Michael Moore is an extremist. Extreme left-wing in this case, if I recall correctly. I saw Bowling for Columbine and it was a a good movie, but always, ALWAYS remember that's just ONE side of the spectrum. I'm not much at home at US politics, but I believe that Michael Moore is to left-wing/democrats what Ann Coulter is to the ring-wing/republicans. Except one is a small fat guy with beard and the other... isn't. Don't copy other people's opinions; listen to both sides of the story and make your own.
That said, I still would like to see that movie for fun. I'm no american, so american political views be damned; I just want to see the guy piss over several people!
Safety/Environmental "Nazi"s will go absolutely ape
Those people go ape about ANYTHING. Suggest the use of wind power, one group will cheer and the other group will start bitching claiming seagulls might get whacked by the rotorblades. Suggest hydropower, one group will cheer and another group will bitch about the safety of the backward-swimming Russian troutski. Suggest solar power, one group will cheer and another will bitch about "landscape polution".
Enviromentalist extremists are best left unheard and/or shot at.
Yes, good points, but there are certain objects that simply don't have a backside or a back side which is unreachable. Still though, allot can be achieved with some high-quality cable and some soldering if it were that important... So the VGA cable is doable. However, the network cable might prove difficult. Still though, it OUGHT to be possible to use ribbon cables. Think of those 80-wire IDE ribbon cables that allow ( in theory ) full ATA-133 speeds by spacing an unused wire between each active wire. That's 133mB/s, so the network cable ought to be easily extended. I don't know how much traffic a VGA cable has to handle, but a 30 pin ribbon cable ought to work, I believe. Hell, ribbon cables have achieves faster then 133mB/s speeds, for example, SCSI cables.
Then again, only one way to find out... Now I first need some keyboard adapter from Amiga keyboard to PS/2 keyboard... Hrm...
I'm not old enough to have witnessed the evil juggernaut that was IBM, but I do occasionally hear the elder people talk about days past when IBM would own your soul if one would even look at an IBM compatible piece of junk. There was no greater evil then IBM and it was cursed and spit at.
Now look at IBM, they turned OS into a viable business model and are a nice enough player in the OS world. Who is to say MS can't change into a nice enough OS player? The quality of their software aside, it's a good thing to see they ACKNOWLEDGE OSS to start with.
And, that can be used against them if they claim OSS is a $strRandomNastyLethalDisease. If they do, remind them they use it themselves.
I know, I know... But that's still two rather vital connectors. I want to be able to wire something as I please, which includes pinouts for both the VGA signal and the NIC. Granted, VGA pinout will be a nasty mess of 15 pins, but a NIC pinout would be only 8 pins... Maybe even 4 pins.
Via needs to get rid of all onboard connectors and replace them all with handy-dandy pinouts on the mainboard instead. Would make for some WAY easier modifications, as you can mount the connectors wherever the hell you want them and then wire them to the mainboard, instead of trying to force the mainboard into some awkward angle just so you can plug in the mouse and keyboard...
Wait a sec, I'm not a biological specialist, but aren't some vital organs composed of muscles, like the heart? I mean, if there is no limit to muscle growth, eventually the kid's ribcage would cease expendaning when he's full grown and the only way the heart can grow then ( because it's no longer limited ) is to the inside...
Then again, I might be a fool and the heart might be excluded from this or not be made out of muscles at all...
In the name of Eris, some of those "think tanks" really are full of shit. For example, here's a nice article from the "Small Business Survival Committee" against the recent anti-SUV feelings among several key US people. Their motivation is to be doubted in the first place; why would a think tank that aligns itself with SMALL businesses care about SUV? Non "mom-n-pop" shop/small business will ever produce a SUV. Besides, look at some of their reasoning:
Data from the institute is quite revealing. In 2002, driver deaths, per one million passenger vehicles one to three years old, registered 162 in mini cars, versus 64 in four-wheel-drive SUVs weighing between 3,500 and 6,000 pounds.
