Well yeah but for some reason that kill sound. See I like the sound effects BUT not the music. Perhaps I am just odd but I play most of my games without the enclosed music. Maybe it is a console thing. Give option. Music On/Off Sound On/Off. Not that complex is it? PC games been doing it since the adlib card came along. Yeah I am that old.
Imagine the looks from your fellow travellers while screaming "hang in there" "don't die on my now" "we got a squirter here get a me a clamp he is bleeding all over" into you gameboy.
On a side note, why can't I ever turn of the music on gba games? Is it somekind of mind control program that I must play with horrible repetetive crappy soundcard music?
Personally I think being elitist about certain things is not all that bad. I don't think everyone is equal and that those who do probably would like to create somekind of master race or something. Human beings are different and that makes the world an intrestting and fun place.
So not everyone has the same intelligence or the same physical capabilities. What is better, a gui or a cli? For say web browsing. Hmm, a gui you say? WRONG WRONG WRONG, not if your blind.
Now I am just guessing here since I am not blind and only had to deal very briefly in my past with 1 blind co-worker but I think a blind persom might just be able to use linux cli (suse detects braile drivers as one of its first jobs during install) but the windows gui seems a no-no. On the other hand a person who can only manipulate a pointer and a button is probably not going to enjoy using a cli over a well developed gui.
So not everyone needs the same solution or can even use the same solution.
So why do we want more people to use linux? Well if you are truly behind the ideals of linux/opensource/whatever you don't. What is needed is that there is a greater diversity of OS'es out there and that not one of them has such a majority it can squeeze out the others. There are those who wish to see windows destroyed but I suggest they are the master race creators. The people I prefer to think off as the linux people just want to push Windows back a little. I never heard Linus Torvald say his goal is to destroy MS. Those of us who really like linux for being linux would just prefer MS to be reduced a little. Reduced just enough that companies who sell products for computers are selling them for computers NOT windows.
This is already happening. If you go to a hardware makers site you will see the word linux appear more and more, even just being listed with the "supported" os'es. It is not yet on the box but apparantly the bigger companies are beginning to realize they got a choice. Either support linux (even by just linking to the opensource drivers) or turn away an X% of customers to the competition.
So all we need to do is make the alternate OS'es (Apple/BSD/OS\/2/Linux) a big enough X and the days of Windows only hardware/software/services will slowly come to an end. Compare it if you like to right-hand drive vehicles. The right drive market is small and there is no reason that you can't drive a left-hand drive vehicle in england. Now just check the number of car makers that do make right-hand drive versions of their car. Despite the fact that this adds to the cost and increases logistics.
I don't think we need to convert everyone to make linux a better supported alternative.
But there is an even bigger reason against making Linux go to mainstream. Monopoly. If redhat or novell or whoever gets 90% of the market do you really think they will be any different from MS? Worse linux will then be the target of all the script kiddies and will find a juicy target as linux is just as vulnarable if you use it like a windows machine (security is at much a user problem as an OS problem).
But the one I fear most is that in making linux go mainstream we lose linux. I like the text file configuration. It means that no matter how screwed up I can still edit it and fix it. Example, tv-tuner card and tvtime sometimes I click wrong and select the wrong input (from tv to composite) it takes 3 more clicks to get back to tv but for some reason it is slow as hell to respond. No worries, close, edit the config and start app again. Good luck doing this with a registry.
Yet an awfull lot of the "oh I would use linux if only" crowd wants those text files gone and to be replaced with a registry.
So we got a choice. Either ignore these people and let them use their windows OR turn linux into windows.
I suggest a different approach. Apple ain't doing to bad. It is picking its customers so why doesn't linux do the same. Why dreg windows for users when you can get the cream to come to you? Apple is often accused of b
One of the things you notice in old games is how image after image is exactly the same. Just play wolfenstein and notice all the wall textures are exactly the same wich is to say nothing about the floor and ceiling. Doom added some extra so that wall three textures long could have one in the middle with a stain breaking the pattern and making it look more life like. Doom was bigger then wolfenstein. Doom still had monsters that were all exactly the same. Since then games have only increased in size but with each increase the game have looked better and better. More and more are we going away from boring halways with exactly the same wallpaper to realistic enviroments.
Does it matter? Well I certainly got lost less in Doom then in Wolfenstein. In Half-Life you could navigate by the textures (not turn right at 3rd intersection but follow the signs to the waste disposal). In Morrowind after a user patch all the street signs showed real direction in readable language. Made the game a lot more fun. In Flightsim you no longer taxying behind a blue box but behind a KLM 747 classic.
Does it matter? Well yeah, no a bad game won't be good because of graphics but a good game can be better.
Personally I am looking forward to the day when real RPG's have voice acting (good voice acting). But that is going to take a lot of storage.
It also makes sense for sony for piracy reasons. If blue ray burners are rare then it will be hard to copy games.
Yeah gods man, DO NOT EVEN JOKE ABOUT THAT. The ME team was taken out and shot and buried. Even suggesting that somehow they returned from their eternal damnation is not something to joke about.
599 for a celeron? It is hard for a european to judge american prices but it doesn't sound like a good deal. Especially since the monitor is extra. And the monitor is an extremely bad deal 250 for a 14inch crt?
Should be a basic law in a lot more cases like your medical history. Only doctors have a need to know.
But of course nothing is going to stop insurance agencies from demanding their own boxes. Same as nothing prevents them from age discrimination. Just try being 18 and getting insurance:P
Anyway say such safeguard were in place and the data from your black-box could only be retrieved with a court order. What is going to stop a new goverment in say 10 yrs from changing the law? Kinda like the RIAA tries to change the laws on court orders in trying to find out the addresses of file sharers?
First off I am dutch so my goverment is about 10 yrs behind compared to the US.
