It was probably shot in 3 to 5 weeks. Video games require you to carry those 40 people for months.
The real problem is not the number of people, but that there's no good way to make a low-budget video game. You can make a good movie for very little money by not spending $100 million on special effects and marketing. Video games don't work like that. If you don't spend the money on having good graphics artists, your game looks like crap.
You can sell a movie with a great story and no special effects. You can't sell a game with fantastic game play and crappy graphics and sound - those games were already sold 10-20 years ago.
Video game companies have a pretty good history of putting out game systems at a price point WAY below the market price point for the initial supply of the game systems. Most recently, it's clear that the market was willing to pay well more than retail to get one of a limited supply of XBox 360's.
So a $649 price point may be just fine in the short term, and as the technology shakes itself out, Sony can lower the price.
Early adopters are probaby willing to spend $649, so no reason not to charge it. The people who will only pay $300 or $200 will just have to wait for the price to drop.
Why would I want a device with everything in it as a cell phone when all I'm supposed to do is talk with it?
Cell phone companies can't charge you for sending text messages if all your mobile phone does is make phone calls. They can't charge you for downloading ring tones and wallpapers if your phone doesn't have those features. They can't charge you for uploading photos if your phone doesn't have a camera, and they can't charge you for downloading songs or email if your phone isn't also a music player and email reader.
Cell phone companies want your phones to be feature rich so they can charge you for using those features. They'd much rather give you a phone that costs $50 more than forfeit all the money they won't get from you not using the 'premium' services if they gave you a $50 cheaper phone with limited features instead.
Saying that the governments in the US and Birtian possibly changing is due to the insurgency in Iraq is about as valid as saying the governments in Germany, France, etc, didn't support the invasion because of the insurgency in Iraq, even though the insurgency hadn't happened yet.
Many people thought that invading Iraq was a bad idea. Those people had a government that did not reflect that opinion - in the US, partly because people vote on other issues (like gun control or abortion) that are the most important to them and get you a government that likes to invade other countries as a consequence.
Hell, the government in the US *HAS* to change if for no other reason than that Bush's term limits are up. It's even looking likely that we might get a presidential race between someone like Feingold and McCain - can you imagine that? Each party fielding a rational, intelligent candidate?
Anyway, even if your (or their) definition of success is "get rid of hated US government", they still are failing: At best, they've substitted one hated government for another. Even if Bush gets ousted by a Democrat, the American troops arn't going anywhere - we broke it, we've bought it. The only thing dumber than invading Iraq would be to leave it without finishing the job.
The truth is, though, that THEIR definition of success isn't even political change. Their definition of success is "Condutct/die in a holy war." If you gave many of these guys the choice between wiping the US off the face of the earth and going home to farm with their family, OR continuing a holy war, many of them would find a way to continue a holy war.
That was the big mistake the US made in invading Iraq: We gave the Arab "freedom fighters" a way to fight a holy war locally.
Success, at least as the OP asserted, was defending oneself from the government. Bombs and guns are not going to keep the government in line. If you want to change the definition of success to "kill a lot of people", then bombs and guns work very well.
But all that is going to accomplish is turn your country into a shithole.
A poor economy is one of the historically great motivators for revolution. If the government cannot feed the army, it will collapse.
And what happens AFTER the revolution? This is how we got the Soviet Union, communist China, Cuba, North Korea. Resistence made the economy bad enough that they overthrew the government. Once in power, the resistence turned into the oppressor - they were the only guys left with guns, so all the guys with guns decided to devote all of the rest of the economy to feeding themselves.
They stay in power because by the time the government can't feed the army, the populace is dead. The soldiers are the LAST people to go without food.
Who gets the food in Somalia? The militias. Who gets the food in North Korea? The Army. Who gets the food in Sudan? Government military, and militias.
A poor economy is the best weapon an oppressive government has. You want to make sure the soldiers in your army are willing to commit atrocities on your behalf? Make sure the alternative to doing what you want in the army is starving.
You couldn't be more wrong if you were president. The majority of American casualties and deaths in Iraq are due to firearms. The idea that firearms are ineffective is, much like you, beyond stupid.
