Re:I've got mine on pre-order.
on
Port-A-Nuke
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· Score: 1
Well I'd like a 30 watt LCD monitor, however I don't really have an extra $300 to put into getting one, and my current monitor works fine, not even too expensive since it shuts itself off.
However if you'd like buy me an LCD monitor I'm sure arrangements can be made.
I liked the concept of Black and White more than I liked the game itself personally. I also found that as per usual in games like this the designers had a rather simplistic vision of what good and evil were, particularly in respect to creatures.
Now I played the good route, my creature did it's best to help out everyone, problem was, once it got to a certain level of goodness it stopped taking care of itself, now I don't particularly feel that there's anything wrong with my creature stopping to eat something when it's hungry so long as it doesn't decide to eat the citizens.
Unless I am vastly mistaken they are actually rewarded for considering patents not for granting them(when was the last time you saw anyone other than an ambulence chaser with a no fee unless you win arrangement).
That said, if they let through stupid patents they're likely to continue getting stupid patents which increases their overall volume and therefor their income so the end result is essentially the same.
You seem to be confused as to the difference between the conditions which create terrorists(people who are willing to blow themselves up for a cause) and terrorist leaders(people who help others blow themselves up for a cause).
Terrorists are inspired by poverty, hunger, abuse, religious fanatacism, etc. They see something which is so abhorent to them they are willing to die to change things.
Most terrorist leaders(and revolutionary leaders in general, including those who founded the USA) on the other hand are nearly always members of an almost ruling class. Despite rhretoric to the contrary their goal is simply to replace the present ruling class with one which includes them. There are exceptions of course, the occaisional insane or truly evil person who just wants to cause destruction.
Now we can't really do anything about the leaders, so long as there is a ruling class there will always be people who want to replace that ruling class with one which includes themselves, since they rarely have any real ideology they can sometimes be bought off, but it won't solve the problem. We can however do something about the actual people who serve the cause(you'll notice that Osama bin Laden wasn't flying one of those planes).
The solution is to treat these people like human beings. You can't win this fight with an army without exterminating entire populations because for every person you kill you bring two more of his or her friends/family into the fight. You essentially become the monster people like Osama claimed you were, and bring more people into the movement.
Ok, I will say that portable mp3/ogg/etc style music players are something which will stick around.
However, that said, the iPod is a fad. It is more expensive than comparable devices and from what I've read not that substantially better. It has two major selling points. 1) iTunes 2) It's cool. We've all seen the ads for iPod's which one do they plug? Don't recall them even mentioning iTunes in most of them, it's just sort of vaguely indie shadows dancing around.
Or perhaps KDE could look into working out why it takes longer to compile KDE than Gnome or anything else of comparative size. Christ OpenOffice from source is almost 200 MB and even that compiles in about half the time as KDE(not that it doesn't take a very, very, very long time as well). KDE just takes for ever.
Ok, so we've now got a driver being installed(hope they get the Microsoft Hardware Lab to certify this thing or else Windows XP is going to bitch about this and it won't go smoothly), that'll solve the piracy problem, no one can get around a driver.
I seem to recall some software a few years back which came with a dongle, I also seem to recall that someone managed to fake that dongle so you can pirate the software anyway. Take a lesson here people, if you can't stop piracy with hardware you sure as hell can't do it will software, in all reality Paladium(assuming it ever shows up) probably won't stop piracy. This is for a simple reason, for every guy out there trying to come up with ways to prevent piracy there are at least 100 attempting to circumvent it, and these guys are really really good. There's a lesson here, a lesson we should all have learned a long, long, long time ago, because it's been true since the first copy protection ever implemented. ALL COPY PROTECTION DOES IS INCONVENIENCE THE LEGITIMATE USER. Sorry to have shouted that, but I wouldn't want someone to miss that one. No method of copy protection every created has stopped people from pirating software and the only way I can see that changing any time in the forseeable future.
First off, though I don't know for sure I'd say that the reason they instituted this law after the TWA crash wasn't because they wanted to prevent mechanical failure, but because they wanted to be able to tell families whether their loved one was actually on the plane which crashed into the ocean next time. It's awfully difficult to deal with such things when you really don't have a clue who was on the plane in the first place. This also sort of helps terrorism because you can at least investigate who was on the plane and have somewhere to work from.
Second of all, YOU DO NOT HAVE A FUNDAMENTAL RIGHT TO FLY ANONYMOUSLY BECAUSE YOU DO NOT HAVE A FUNDAMENTAL RIGHT TO FLY. This is where they can always get you, it's what makes you required to show your drivers license to a cop who pulls you over, when you get one you sign a little form which says in return for getting this license I will show my license if pulled over if I do not I understand my license will be revoked, if they haven't put this into the ticket contract yet(which I doubt) they will now.