Granted it is bad, just not completly rotten yet. You have inquiries about the investigation of WMD? We got the same lies and no investigation yet.
Lets see what do I get for my taxes. Roads, public transport, school, hospitals, police, the army, work safety inspectors, food safety inspectors, fire service, unemployment benefits, care for the weak, prisons for the strong:P, trash collection, etc etc etc.
I do not have the typical american view that goverment is only there to screw you. Perhaps that is the problem with privatasation. Here it is the state that collects tax and runs the trash collection with it. In america I believe you got to pay a company to do the same. Both cost money but over here we at least feel the goverment does something with the taxes.
I can think of many arguments for or against black boxes in our lives but taxes is not one of them. As for not having laws because having laws makes people brake is the road to anarachy. Anarachy is the rule of the strong and I am not strong.
NOTHING, we still have human judgement, in the case of the black box (it would have shown a short accelartion very easy to differ from real speeding) and in the case of a human cop. Both would have seen you speeded for traffic reasons, not because you wanted to speed.
So if you had been flashed you could have used the black box to show what really was happening. Wich is why track measuring (where speed is measured over distance) is better anyway since it allows you to overtake fast then slow down again if needed.
The problem with your claim that your a good driver is that everyone claims to except me (I am not, I keep looking for the right peddle to press wich kinda freaks out the examiner) AND PEOPLE ARE NOT. Not 24/7 not in difficult circumstances and not in a car wich you delayed having put new tires on.
I am not saying I like it but neither do I like the number of people killed on the roads. Something needs to be done. Two options. People start driving safely of their own free will OR we use a big stick. Personally I don't think the first is going to happen. I don't want the big stick either but we better come up with better arguments then you wanting to speed.
Let me ask you this. I use public transport and in Amsterdam we didn't use to have conducters. Now I usually buy a ticket even without conducters to check but you know sometimes money is really thight and I need the money for food/computer games. Shall we get rid of the new conductors that are forcing me to obey the law?
The liberal, let people police themselves, has been tried. Didn't work. I don't like the alternative. We know got cameras and conductors in trams. Why should car drivers not be watched?
Speed limits are not about safe speeds in your car, speed limits got zero to do with your car or how good it sticks to the road. Speed limits have to do with all the other traffic. Speed doesn't kill. Differences in speed do. Sadly all to many accidents are just a fast vehicles colliding with a slow one. Or having to dodge a slow one.
Sure there are a number of accidents were the driver looses control (read went to fast around a corner) but they are alright since they only kill themselves. If you wrap your car around a tree I could care less.
If everyone drove the exactly the same speed on a road there would be far few accidents. That is, as far I been able to understand, the idea behind speed limits. It is to prevent the Porsche 911 driving 250km while a lada is doing 80km. If then that lada decides to overtake a lorry and the porsche is coming up behind you got an accident. Same with overtaking on smaller roads, if I see a pair of headlights in the far distance ahead I need to be be sure that that car is not doing a land speed record if I am to overtake.
Remember that java applet sometime ago that showed two streams of traffic crossing by carefully managing the speed? But I can do something better, just 1 stream of traffic, all driving the same speed resulting in zero accidents and zero traffic jams.
Speed limits are about optomizng the flow of traffic and to stop the speed differences between the slowest and fastest to become to big
Handling characters of modern cars have nothing to do with them. For no other reason that not everyone is driving a modern car, and many of those who do are not very good drivers.
I kid you not, it was like those book adventures, where you turn to page.
Two books on for the x-wing and one for the tie. You would choose a speed and heading and turn to the apporiate page, then your opponent would and so you would twist and turn trying to get a lock. NO BATTERIES and a lot of fun. Sadly I lost it.
Just said that it was not acceptable, didn't mind the two years part, that was specific enough to be reasonable, I couldn't work for a direct competitor of them in a specific market. Reasonable enough. I was a web programmer and meant I could not work for another ISP in web development.
What I protested against was them owning my own creations for the time employed AND after I was employed. So I got a line added to the contract that exempted any code I write in my own time for wich I did not write in relation to work (the wording was legalize but basically that unless they told me to write it OR I wrote it for them it was mine).
The funniest thing? The lawyer of the company who amended it for me wasn't suprised or anything. Was more suprised that I was the first to ask him to do it. As a lawyer he found the clause very reasonable. So did the company, just that when the contract was signed up they went for the max expecting people to negotiate.
So it can really be that they put it in there just to cover themselves. If that is so they got no problem clarifying it for you. If they don't want to do that they are planning on using it. Be afraid, be very very afraid.
So that job is not much of a loss IF you are working on your own stuff.
1. if every car had it then it would not need to be labelled just as cars currently don't carry a label "contains engine". It would be taken for granted. Cars without would be labelled.
2. Dump it? So after an accident I hit erase? Kinda defeats the point doesn't it?
3. YES YES YES. ONLY the police with the normal investigation tools should be able to access it, NOBODY ELSE. The police can already examine a car at a crash site or get the car confiscated if it is a suspected hit and run. A black box would be just like examing if a light was burning before it broke or checking brake marks.
4. Related to 3. But also needs to be very clear what is dumped, how fast a car was hit may be nice to know for repair but not were the car was.
5. Depends, if all the above are observed it doesn't matter, worse it will be recorded anyway. How? Because the car will know how far it drove in wich direction. So if you know the starting point you can work out the destination.
6. Timelimit, obviously if it is going to be usefull just recording the last 60 seconds or so is useless. Hitting and killing a pedestrian may not have enough of an impact on a car to trigger a recording. Adding the location would help in catching hit and runners but leads to privacy fears. Then again we all use mobile phones without fear so if only the police can request them with a court order then it is a limited risk. Just like DNA testing has made it harder for rapist, black box will make it harder for road killers.