Brilliant. Fucking brilliant. That's an ammount of misinformation that would make many a discordianist proud. I love that logic, how many people died in M1A2 Abrams tanks lately? Probably less then that. So clearly, everyone in the US should drive a M1A2 Abrams MBT. Also, more people die each year by drowning in water then by drowning in hydrochloric acid. Therefore, hydrochloric acid is safer to swim in then water. I'm not even going tom start on their anti-"EC penalty vs MS" article. Since when does MS count as a small business, anyways, to attract their concern?
I've been wondering... IF Wine is a LGPL-ed product, then how can WineX exist without source code? I might be horribly wrong here, but doesn't the LGPL, like the GPL, force the creators of derivative works to make the source code available? I know they can just sod it all and only include sources with every CD they sell, that'd their right. But the person receiving that source code has the right to distribute it then, iirc.
Then again, it's the LGPL, so there might be something involved here that I'm not aware of. Mainly dealing with libraries. But I don't know if WineX uses just the Wine libraries or not. If they'd actually use a single line of Wine code ( instead of just using the libraries ) in their own sources, though, it'd be a LGPL-ed work, right?
Well, like you said, it is your right to think so and say so. I'm not going to stop you on, but I am going to point out that the majority of people ( or at least current mods ) do view of it as funny. What you may view as something that's crossed the line may be a simple joke to someone else. And in this case, that someone else is the majority of people.
It could just as easily have been a joke about Mike ( Look! Ontopic! ) getting intimate with Natalie Portman and hot grits in zero-g or something, so don't sweat.:)
It's a joke. A simple joke. I'm not asking you to laugh your butt of at my joke, not do I expect you or anyone else to like them. However, I do expect you to view jokes with a sense of humour and not to disregard them as poor taste just because you feel like that. There are people in here who do like those jokes.
So please, lighten up a bit regarding the jokes.:) If it's spiteful or insulting it will never get modded up to start with, so why get your panties in a bunch over something trivial?
Legislation to curtail spyware is long over due. An operating system that is resistant to spyware is already available, and it ain't Windows.
I call FUD.
MS Windows isn't the prime target for spyware because of it's rather poor record, it's the prime target because 95% of the people out there use some form of Windows and thus the number of clueless retards using Windows is higher then with MacOS or Linux. Blaming spyware on Windows is flawed, because spyware on Linux is realistic, possible but simply not profitable enough. Nor are Linux users ( generally ) retarded enough to actually install bonzibuddy_2.4.0.(rpm|deb|tgz|ebuild(?)).
Yet. If Linux gets enough market share, some spyware, virusses and other crap WILL come to Linux. Never EVER underestimate the stupidity of the average computer user.
Youve got underpaid, unmotivated and uneducated teachers, attempting to simply control a group of apathetic and uncaring students, who have little to no motivation and guidance from their gaurdians.
Hmm, dunno about US eductional systems, but allow me to give people an inside view into the Dutch educational system. Be sure to be seated properly, to make sure you don't end up hurt when you flop over crying or laughing.
First of all, the underpaid, unmotivated and uneducated teachers. Amazingly and with allot of luck, most of my teachers this year are actually bright, know how to motivate you and are still underpaid. Could have been pure luck on my part though, but the majority simply came across as capable teachers and nice people who would motivate me when required and if the subjects they gave would actually be able to teach me something, they could have. Still though, for some teachers work-stress is immense, though some are more capable of handling it then others. One of the teachers who's also responsible for organization stuff, however, has hours on a day where his duties include:
Teaching asp.net to one class.
Teaching SQL to two classes.
Supervising and assisting a bunch of people with their final project.
Supervising and assisting all other teachers.
Maintain a line of communications between teachers and organization staff.
Suffice to say, it is unrealistic to expect anyone can work under this kind of load. Even for the regular teachers work loads can mount up, because they have to prepare lessons, evaluate tests, wite the tests, stay up to date on their subjects ( We're talking IT here, go figure ) and more.