Thirdly, this is not like the Soviet Union because the problem with the USSR wasn't that you had to show a passport to travel in your own country(and this was any sort of travel including walking as a point, it was that not everyone got one and even those who did weren't always allowed to travel. This will be like the USSR if and only if they refuse to give large segments of the population which they wish oppressed an ID which allows them to fly.
That said, I hate the Patriot Act as much as the next guy(well so long as the next guy isn't a gun toting militia man or a libertarian). I admitedly think we probably have bigger things to worry about now, like getting rid of the asshats who made this sort of crap possible in the first place(Bush, Ashcroft, 99/100 members of the Senate).
On a related but somewhat off topic rant, what idiot came up with the term illegal combatant and expects that to fly, does our government really believe that, regardless of their guilt or innocence, the rest of the world is going to accept that argument for revoking the rights of the Geneva convention as well as those granted to humans in general?
Wow, someone who actually believes voting can fix this problem.
We live in a society which essentially allows you to choose between a Democrat and a Republican candidate, a two party system. We could have a multiple party system, but given the fact that we have neither a parlimentary structure(coalition governance) nor any sort of run off voting(you can win with a minority) a third party candidate has about as much chance og winning as a snowman has in hell.
Now in order to get to be one of those two people you have to gain the support of the party of you choosing, and then you have to run, this takes money, an astronomical amount of money.
There is a big problem with this because you have to get that money somewhere, which means you either have to be extremely rich yourself and/or you need the support of very rich people/companies. These are the people who have the power, the people who get to choose who we get to vote for.
I'm not going to say these people are fundamentally evil or even that they're out to get us, because that isn't true, but they have interests, and those interests don't necessarily align with yours or mine.
Even in the unlikely event that you have a candidate who is rich enough to fund his(yes I know I should use his or her, but face it we won't have a woman president any time soon) own electoral campaign, he still has to bow to these interests because they fund the party whose support he needs to run.
A number of states either have or are working on laws to ban the sale/ownership of hyper realistic toy guns. I'm not sure whether air soft guns with the red tip would be differentiated enough under these laws in the first place, but without I'm sure they'd be illegal.
This sort of thing may sound like the government getting involved where it ought not to be and ruining peoples fun, but as I understand it the chief reason for these laws is that it can be difficult for a police officer to determine whether such a gun is real or fake at a glance. When cops see guns pointed at them, they don't usually take it lightly and people getting killed while wielding toy guns isn't terribly good for anyone.
Perhaps not, but it is fair to blame them for the fact that they now have a browser whose last major release version was what, August 2002? and it's now 2004.
Microsoft felt they had the browser wars won, so they left IE alone(IE isn't really terribly profitable except in the sense that if people start switching from it they might stop fearing M$ alternatives so much). Now of course they don't have pop up blocking, they don't have tabs, they are still way too tied into the OS, etc and they are losing badly.
Right now they are the underdog, people may not know there are alternatives out there but a CERT alert telling people to stop using your browser isn't good for buisness, there are still some people who pay attention to those things.
The shrink wrapped products aren't really so much of the issue I think. Partly it's of course the usual quality routine like all media, you produce derivative crap and a lot of people aren't going to buy it, but it's not really that which is the problem.
The way I see it is that the major benefit of software distribution is that(for games and the like at least) once you've paid the, admitedly rather hefty, initial development costs it costs very little money to make more copies.
If there's anything in the world which positively screams more sales at lower profits is better than a few sales at higher profits it's software, but they don't sell that way, games are $50 a piece here in the US(and if you've looked at them anywhere else where the currency value is a little lower it's not unsurprising to see them for close to $100) which is more than most people can afford to spend on a game.
I kind of like the previews myself, though they're starting to ruin that for me too. It really kind of annoys me when they start previewing a movie like 6 months before it's going to come out(ex signs or his new one the village for that matter). I mean you get to the point where you're saying to yourself, "that hasn't come out yet, I've seen the preview at the last 30 films I've been too".
You hit the nail right on the head there, the principal language of government is English. That doesn't necessarily mean that the general populace can speak/read it. During the middle ages the language of government in England was french, but regular people didn't speak it.
The issue is not whether they can use this to convict you in court(in most cases as you say a good defense attorney could plant massive seeds of doubt if this was their primary evidence).
The problem is that this sort of evidence would be more than enough to get a search warrant and assuming they can get within range of your house without stepping on your property, it's use probably doesn't require one.
