So, the "much larger scale" argument is totally bogus.
Only if upcoming technology and services make it possible to aggregate those photos and use them *together* in a systematic and consistent manner akin to Google Maps. Having "complete coverage" isn't in itself the same thing if they're not stored in consistent locations online and compatible formats accessible via a single interface.
That said, I think it's possible that technology will make that doable sooner rather than later, making the whole greater than the sum of the parts. If people aren't making a fuss about that now it's possibly because the implications aren't apparent yet.
But what Google are doing is creating a data set that already has those consistent and in-one-place characteristics... and from a present-day point of view that *does* make it different.
You mean if you had a massive fleet of cars that recorded almost complete sets of photos every few metres in every single street in several countries, and you had (likely) numerous terabytes of many, many people's wireless transmissions....? Oh, sorry, you meant
Heck, you can walk around with a camera all you want and take snapshots of everything you feel like... licenseplates, folks dressing, whatever you like.
So that's not actually doing what Google did because Google did it in a much larger scale and that's what makes it an issue.
This is one of those stupid pedantic arguments, that fails (quite deliberately) to acknowledge- or possibly even to realise- not only is the *quantitative* difference significant in itself, but that it also makes a fundamental *qualitative* difference.
That is, if Google has a very large, consistent set of multimedia data accessible through a single interface (i.e. Street View and friends), it's *far* more significant in terms of its systematic effect- and possible effects on privacy- than millions of people each taking a few photos and data and uploading them to random websites.
I mean if you don't want to be filmed everywhere you're going by a Big Brother government JUST STOP GOING IN PUBLIC!!
True.
I really don't have a problem with it. I also understand that when I'm in public, I'm IN PUBLIC VIEW.
Its really not hard unless you're an idiot.
If you don't want people to know you're doing something, do it in the privacy of your own home. Don't get pissed off when someone sees you do something in a public place.
He said filmed, not seen. There's a difference... in fact, there's an absolutely *massive* difference that's really not hard to see "unless you're an idiot".
In fact, there's a difference between being seen by ordinary people in a public place- as has happened for thousands of years, and which set our expectations of what "in public" means- and what has happened within less than the past generation which means that you may be viewed and recorded remotely.
I find all these "anything you do in public is fair game" type arguments miss the point that modern technology fundamentally changes what "in public" means. Rather than being seen by (possibly) a few people in your immediate surroundings with limited memories, and without the expectation of your every move being tracked- unless this was being actively done by (e.g.) a policeman- you can now be passively and automatically viewed and tracked from a distance and anything you do recorded for an indefinite period of time.
Maybe this is the way it already is in some places- but we should be asking if this is the way it *should* be.
And "in public" hasn't ever been the free-for-all that you and others imply. In a free society- people can, and have in the past been able to, go where they liked, take photographs (for example) and so on... it was "in public"... right? Yet I'm willing to bet that it still wouldn't have been socially- and possibly not legally- acceptable to follow one particular person round constantly taking photographs and watching what they were doing (even without interfering) without good reason?
It's in public... if they don't like it, they should be in the privacy of their home- right? Oddly enough, no.
In short, the "in public you should have no expectation of privacy" is not as clear cut as some think. And the fact is that technology changes the game *without* the rules being changed. We haven't been in this situation before, we should be asking the questions and considering new social and legal issues brought up by this... not spouting pat answers based on a misrepresentation of previous social conventions that were never exactly like that anyway.
When I was about 5 (almost 50 years ago) we were visiting relatives, and they took us to see where a coal mine had been buring underground for years. The ground was warm
Has anyone ever taken advantage of something like this to save on heating bills?!
The problem is that a lot of this went on back during the 1980s when we didn't realise the environmental consequences of dividing by zero.
Countless programmers who forgot to include a check for the divisor being zero back then have spawned code which still remains in use today, causing continued damage throughout the world. They are to blame for all these environmental disasters... as are the Pet Shop Boys.
I remember learning about England during the Industrial Revolution. [..] Somebody asked "If it was so horrible for the factory workers why did they all go there" The teacher made the point that as bad as the factories were, it was still better than farming.