Then there's us student. After three years of this particular college, both morale and motivation have taken a dive into the negative areas of unrealistic numbers. Short term guidance has been so-so. We're given barely enough information to understand what the hell to college is planning before it's all changed again, so it's no use after all. No one has any ideas as to what's best for ourselves in the long run, partially because of pure apathy. I can elaborate one this more because I am a student myself, after all:
Internships: AKA among us students as "slave labour minus the cheap housing". Basically, you end up working full time for some company, usually doing the most shit jobs around because you're the cheapest around, at an amazing 200 euro a MONTH. The basic idea behind this is that we get work experience. In a goddamn computer store. The other basic, yet hidden reason, is that if the college manages to have double the amount of paying students by sending half of them on internship every other half year.
Disorganisation: Last year I had to sign a form that stated which subjects I wanted to follow and which courses I wanted to take. I didn't fill it in because I expected this to happen, but most people did. Basically, they ignored their own stupid idea and now everyone is doing the exact same thing, regardless of what one wanted. Oh wait, they did manage to split up programming ( asp.net, don't ask. ) and SQL classes. ( SQL being taught with... MS Access. Again, don't ask. ) However, they are exactly at the same time by the same teacher. ( See above ) So if you want to do both, you're screwed.
Being treated like a retard: Seriously, this is very annoying. We live in the year 2004, all of us are doing this college because we are interested in computers and thus already got some experience with them. Trying to teach us how to install Win98 will be a waste of time. Trying to teach us how to install WinME is a waste of time and futile because no one wants WinME. Trying to teach us how to install NT4 is a waste of time as well. I will let you people guess what trying to teach us how to do a basic install Win2k actually is. None of it all goes beyond the basics. Linux classes don't go beyond simple installing and VERY basic admini
I know, ironic I post this in a Slashdot journal. At least it's not personal crap, it's actually an issue that lives among people on the internet. Then again, I'm high on irony lately...
I'm quoting myself in a reply on my own post by refering to my journal which is claimed to be a blog yet it isn't... Wow. I think I just achieved a whole new level of "weird" here on Slashdot.
Unfortunately, both are solutions that will only tackle a few problems by rather brute methods, such as RAID redundancy. ( Hehehe )
What IT currently needs are solid state harddisks. FAR higher reliablity, far higher speeds, close to no issues anymore with cooling... How do you think 40gb SS HDs would sell? They'd sell like hot cakes for database solutions: just slap 10 of them together in a RAID 0 configuration and you just got yourself one 400gb drive with speeds that are somewhere between SCSI 15k access times and RAM access times, yet still with a better reliability then any IDE or SCSI system can offer.
Remember that for enterprise customers, reliability and speed sell. Not low pricing or capacity.
I suggest...
on
Meet Joe Blog
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
... a seperate section on Slashdot for all *blog related articles, to clearly define which articles are about blogs.
They already got that over here on some highways. Like in your examples, they measure the time elapsed as you travel between two fixed points. This is even FAR worse, because you can either overtake the trucks on the right lane and get nailed for speeding ( 120km/h past 12 trucks at 80km/h would cause a traffic jam ) or you spend some quality time behind the truck chuggin about at 80km/h.
Survelance cameras are already very common in major cities
I live in some minor shitsville in the middle of the Netherlands and those goddamn speeding cameras are common around here. In fact, there are so many around here the provincial goverment has denied a request to place more cameras, due to the fact there are so many already. Heck, there's a 800m stretch of road with FOUR cameras. If you go 54 km/h for even a few dozen meters, you're bound to end up 28 euros poorer. Now before people will scream "safety" and "the law", I'd like to remind people this road could take 80km/h with ease, there are NO sidewalks adjacent to the road and no building for kids or disabled people.
This, coupled with the facts the dutch police has "prestation contracts" that state they will bring in a minimum amount of euros on fines and the fact the police only posts cameras and surveillance vehicles where profitable instead of logical really make me doubt wether the police is there for my security not for my money. I really don't want an RFID tag in my car so those greedy bastards can squeeze more money from me. What's next, are they going to tie the RFID tag into the onboard computers? A nice note reading "You were speeding, your front lights are too dim, you ran a traffic light three days ago and you're using the wrong diesel fuel.", along with a 150 euro bill? I just wish the goverment would stop lying to me and say "Yeah, we're doing it for the money." instead of this bullshit story about safety.