Kinda like ehm, the life jacket of the black box. The orange bit is the protection, the insides (the real black box) is,/me looks at box after aircraft crash photos, kinda charcoalie.
Awh poor little you, how about the person you killed. Oh no I just drove 35 where on 30 is allowed and I ran over this kid and killed him but I am the one that should be felt sorry for.
Ehm no? Sadly humans need a sign to tell them what speed to drive at. How fucking hard is it then to drive at that speed? People are killed because of idiots like you. So basically all you are doing is proving that we need these black boxes or else you just can't be made to drive at a safe speed.
There was a recent accident in Noord Holland, car overtook, misjudged, 4 people killed. Now the black box advocates are suggesting that they got the solution and you are their prime example.
You are worried that someone abuses the black box but you are abusing the absence of a black box by breaking the law.
Lets put it differently, what would you call someone who is charged with rape and ordered to donate DNA for investigation and then says NO because it may finger me in previous rapes I commited?
I think current law is pretty clear. "THAT IS THE WHOLE POINT DIPSHIT".
So claiming this black box will stop you or at least catch you at breaking the law IS EXACTLY THE REASON THEY ARE TRYING TO INTRODUCE IT. They should send you a card thanking you for making their point.
The police using technology to prove criminals have broken the law. Yeah that is abusive, how dare they stop that. I got rights!!!!
Please can the real privacy advocates kill you off? You are hurting the cause. It is the system mis-used to capture non-criminals that should be alarming. Would be very easy to link car->license->nationality and then stop any car near a "sensitive" area belonging to say an Arab. Or have a poor persons car tailed by private security when it enters a rich area. Those are the real fears, not your petty speeding ticket.
The pros are simple. Lets make it go a bit further and install a box in very car that records exactly what the car is doing at all times. Furthermore if a car is found driving without a box the police will know instantly and can stop it.
What will happen? Well a sharp drop in car thefts, kinda hard to steal a car that is constantly reporting were it is. Tech like this is already in use and it is helping.
Currently hit and runs are on the increase. With such a system the offending car could be easily traced.
Fewer high speed chases. Police can just hang back and see where the car is going to end up.
People disabling the device would have the problem that the car "winks" out on a certain spot. Very easy for the police to then raid the shop were the device is disabled.
No more need for speed camera or police resources wasted on policing the roads.
So a clear win eh?
After all what is on the CON side?
A lot whining, oh such a black box means I can't lie about an accident anymore. I can't speed anymore. I can't use my car in a crime anymore.
Yeah well guess what, society depends on people not doing these things. So the only ones hurt are criminals and who cares about them.
Any person that raises privacy issues and names one of the above points is an enemy of privacy and is probably being paid to undermine the real privacy advocates.
The real issue with any system like this can be illustrated by the following question. IBM once was asked to setup a system that allowed a certain country to register the religion of each person and that of their parents. Pretty harmless right? Right, read up on the holocaust sometimes and more importantly read up on the time between when the registration took place and when the gas chambers opened.
The problem is not how such a black box will be used now. The problem is 10-15-20 yrs from now. When someone totally different then the current goverment may be handed a tool that tells them exactly where everyone is.
Sadly this issue will get overshouted by all those who don't want to be fingered by their own car in an "accident" who don't want to get a fine because their car reported it was speeding. The criminals protesting are in fact the advocates for introducing such a system.
Personally I am undecided. Cars seem to get more and more out of control with the drivers somehow loosing touch with basic human values. SUV's are expensive gas guzzlers wich are hard to park, don't fit on roads, are unneeded and have a far higher chance of killing in an accident (pedestrians don't stand a chance and small cars get crushed) and yet SUV's sell like hot cakes.
For some reason when people get in a car they seem to need the state to watch their every move or they won't behave by the values they themselves told the state to enforce.
Perhaps the greatest enemy to privacy is human nature. Give a human anonimity and he won't human anymore. Just play a round of CS or chat on freenet and you will see what I mean. Perhaps we need a big brother/community watching over us.
Hell, test youreselve, read/. at -1. No? Then you want a police webstate.
Sadly of ID doom started it for me. I had two choices, not play the game or pirate it. Why? Lack of money? Hardly, I had the cash (wich literally was the problem), just that doom in its day was not sold boxed and I have no credit card. I am dutch so we don'thave that whole CC thing going (we use free debit cards some who even PAY YOU for the privilege of handling you money. No transaction fees either). So after I played the demo over and over and over I did what I never done before. I got the disks from someone who had a better modem.
I used to buy my games. Still got a 30 centimeter tall stack of CD's (phantasmagoria is about half of them to be honest). I easily bought 2 games sometimes more per month.
And I stopped. Why? I simply came to realize that games are becoming less and less value. if I compare play time of old titles like x-wing, the "ufo enemy unknown/x-com" series, transport tycoon, the sims, fallout, etc etc to more modern games I can't help but feel cheated. Farcry is a case in point. Nice engine, got sick of the boring arcade combat hit god mode and lost all interest just after a couple of hours. Max Payne, ugh. Got it at discount and it was still to much.
I think the game industry is making a dangerous mistake. By going mainstream, making games easier and simpler to play they are losing their core paying audience and getting a larger non-paying audience.
There are still games worth paying for but less and less. Doom3 is a difficult one. The orginal quake was my first bought ID game and that was an extremely good buy. I bought it the moment it came out, saved me a lot of hassle downloading it AND instantly shut the bosses up who were afraid of letting pirated software on their network. Sorry, got the official CD right here boss. Oh afraid of pirating because we are playing it with a group and I got only the 1 cd? No problem, we just only install the demo from the cd. Brilliant.