It's not quite as simple as that. In the case of England during the Industrial Revolution, the inclosures act(s) effectively made it more difficult for people to earn a living on the land as they had done previously, and increasingly forced them to move into cities to undertake industrial work. The Marxist interpretation is that the government was effectively legislating people off the land and into the capitalist system.
I'm not saying that working on the land was an easy option by any means- only that saying that people left it entirely of their own free will is misleading.
Some may argue the same thing happens nowadays when people leave farming to take up city-based factory work in third world countries- there is an active external force/agenda (e.g. those international bodies wishing to force through capitalist/free-market reforms by tying aid or loans to them) coercing people into the industrial option by making the old way of doing things unworkable.
Yes... Internet connections were *very* slow back then. That's why his message took around 35 years to reach Slashdot. In fact, he was very insightful, as Slashdot wouldn't be invented for almost another quarter century.
Which definition of "vectors" excludes straight lines? The gadget converts a raster image to drawing instructions; then executes the instructions with a pen. It's a plotter.
Nitpicky will-never-agree arguments about what this Lego printer/plotter is aside, I converted my Atari 1020 plotter into a "raster" printer by having it draw horizontal lines of varying length to represent runs of dots on each row, not unlike this one. It was *incredibly* slow though.
Don't worry, you could always join the heretical sect of the Cult of Mac, the one that awaits the Second Coming of Woz, the True Steve, who shall lead them back to the promised land, flowing with expansion slots and user-customizable features
Er, wrong- sorry.:-)
The Mac was- at least after he maneuvered his way into being in charge of it- very much a Steve Jobs-driven project, representing his particular vision. I'm not sure that Woz had much to do with it at all.
Further, the original Mac had no expansion slots at all- not even a proper way of upgrading its insufficient 128K RAM- only serial ports at the back.
In fact the Mac was- despite its positive innovations- in many respects the anti-Woz, though compared to the iPhone it now looks like a hackers' paradise.
That's a great quote, so I kind of feel like a bastard for spoiling it, but... P2P programs generally recognise identical files by their hash value; so if the guy simply renamed some files that were already out there under their original name, they'd have used his copy for certain parts, even if people didn't search under it for that name.
That as may be, though we weren't speaking about ebola per se, rather a hypothetical disease similar to ebola in speed of death, but with AIDS-like transmission route.
One could only imagine an ebola like venereal disease. AIDS with a 90% death rate and a two week period from infection to death.
That sounds frightening- and I'm sure it would be if you actually caught it- but it would quite likely be self-limiting since people would probably die before they were likely to spread it to many- if any- other partners (two week max. window, reduced by period they were visibly ill during), and the trail of infected people would be clear- unlike "normal" AIDS where the delay of symptoms over years could make that *much* less obvious.
It's been said that ebola's aggressiveness in killing people quickly and visibly- and the fact it kills of the host quickly- is the reason it hasn't spread further.
So lets see here, your trying to prove a point against capitalism in China which is... Communist. Yeah, its not "true" communism but its sure not pure capitalism.
No, it's not "communism" at all in any meaningful of the word, unless one is of the persuasion that kneejerk-labels any undemocratic and unfree system as "communist". (*) They may have started out as that- supposedly- but they sure as hell aren't now.
One description I've heard of China is as the world's first example of a truly mature fascist state- that's as in Mussolini's original sense of the word where the interests of business and the government are one and the same, and it blatantly *isn't* democratic.
(*) Not that I'm defending communism, but China isn't communist nowadays, regardless of what some- including themselves- might assert. I mean the German Democratic Republic blatantly wasn't democratic, regardless of their self-appointed name.
Kind of off topic but the DS version added a ton to the game (not just multi-player modes.. which were also great), give it a try!
In all honesty, the reason I didn't consider the DS version was their insistence of cramming in Mario and other "trademark" Nintendo characters whose Disneyfied childishness I dislike.
It struck me that they personified- and were arguably the reason for- my general dislike of Nintendo at a gut level that's hard to pin down. You have to realise that I never played with Nintendo growing up (they were never that big in Europe until the SNES era; the NES that Americans get endlessly nostalgic about was dwarfed by the 8-bit home computer market and even by the Sega Master System!). So I don't have that "happy childhood" association.