Hrm, wouldn't it be wonderful if somebody kept track of the causes of troop fatalities in Iraq? Then we could tell which one of us is really stupid. But wait! SOMEBODY DOES KEEP TRACK!
Top 10 causes of troop fatalities in Iraq, March 2003->May 2006:
Hostile - hostile fire - IED attack 863 - 32.1% Hostile - hostile fire 389 - 14.5% Non-hostile - vehicle accident 215 - 8% Hostile - hostile fire - small arms fire 154 - 5.7% Hostile - hostile fire - car bomb 101 - 3.8% Hostile - hostile fire - mortar attack 89 - 3.3% Hostile - hostile fire - RPG attack 78 - 2.9% Non-hostile - helicopter crash 78 - 2.9% Hostile - helicopter crash 66 - 2.5% Hostile - hostile fire - ambush 60 - 2.2%
That includes the start of the war though. If you look at the past three months (March->May):
That counts unspecified hostile fire (which could be anything) in the 2nd category, as I would guess it's more likely that actual IED casualties are classified as IED deaths than just hostile fire deaths while gunfire is more likely to just get lumped into hostile fire.
36.4% of all fatalities (combat AND non-combat fatalities) in Iraq since March 2003 were caused by IED. In the past three months, over half of *ALL* troop fatalities (99 out of 183) have been caused by IED. If you take out the non-com deaths, 63% of combat deaths are by IED alone.
The longer the war has gone on, the more insurgents have been relying on IED's. Why? Because the insurgents who use guns are dead. That's the tactical environment in Iraq: Use your gun to kill a few US troops before you get killed, or use your IED to kill more troops and do it again later.
Do you really think people will listen to you if you keep calling them stupid?
Do you really think a gun nut is going to listen to me if I don't?
He's a gun-nut. By definition, he is going to ignore any evidence or logical argument counter to his irrational opinion. If he was rational, he wouldn't have his irrational opinion in the first place.
I'm just using inflamatory subject lines to get posts read.:)
But back to you:
But you contradict yourself because in your original post you said bombs weren't effective
There's no contradiction. I said guns are so useless that terrorsts prefer to use bombs. I didn't say bombs were effective at fighting governments.
What you need to do is take a chill pill, relax a bit and open your eyes and take a LOOK. Otherwise you could spend the rest of your life in your alternate reality.
A look at what? The argument that guns are necessary to or effective at protecting the populace from the government is a stupid one. The only way you can believe it is by ignoring excessive, practical evidence that guns are useless at resisting a modernly armed government. That's reality.
That is obvioulsy why the IRA owned South Armagh and even the police had to be flown in and could not use the roads for safety, even garbage had to be flown out by helicopter from the bases (until the SAS came in and played them at their own game with their underhanded tactics). Get your facts right. Terrorists did a HUGE amount of damage to the UK government and over a LONG period of time. The UK Government had no chance against the populance that dispised them so much.
And? I said that guns are useless for defending yourself from the government. You havn't presented anything against that.
All you've said is that terrorists can cause a lot of damage. So? What's that got to do with guns? Terrorists who cause the most damage don't even use guns! They use fertilizer, box cutters, improvised artillery shells, and airplanes. And for all the damage the IRA did, all they managed to do was hurt the economy where they lived. All of their efforts did nothing but hurt themselves. Pretty stupid, isn't it?
this becomes extraordinarily difficult if the government doesn't know who the "bad guys" specifically are.
That's the whole problem. The government that takes away the rights of actual bad guys is not the problem. The problem is that the BAD GUYS ARE WHOEVER THE GOVERNMENT SAYS THEY ARE! So once you let the government take away the rights of the bad guys, you've let the government take away your rights - all they have to do is declare you to be a bad guy. The soldier who comes to get you isn't going to know if you're an actual bad guy or just somebody the government doesn't like.
It USED to be that if that happened, you'd get to go to court and if the government was full of it you could plead your case and probably be released. But we're chipping away at that - we've allowed the government to decide you are a bad guy, then wisk you away to some secret detention facility. Then you are, indeed, fucked.