Doom3 however is an entirely different game, it is closer to max payne. Now am I willing to pay about 15x/25x a movie ticket for something that is not going to last nearly as long?
I think it is not piracy that is killing games. I think it is game developers aiming more and more to the kind of people that pirate that are hurting games. You will note that "the sims" still sells, years later at far to high prices. Lucasarts adventures all sold well enough to make a small profit. How many adventures has lucasarts released lately? They are aiming for bigger crowds now, sadly that also seems to mean fewer sales. It killed sierra, who is next.
So ID's dilemma is this. It scored with the pirates. Does it also score with the store buyers? I am undeciced at the moment. The lack of copy protection probably has me buy it, at least that quarantees that I can play the damn thing (the hardware is not a problem).
In short I think you are reversing cause and effect, A few more years of Splinter Cells or Painkillers or Max Paynes or Far Crys and there will BE no more any other games with godly single player modes but no online play. Remember there are other genres then "lone wanker" saves the world with a gun.
Then again we don't know how well Doom3 will sell yet. It could easily be that I am the only one who switched from buyers to pirates. Maybe there are two seperate gaming groups in the world. The theft figures of the pirates are in. Now we got to wait for the sales figures from the buyers.
Geez what is it with license. Fallout did not have a license when it was released. It created it.
But you need a big licensed name to sell you game nowadays. Kindly explain Star Wars Galaxies to me then. Biggest license around and doesn't sell.
If these guys got a nice engine for creating a post-apolyptical world then why can't they create their own story? Nobody "owns" hero must rebuild mankind. No law saying you can't create your own vault-dweller.
Instead of whining let them release their own game set in their own world. It is not like we are being overwhelmed with RPG's set in the future.
Arcanum and TOEE suffered both from one very simple thing. TO BLOODY BIG. There is no fun in walking around a landscape where a shed/building that is empty takes up several screens. Add the bugs to TOEE and they didn't sell because they were crap. It is sometimes hard to figure out why baldurs gate and its succesors worked. Just play some Arcanum and TOEE and it will become clear. Baldurs gate is smaller. Less gigantic areas with nothing to do in and far less walking involved.
On a side note, when are RPG games going to develop some code that makes sure only items are dropped wich I can use. Especially sucks in single player rpg's. Wow, my wizard got a gigantic asskicking sword. Can't use it and is to heavy to carry back. Nice. Usefull. Would it have been so hard to add class specific loot. Tip don't play nevewinter nights as a monk. You will have more money then creoscote and nothing to spend it on.
Both were warned against by the engineers, both times multiple warnings were ignored by management and the engineers did not press hard enough in fear of their jobs. NASA has become a business where the suits call the shots not the rocket scientists.
As shown with the second "accident" NASA hasn't learned and I very much doubt they have learned this time.
The shuttle itself is an extremely bad design. The engineers wanted to fit an escape mechanism. Kinda like the ejection cockpit the F-111 bomber has. Funny thing is that such an thing exist on the russian rockets, there has at least been one case of a crew succesfully ejecting from an exploding rockter, but was rejected for the shuttle. The first "accident" would have been a perfect use of an escape pod. The cockpit survived the blast and the crew was not killed by the exploding rocket but by hitting the ground several minutes later. Plenty of time for to pull the eject handle.
Old or new something is only reliable if you use it properly. Start letting the suits decide and you are just waiting for them to screw up.
It is insulting, some grandmothers broke bloody enigma, worked on the first computers, developed the first computer languages. If you don't get linux or for that matter windows just admit it.
You would be suprised how many grandmothers worked in business and had Unix come in as the newbie. To them linux will be childs play just as soon as someone actually allows them to get their hands on it and the teenage looser grandson doesn't think he knows best.
For the rest I agree with you. My linux desktop been more then ready. I code, surf, watch movies all a lot easier and faster then on a windows machine. I still can't understand all the stuff about codecs. Movies just work for me. Got to love mplayer. Linux not ready? Windows is not ready. Windows got the codecs, just not the architecture to install them all easily.
American news favors Israel but the BBC and most european news agencies are completly in bed with the arabs. Both biases make sure that nobody knows what really is going on.
I suppose it is because news has to sell, it got to have a story and a story needs a hero and villian. Never mind if they ain't there, the news editor will just make one. Look at all the conflicts in the previous century. WW2 is a nice one, the nazis were the evil ones the americans the heroes except what is the difference between "no jews allowed" and "whites only" what percentage of jews were gassed and what percentage of indians were slaughtered? America went west and took the land owned by those who didn't make proper use of it (or whatever excuse was used to put indians in reservation) the germans went east.
Afghanistan had the russians as the bad guys and the noble arabs. The same arabs that america is now fighting.
It is intrestting that the BBC is far less symphatetic against the IRA or the rote arme fraction (however that is spelled) or the baskian seperatists. During the recent spain bombing it was not just the spanish goverment that was hoping it were baskians who did it. The news that it was arabs was a bit of a blow to the european news agencies that had tried to make the terror war appear to be only a problem for american. Despite the fact that most european countries have their own terror wars going on or had until recently.
There is no truly unbiased newsource in the world. Not google, not the BBC and most certainly not any american owned station. The best you can do is get your news from multiple locations. And no watching BBC and CNN does not count. If there is not at least one newsource you use where the biase does not offend you then you are being misinformed. Or the other way around, if you agree with the "angle" of the news story then you are being lied to. It is just lies you like to hear.
Bosses noticing anything? HA. It is very very simple for a boss like this to simply get the work done by those below him and claim the credit. Standard middle management practice. And upper management doesn't spot this because they don't have the time and really just don't want to know as any action just means extra work.
if you ever worked in a big place then you will know there are always a few people like this boss around that sap morale and are just a waste but that can't get be gotten rid off because they make sure to have the right friends and never actually so badly screw up that action must be taken.