This means that the cops can scan your house whenever they like and use these scans to get a warrant. True if you're not doing anything wrong you shouldn't(shouldn't I say not don't) have anything to worry about, but it's still a bit of an invasion of privacy.
I don't know about you, but I firmly believe that anyone who can claim on the one hand to strictly follow the teachings of Jesus "turn the other cheek" Christ who was(assuming he existed), minus the free love bit, the biggest hippy ever recorded in the history of mankind and at the same time believe all the other things conservatives seem to believe, is a bleeding loony.
Pretty much every single religion on the face of the earth(including Islam for a little balance against the set of loonies who think the Koran justifies blowing people up or beheading them) boils down to treating you fellow humans fairly and not killing them. The head of one of the world's largest ones(John Paul II) in some of his rare moments of clarity and admitedly movement of any kind continues to criticize Bush for the war in Iraq.
You cannot claim to be a chosen son of God, any God, and act in a way which is totally contradictory to the major teachings of that God.
Transgaming provides a service. The question is whether that service is worth the money or not. Wine could quite easily have added directx support on their own, they didn't, anyone else could have gotten a group together and worked on getting it done, no one did, transgaming provides the ability to play most windows games on Linux, no one else has done so. If they want to charge a little bit of money for that, and people are willing to pay for it, good for them.
I always feel like I'm coming off as a Microsoft Apologist when i post here, which I'm not, a lot of the vulnerabilities shouldn't exist, especially not at this late a date, MS should have done a code audit a long time ago to try and catch more of these before other people do.
That said, switching people to Linux won't help if they don't apply security patches, an insecure system is an insecure system *nix or not.
I also personally believe that if *nix ever gets onto the desktop the way Windows is now, there will be an awful lot more virus makers targeting it than there are now. Some of these people are very clever, if misguided people, and they'll find vulnerabilities on Linux, perhaps not as many, nor perhaps as serious, but they will be there.
As a side note, it might be good to see more of the people who want linux on the desktop everywhere to start working on more userfriendly security apps for Linux for the time when this eventually happens. Yes such things exist, but it might be nice to see some easy to use virus scanners and firewall applications before they are needed.
You seem to be missing the point here. It's tragic that honest companies died along the way, but the tragedy with Enron was that the executives(who were the ones commiting the fraud) made off with millions while the ordinary enron employees, who for the most part were just doing their jobs, got hosed.
That's why Enron was a tragedy, not because the company went under, or because it couldn't compete, or any other BS, but because the misactions of a few greedy bastards essentially screwed over a whole bunch of regular people.
I dunno really, they've bit off more than they could chew before and not delayed releases. I mean I still remember when Windows 2000 was supposed to be a magical combination of Windows 9x and Windows NT, which it wasn't, XP was. 2k was a good OS, well as far as that goes, but it wasn't all that friendly to 9x programs and the like, and wasn't what they originally said it was going to be.
Simple enough, at least if you have norton or zonealarm installed, the XP firewall will kill windowsupdate(don't really know why), but neither norton nor zone will. So long as you allow the update connections quickly enough, windows update will time out if you don't allow the connections through pretty quickly.
Don't get me wrong, I like seeing review articles on things like this. However, it really doesn't seem to be much of a review. He basically says xterm is good, that the built in terminals for KDE and GNOME are ok, and that there are other terminals out there.
I didn't really find this all that useful, because the only terminals he really goes into any depth on are the ones pretty well everyone has already used. The only thing he says about RXVT(the only non standard terminal he goes into any detail about) is that he wishes they hadn't taken out scrolling.
NPR may not be right wing dominated. Come on folks what do you expect it's public radio if the republicans had their way they'd cut all of their funding(one of the few things I agree with republicans on, I can handle Public Television but NPR makes me want to gag doesn't even have the excuse of providing childrens programming for its existence), but in addition to being ridiculously far left they are also mind numbingly dull.
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However if you'd like buy me an LCD monitor I'm sure arrangements can be made.
Now I played the good route, my creature did it's best to help out everyone, problem was, once it got to a certain level of goodness it stopped taking care of itself, now I don't particularly feel that there's anything wrong with my creature stopping to eat something when it's hungry so long as it doesn't decide to eat the citizens.
That said, if they let through stupid patents they're likely to continue getting stupid patents which increases their overall volume and therefor their income so the end result is essentially the same.
Terrorists are inspired by poverty, hunger, abuse, religious fanatacism, etc. They see something which is so abhorent to them they are willing to die to change things.
Most terrorist leaders(and revolutionary leaders in general, including those who founded the USA) on the other hand are nearly always members of an almost ruling class. Despite rhretoric to the contrary their goal is simply to replace the present ruling class with one which includes them. There are exceptions of course, the occaisional insane or truly evil person who just wants to cause destruction.