Guess there'd be a market for both realistic and unrealistic human characters in games. Clearly, realistic characters would do very well in RPGs and simulation games like The Sims. Try out the "The Sims 2 Body Editor" for some sense of what to expect from EA soon. It's not bad, nice and realistics. On the other hand, there are games where realistics characters aren't as important, such as FPS games. Who cares about a realistic chin lines on the enemy soldier if you're a few mouse clicks away from turning said realistic character into a corpse with a lovely ragdoll physics system?
Same thing with movies, some will obviously develop more on a "cartoonish" look, such as anime gone 3d. No matter how hard they try, they can never make a 16 year old school girl with blue hair that can handle a 300 foot robot come over as realistic. Then again, eventually, there will be serious movies with close to no real actors in it. It will all be rendered because having a large cluster is cheaper then having Keanu Reeves ruin your movie with some atrocious acting...
Meeting people on the internet instead of meeting people for real is like driving a Trabant instead of a Mercedes.
Both do exactly the same thing, get you where you want. Yet, those who cant afford a Mercedes will buy the Trabant and then bitch at the Mercedes people, claiming their Trabants are just as good, if not better. Much to the annoyance to Mercedes people. Seriously, I hang around on IRC and on here because it's interesting at times, not because I crave social interaction with anyone on the internet. That's what a life is for.
Horrible 'brand'. Once worked in a computer store for a while. We sold about 20 of their TFTs before we figured out that the three we had on display were showing serious signs of wear. After being on display for just two months. That, coupled with the two we already sent back for replacement, ( One simply didn't work, another one auto-adjusted the screen about 15cm too far to the right. ) make me glad I wasn't working there anymore when all those BenQ monitors started to fail on our customers.
Anyways, let BenQ take the brunt of a new tech. If I'd want a 16x dvd+-rw drive so badly, I'd wait for very good quality ( Plextor ) or a good medium between quality and price. ( NEC ) And yes, those of you who are interested can take that as a hint.
Slashdot Mirror
Symantec and McAffee stock go orbital?
Michael Moore is an extremist. Extreme left-wing in this case, if I recall correctly. I saw Bowling for Columbine and it was a a good movie, but always, ALWAYS remember that's just ONE side of the spectrum. I'm not much at home at US politics, but I believe that Michael Moore is to left-wing/democrats what Ann Coulter is to the ring-wing/republicans. Except one is a small fat guy with beard and the other... isn't. Don't copy other people's opinions; listen to both sides of the story and make your own.
That said, I still would like to see that movie for fun. I'm no american, so american political views be damned; I just want to see the guy piss over several people!
Those people go ape about ANYTHING. Suggest the use of wind power, one group will cheer and the other group will start bitching claiming seagulls might get whacked by the rotorblades. Suggest hydropower, one group will cheer and another group will bitch about the safety of the backward-swimming Russian troutski. Suggest solar power, one group will cheer and another will bitch about "landscape polution".
Enviromentalist extremists are best left unheard and/or shot at.
Yes, good points, but there are certain objects that simply don't have a backside or a back side which is unreachable. Still though, allot can be achieved with some high-quality cable and some soldering if it were that important... So the VGA cable is doable. However, the network cable might prove difficult. Still though, it OUGHT to be possible to use ribbon cables. Think of those 80-wire IDE ribbon cables that allow ( in theory ) full ATA-133 speeds by spacing an unused wire between each active wire. That's 133mB/s, so the network cable ought to be easily extended. I don't know how much traffic a VGA cable has to handle, but a 30 pin ribbon cable ought to work, I believe. Hell, ribbon cables have achieves faster then 133mB/s speeds, for example, SCSI cables.
