thought was the central question, and he stripped everything out that he thought got in the way of that. And that's what left him room to sort of explore the inner workings of the characters a little bit more and create that surrealness, which of course only served to support the theme too.
The second movie, though, was terrible. That was more like masturbation on Oshii's part. I don't think I've ever seen a sci-fi film that's more slowly paced... and that includes 2001: a Space Odyssey (which Oshii clearly uses for inspiration).
Whenever somebody talks about doing a new adaptation of GitS, the question is always whether they'll adapt the manga or the original film. I personally think the manga is basically unfilmable (as a standalone feature film) and whatever film is made then has to basically do what Oshii did and take one element out and focus on that. Maybe there's a different element that can be pulled out than the original film did, but I don't think Shirow's manga can ever really be boiled down to a 2 hour movie. It's probably a mistake to try, and luckily Oshii saw that and made something original and unique on its own. Hopefully Spielberg is that smart.
I find a glossy display gives better blacks and dark colours,
That is the idea.
It's very easy to make a cheap LCD screen extremely bright - brighter than you would ever need (or could even tolerate). It is not easy to make a cheap LCD screen with a decent black level.
So these glossy screens act as a sort of neutral density filter. They lower the black level at the expense of some of the unusable white level on the other end of the spectrum.
But these filters are always being used to mask flaws (poor black level and contrast) in cheap screens. It is still obviously better to just buy a better screen capable of better black levels.
I have a laptop with a glossy screen and I hate it. I bought it because it was cheap. Next time, I'll spend a little more and buy a laptop with a decent screen that doesn't require tricks to get it to look good at the expense of glare.
At work, I have two non-coated screens and it's such a pleasure to work with them by comparison.
Remember people they are not a bank. They are just some people holding onto your money. How would you trust someone you dont know to hold your money?
Maybe you think my story is isolated but read online. Paypal routinely freezes peoples accounts only to never let them have their money.
But why would you let them "hold onto" your money?
I have a PayPal account and use it fairly often. I don't keep any money in there. What point is there in doing so? If I want to pay for something, I have PayPal take the money off my credit card. (They cannot do so without authorization, by law.) If I'm being paid for something, I wait until I have the payment notice and then I immediately have that money transferred to my bank account.
Even if you're a bulk seller, I can't see how it's all that difficult to just go in there once a day and transfer the balance to a bank account. It takes less than one minute.
PayPal should be seen as a conduit between buyers and sellers; that's it. If you use it that way (and it is the proper way to use it), then their service is fine. There's no reason to leave a bunch of money in your PayPal account. You may as well give it to some guy on the street and ask him to hold it for you.
It's a particular type of signal being generated on a particular (popular) cell phone frequency that's the problem. I believe it's actually 800mhz GSM where the interference occurs. It's the same frequency that also messes with hospital equipment.
From what I've read, the EU has required extra shielding on planes that need it in order to implement cell phone calls. I would think that'd be kind of a nightmare for planes that do double-duty domestic and international (or for planes that *could* do both - it'd limit an airline's sub inventory if an otherwise perfectly capable plane didn't have the proper shielding for domestic duty).
Also, airliners don't seem to have a problem even if they're unshielded as long as the wiring is in good condition. The problem is a lot of older airliners might have wiring that's starting to fray and insulation that's worn. 20+ years of vibration and rubbing can take the insulation off of any wire. Wiring is supposed to be inspected at regular intervals but a lot of it is tough to get to and it's in bundles, so you can't really see every individual wire over its entire length.
So yeah, it *is* more dangerous to fly with cell phones on than without, and it's more dangerous than wi-fi cards that operate on a different frequency (and not in "burst" mode, or whatever these GSM phones do).
So because you don't LIKE it, it should be ILLEGAL and punishable by a court of law?
Uh, yeah?
That's why all laws exist. Enough people don't like something and it gets outlawed.
People don't *like* being robbed on the street. People don't *like* being stabbed. People don't *like* having their homes burglarized. Hence, all of these things are illegal.
If a large majority of people don't like hearing others yapping in their cell phones on a flight, then yes, it should be illegal too for that reason alone.
The redbirds were long past the end of their useful lives. Read this: http://www.nycsubway.org/cars/r262829.html
While still reliable given their age, it was no longer cost effective maintaining them. At a certain point, it becomes more affordable to buy new cars than to keep maintaining the old ones. These cars would bankrupt any city that couldn't afford to buy new cars. If a city can't afford to buy new cars, then they couldn't afford to maintain these ones.