Iraqi insurgents HAVE guns. They have PILES of guns. They *CHOOSE* not to use them because they ARE NOT EFFECTIVE.
The insurgents would be doing us a HUGE FAVOR if they started using guns. Why? Because then we would know who the insurgents were - they're the guys shooting at us - and we'd know where they are - in the building the bullets are coming from! Then we just drop a bomb on the building, problem solved.
Instead, the insurgents avoid using guns and instead use bombs. Why? Because when a bomb kills your troops, the bomb doesn't tell you who or where the insurgent is.
That's the problem with you gun nuts - you have absolutely no concept of tactics. You think that "Oo, I can shoot the other guy, I win!" The other guy is thinking "Oo, I can drop a bomb on the other guy, I win!" and HE is right.
Insurgents in Iraq are not causing all this damage DESPITE not using guns, they're causing it BECAUSE they don't use guns.
The insurgents who thought they could fight the US with guns are already dead. Only the insurgents who use bombs are left, because they're never around to be killed.
Gattaca wasn't about a government that wanted bad things for defective people. It was about what happens to a society that only wants the best (a society we have now), when 'best' is believed to be easily determined by genetic identification. It's not that I want something bad for the 'defective people', I just selfishly would prefer to hire/associate with/marry non-defective people.
If employment eligibility tracking is based on genetic profile, how long is it before employers can buy products that tell them if their potential employees have, say, health problems that will raise their health insurance premiums?
Actually, power lies with guns (as it always has), whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive that it is the Duty of the People to alter or abolish it.
You're an idiot, and this is just an assaninely stupid statement.
What you seem to have missed out on is that in 1776, the guns the populace had and the guns the government had were the same, so the side that won was pretty much based on how many people you had, influenced by your ability to pay them, and their emotional/economic investment in the fight.
In modern day resistence, guns are so useless that they're only used against extremely poor governments. You might be able to stage a revolution in the Congo with guns, hell, you can even do it with enough people and some machetes, but there is just no way that you can keep a government like the US government honest with the treat of a firearm. The government is not threatened by a firearm - it is useless against their tank, and it is especially useless after the government has blown up your car.
Iraqi insurgents have guns. IRA had guns. Hamas has guns. What do these groups do with guns? They try to AVOID using them, because when they make use guns they are visible, and when they are visible people can drop a bomb on them. A gun is useless when your enemy is just going to send a missile into your apartment if they know where you are. They know that guns don't work, which is why they use bombs. Look at the number of Americans killed in Iraq by IED vs. firearm.
Even with bombs, you're not going to get what you want; all you succeed at doing is creating an environment of poor security, which leads to a poor economy. Even in a poor economy, the government is still better off than the populace. Once you've let the government get out of hand, it's too late: The best you can do is make your economy so bad that your government becomes militarily weak enough that they provoke someone to come and invade you.
There's a name for places like that: Bosnia.
Americans must VIGILENTLY protect and excercise their democratic rights to keep the government honest. If it comes time to use guns, we're fucked.
You've translated the question "Which came first, the chicken or the egg?" to "Which came first, the egg producer or the egg?" Obviously the egg producer must come first.
But that's only ONE way to inerpret the question. You could also translate the question to "Which came first, the thing that hatches from the egg or the egg?" In that case, obviously the egg came first.
It all comes down to "What is a chicken?" is a chicken something that lays eggs, something that hatches from eggs, or both?
If you say a chicken is something that lays eggs, then the chicken came first. If you say that a chicken is something that hatches form an egg, then the egg came first. There is no single 'right' answer to the question because the question has two meanings depending on how you define the words.
When tickets are auctioned, the amount of money made by the act is more closely related to the number of people who want the tickets.
When you have a lot more money coming to you based on the number of fans you have, it becomes much more tempting to release your music for free to make it back on the concerts.
The better technology gets at distributing bands' music for them, the more attractive this gets.
If at all, what's been ruled on, is that it's not per se illegal to give something away for free. Big deal.