Now we can't really do anything about the leaders, so long as there is a ruling class there will always be people who want to replace that ruling class with one which includes themselves, since they rarely have any real ideology they can sometimes be bought off, but it won't solve the problem. We can however do something about the actual people who serve the cause(you'll notice that Osama bin Laden wasn't flying one of those planes).
The solution is to treat these people like human beings. You can't win this fight with an army without exterminating entire populations because for every person you kill you bring two more of his or her friends/family into the fight. You essentially become the monster people like Osama claimed you were, and bring more people into the movement.
However, that said, the iPod is a fad. It is more expensive than comparable devices and from what I've read not that substantially better. It has two major selling points. 1) iTunes 2) It's cool. We've all seen the ads for iPod's which one do they plug? Don't recall them even mentioning iTunes in most of them, it's just sort of vaguely indie shadows dancing around.
Or perhaps KDE could look into working out why it takes longer to compile KDE than Gnome or anything else of comparative size. Christ OpenOffice from source is almost 200 MB and even that compiles in about half the time as KDE(not that it doesn't take a very, very, very long time as well). KDE just takes for ever.
I seem to recall some software a few years back which came with a dongle, I also seem to recall that someone managed to fake that dongle so you can pirate the software anyway. Take a lesson here people, if you can't stop piracy with hardware you sure as hell can't do it will software, in all reality Paladium(assuming it ever shows up) probably won't stop piracy. This is for a simple reason, for every guy out there trying to come up with ways to prevent piracy there are at least 100 attempting to circumvent it, and these guys are really really good. There's a lesson here, a lesson we should all have learned a long, long, long time ago, because it's been true since the first copy protection ever implemented. ALL COPY PROTECTION DOES IS INCONVENIENCE THE LEGITIMATE USER. Sorry to have shouted that, but I wouldn't want someone to miss that one. No method of copy protection every created has stopped people from pirating software and the only way I can see that changing any time in the forseeable future.
Second of all, YOU DO NOT HAVE A FUNDAMENTAL RIGHT TO FLY ANONYMOUSLY BECAUSE YOU DO NOT HAVE A FUNDAMENTAL RIGHT TO FLY. This is where they can always get you, it's what makes you required to show your drivers license to a cop who pulls you over, when you get one you sign a little form which says in return for getting this license I will show my license if pulled over if I do not I understand my license will be revoked, if they haven't put this into the ticket contract yet(which I doubt) they will now.
Thirdly, this is not like the Soviet Union because the problem with the USSR wasn't that you had to show a passport to travel in your own country(and this was any sort of travel including walking as a point, it was that not everyone got one and even those who did weren't always allowed to travel. This will be like the USSR if and only if they refuse to give large segments of the population which they wish oppressed an ID which allows them to fly.
That said, I hate the Patriot Act as much as the next guy(well so long as the next guy isn't a gun toting militia man or a libertarian). I admitedly think we probably have bigger things to worry about now, like getting rid of the asshats who made this sort of crap possible in the first place(Bush, Ashcroft, 99/100 members of the Senate).
On a related but somewhat off topic rant, what idiot came up with the term illegal combatant and expects that to fly, does our government really believe that, regardless of their guilt or innocence, the rest of the world is going to accept that argument for revoking the rights of the Geneva convention as well as those granted to humans in general?
The flashlight in AvP only sucked because the things eating you could see perfectly in the dark, well they could see you at least.
We live in a society which essentially allows you to choose between a Democrat and a Republican candidate, a two party system. We could have a multiple party system, but given the fact that we have neither a parlimentary structure(coalition governance) nor any sort of run off voting(you can win with a minority) a third party candidate has about as much chance og winning as a snowman has in hell.
Now in order to get to be one of those two people you have to gain the support of the party of you choosing, and then you have to run, this takes money, an astronomical amount of money.
There is a big problem with this because you have to get that money somewhere, which means you either have to be extremely rich yourself and/or you need the support of very rich people/companies. These are the people who have the power, the people who get to choose who we get to vote for.
I'm not going to say these people are fundamentally evil or even that they're out to get us, because that isn't true, but they have interests, and those interests don't necessarily align with yours or mine.
Even in the unlikely event that you have a candidate who is rich enough to fund his(yes I know I should use his or her, but face it we won't have a woman president any time soon) own electoral campaign, he still has to bow to these interests because they fund the party whose support he needs to run.
This sort of thing may sound like the government getting involved where it ought not to be and ruining peoples fun, but as I understand it the chief reason for these laws is that it can be difficult for a police officer to determine whether such a gun is real or fake at a glance. When cops see guns pointed at them, they don't usually take it lightly and people getting killed while wielding toy guns isn't terribly good for anyone.