They were also just not very nice anymore by any standard. They were at least 40 years old and had several million miles on them. The ride quality was similar to a soapbox racer. Seat comfort was an oxymoron. They lacked safety features such as electronic door obstruction indicators, which resulted in several well-publicized draggings down subway platforms and one or two near fatalities in just the last few years of service life. (The MTA actually flat-out refused to fix this problem towards the end, because they knew they were retiring these cars and saw no point in spending the money for the upgrade.)
They were "refurbished" in the 1980's but all that did was put them mostly back to the way they were in the 1960's. They did get air conditioning at that time, but by the end, it seemed like most cars' air conditioners were broken and the MTA again specifically declined to spend the energy fixing any problems that didn't result in trains being taken out of service. Keep in mind a broken air conditioner in these cars meant *hot* air was being blown into the car, not regular air or no air. A redbird with a broken air conditioner in summer is probably the last place on Earth I'd want to be. I'd be surprised if temperatures didn't reach 125 degrees on a regular basis in those cars.
At this point, 20 years on from their last refurbishment (and a couple million miles), they would have required another one to keep going. It costs about half as much to refurbish a car as it does to buy a new one.
So these "free" cars would have really only saved about 50% up front for any city that wanted them, then would have required a lot of ongoing maintenance. After probably only 3-4 years, that city would be behind where they would have been had they just bought new cars. And they'd be stuck with cars that were a borderline embarrassment and on which nobody wanted to ride. (New Yorkers rode them because we had to, not because we liked them.)
There comes a time when junk is junk.
The vast majority of Deloreans ever made are still on the road, driving, in good condition. I'd call these the Yugos of the deep instead.
Many of the redbirds were more than 50 years old when retired and all had around 10 million miles on them. Even at the end of their lives, they traveled 30,000 miles in between maintenance stops.
Come talk to me when either a Yugo *or* a Delorean is that reliable.
I wish there were some underwater photos showing what the subway cars are like after spending several years underwater.
Here are some from the reef in New Jersey: http://www.nycsubway.org/cars/redbird-scrap.html
I'm surprised they aren't selling them for scrap. A common automobile crushes at more than 200 dollars.
A common automobile can be cheaply towed to a junkyard and crushed.
A subway car? Not so easy to transport.
The city went through a period of several years when it could not get rid of these subway cars. Nobody wanted them because the expense of transporting them and then tearing them down outweighed any financial gain from the scrap metal. So a decision was made to offer them for free. Still, for a while there were no takers. Finally, someone came up with the bright idea of just dumping them in the ocean at city expense. From there grew the artificial reef idea, which would at least take the dumping expenses off the city's hands. Still, there were skeptics who didn't think it would work. The whole point of this article is that it has worked so well that now the city can't supply enough old cars to meet demand.
I doubt the city will ever try charging money for this because that removes the one real incentive over, say, just sinking a bunch of junked cars. And anyway, it wouldn't matter because the city's running out of subway cars. If you can't buy one at any price, what's the point of even having an asking price? It's like putting a sign on your car that says "$6,000" and when somebody calls you to ask about it, you say "yes, it's $6,000, but it's not for sale."
Most Redbirds were phased out from 2001 to 2003 and replaced by the new R142 and R142A cars.
I would correct this on Wikipedia but I'm sure some jerk would just revert it back.
The R-142's were not a direct replacement for the redbirds. (btw, "redbird" is a generic term - these cars did have contract number designations, but at least five different car types were painted red and called redbirds.) On the 7 line, R-62's actually replaced the redbirds. The R-142's then replaced the R-62's moved from the 2 and 3 lines.
The Wikipedia article makes it sound like the lines running old cars are now running new cars. They're not; they're just running not-quite-as-old cars.
It is interesting that only a few of the photos in the New York Times article actually show redbirds. The main photo at the top of the story (at least when I looked at it) shows a much newer R-62 being dumped in the water. I didn't realize any of those had actually been retired.
You and everyone else who has posted similar things below you are arguing semantics and missing the point.
How many public roads lead directly *into* a person's garage? At some point, the road changes from public to private property. Would you think the safer assumption would be that the private property begins at the threshold of the garage or somewhere earlier? It's quite rare to buy a house without buying the lot around it. If you assume that the property line does begin somewhere before the garage, where would you naturally assume that to be? Well, luckily you have an obvious line between gravel and pavement to tell you.