But they are hurting morale nonetheless and this has a very real effect on performance. It is just that the uppers prefer to then get bigger budgets or blame it on underlings rather then fire middle management for incompetence. That sends a dangerous precedent. Start firing mid lvl managers and someone might get the idea to start firing incompetent upper management. Can't have that can we. Next we will be firing ministers for being a waste of space. Holding goverment accountable!!!!!
NONE OF THAT TIME SHOULD HAVE BEEN SPEND WITH SOLITAIRE OPEN.
He is a goverment employee meaning he is not allowed to use the computer for private use. So if he even had solitaire open for 1 minute in a year he would still be in the wrong. But that was not the case. He played solitaire so much it had become a running joke in the department even with cartoons. This is not like making a few personal calls in a month. This is moral busting abuse of goverment facilities.
A boss that does everything that is forbidden will have a bad effect on those below him. We need people like this admin to get goverment back on its feed.
This boss and the bosses that fired the sysadmin are the ones responsible for the fact that goverment needs ever more taxes to do less and less actuall work. I can't beleive anyone who is a taxpayer who is on the boss or his bosses side. THEY ARE WASTING YOUR TAXMONEY. Just because you are the boss does not give you the right to do nothing at work. Not when you work for the goverment. If he had been an ordinary clerk he would have been fired instantly and the sysadmin given a complimant on a job well done by stopping waste.
So very simple. At work, WORK. Anything else can get you fired. Especially if you are getting paid with my money. Anyone who thinks differently can pay my taxes.
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Well yeah but for some reason that kill sound. See I like the sound effects BUT not the music. Perhaps I am just odd but I play most of my games without the enclosed music. Maybe it is a console thing. Give option. Music On/Off Sound On/Off. Not that complex is it? PC games been doing it since the adlib card came along. Yeah I am that old.
Imagine the looks from your fellow travellers while screaming "hang in there" "don't die on my now" "we got a squirter here get a me a clamp he is bleeding all over" into you gameboy.
On a side note, why can't I ever turn of the music on gba games? Is it somekind of mind control program that I must play with horrible repetetive crappy soundcard music?
So not everyone has the same intelligence or the same physical capabilities. What is better, a gui or a cli? For say web browsing. Hmm, a gui you say? WRONG WRONG WRONG, not if your blind.
Now I am just guessing here since I am not blind and only had to deal very briefly in my past with 1 blind co-worker but I think a blind persom might just be able to use linux cli (suse detects braile drivers as one of its first jobs during install) but the windows gui seems a no-no. On the other hand a person who can only manipulate a pointer and a button is probably not going to enjoy using a cli over a well developed gui.
So not everyone needs the same solution or can even use the same solution.
So why do we want more people to use linux? Well if you are truly behind the ideals of linux/opensource/whatever you don't. What is needed is that there is a greater diversity of OS'es out there and that not one of them has such a majority it can squeeze out the others. There are those who wish to see windows destroyed but I suggest they are the master race creators. The people I prefer to think off as the linux people just want to push Windows back a little. I never heard Linus Torvald say his goal is to destroy MS. Those of us who really like linux for being linux would just prefer MS to be reduced a little. Reduced just enough that companies who sell products for computers are selling them for computers NOT windows.
This is already happening. If you go to a hardware makers site you will see the word linux appear more and more, even just being listed with the "supported" os'es. It is not yet on the box but apparantly the bigger companies are beginning to realize they got a choice. Either support linux (even by just linking to the opensource drivers) or turn away an X% of customers to the competition.
So all we need to do is make the alternate OS'es (Apple/BSD/OS\/2/Linux) a big enough X and the days of Windows only hardware/software/services will slowly come to an end. Compare it if you like to right-hand drive vehicles. The right drive market is small and there is no reason that you can't drive a left-hand drive vehicle in england. Now just check the number of car makers that do make right-hand drive versions of their car. Despite the fact that this adds to the cost and increases logistics.
I don't think we need to convert everyone to make linux a better supported alternative.
But there is an even bigger reason against making Linux go to mainstream. Monopoly. If redhat or novell or whoever gets 90% of the market do you really think they will be any different from MS? Worse linux will then be the target of all the script kiddies and will find a juicy target as linux is just as vulnarable if you use it like a windows machine (security is at much a user problem as an OS problem).
But the one I fear most is that in making linux go mainstream we lose linux. I like the text file configuration. It means that no matter how screwed up I can still edit it and fix it. Example, tv-tuner card and tvtime sometimes I click wrong and select the wrong input (from tv to composite) it takes 3 more clicks to get back to tv but for some reason it is slow as hell to respond. No worries, close, edit the config and start app again. Good luck doing this with a registry.
Yet an awfull lot of the "oh I would use linux if only" crowd wants those text files gone and to be replaced with a registry.
So we got a choice. Either ignore these people and let them use their windows OR turn linux into windows.
I suggest a different approach. Apple ain't doing to bad. It is picking its customers so why doesn't linux do the same. Why dreg windows for users when you can get the cream to come to you? Apple is often accused of b
Does it matter? Well I certainly got lost less in Doom then in Wolfenstein. In Half-Life you could navigate by the textures (not turn right at 3rd intersection but follow the signs to the waste disposal). In Morrowind after a user patch all the street signs showed real direction in readable language. Made the game a lot more fun. In Flightsim you no longer taxying behind a blue box but behind a KLM 747 classic.
Does it matter? Well yeah, no a bad game won't be good because of graphics but a good game can be better.
Personally I am looking forward to the day when real RPG's have voice acting (good voice acting). But that is going to take a lot of storage.
It also makes sense for sony for piracy reasons. If blue ray burners are rare then it will be hard to copy games.