No, what's been ruled on is that it's not per se illegal for COMPETITORS to AGREE to give product away for free.
Which I think is an extremely interesting ruling - what if Sony and Microsoft got together and agreed to give away game systems until Nintendo was forced out of business?
If insurgents are using untraceable cell phones to plan attacks, it would seem the simple answer is to have the cellular network stop accepting calls from disposable phones. Either the number is registered to someone, or you can't make a call with it. Then we can give that NSA terrorist phone call pattern matching program a real test!
The reason we are losing in Iraq is because we are trying to have a small number of troops fight a small number of insurgents. This doesn't work because the in that environment, the insurgents get to choose when to fight.
We are never going to be successful until we have enough troops and equipment in Iraq to control transportation and communication.
Your problem with faxes was probably user error - you can't use fax machines with Vonage (or any other VoIP, for that matter) voice lines. Those routers use audio compression to send your voice over the internet, and audio compression is lossy. Trying to send a fax transmission over a VoIP voice line is like trying to compress the data on your hard drive into an MP3. Audio compression isn't bit-for-bit equivalent, and fax transmissions will error when bits change.
You need a second line to send faxes, and most of the Vonage routers have a second jack labelled FAX specifically for this. The fax line doesn't use audio compression, it receives the fax transmission as data instead of audio, and forwards it over the internet as data instead of compressed audio. The fax line is not active by default though - it's an entire second line (2nd phone number, can be used simultaneously with your voice line if you have the bandwidth). I have it and it's worked flawlessly for me.
Of course, that doesn't excuse the hoops you had to jump through to cancel. Maybe they've been subcontracting their cancellation service to AOL.
*MY* big problem with Vonage is that the online voicemail retreival is SLOW AS SHIT. But it still beats trying to retreive voicemail over the phone, at least online I can just click on all the message buttons, open them in new windows, then come back and listen to them all 5 minutes later when they've finally downloaded. At least with online voicemail, even if there's a 30-120 second latency to get a message, I can easily rewind/fastforward/replay/save to computer.
I've been using the Verizon service for about 2 years. What is EXTREMELY odd is that the published rates are CONSERVATIVE - I frequently exceed them by 4 times or more (downloading at 300 megaBYTES per second, for example, when the published rate is apparently 400-700 megabits.)
The biggest issue I've found with quality of connection is network contention with cell phones. If I use the Verizon service at 2 AM, it's virtually indisinguishable from my home cable service. In the middle of the day though, it gets much slower and tends to drop connection fairly frequently, maybe once an hour depending on what's going on.
At best, you get 56k, if you're getting all four of four possible time slices allocated to you. But in practice, I often apparently get just one time slice, making it about 1/4th the speed of a 56k modem.
On the upside, it was only $20/month, three years ago, so it wasn't bad cnsidering the price for critical, non-data intensive internet aps (like email).
Conversely, on my Verizon service, I often get better speeds than my cable modem at home, although my latency at home is obviously better. The other nice thing about Verizon is even if you're NOT in one of the 181 metro areas with the full broadband connection, you can still get a good 120 kpbs most anywhere else. For example, I use the Verizon on the road for business, but if my cable connection at home in Chippewa Falls WI (definitely not a metro area) craps out, I can still get on Verizon's network at better-than-dialup speeds from my living room. (I can also run the whole house off it by setting up a network bridge.)
Patents can be used a bit like nuclear weapons - you don't intend on using them, but the fact that you have them prevents somebody else from using theirs.
Same deal with patents - you'll think twice about suing somebody for patent infringement if they're likely sitting on a patent they can sue you for infringing.
Patents can also be used in trade - I'll let you use my patents if I can use your patents. Particularly handy agreement with a competitor to keep new competitors out of a marketplace.
Slashdot Mirror
It was probably shot in 3 to 5 weeks. Video games require you to carry those 40 people for months.
The real problem is not the number of people, but that there's no good way to make a low-budget video game. You can make a good movie for very little money by not spending $100 million on special effects and marketing. Video games don't work like that. If you don't spend the money on having good graphics artists, your game looks like crap.