Then again, only one way to find out... Now I first need some keyboard adapter from Amiga keyboard to PS/2 keyboard... Hrm...
I'm not old enough to have witnessed the evil juggernaut that was IBM, but I do occasionally hear the elder people talk about days past when IBM would own your soul if one would even look at an IBM compatible piece of junk. There was no greater evil then IBM and it was cursed and spit at.
Now look at IBM, they turned OS into a viable business model and are a nice enough player in the OS world. Who is to say MS can't change into a nice enough OS player? The quality of their software aside, it's a good thing to see they ACKNOWLEDGE OSS to start with.
And, that can be used against them if they claim OSS is a $strRandomNastyLethalDisease. If they do, remind them they use it themselves.
I know, I know... But that's still two rather vital connectors. I want to be able to wire something as I please, which includes pinouts for both the VGA signal and the NIC. Granted, VGA pinout will be a nasty mess of 15 pins, but a NIC pinout would be only 8 pins... Maybe even 4 pins.
Via needs to get rid of all onboard connectors and replace them all with handy-dandy pinouts on the mainboard instead. Would make for some WAY easier modifications, as you can mount the connectors wherever the hell you want them and then wire them to the mainboard, instead of trying to force the mainboard into some awkward angle just so you can plug in the mouse and keyboard...
Wait a sec, I'm not a biological specialist, but aren't some vital organs composed of muscles, like the heart? I mean, if there is no limit to muscle growth, eventually the kid's ribcage would cease expendaning when he's full grown and the only way the heart can grow then ( because it's no longer limited ) is to the inside...
Then again, I might be a fool and the heart might be excluded from this or not be made out of muscles at all...
In the name of Eris, some of those "think tanks" really are full of shit. For example, here's a nice article from the "Small Business Survival Committee" against the recent anti-SUV feelings among several key US people. Their motivation is to be doubted in the first place; why would a think tank that aligns itself with SMALL businesses care about SUV? Non "mom-n-pop" shop/small business will ever produce a SUV. Besides, look at some of their reasoning:
Brilliant. Fucking brilliant. That's an ammount of misinformation that would make many a discordianist proud. I love that logic, how many people died in M1A2 Abrams tanks lately? Probably less then that. So clearly, everyone in the US should drive a M1A2 Abrams MBT. Also, more people die each year by drowning in water then by drowning in hydrochloric acid. Therefore, hydrochloric acid is safer to swim in then water. I'm not even going tom start on their anti-"EC penalty vs MS" article. Since when does MS count as a small business, anyways, to attract their concern?
I've been wondering... IF Wine is a LGPL-ed product, then how can WineX exist without source code? I might be horribly wrong here, but doesn't the LGPL, like the GPL, force the creators of derivative works to make the source code available? I know they can just sod it all and only include sources with every CD they sell, that'd their right. But the person receiving that source code has the right to distribute it then, iirc.
Then again, it's the LGPL, so there might be something involved here that I'm not aware of. Mainly dealing with libraries. But I don't know if WineX uses just the Wine libraries or not. If they'd actually use a single line of Wine code ( instead of just using the libraries ) in their own sources, though, it'd be a LGPL-ed work, right?
Just sent my hotmail account a mail from my gmail account. The message didn't bounce and arrived in my hotmail account just fine.
So at least hotmail isn't using dirty tactics.
Well, like you said, it is your right to think so and say so. I'm not going to stop you on, but I am going to point out that the majority of people ( or at least current mods ) do view of it as funny. What you may view as something that's crossed the line may be a simple joke to someone else. And in this case, that someone else is the majority of people.
It could just as easily have been a joke about Mike ( Look! Ontopic! ) getting intimate with Natalie Portman and hot grits in zero-g or something, so don't sweat. :)
It's a joke. A simple joke. I'm not asking you to laugh your butt of at my joke, not do I expect you or anyone else to like them. However, I do expect you to view jokes with a sense of humour and not to disregard them as poor taste just because you feel like that. There are people in here who do like those jokes.