Yeah gods man, DO NOT EVEN JOKE ABOUT THAT. The ME team was taken out and shot and buried. Even suggesting that somehow they returned from their eternal damnation is not something to joke about.
iMac's are a better deal. And are not that blue.
But of course nothing is going to stop insurance agencies from demanding their own boxes. Same as nothing prevents them from age discrimination. Just try being 18 and getting insurance :P
Anyway say such safeguard were in place and the data from your black-box could only be retrieved with a court order. What is going to stop a new goverment in say 10 yrs from changing the law? Kinda like the RIAA tries to change the laws on court orders in trying to find out the addresses of file sharers?
Granted it is bad, just not completly rotten yet. You have inquiries about the investigation of WMD? We got the same lies and no investigation yet.
Lets see what do I get for my taxes. Roads, public transport, school, hospitals, police, the army, work safety inspectors, food safety inspectors, fire service, unemployment benefits, care for the weak, prisons for the strong :P, trash collection, etc etc etc.
I do not have the typical american view that goverment is only there to screw you. Perhaps that is the problem with privatasation. Here it is the state that collects tax and runs the trash collection with it. In america I believe you got to pay a company to do the same. Both cost money but over here we at least feel the goverment does something with the taxes.
I can think of many arguments for or against black boxes in our lives but taxes is not one of them. As for not having laws because having laws makes people brake is the road to anarachy. Anarachy is the rule of the strong and I am not strong.
So if you had been flashed you could have used the black box to show what really was happening. Wich is why track measuring (where speed is measured over distance) is better anyway since it allows you to overtake fast then slow down again if needed.
The problem with your claim that your a good driver is that everyone claims to except me (I am not, I keep looking for the right peddle to press wich kinda freaks out the examiner) AND PEOPLE ARE NOT. Not 24/7 not in difficult circumstances and not in a car wich you delayed having put new tires on.
I am not saying I like it but neither do I like the number of people killed on the roads. Something needs to be done. Two options. People start driving safely of their own free will OR we use a big stick. Personally I don't think the first is going to happen. I don't want the big stick either but we better come up with better arguments then you wanting to speed.
Let me ask you this. I use public transport and in Amsterdam we didn't use to have conducters. Now I usually buy a ticket even without conducters to check but you know sometimes money is really thight and I need the money for food/computer games. Shall we get rid of the new conductors that are forcing me to obey the law?
The liberal, let people police themselves, has been tried. Didn't work. I don't like the alternative. We know got cameras and conductors in trams. Why should car drivers not be watched?
Sure there are a number of accidents were the driver looses control (read went to fast around a corner) but they are alright since they only kill themselves. If you wrap your car around a tree I could care less.
If everyone drove the exactly the same speed on a road there would be far few accidents. That is, as far I been able to understand, the idea behind speed limits. It is to prevent the Porsche 911 driving 250km while a lada is doing 80km. If then that lada decides to overtake a lorry and the porsche is coming up behind you got an accident. Same with overtaking on smaller roads, if I see a pair of headlights in the far distance ahead I need to be be sure that that car is not doing a land speed record if I am to overtake.
Remember that java applet sometime ago that showed two streams of traffic crossing by carefully managing the speed? But I can do something better, just 1 stream of traffic, all driving the same speed resulting in zero accidents and zero traffic jams.
Speed limits are about optomizng the flow of traffic and to stop the speed differences between the slowest and fastest to become to big
Handling characters of modern cars have nothing to do with them. For no other reason that not everyone is driving a modern car, and many of those who do are not very good drivers.
Two books on for the x-wing and one for the tie. You would choose a speed and heading and turn to the apporiate page, then your opponent would and so you would twist and turn trying to get a lock. NO BATTERIES and a lot of fun. Sadly I lost it.
What I protested against was them owning my own creations for the time employed AND after I was employed. So I got a line added to the contract that exempted any code I write in my own time for wich I did not write in relation to work (the wording was legalize but basically that unless they told me to write it OR I wrote it for them it was mine).
The funniest thing? The lawyer of the company who amended it for me wasn't suprised or anything. Was more suprised that I was the first to ask him to do it. As a lawyer he found the clause very reasonable. So did the company, just that when the contract was signed up they went for the max expecting people to negotiate.
So it can really be that they put it in there just to cover themselves. If that is so they got no problem clarifying it for you. If they don't want to do that they are planning on using it. Be afraid, be very very afraid.
So that job is not much of a loss IF you are working on your own stuff.
1. if every car had it then it would not need to be labelled just as cars currently don't carry a label "contains engine". It would be taken for granted. Cars without would be labelled. 2. Dump it? So after an accident I hit erase? Kinda defeats the point doesn't it? 3. YES YES YES. ONLY the police with the normal investigation tools should be able to access it, NOBODY ELSE. The police can already examine a car at a crash site or get the car confiscated if it is a suspected hit and run. A black box would be just like examing if a light was burning before it broke or checking brake marks. 4. Related to 3. But also needs to be very clear what is dumped, how fast a car was hit may be nice to know for repair but not were the car was. 5. Depends, if all the above are observed it doesn't matter, worse it will be recorded anyway. How? Because the car will know how far it drove in wich direction. So if you know the starting point you can work out the destination. 6. Timelimit, obviously if it is going to be usefull just recording the last 60 seconds or so is useless. Hitting and killing a pedestrian may not have enough of an impact on a car to trigger a recording. Adding the location would help in catching hit and runners but leads to privacy fears. Then again we all use mobile phones without fear so if only the police can request them with a court order then it is a limited risk. Just like DNA testing has made it harder for rapist, black box will make it harder for road killers.