If you're thinking of dismissing my views as those of an adolescent going through a reacting-against-childish-things phase, you're mistaken. I'm in my mid-thirties and never cared much for contrived sex-and-violence edginess in games for the aforementioned "adult" (read; adolescent) market.
But as an adult, Nintendo's characters hold no appeal to me- some things aimed at kids can be enjoyed by adults at some level, but Mario and friends (as characters rather than games) just don't strike me that way, any more than Barney the Dinosaur does for anyone that hadn't already seen it as a kid.
I just find them cloying and insufferable in a way that distracts and has negative associations for anything they appear on. And I don't want that annoying **** associated with the simple pleasure of Tetris.
Of course, there is another possible explanation: Your particular flash reader device has an incompatibility with your flash cards (possible but not likely). You could try different readers if you haven't already.
You're right that it's possible, but unlikely. The cards in question have 76% of reviewers giving them a one star panning, and if you read the reviews you'll see that's for reasons of reliability (*).
In short, when things are this bad, it's almost certainly the same issue.
I don't know how the OP "unwittingly" bought one unless it was quite a long time ago, as the bad reviews go back over six months. Perhaps he was one of the first?
(*) Amazon's ratings for things like memory cards are useless, as there are lots of third-party sellers, and people complain about fakes or incorrect cards send by one particular seller, or use it to complain about their service. This doesn't seem to apply to NewEgg.
As usual, slashdot missed the other informative story about how the Tetris Company never paid the real inventor anything.
The Tetris Company *is* partly Alexey Pazhitnov's (i.e. the original inventor of Tetris). It was formed after he regained the rights to the game in the mid-1990s, long *after* the likes of Nintendo had released their uber-popular version of the game.
So, on the one hand you could argue that Pazhitnov had the right to some payback through them. On the other hand, they don't (to the best of my knowledge) have the rights to Tetris-style gameplay in itself, only the trademarks, and it's pretty contemptible that they're using bullying abuse of the legal process to shut out Tetris clones, whether or not you believe those have the right to exist.
It's also ironic that Pazhitnov invented a game was one whose appeal was its very simpleness, that isn't really enhanced by bells and whistles (which arguably detract from it), and that has little need for anything added beyond the archetypcal classic Game Boy version.... and yet the success of his Tetris Company depends on just that, i.e. selling endless new versions of that game which for the reasons given only ever end up being pointlessly bell-and-whistled bloatings of the original.
However, no one ever said that you had to buy into the manufacturer's game. If you don't like HP's inkjet prices, then don't buy it.
If this was directed specifically at him, then it doesn't say anywhere that he *did* buy HP!
Or perhaps it was aimed at the audience in general (i.e. "no one ever said that one has to buy into the manufacturer's game. If one doesn't like HP's inkjet prices, then one doesn't have to buy it").
Either way, it's BS. Your implication is that because anyone has the choice of buying HP's ink they either agree to it- in which case they can't really complain- or that they should shut up and not complain.
Just one thing; it's quite reasonable for someone to criticise something even if they have no intention of buying it.
What you say is just another example of a far too common assumption around here, that the freedom offered by "don't like it, don't buy it" somehow
nullifies any right to criticism- essentially that it extends to "you have the right not to buy it, therefore you have no right to criticise it". Wrong.
You could say that those who buy it knew what they were getting into and don't have the right to criticise. That's open to question. But it's downright wrong and overly entitled to assume that someone exercising their right not to buy has no right to criticise.
As I said above, there was no sign that the GP *had* bought HP anyway. And you have no right to expect him not to criticise the company for their overpriced ink.
Much as I dislike PETA's immature, attention-whoring, hardline, hypocritical, etc. etc. stance in general, the "sea kittens" thing at least (somewhat) raises the issue about people's double standards when it comes to animal cruelty, etc. Let's be honest, if you're a cute animal, you'll get *way* more people fighting to protect you. Baby seals vs. nasty looking insects? No competition.
I don't think PETA should be wading into the waters of making a new license
As with virtually everything PETA do, the license is simply a means to an end, that being to get themselves and their message into the papers on the back of a story.
They're undeniably good at that, though whether it ultimately benefits or weakens their ostensible goal is strongly open to question.