You can sell a movie with a great story and no special effects. You can't sell a game with fantastic game play and crappy graphics and sound - those games were already sold 10-20 years ago.
Video game companies have a pretty good history of putting out game systems at a price point WAY below the market price point for the initial supply of the game systems. Most recently, it's clear that the market was willing to pay well more than retail to get one of a limited supply of XBox 360's.
So a $649 price point may be just fine in the short term, and as the technology shakes itself out, Sony can lower the price.
Early adopters are probaby willing to spend $649, so no reason not to charge it. The people who will only pay $300 or $200 will just have to wait for the price to drop.
Why would I want a device with everything in it as a cell phone when all I'm supposed to do is talk with it?
Cell phone companies can't charge you for sending text messages if all your mobile phone does is make phone calls. They can't charge you for downloading ring tones and wallpapers if your phone doesn't have those features. They can't charge you for uploading photos if your phone doesn't have a camera, and they can't charge you for downloading songs or email if your phone isn't also a music player and email reader.
Cell phone companies want your phones to be feature rich so they can charge you for using those features. They'd much rather give you a phone that costs $50 more than forfeit all the money they won't get from you not using the 'premium' services if they gave you a $50 cheaper phone with limited features instead.
Saying that the governments in the US and Birtian possibly changing is due to the insurgency in Iraq is about as valid as saying the governments in Germany, France, etc, didn't support the invasion because of the insurgency in Iraq, even though the insurgency hadn't happened yet.
Many people thought that invading Iraq was a bad idea. Those people had a government that did not reflect that opinion - in the US, partly because people vote on other issues (like gun control or abortion) that are the most important to them and get you a government that likes to invade other countries as a consequence.
Hell, the government in the US *HAS* to change if for no other reason than that Bush's term limits are up. It's even looking likely that we might get a presidential race between someone like Feingold and McCain - can you imagine that? Each party fielding a rational, intelligent candidate?
Anyway, even if your (or their) definition of success is "get rid of hated US government", they still are failing: At best, they've substitted one hated government for another. Even if Bush gets ousted by a Democrat, the American troops arn't going anywhere - we broke it, we've bought it. The only thing dumber than invading Iraq would be to leave it without finishing the job.
The truth is, though, that THEIR definition of success isn't even political change. Their definition of success is "Condutct/die in a holy war." If you gave many of these guys the choice between wiping the US off the face of the earth and going home to farm with their family, OR continuing a holy war, many of them would find a way to continue a holy war.
That was the big mistake the US made in invading Iraq: We gave the Arab "freedom fighters" a way to fight a holy war locally.
Success, at least as the OP asserted, was defending oneself from the government. Bombs and guns are not going to keep the government in line. If you want to change the definition of success to "kill a lot of people", then bombs and guns work very well.
But all that is going to accomplish is turn your country into a shithole.
A poor economy is one of the historically great motivators for revolution. If the government cannot feed the army, it will collapse.
And what happens AFTER the revolution? This is how we got the Soviet Union, communist China, Cuba, North Korea. Resistence made the economy bad enough that they overthrew the government. Once in power, the resistence turned into the oppressor - they were the only guys left with guns, so all the guys with guns decided to devote all of the rest of the economy to feeding themselves.
They stay in power because by the time the government can't feed the army, the populace is dead. The soldiers are the LAST people to go without food.
Who gets the food in Somalia? The militias. Who gets the food in North Korea? The Army. Who gets the food in Sudan? Government military, and militias.
A poor economy is the best weapon an oppressive government has. You want to make sure the soldiers in your army are willing to commit atrocities on your behalf? Make sure the alternative to doing what you want in the army is starving.
You couldn't be more wrong if you were president. The majority of American casualties and deaths in Iraq are due to firearms. The idea that firearms are ineffective is, much like you, beyond stupid.
Hrm, wouldn't it be wonderful if somebody kept track of the causes of troop fatalities in Iraq? Then we could tell which one of us is really stupid. But wait! SOMEBODY DOES KEEP TRACK!