I can understand these guys mistakenly driving down this family's driveway and then having nowhere to turn around until they got to the garage area. But then you've gotta delete the photos. You can't tell me these guys didn't know they were on private property at *some* point, and the obvious line is where the road changes from gravel to paved.
The local city or county authority knows who you are by your billing information, water usage, electric usage, and cars registered to your address.
The only one of those that my local government knows anything about me from (and remember, local != federal) is my car registration. And the only thing I gave them on that form was make, model, mileage and address. So if their purpose is to know how many Jeep Grand Cherokees there are in the country, well, I guess they've got it covered.
Water and electric usage are handled by private companies. Ditto for gas. This information is not available to the government without a subpoena. (Oh sure, they could probably get it under the Patriot Act or something, but it's not like there's a big browseable database residing on some CIA computer showing the number of times residents of Nassau County, NY watered their lawns last year.)
Additionally, what information is not known about you from your ISP can usually be garnered from the telephone people (they hear everything you know).
Provided you have a traditional telephone. More and more people don't. There are reasons why the cell phone providers weren't implicated in the whole FISA thing...
We use building permits to know how much activity is happening in new homes and home modifications and real estate records for sales of existing homes.
Again, controlled by local governments. As anyone who's tried to get these records will tell you, obtaining even *one* is a major chore. You think the feds have gotten every city and county in the nation on board to just email them all these records every day? Ha! Talk about a conspiracy theory... the JFK and 9/11 theories would be nothing compared to that! Cities and counties just voluntarily sending real estate records! Oh, that's rich.
Put all that together with tax records, medical and insurance records and about the only thing we don't know about you is who at the last fucking piece of pizza (I wanted that for breakfast).
Tax records are the only records you've so far mentioned that the federal government has fairly easy access to.
Insurance records are no easier for the government to get than any other private purchase. And not that they'll tell them much anyway.
P.S. Governments are responsible for schools in the same way that they are responsible for ensuring enough public transportation. Insurance industries can tell us how many beds will be profitable and that has NOTHING to do with the number of people in the area.
Wait... schools have beds now? It's been a long time since I was in school, I guess...
Talk about a mixed message. I don't even know what you're trying to say here.
Not sure where you are from, but around here I don't imagine that too many illegals actually participate in the census taking.
They get counted whether they want to be or not. I'm guessing you're not old enough to remember the last census, or you didn't live in New York at the time (as you seem to imply you do now).
Census takers will go door to door and count heads manually if they have to. They'll keep going back until somebody answers.
Yes, there's probably an undercount, but there's probably an undercount of everybody until we get statistical sampling. Proportionally, illegals probably aren't undercounted anymore than legals.
I take your point that there's all this data floating around out there about us now. But the thing that you and other conspiracy theorists fail to take into account is that humans have to do something with all that data. And when you're talking about a government, you're talking about a big, disorganized bureaucracy that's already comprised of imperfect human beings. There is simply no way the federal government would be able to get much of anything useful out of all this data that's out there, coming from different agencies in different formats, much of which i
I also agree that it's useful knowledge for the government to know the demographic makeup of its citizens. Immigration patterns, for example. If you know that 1 million Chinese passed through the port of New York between 2000 and 2010, and 400,000 of them still live in New York while 600,000 of them live elsewhere on the east coast, then that can tell you what sorts of immigration patterns you might see in the near future. And that will help aid in city planning.
And this is not kept secret; everyone has access to census info, and it's probably actually *more* useful for others outside the government to have this info.
Regardless, on the US forms, while it doesn't seem to be specified anywhere, I don't think it's strictly required that you answer anything other than your name and address. I could be wrong on that, but the Constitution simply says that every person must be counted; demographics aren't mentioned anywhere.
Thanks for the clarification. I was sitting here and thinking to myself, "That can't bee right. 6-bits of color is how much my RGB Amiga 500 used in 1987 (64 colors)."
No offense intended, but I can't believe in this day and age that people who are otherwise generally well-versed in computers and computer peripherals are still not even aware of this specification for LCD screens - which is probably the most important one.
Everybody gets so fixated on response times and viewing angles, but none of that amounts to a hill of beans without color rendition and accuracy. The most important specs to look at on any LCD screen are bits per pixel and gamut. Contrast is also useful to know if you also know black level threshold. Without that, though, contrast ratio is useless because it's much easier to make an LCD screen brighter than it is to make one darker, and LCD screens these days are by and large capable of much more brightness than would ever be usable. A contrast ratio of 10,000:1 is meaningless without knowing the starting point for that range.