Anyway, I'm sure that they'd be happy if the license took off for its own sake, but that wasn't the reason they created and launched it like that.
License proliferation is only a problem if a license is likely to be widely used. While a few hardcore PETA, er... -philes will probably use it, its incompatibility with the GPL etc will limit its usefulness.
you actually mean 'merging' with them. galaxies do not consume stellar material to burn. stellar material just merges.
I don't consume Cheetos and Mountain Dew, I merge with them. I don't burn most of them, they simply merge into a nearly circular ring around my midsection.
You know you're in *real* trouble when you genuinely can't lose weight because you got so fat in the first place that your gravitational field has become self-sustaining.
They cancelled it. Internet community cried out it never had a chance with its programming and how it was the next evolution of the simpsons (they were getting old, and futurama connected with the upcoming technological revolutions)
Eh... I think you're overstating it. Futurama isn't- and I doubt was ever meant to be- "serious" sci-fi. It's basically a parody of mid-to-late twentieth century science fiction and its cliches.
It also relies heavily on the "take an aspect of present-day society and parody it by doing an absurdly high-tech/futuristic version of it" humour.
I don't think it was ever intended to be a remotely serious idea of what the future was like, which is why saying "futurama connected with the upcoming technological revolutions" is a bit OTT. Futurama isn't really about the future, except in a very humorous way. It's about the present and the past shows we grew up with.
Sure, it certainly includes some genuine geek humour that not everyone will get. This likely endears it to the later group, but it still doesn't make it serious sci-fi- and that isn't a criticism, because I don't think it was ever meant to be.
As for The Simpsons, I think you're mistaken in assuming that Futurama is its natural successor. For all its humour, Futurama is still more limited by its premise than The Simpsons' deceptively basic setup- which in fact is what made the latter so successful. It's also a more niche-appeal show, and always will be.
Slashdot Mirror
So, the "much larger scale" argument is totally bogus.
Only if upcoming technology and services make it possible to aggregate those photos and use them *together* in a systematic and consistent manner akin to Google Maps. Having "complete coverage" isn't in itself the same thing if they're not stored in consistent locations online and compatible formats accessible via a single interface.
That said, I think it's possible that technology will make that doable sooner rather than later, making the whole greater than the sum of the parts. If people aren't making a fuss about that now it's possibly because the implications aren't apparent yet.
But what Google are doing is creating a data set that already has those consistent and in-one-place characteristics... and from a present-day point of view that *does* make it different.
If you did what google did, nobody would care.
You mean if you had a massive fleet of cars that recorded almost complete sets of photos every few metres in every single street in several countries, and you had (likely) numerous terabytes of many, many people's wireless transmissions....? Oh, sorry, you meant
Heck, you can walk around with a camera all you want and take snapshots of everything you feel like... licenseplates, folks dressing, whatever you like.
So that's not actually doing what Google did because Google did it in a much larger scale and that's what makes it an issue.
This is one of those stupid pedantic arguments, that fails (quite deliberately) to acknowledge- or possibly even to realise- not only is the *quantitative* difference significant in itself, but that it also makes a fundamental *qualitative* difference.
That is, if Google has a very large, consistent set of multimedia data accessible through a single interface (i.e. Street View and friends), it's *far* more significant in terms of its systematic effect- and possible effects on privacy- than millions of people each taking a few photos and data and uploading them to random websites.
I mean if you don't want to be filmed everywhere you're going by a Big Brother government JUST STOP GOING IN PUBLIC!!
True. I really don't have a problem with it. I also understand that when I'm in public, I'm IN PUBLIC VIEW. Its really not hard unless you're an idiot. If you don't want people to know you're doing something, do it in the privacy of your own home. Don't get pissed off when someone sees you do something in a public place.
He said filmed, not seen. There's a difference... in fact, there's an absolutely *massive* difference that's really not hard to see "unless you're an idiot".
In fact, there's a difference between being seen by ordinary people in a public place- as has happened for thousands of years, and which set our expectations of what "in public" means- and what has happened within less than the past generation which means that you may be viewed and recorded remotely.