Microsoft felt they had the browser wars won, so they left IE alone(IE isn't really terribly profitable except in the sense that if people start switching from it they might stop fearing M$ alternatives so much). Now of course they don't have pop up blocking, they don't have tabs, they are still way too tied into the OS, etc and they are losing badly.
Right now they are the underdog, people may not know there are alternatives out there but a CERT alert telling people to stop using your browser isn't good for buisness, there are still some people who pay attention to those things.
The way I see it is that the major benefit of software distribution is that(for games and the like at least) once you've paid the, admitedly rather hefty, initial development costs it costs very little money to make more copies.
If there's anything in the world which positively screams more sales at lower profits is better than a few sales at higher profits it's software, but they don't sell that way, games are $50 a piece here in the US(and if you've looked at them anywhere else where the currency value is a little lower it's not unsurprising to see them for close to $100) which is more than most people can afford to spend on a game.
I kind of like the previews myself, though they're starting to ruin that for me too. It really kind of annoys me when they start previewing a movie like 6 months before it's going to come out(ex signs or his new one the village for that matter). I mean you get to the point where you're saying to yourself, "that hasn't come out yet, I've seen the preview at the last 30 films I've been too".
You hit the nail right on the head there, the principal language of government is English. That doesn't necessarily mean that the general populace can speak/read it. During the middle ages the language of government in England was french, but regular people didn't speak it.
The problem is that this sort of evidence would be more than enough to get a search warrant and assuming they can get within range of your house without stepping on your property, it's use probably doesn't require one.
This means that the cops can scan your house whenever they like and use these scans to get a warrant. True if you're not doing anything wrong you shouldn't(shouldn't I say not don't) have anything to worry about, but it's still a bit of an invasion of privacy.
Pretty much every single religion on the face of the earth(including Islam for a little balance against the set of loonies who think the Koran justifies blowing people up or beheading them) boils down to treating you fellow humans fairly and not killing them. The head of one of the world's largest ones(John Paul II) in some of his rare moments of clarity and admitedly movement of any kind continues to criticize Bush for the war in Iraq.
You cannot claim to be a chosen son of God, any God, and act in a way which is totally contradictory to the major teachings of that God.
Half the globe becomes a fiery wasteland and the other half freezes and we've got bigger problems?
Transgaming provides a service. The question is whether that service is worth the money or not. Wine could quite easily have added directx support on their own, they didn't, anyone else could have gotten a group together and worked on getting it done, no one did, transgaming provides the ability to play most windows games on Linux, no one else has done so. If they want to charge a little bit of money for that, and people are willing to pay for it, good for them.
That said, switching people to Linux won't help if they don't apply security patches, an insecure system is an insecure system *nix or not.
I also personally believe that if *nix ever gets onto the desktop the way Windows is now, there will be an awful lot more virus makers targeting it than there are now. Some of these people are very clever, if misguided people, and they'll find vulnerabilities on Linux, perhaps not as many, nor perhaps as serious, but they will be there.
As a side note, it might be good to see more of the people who want linux on the desktop everywhere to start working on more userfriendly security apps for Linux for the time when this eventually happens. Yes such things exist, but it might be nice to see some easy to use virus scanners and firewall applications before they are needed.
That's why Enron was a tragedy, not because the company went under, or because it couldn't compete, or any other BS, but because the misactions of a few greedy bastards essentially screwed over a whole bunch of regular people.
I dunno really, they've bit off more than they could chew before and not delayed releases. I mean I still remember when Windows 2000 was supposed to be a magical combination of Windows 9x and Windows NT, which it wasn't, XP was. 2k was a good OS, well as far as that goes, but it wasn't all that friendly to 9x programs and the like, and wasn't what they originally said it was going to be.
Simple enough, at least if you have norton or zonealarm installed, the XP firewall will kill windowsupdate(don't really know why), but neither norton nor zone will. So long as you allow the update connections quickly enough, windows update will time out if you don't allow the connections through pretty quickly.
I didn't really find this all that useful, because the only terminals he really goes into any depth on are the ones pretty well everyone has already used. The only thing he says about RXVT(the only non standard terminal he goes into any detail about) is that he wishes they hadn't taken out scrolling.
NPR may not be right wing dominated. Come on folks what do you expect it's public radio if the republicans had their way they'd cut all of their funding(one of the few things I agree with republicans on, I can handle Public Television but NPR makes me want to gag doesn't even have the excuse of providing childrens programming for its existence), but in addition to being ridiculously far left they are also mind numbingly dull.