Top 10 causes of troop fatalities in Iraq, March 2003->May 2006:
Hostile - hostile fire - IED attack 863 - 32.1%
Hostile - hostile fire 389 - 14.5%
Non-hostile - vehicle accident 215 - 8%
Hostile - hostile fire - small arms fire 154 - 5.7%
Hostile - hostile fire - car bomb 101 - 3.8%
Hostile - hostile fire - mortar attack 89 - 3.3%
Hostile - hostile fire - RPG attack 78 - 2.9%
Non-hostile - helicopter crash 78 - 2.9%
Hostile - helicopter crash 66 - 2.5%
Hostile - hostile fire - ambush 60 - 2.2%
That includes the start of the war though. If you look at the past three months (March->May):
IED/Car Bomb/Explosion/Helicopter/missile: 119
Non-specied hotile fire/small arms fire: 37
That counts unspecified hostile fire (which could be anything) in the 2nd category, as I would guess it's more likely that actual IED casualties are classified as IED deaths than just hostile fire deaths while gunfire is more likely to just get lumped into hostile fire.
36.4% of all fatalities (combat AND non-combat fatalities) in Iraq since March 2003 were caused by IED. In the past three months, over half of *ALL* troop fatalities (99 out of 183) have been caused by IED. If you take out the non-com deaths, 63% of combat deaths are by IED alone.
The longer the war has gone on, the more insurgents have been relying on IED's. Why? Because the insurgents who use guns are dead. That's the tactical environment in Iraq: Use your gun to kill a few US troops before you get killed, or use your IED to kill more troops and do it again later.
Source:
http://icasualties.org/oif/stats.aspx
Do you really think people will listen to you if you keep calling them stupid?
Do you really think a gun nut is going to listen to me if I don't?
He's a gun-nut. By definition, he is going to ignore any evidence or logical argument counter to his irrational opinion. If he was rational, he wouldn't have his irrational opinion in the first place.
I'm just using inflamatory subject lines to get posts read. :)
But back to you:
But you contradict yourself because in your original post you said bombs weren't effective
There's no contradiction. I said guns are so useless that terrorsts prefer to use bombs. I didn't say bombs were effective at fighting governments.
What you need to do is take a chill pill, relax a bit and open your eyes and take a LOOK. Otherwise you could spend the rest of your life in your alternate reality.
A look at what? The argument that guns are necessary to or effective at protecting the populace from the government is a stupid one. The only way you can believe it is by ignoring excessive, practical evidence that guns are useless at resisting a modernly armed government. That's reality.
That is obvioulsy why the IRA owned South Armagh and even the police had to be flown in and could not use the roads for safety, even garbage had to be flown out by helicopter from the bases (until the SAS came in and played them at their own game with their underhanded tactics). Get your facts right. Terrorists did a HUGE amount of damage to the UK government and over a LONG period of time. The UK Government had no chance against the populance that dispised them so much.
And? I said that guns are useless for defending yourself from the government. You havn't presented anything against that.
All you've said is that terrorists can cause a lot of damage. So? What's that got to do with guns? Terrorists who cause the most damage don't even use guns! They use fertilizer, box cutters, improvised artillery shells, and airplanes. And for all the damage the IRA did, all they managed to do was hurt the economy where they lived. All of their efforts did nothing but hurt themselves. Pretty stupid, isn't it?
this becomes extraordinarily difficult if the government doesn't know who the "bad guys" specifically are.
That's the whole problem. The government that takes away the rights of actual bad guys is not the problem. The problem is that the BAD GUYS ARE WHOEVER THE GOVERNMENT SAYS THEY ARE! So once you let the government take away the rights of the bad guys, you've let the government take away your rights - all they have to do is declare you to be a bad guy. The soldier who comes to get you isn't going to know if you're an actual bad guy or just somebody the government doesn't like.
It USED to be that if that happened, you'd get to go to court and if the government was full of it you could plead your case and probably be released. But we're chipping away at that - we've allowed the government to decide you are a bad guy, then wisk you away to some secret detention facility. Then you are, indeed, fucked.