I find all these "anything you do in public is fair game" type arguments miss the point that modern technology fundamentally changes what "in public" means. Rather than being seen by (possibly) a few people in your immediate surroundings with limited memories, and without the expectation of your every move being tracked- unless this was being actively done by (e.g.) a policeman- you can now be passively and automatically viewed and tracked from a distance and anything you do recorded for an indefinite period of time.
Maybe this is the way it already is in some places- but we should be asking if this is the way it *should* be.
And "in public" hasn't ever been the free-for-all that you and others imply. In a free society- people can, and have in the past been able to, go where they liked, take photographs (for example) and so on... it was "in public"... right? Yet I'm willing to bet that it still wouldn't have been socially- and possibly not legally- acceptable to follow one particular person round constantly taking photographs and watching what they were doing (even without interfering) without good reason?
It's in public... if they don't like it, they should be in the privacy of their home- right? Oddly enough, no.
In short, the "in public you should have no expectation of privacy" is not as clear cut as some think. And the fact is that technology changes the game *without* the rules being changed. We haven't been in this situation before, we should be asking the questions and considering new social and legal issues brought up by this... not spouting pat answers based on a misrepresentation of previous social conventions that were never exactly like that anyway.
When I was about 5 (almost 50 years ago) we were visiting relatives, and they took us to see where a coal mine had been buring underground for years. The ground was warm
Has anyone ever taken advantage of something like this to save on heating bills?!
The problem is that a lot of this went on back during the 1980s when we didn't realise the environmental consequences of dividing by zero.
Countless programmers who forgot to include a check for the divisor being zero back then have spawned code which still remains in use today, causing continued damage throughout the world. They are to blame for all these environmental disasters... as are the Pet Shop Boys.
I remember learning about England during the Industrial Revolution. [..] Somebody asked "If it was so horrible for the factory workers why did they all go there" The teacher made the point that as bad as the factories were, it was still better than farming.
It's not quite as simple as that. In the case of England during the Industrial Revolution, the inclosures act(s) effectively made it more difficult for people to earn a living on the land as they had done previously, and increasingly forced them to move into cities to undertake industrial work. The Marxist interpretation is that the government was effectively legislating people off the land and into the capitalist system.
I'm not saying that working on the land was an easy option by any means- only that saying that people left it entirely of their own free will is misleading.
Some may argue the same thing happens nowadays when people leave farming to take up city-based factory work in third world countries- there is an active external force/agenda (e.g. those international bodies wishing to force through capitalist/free-market reforms by tying aid or loans to them) coercing people into the industrial option by making the old way of doing things unworkable.
You're working in the 70s?
Yes... Internet connections were *very* slow back then. That's why his message took around 35 years to reach Slashdot. In fact, he was very insightful, as Slashdot wouldn't be invented for almost another quarter century.
Which definition of "vectors" excludes straight lines? The gadget converts a raster image to drawing instructions; then executes the instructions with a pen. It's a plotter.
Nitpicky will-never-agree arguments about what this Lego printer/plotter is aside, I converted my Atari 1020 plotter into a "raster" printer by having it draw horizontal lines of varying length to represent runs of dots on each row, not unlike this one. It was *incredibly* slow though.
Not as cool as the Lego printer either.
Don't worry, you could always join the heretical sect of the Cult of Mac, the one that awaits the Second Coming of Woz, the True Steve, who shall lead them back to the promised land, flowing with expansion slots and user-customizable features
Er, wrong- sorry. :-)
The Mac was- at least after he maneuvered his way into being in charge of it- very much a Steve Jobs-driven project, representing his particular vision. I'm not sure that Woz had much to do with it at all.
Further, the original Mac had no expansion slots at all- not even a proper way of upgrading its insufficient 128K RAM- only serial ports at the back.
In fact the Mac was- despite its positive innovations- in many respects the anti-Woz, though compared to the iPhone it now looks like a hackers' paradise.
So Neo wasn't such a tough guy after all, with all those pins in his muscles in the first movie! He was just enjoying natural painkillers.
Speaking of films then, this guy must have an addiction to painkillers...
Reminds me of this bash.org quote.
That's a great quote, so I kind of feel like a bastard for spoiling it, but... P2P programs generally recognise identical files by their hash value; so if the guy simply renamed some files that were already out there under their original name, they'd have used his copy for certain parts, even if people didn't search under it for that name.