So please, lighten up a bit regarding the jokes. :) If it's spiteful or insulting it will never get modded up to start with, so why get your panties in a bunch over something trivial?
I call FUD.
MS Windows isn't the prime target for spyware because of it's rather poor record, it's the prime target because 95% of the people out there use some form of Windows and thus the number of clueless retards using Windows is higher then with MacOS or Linux. Blaming spyware on Windows is flawed, because spyware on Linux is realistic, possible but simply not profitable enough. Nor are Linux users ( generally ) retarded enough to actually install bonzibuddy_2.4.0.(rpm|deb|tgz|ebuild(?)).
Yet. If Linux gets enough market share, some spyware, virusses and other crap WILL come to Linux. Never EVER underestimate the stupidity of the average computer user.
Hmm, dunno about US eductional systems, but allow me to give people an inside view into the Dutch educational system. Be sure to be seated properly, to make sure you don't end up hurt when you flop over crying or laughing.
First of all, the underpaid, unmotivated and uneducated teachers. Amazingly and with allot of luck, most of my teachers this year are actually bright, know how to motivate you and are still underpaid. Could have been pure luck on my part though, but the majority simply came across as capable teachers and nice people who would motivate me when required and if the subjects they gave would actually be able to teach me something, they could have. Still though, for some teachers work-stress is immense, though some are more capable of handling it then others. One of the teachers who's also responsible for organization stuff, however, has hours on a day where his duties include:
Suffice to say, it is unrealistic to expect anyone can work under this kind of load. Even for the regular teachers work loads can mount up, because they have to prepare lessons, evaluate tests, wite the tests, stay up to date on their subjects ( We're talking IT here, go figure ) and more.
Then there's us student. After three years of this particular college, both morale and motivation have taken a dive into the negative areas of unrealistic numbers. Short term guidance has been so-so. We're given barely enough information to understand what the hell to college is planning before it's all changed again, so it's no use after all. No one has any ideas as to what's best for ourselves in the long run, partially because of pure apathy. I can elaborate one this more because I am a student myself, after all:
Internships: AKA among us students as "slave labour minus the cheap housing". Basically, you end up working full time for some company, usually doing the most shit jobs around because you're the cheapest around, at an amazing 200 euro a MONTH. The basic idea behind this is that we get work experience. In a goddamn computer store. The other basic, yet hidden reason, is that if the college manages to have double the amount of paying students by sending half of them on internship every other half year.
Disorganisation: Last year I had to sign a form that stated which subjects I wanted to follow and which courses I wanted to take. I didn't fill it in because I expected this to happen, but most people did. Basically, they ignored their own stupid idea and now everyone is doing the exact same thing, regardless of what one wanted. Oh wait, they did manage to split up programming ( asp.net, don't ask. ) and SQL classes. ( SQL being taught with... MS Access. Again, don't ask. ) However, they are exactly at the same time by the same teacher. ( See above ) So if you want to do both, you're screwed.
Being treated like a retard: Seriously, this is very annoying. We live in the year 2004, all of us are doing this college because we are interested in computers and thus already got some experience with them. Trying to teach us how to install Win98 will be a waste of time. Trying to teach us how to install WinME is a waste of time and futile because no one wants WinME. Trying to teach us how to install NT4 is a waste of time as well. I will let you people guess what trying to teach us how to do a basic install Win2k actually is. None of it all goes beyond the basics. Linux classes don't go beyond simple installing and VERY basic admini
It will just include an nice EULA then that will tell you to fuck off and go to hell if you have any complaints.
Also, this EULA will be printed on the inside of the case.
Those who fail to learn from history, are condemned to repeat it.
Ahem, wise man once said:
I'm quoting myself in a reply on my own post by refering to my journal which is claimed to be a blog yet it isn't... Wow. I think I just achieved a whole new level of "weird" here on Slashdot.