Iraqi insurgents HAVE guns. They have PILES of guns. They *CHOOSE* not to use them because they ARE NOT EFFECTIVE.
The insurgents would be doing us a HUGE FAVOR if they started using guns. Why? Because then we would know who the insurgents were - they're the guys shooting at us - and we'd know where they are - in the building the bullets are coming from! Then we just drop a bomb on the building, problem solved.
Instead, the insurgents avoid using guns and instead use bombs. Why? Because when a bomb kills your troops, the bomb doesn't tell you who or where the insurgent is.
That's the problem with you gun nuts - you have absolutely no concept of tactics. You think that "Oo, I can shoot the other guy, I win!" The other guy is thinking "Oo, I can drop a bomb on the other guy, I win!" and HE is right.
Insurgents in Iraq are not causing all this damage DESPITE not using guns, they're causing it BECAUSE they don't use guns.
The insurgents who thought they could fight the US with guns are already dead. Only the insurgents who use bombs are left, because they're never around to be killed.
Gattaca wasn't about a government that wanted bad things for defective people. It was about what happens to a society that only wants the best (a society we have now), when 'best' is believed to be easily determined by genetic identification. It's not that I want something bad for the 'defective people', I just selfishly would prefer to hire/associate with/marry non-defective people.
If employment eligibility tracking is based on genetic profile, how long is it before employers can buy products that tell them if their potential employees have, say, health problems that will raise their health insurance premiums?
Actually, power lies with guns (as it always has), whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive that it is the Duty of the People to alter or abolish it.
You're an idiot, and this is just an assaninely stupid statement.
What you seem to have missed out on is that in 1776, the guns the populace had and the guns the government had were the same, so the side that won was pretty much based on how many people you had, influenced by your ability to pay them, and their emotional/economic investment in the fight.
In modern day resistence, guns are so useless that they're only used against extremely poor governments. You might be able to stage a revolution in the Congo with guns, hell, you can even do it with enough people and some machetes, but there is just no way that you can keep a government like the US government honest with the treat of a firearm. The government is not threatened by a firearm - it is useless against their tank, and it is especially useless after the government has blown up your car.
Iraqi insurgents have guns. IRA had guns. Hamas has guns. What do these groups do with guns? They try to AVOID using them, because when they make use guns they are visible, and when they are visible people can drop a bomb on them. A gun is useless when your enemy is just going to send a missile into your apartment if they know where you are. They know that guns don't work, which is why they use bombs. Look at the number of Americans killed in Iraq by IED vs. firearm.
Even with bombs, you're not going to get what you want; all you succeed at doing is creating an environment of poor security, which leads to a poor economy. Even in a poor economy, the government is still better off than the populace. Once you've let the government get out of hand, it's too late: The best you can do is make your economy so bad that your government becomes militarily weak enough that they provoke someone to come and invade you.
There's a name for places like that: Bosnia.
Americans must VIGILENTLY protect and excercise their democratic rights to keep the government honest. If it comes time to use guns, we're fucked.
You've translated the question "Which came first, the chicken or the egg?" to "Which came first, the egg producer or the egg?" Obviously the egg producer must come first.
But that's only ONE way to inerpret the question. You could also translate the question to "Which came first, the thing that hatches from the egg or the egg?" In that case, obviously the egg came first.
It all comes down to "What is a chicken?" is a chicken something that lays eggs, something that hatches from eggs, or both?
If you say a chicken is something that lays eggs, then the chicken came first. If you say that a chicken is something that hatches form an egg, then the egg came first. There is no single 'right' answer to the question because the question has two meanings depending on how you define the words.
When tickets are auctioned, the amount of money made by the act is more closely related to the number of people who want the tickets.
When you have a lot more money coming to you based on the number of fans you have, it becomes much more tempting to release your music for free to make it back on the concerts.
The better technology gets at distributing bands' music for them, the more attractive this gets.
If at all, what's been ruled on, is that it's not per se illegal to give something away for free. Big deal.
No, what's been ruled on is that it's not per se illegal for COMPETITORS to AGREE to give product away for free.