That as may be, though we weren't speaking about ebola per se, rather a hypothetical disease similar to ebola in speed of death, but with AIDS-like transmission route.
One could only imagine an ebola like venereal disease. AIDS with a 90% death rate and a two week period from infection to death.
That sounds frightening- and I'm sure it would be if you actually caught it- but it would quite likely be self-limiting since people would probably die before they were likely to spread it to many- if any- other partners (two week max. window, reduced by period they were visibly ill during), and the trail of infected people would be clear- unlike "normal" AIDS where the delay of symptoms over years could make that *much* less obvious.
It's been said that ebola's aggressiveness in killing people quickly and visibly- and the fact it kills of the host quickly- is the reason it hasn't spread further.
So lets see here, your trying to prove a point against capitalism in China which is... Communist. Yeah, its not "true" communism but its sure not pure capitalism.
No, it's not "communism" at all in any meaningful of the word, unless one is of the persuasion that kneejerk-labels any undemocratic and unfree system as "communist". (*) They may have started out as that- supposedly- but they sure as hell aren't now.
One description I've heard of China is as the world's first example of a truly mature fascist state- that's as in Mussolini's original sense of the word where the interests of business and the government are one and the same, and it blatantly *isn't* democratic.
(*) Not that I'm defending communism, but China isn't communist nowadays, regardless of what some- including themselves- might assert. I mean the German Democratic Republic blatantly wasn't democratic, regardless of their self-appointed name.
man fsck.msdos
Yeah, I hated that kludgey old OS too...
Kind of off topic but the DS version added a ton to the game (not just multi-player modes.. which were also great), give it a try!
In all honesty, the reason I didn't consider the DS version was their insistence of cramming in Mario and other "trademark" Nintendo characters whose Disneyfied childishness I dislike.
It struck me that they personified- and were arguably the reason for- my general dislike of Nintendo at a gut level that's hard to pin down. You have to realise that I never played with Nintendo growing up (they were never that big in Europe until the SNES era; the NES that Americans get endlessly nostalgic about was dwarfed by the 8-bit home computer market and even by the Sega Master System!). So I don't have that "happy childhood" association.
If you're thinking of dismissing my views as those of an adolescent going through a reacting-against-childish-things phase, you're mistaken. I'm in my mid-thirties and never cared much for contrived sex-and-violence edginess in games for the aforementioned "adult" (read; adolescent) market.
But as an adult, Nintendo's characters hold no appeal to me- some things aimed at kids can be enjoyed by adults at some level, but Mario and friends (as characters rather than games) just don't strike me that way, any more than Barney the Dinosaur does for anyone that hadn't already seen it as a kid.
I just find them cloying and insufferable in a way that distracts and has negative associations for anything they appear on. And I don't want that annoying **** associated with the simple pleasure of Tetris.
Of course, there is another possible explanation: Your particular flash reader device has an incompatibility with your flash cards (possible but not likely). You could try different readers if you haven't already.
You're right that it's possible, but unlikely. The cards in question have 76% of reviewers giving them a one star panning, and if you read the reviews you'll see that's for reasons of reliability (*).
In short, when things are this bad, it's almost certainly the same issue.
I don't know how the OP "unwittingly" bought one unless it was quite a long time ago, as the bad reviews go back over six months. Perhaps he was one of the first?
(*) Amazon's ratings for things like memory cards are useless, as there are lots of third-party sellers, and people complain about fakes or incorrect cards send by one particular seller, or use it to complain about their service. This doesn't seem to apply to NewEgg.
"That's not a telescope array..... *that's* a telescope array."
As usual, slashdot missed the other informative story about how the Tetris Company never paid the real inventor anything.
The Tetris Company *is* partly Alexey Pazhitnov's (i.e. the original inventor of Tetris). It was formed after he regained the rights to the game in the mid-1990s, long *after* the likes of Nintendo had released their uber-popular version of the game.
So, on the one hand you could argue that Pazhitnov had the right to some payback through them. On the other hand, they don't (to the best of my knowledge) have the rights to Tetris-style gameplay in itself, only the trademarks, and it's pretty contemptible that they're using bullying abuse of the legal process to shut out Tetris clones, whether or not you believe those have the right to exist.