Unfortunately, most manufacturers make the specs that are actually important almost impossible to find. Even a lot of manufacturers who could brag about these things - because their screens do all the right things in color rendition and accuracy - choose not to. Dell, for example, is probably the largest manufacturer of 8bpp Super-IPS screens with wide color gamuts. Their higher-end screens, which are still pretty cheap relative to most screens marketed towards professionals, are among the more capable out there. But I have never seen Dell actually try to make this argument - I have never seen them argue that colors on their monitors are more vibrant and true-to-life (to use the marketing-speak that they'd probably go with), even though they could.
The reason is that people don't seem to know or care. And they should. You're looking at a screen in some cases almost every waking hour you have (if you're like me and work on computers, then go home and switch on your laptop), and many people are using them for things like photo editing or home video production. People should be demanding good color rendition.
It's almost shocking that Apple, of all companies, does not provide 8bpp panels across their entire line. At the very least, given their reputation as a manufacturer of computers for creative professionals, they should be making it clear which screens are 8bpp panels and which ones aren't. And they should be publishing their screens' gamut as well.
I have FIOS and get the same 20/5 every time I check it.
Big whoop. I have 20/5 with Cablevision and that's their bottom tier. And I just tested it and yes, that's what I'm actually getting.
I had FIOS for a few months and was severely disappointed. The Actiontec router they force upon you is a complete piece of junk - the thing went down on me at least once a day, and in searching around the net I discovered that any app that had more than something like eight sockets open at a time would crash it. That would be no big deal if they allowed you to use your own router, but they don't. They say it's because most routers "can't handle the speeds" that they offer. Yeah, right. My 5 year old Linksys WRT54G is working just fine with Cablevision at higher speeds than FIOS offered (they were 15/2 at the time) and it doesn't ever crash.
I also got all sorts of audio dropouts on my TV with FIOS. And I got nickel and dimed to death - they quoted me $127 as a monthly total over the phone, but my bill was always about $165. I'm paying $124 per month with Cablevision now, and I have more channels and some premium channels that I didn't have with FIOS. And my service is stable.
FIOS is overrated.
The Japanese have an irrational acceptance of authority and conformism.
What's so irrational about it? They didn't always have such an acceptance. This is a country that has existed for thousands of years, the first couple thousand of which were spent in a state of near-constant civil war without any centralized government. It was only after a strong central government was formed - and further refined with our help - that they became a prosperous, peaceful country with one of the highest standards of living in the world.
Acceptance of authority and conformism has brought them peace, prosperity, high educational standards, low crime, good health and long life expectancy. They are no less "free" than we are, either. Their government does not wiretap their citizens' phone calls or endorse torture, and their taxes do not go to supporting a massive military industrial complex or a set of oil cartels. So in what way is their culture "irrational"? Especially in comparison to ours?
Accept the fact that not everybody thinks the way Americans do. We are not the center of the universe and the way we think is not the "right" way.
This article is dead on and people are smart for doing this. Don't hate because someone knows a good thing when they see it. I just bought 10 HD DVD's for $50. And at a later point I will rip them onto my computer then burn them to a Blu-Ray disc.
And play them on what? They won't play on any BD player currently in existence, or likely in existence in the future (by design).
Then there's the media. How cheap are you expecting dual-layer Blu-Ray discs to be? Go look up the price of a dual-layer recordable DVD. And those have been out for five years or so. Right now, single layer Blu-Ray recordable discs are about $10 each. They'll come down eventually, but it will take a while, as it did with DVD.
In the end, you'll probably have spent about $15 total per burned Blu-Ray disc - which by that time will be more than you could have bought the real thing for used. (On a lot of Blu-Ray titles, it's *already* more than you'd pay for them, in some cases new.) I guarantee you 100%, without any doubt in my mind, that you're going to end up re-buying all these movies rather than burning them and watching them on a Blu-Ray player.
HD-DVD proponents really need to just let this whole thing go. What makes sense at this point is to either stick with DVD, which is fine, or buy a Blu-Ray player. It does not make sense to buy an HD-DVD player at any price. It is a dead format with a tiny library that's not going to get any bigger. Sure, the players can upscale DVD's, but so can pretty much every regular $40 DVD player these days. HD-DVD isn't even worth that $35 premium to play the few good HD-DVD titles that exist, especially when you factor in having to re-buy them for Blu-Ray (unless you see a need to keep two players hooked up, one of which will be for no other reason than to play the few HD-DVD's you actually own).
Save that $35 for buying your first couple Blu-Ray movies or paying for a couple months of Netflix.