Kinda like ehm, the life jacket of the black box. The orange bit is the protection, the insides (the real black box) is, /me looks at box after aircraft crash photos, kinda charcoalie.
Ehm no? Sadly humans need a sign to tell them what speed to drive at. How fucking hard is it then to drive at that speed? People are killed because of idiots like you. So basically all you are doing is proving that we need these black boxes or else you just can't be made to drive at a safe speed.
There was a recent accident in Noord Holland, car overtook, misjudged, 4 people killed. Now the black box advocates are suggesting that they got the solution and you are their prime example.
Lets put it differently, what would you call someone who is charged with rape and ordered to donate DNA for investigation and then says NO because it may finger me in previous rapes I commited?
I think current law is pretty clear. "THAT IS THE WHOLE POINT DIPSHIT".
So claiming this black box will stop you or at least catch you at breaking the law IS EXACTLY THE REASON THEY ARE TRYING TO INTRODUCE IT. They should send you a card thanking you for making their point.
The police using technology to prove criminals have broken the law. Yeah that is abusive, how dare they stop that. I got rights!!!!
Please can the real privacy advocates kill you off? You are hurting the cause. It is the system mis-used to capture non-criminals that should be alarming. Would be very easy to link car->license->nationality and then stop any car near a "sensitive" area belonging to say an Arab. Or have a poor persons car tailed by private security when it enters a rich area. Those are the real fears, not your petty speeding ticket.
The pros are simple. Lets make it go a bit further and install a box in very car that records exactly what the car is doing at all times. Furthermore if a car is found driving without a box the police will know instantly and can stop it.
What will happen? Well a sharp drop in car thefts, kinda hard to steal a car that is constantly reporting were it is. Tech like this is already in use and it is helping.
Currently hit and runs are on the increase. With such a system the offending car could be easily traced.
Fewer high speed chases. Police can just hang back and see where the car is going to end up.
People disabling the device would have the problem that the car "winks" out on a certain spot. Very easy for the police to then raid the shop were the device is disabled.
No more need for speed camera or police resources wasted on policing the roads.
So a clear win eh?
After all what is on the CON side?
A lot whining, oh such a black box means I can't lie about an accident anymore. I can't speed anymore. I can't use my car in a crime anymore.
Yeah well guess what, society depends on people not doing these things. So the only ones hurt are criminals and who cares about them.
Any person that raises privacy issues and names one of the above points is an enemy of privacy and is probably being paid to undermine the real privacy advocates.
The real issue with any system like this can be illustrated by the following question. IBM once was asked to setup a system that allowed a certain country to register the religion of each person and that of their parents. Pretty harmless right? Right, read up on the holocaust sometimes and more importantly read up on the time between when the registration took place and when the gas chambers opened.
The problem is not how such a black box will be used now. The problem is 10-15-20 yrs from now. When someone totally different then the current goverment may be handed a tool that tells them exactly where everyone is.
Sadly this issue will get overshouted by all those who don't want to be fingered by their own car in an "accident" who don't want to get a fine because their car reported it was speeding. The criminals protesting are in fact the advocates for introducing such a system.
Personally I am undecided. Cars seem to get more and more out of control with the drivers somehow loosing touch with basic human values. SUV's are expensive gas guzzlers wich are hard to park, don't fit on roads, are unneeded and have a far higher chance of killing in an accident (pedestrians don't stand a chance and small cars get crushed) and yet SUV's sell like hot cakes.
For some reason when people get in a car they seem to need the state to watch their every move or they won't behave by the values they themselves told the state to enforce.
Perhaps the greatest enemy to privacy is human nature. Give a human anonimity and he won't human anymore. Just play a round of CS or chat on freenet and you will see what I mean. Perhaps we need a big brother/community watching over us.
Hell, test youreselve, read /. at -1. No? Then you want a police webstate.
I used to buy my games. Still got a 30 centimeter tall stack of CD's (phantasmagoria is about half of them to be honest). I easily bought 2 games sometimes more per month.
And I stopped. Why? I simply came to realize that games are becoming less and less value. if I compare play time of old titles like x-wing, the "ufo enemy unknown/x-com" series, transport tycoon, the sims, fallout, etc etc to more modern games I can't help but feel cheated. Farcry is a case in point. Nice engine, got sick of the boring arcade combat hit god mode and lost all interest just after a couple of hours. Max Payne, ugh. Got it at discount and it was still to much.
I think the game industry is making a dangerous mistake. By going mainstream, making games easier and simpler to play they are losing their core paying audience and getting a larger non-paying audience.
There are still games worth paying for but less and less. Doom3 is a difficult one. The orginal quake was my first bought ID game and that was an extremely good buy. I bought it the moment it came out, saved me a lot of hassle downloading it AND instantly shut the bosses up who were afraid of letting pirated software on their network. Sorry, got the official CD right here boss. Oh afraid of pirating because we are playing it with a group and I got only the 1 cd? No problem, we just only install the demo from the cd. Brilliant.
Doom3 however is an entirely different game, it is closer to max payne. Now am I willing to pay about 15x/25x a movie ticket for something that is not going to last nearly as long?
I think it is not piracy that is killing games. I think it is game developers aiming more and more to the kind of people that pirate that are hurting games. You will note that "the sims" still sells, years later at far to high prices. Lucasarts adventures all sold well enough to make a small profit. How many adventures has lucasarts released lately? They are aiming for bigger crowds now, sadly that also seems to mean fewer sales. It killed sierra, who is next.
So ID's dilemma is this. It scored with the pirates. Does it also score with the store buyers? I am undeciced at the moment. The lack of copy protection probably has me buy it, at least that quarantees that I can play the damn thing (the hardware is not a problem).
In short I think you are reversing cause and effect, A few more years of Splinter Cells or Painkillers or Max Paynes or Far Crys and there will BE no more any other games with godly single player modes but no online play. Remember there are other genres then "lone wanker" saves the world with a gun.