Which I think is an extremely interesting ruling - what if Sony and Microsoft got together and agreed to give away game systems until Nintendo was forced out of business?
If insurgents are using untraceable cell phones to plan attacks, it would seem the simple answer is to have the cellular network stop accepting calls from disposable phones. Either the number is registered to someone, or you can't make a call with it. Then we can give that NSA terrorist phone call pattern matching program a real test!
The reason we are losing in Iraq is because we are trying to have a small number of troops fight a small number of insurgents. This doesn't work because the in that environment, the insurgents get to choose when to fight.
We are never going to be successful until we have enough troops and equipment in Iraq to control transportation and communication.
What if you have a router with your VoIP integrated?
I've got the linksys RT31P2 - three downstream ethernet and 2 phone jacks. Never had any issues.
Ooops, unit error. I did indeed mean Kilo. Been doing too many PCIe/10GigE performance benchmarks this week.
Your problem with faxes was probably user error - you can't use fax machines with Vonage (or any other VoIP, for that matter) voice lines. Those routers use audio compression to send your voice over the internet, and audio compression is lossy. Trying to send a fax transmission over a VoIP voice line is like trying to compress the data on your hard drive into an MP3. Audio compression isn't bit-for-bit equivalent, and fax transmissions will error when bits change.
You need a second line to send faxes, and most of the Vonage routers have a second jack labelled FAX specifically for this. The fax line doesn't use audio compression, it receives the fax transmission as data instead of audio, and forwards it over the internet as data instead of compressed audio. The fax line is not active by default though - it's an entire second line (2nd phone number, can be used simultaneously with your voice line if you have the bandwidth). I have it and it's worked flawlessly for me.
Of course, that doesn't excuse the hoops you had to jump through to cancel. Maybe they've been subcontracting their cancellation service to AOL.
*MY* big problem with Vonage is that the online voicemail retreival is SLOW AS SHIT. But it still beats trying to retreive voicemail over the phone, at least online I can just click on all the message buttons, open them in new windows, then come back and listen to them all 5 minutes later when they've finally downloaded. At least with online voicemail, even if there's a 30-120 second latency to get a message, I can easily rewind/fastforward/replay/save to computer.
I've been using the Verizon service for about 2 years. What is EXTREMELY odd is that the published rates are CONSERVATIVE - I frequently exceed them by 4 times or more (downloading at 300 megaBYTES per second, for example, when the published rate is apparently 400-700 megabits.)
The biggest issue I've found with quality of connection is network contention with cell phones. If I use the Verizon service at 2 AM, it's virtually indisinguishable from my home cable service. In the middle of the day though, it gets much slower and tends to drop connection fairly frequently, maybe once an hour depending on what's going on.
At best, you get 56k, if you're getting all four of four possible time slices allocated to you. But in practice, I often apparently get just one time slice, making it about 1/4th the speed of a 56k modem.
On the upside, it was only $20/month, three years ago, so it wasn't bad cnsidering the price for critical, non-data intensive internet aps (like email).
Conversely, on my Verizon service, I often get better speeds than my cable modem at home, although my latency at home is obviously better. The other nice thing about Verizon is even if you're NOT in one of the 181 metro areas with the full broadband connection, you can still get a good 120 kpbs most anywhere else. For example, I use the Verizon on the road for business, but if my cable connection at home in Chippewa Falls WI (definitely not a metro area) craps out, I can still get on Verizon's network at better-than-dialup speeds from my living room. (I can also run the whole house off it by setting up a network bridge.)
Patents can be used a bit like nuclear weapons - you don't intend on using them, but the fact that you have them prevents somebody else from using theirs.
Same deal with patents - you'll think twice about suing somebody for patent infringement if they're likely sitting on a patent they can sue you for infringing.
Patents can also be used in trade - I'll let you use my patents if I can use your patents. Particularly handy agreement with a competitor to keep new competitors out of a marketplace.
Selective enforcement of the law is one of the hallmarks of corruption.
There's a greeting card for that?
What's it say? "We know who is wishing you a Happy Birthday!" ??