It's also ironic that Pazhitnov invented a game was one whose appeal was its very simpleness, that isn't really enhanced by bells and whistles (which arguably detract from it), and that has little need for anything added beyond the archetypcal classic Game Boy version.... and yet the success of his Tetris Company depends on just that, i.e. selling endless new versions of that game which for the reasons given only ever end up being pointlessly bell-and-whistled bloatings of the original.
However, no one ever said that you had to buy into the manufacturer's game. If you don't like HP's inkjet prices, then don't buy it.
If this was directed specifically at him, then it doesn't say anywhere that he *did* buy HP!
Or perhaps it was aimed at the audience in general (i.e. "no one ever said that one has to buy into the manufacturer's game. If one doesn't like HP's inkjet prices, then one doesn't have to buy it").
Either way, it's BS. Your implication is that because anyone has the choice of buying HP's ink they either agree to it- in which case they can't really complain- or that they should shut up and not complain.
Just one thing; it's quite reasonable for someone to criticise something even if they have no intention of buying it.
What you say is just another example of a far too common assumption around here, that the freedom offered by "don't like it, don't buy it" somehow nullifies any right to criticism- essentially that it extends to "you have the right not to buy it, therefore you have no right to criticise it". Wrong.
You could say that those who buy it knew what they were getting into and don't have the right to criticise. That's open to question. But it's downright wrong and overly entitled to assume that someone exercising their right not to buy has no right to criticise.
As I said above, there was no sign that the GP *had* bought HP anyway. And you have no right to expect him not to criticise the company for their overpriced ink.
Sea Kittens?
Much as I dislike PETA's immature, attention-whoring, hardline, hypocritical, etc. etc. stance in general, the "sea kittens" thing at least (somewhat) raises the issue about people's double standards when it comes to animal cruelty, etc. Let's be honest, if you're a cute animal, you'll get *way* more people fighting to protect you. Baby seals vs. nasty looking insects? No competition.
I don't think PETA should be wading into the waters of making a new license
As with virtually everything PETA do, the license is simply a means to an end, that being to get themselves and their message into the papers on the back of a story.
They're undeniably good at that, though whether it ultimately benefits or weakens their ostensible goal is strongly open to question.
Anyway, I'm sure that they'd be happy if the license took off for its own sake, but that wasn't the reason they created and launched it like that.
License proliferation is only a problem if a license is likely to be widely used. While a few hardcore PETA, er... -philes will probably use it, its incompatibility with the GPL etc will limit its usefulness.
you actually mean 'merging' with them. galaxies do not consume stellar material to burn. stellar material just merges.
I don't consume Cheetos and Mountain Dew, I merge with them. I don't burn most of them, they simply merge into a nearly circular ring around my midsection.
You know you're in *real* trouble when you genuinely can't lose weight because you got so fat in the first place that your gravitational field has become self-sustaining.
They cancelled it. Internet community cried out it never had a chance with its programming and how it was the next evolution of the simpsons (they were getting old, and futurama connected with the upcoming technological revolutions)
Eh... I think you're overstating it. Futurama isn't- and I doubt was ever meant to be- "serious" sci-fi. It's basically a parody of mid-to-late twentieth century science fiction and its cliches.
It also relies heavily on the "take an aspect of present-day society and parody it by doing an absurdly high-tech/futuristic version of it" humour.
I don't think it was ever intended to be a remotely serious idea of what the future was like, which is why saying "futurama connected with the upcoming technological revolutions" is a bit OTT. Futurama isn't really about the future, except in a very humorous way. It's about the present and the past shows we grew up with.
Sure, it certainly includes some genuine geek humour that not everyone will get. This likely endears it to the later group, but it still doesn't make it serious sci-fi- and that isn't a criticism, because I don't think it was ever meant to be.
As for The Simpsons, I think you're mistaken in assuming that Futurama is its natural successor. For all its humour, Futurama is still more limited by its premise than The Simpsons' deceptively basic setup- which in fact is what made the latter so successful. It's also a more niche-appeal show, and always will be.
My spelling is perfect but I still get my grammer wrong sometimes.
Perhaps your grammar got run over by a reindeer?