Then again we don't know how well Doom3 will sell yet. It could easily be that I am the only one who switched from buyers to pirates. Maybe there are two seperate gaming groups in the world. The theft figures of the pirates are in. Now we got to wait for the sales figures from the buyers.
But you need a big licensed name to sell you game nowadays. Kindly explain Star Wars Galaxies to me then. Biggest license around and doesn't sell.
If these guys got a nice engine for creating a post-apolyptical world then why can't they create their own story? Nobody "owns" hero must rebuild mankind. No law saying you can't create your own vault-dweller.
Instead of whining let them release their own game set in their own world. It is not like we are being overwhelmed with RPG's set in the future.
Arcanum and TOEE suffered both from one very simple thing. TO BLOODY BIG. There is no fun in walking around a landscape where a shed/building that is empty takes up several screens. Add the bugs to TOEE and they didn't sell because they were crap. It is sometimes hard to figure out why baldurs gate and its succesors worked. Just play some Arcanum and TOEE and it will become clear. Baldurs gate is smaller. Less gigantic areas with nothing to do in and far less walking involved.
On a side note, when are RPG games going to develop some code that makes sure only items are dropped wich I can use. Especially sucks in single player rpg's. Wow, my wizard got a gigantic asskicking sword. Can't use it and is to heavy to carry back. Nice. Usefull. Would it have been so hard to add class specific loot. Tip don't play nevewinter nights as a monk. You will have more money then creoscote and nothing to spend it on.
As shown with the second "accident" NASA hasn't learned and I very much doubt they have learned this time.
The shuttle itself is an extremely bad design. The engineers wanted to fit an escape mechanism. Kinda like the ejection cockpit the F-111 bomber has. Funny thing is that such an thing exist on the russian rockets, there has at least been one case of a crew succesfully ejecting from an exploding rockter, but was rejected for the shuttle. The first "accident" would have been a perfect use of an escape pod. The cockpit survived the blast and the crew was not killed by the exploding rocket but by hitting the ground several minutes later. Plenty of time for to pull the eject handle.
Old or new something is only reliable if you use it properly. Start letting the suits decide and you are just waiting for them to screw up.
You would be suprised how many grandmothers worked in business and had Unix come in as the newbie. To them linux will be childs play just as soon as someone actually allows them to get their hands on it and the teenage looser grandson doesn't think he knows best.
For the rest I agree with you. My linux desktop been more then ready. I code, surf, watch movies all a lot easier and faster then on a windows machine. I still can't understand all the stuff about codecs. Movies just work for me. Got to love mplayer. Linux not ready? Windows is not ready. Windows got the codecs, just not the architecture to install them all easily.
I suppose it is because news has to sell, it got to have a story and a story needs a hero and villian. Never mind if they ain't there, the news editor will just make one. Look at all the conflicts in the previous century. WW2 is a nice one, the nazis were the evil ones the americans the heroes except what is the difference between "no jews allowed" and "whites only" what percentage of jews were gassed and what percentage of indians were slaughtered? America went west and took the land owned by those who didn't make proper use of it (or whatever excuse was used to put indians in reservation) the germans went east.
Afghanistan had the russians as the bad guys and the noble arabs. The same arabs that america is now fighting.
It is intrestting that the BBC is far less symphatetic against the IRA or the rote arme fraction (however that is spelled) or the baskian seperatists. During the recent spain bombing it was not just the spanish goverment that was hoping it were baskians who did it. The news that it was arabs was a bit of a blow to the european news agencies that had tried to make the terror war appear to be only a problem for american. Despite the fact that most european countries have their own terror wars going on or had until recently.
There is no truly unbiased newsource in the world. Not google, not the BBC and most certainly not any american owned station. The best you can do is get your news from multiple locations. And no watching BBC and CNN does not count. If there is not at least one newsource you use where the biase does not offend you then you are being misinformed. Or the other way around, if you agree with the "angle" of the news story then you are being lied to. It is just lies you like to hear.
Not on a goverment computer, you agree when you start using it that you may be monitored. So the whole privacy thing is straight out of the window
if you ever worked in a big place then you will know there are always a few people like this boss around that sap morale and are just a waste but that can't get be gotten rid off because they make sure to have the right friends and never actually so badly screw up that action must be taken.
But they are hurting morale nonetheless and this has a very real effect on performance. It is just that the uppers prefer to then get bigger budgets or blame it on underlings rather then fire middle management for incompetence. That sends a dangerous precedent. Start firing mid lvl managers and someone might get the idea to start firing incompetent upper management. Can't have that can we. Next we will be firing ministers for being a waste of space. Holding goverment accountable!!!!!
He is a goverment employee meaning he is not allowed to use the computer for private use. So if he even had solitaire open for 1 minute in a year he would still be in the wrong. But that was not the case. He played solitaire so much it had become a running joke in the department even with cartoons. This is not like making a few personal calls in a month. This is moral busting abuse of goverment facilities.
A boss that does everything that is forbidden will have a bad effect on those below him. We need people like this admin to get goverment back on its feed.
This boss and the bosses that fired the sysadmin are the ones responsible for the fact that goverment needs ever more taxes to do less and less actuall work. I can't beleive anyone who is a taxpayer who is on the boss or his bosses side. THEY ARE WASTING YOUR TAXMONEY. Just because you are the boss does not give you the right to do nothing at work. Not when you work for the goverment. If he had been an ordinary clerk he would have been fired instantly and the sysadmin given a complimant on a job well done by stopping waste.
So very simple. At work, WORK. Anything else can get you fired. Especially if you are getting paid with my money. Anyone who thinks differently can pay my taxes.