Unfortunately, both are solutions that will only tackle a few problems by rather brute methods, such as RAID redundancy. ( Hehehe )
What IT currently needs are solid state harddisks. FAR higher reliablity, far higher speeds, close to no issues anymore with cooling... How do you think 40gb SS HDs would sell? They'd sell like hot cakes for database solutions: just slap 10 of them together in a RAID 0 configuration and you just got yourself one 400gb drive with speeds that are somewhere between SCSI 15k access times and RAM access times, yet still with a better reliability then any IDE or SCSI system can offer.
Remember that for enterprise customers, reliability and speed sell. Not low pricing or capacity.
... a seperate section on Slashdot for all *blog related articles, to clearly define which articles are about blogs.
So it's easier for people to ignore it.
They already got that over here on some highways. Like in your examples, they measure the time elapsed as you travel between two fixed points. This is even FAR worse, because you can either overtake the trucks on the right lane and get nailed for speeding ( 120km/h past 12 trucks at 80km/h would cause a traffic jam ) or you spend some quality time behind the truck chuggin about at 80km/h.
All in the name of safety, of course.
I live in some minor shitsville in the middle of the Netherlands and those goddamn speeding cameras are common around here. In fact, there are so many around here the provincial goverment has denied a request to place more cameras, due to the fact there are so many already. Heck, there's a 800m stretch of road with FOUR cameras. If you go 54 km/h for even a few dozen meters, you're bound to end up 28 euros poorer. Now before people will scream "safety" and "the law", I'd like to remind people this road could take 80km/h with ease, there are NO sidewalks adjacent to the road and no building for kids or disabled people.
This, coupled with the facts the dutch police has "prestation contracts" that state they will bring in a minimum amount of euros on fines and the fact the police only posts cameras and surveillance vehicles where profitable instead of logical really make me doubt wether the police is there for my security not for my money. I really don't want an RFID tag in my car so those greedy bastards can squeeze more money from me. What's next, are they going to tie the RFID tag into the onboard computers? A nice note reading "You were speeding, your front lights are too dim, you ran a traffic light three days ago and you're using the wrong diesel fuel.", along with a 150 euro bill? I just wish the goverment would stop lying to me and say "Yeah, we're doing it for the money." instead of this bullshit story about safety.
Guess there'd be a market for both realistic and unrealistic human characters in games. Clearly, realistic characters would do very well in RPGs and simulation games like The Sims. Try out the "The Sims 2 Body Editor" for some sense of what to expect from EA soon. It's not bad, nice and realistics. On the other hand, there are games where realistics characters aren't as important, such as FPS games. Who cares about a realistic chin lines on the enemy soldier if you're a few mouse clicks away from turning said realistic character into a corpse with a lovely ragdoll physics system?
Same thing with movies, some will obviously develop more on a "cartoonish" look, such as anime gone 3d. No matter how hard they try, they can never make a 16 year old school girl with blue hair that can handle a 300 foot robot come over as realistic. Then again, eventually, there will be serious movies with close to no real actors in it. It will all be rendered because having a large cluster is cheaper then having Keanu Reeves ruin your movie with some atrocious acting...
Meeting people on the internet instead of meeting people for real is like driving a Trabant instead of a Mercedes.
Both do exactly the same thing, get you where you want. Yet, those who cant afford a Mercedes will buy the Trabant and then bitch at the Mercedes people, claiming their Trabants are just as good, if not better. Much to the annoyance to Mercedes people. Seriously, I hang around on IRC and on here because it's interesting at times, not because I crave social interaction with anyone on the internet. That's what a life is for.
Horrible 'brand'. Once worked in a computer store for a while. We sold about 20 of their TFTs before we figured out that the three we had on display were showing serious signs of wear. After being on display for just two months. That, coupled with the two we already sent back for replacement, ( One simply didn't work, another one auto-adjusted the screen about 15cm too far to the right. ) make me glad I wasn't working there anymore when all those BenQ monitors started to fail on our customers.
Anyways, let BenQ take the brunt of a new tech. If I'd want a 16x dvd+-rw drive so badly, I'd wait for very good quality ( Plextor ) or a good medium between quality and price. ( NEC ) And yes, those of you who are interested can take that as a hint.