Score: 4, Insightful!?
Aren't we supposed to be geeks? Aren't geeks supposed to like problem solving? There's a simple fix here: use a thin wire (with associated size, flexibility and weight advantages) which has plugs on both ends and will, as such, disconnect under tension. It's also easy to replace if it does break.
So I'm guilty until proven innocent of automatically having no care about the safety of myself and others purely due to my age?
I enjoy a debate and if you feel that under 25s are unsafe to drive I'd be interested in hearing why, but sweeping emotional generalisations don't really help to advance your point.
Errm, what exactly might I be doing wrong? I'm not pushing up these numbers to make a point - if I can get £300-£500 insurance on a vaguely decent car I'll be interested, but filling in my exact details (but assuming I hold a full license) on the forms on the website spit out roughly the values given in my post above every time. I'm well aware that it's over 10 times the value of the car - that's why I was complaining in the first place!
There is a known gap between costs male and female drivers, although not as wide as what we're seeing, so I'm truly stumped as to why it's so low for your girlfriend, because my experience seems to be echoed by many people I know. Anything you can think of would be interesting to know.
Online quote from Churchill.com (who are considered fairly good for young people) for me to drive that Volvo (assuming I learned to drive) would be £2409.75, or about US$4250 comprehensive, or £2283.75 ($4050) for third party.
I don't know whether you'll read this, but you might want to know that you've made some completely incorrect assumptions about me. Firstly I have not had 6 months of experience - I don't drive at all since I simply can't afford insurance (yes, I could afford to save up for a car and petrol, but I can't pay over the cost of the car again to insure it). Secondly, I quite understand that the insurers need to charge more for statistically unsafe groups, but the figures they talk about are inflated at best - so a teenager is about twice as likely to have an accident, why is my premium raised by a factor of ten?
What I would give a shit about is the implications for the insurance companies to rip you off even worse than they already do. As an American you probably don't know how bad it already is - for me (a 17 year old male) to be insured on a basic, old car (say a VW bug) would cost somewhere between $2300 and $3500 (converted to US$ for your convenience). If they're mining all this data about exactly how and where I travel, they'll do anything in their power to declare me unsafe and raise my premiums. If I refuse to have a GPS tracker they'll assume I have something to hide and stick a statutory (and massive) penalty on me.
A recent example would be Apple - odd since shooflot seems to have had bad experience, but anyway - I recieved an iMac with a dead power supply, unfortunate but inevitably possible. Went to the website, found 'self service' warranty support, ordered a new PSU and had it in my machine the next day, as well as having a prepaid shipping box to get the old one back to them. No questions asked, no mess, no "please wait up to 28 days", just getting what I asked for and having it delivered as fast as could be expected was enough to make a good impression on me. They also shipped me a copy of Tiger for about £10 through their "up to date" program back when that was released, again no fuss, just providing what they promised if not more.
People seem to be either very happy or very annoyed with Apple support though, so maybe my experience is just lucky.
I may be mistaken, but didn't they announce they were switching the low end manchines first? They also said the switch would be completed by 2007, which means there won't be a machine to match a dual 2.7GHz G5 for a good two years yet (assuming they _do_ complete on time). While Macs do tend to outlive PCs, two years of use minimum plus a decent resale value isn't too bad a deal if you need a machine any time soon, and it will be supported for longer if you don't feel a need for the latest and greatest. Not a great deal, but not too bad.
Also it's a nice number cruncher in its own right - Linux PPC will be around for a long time yet so it's not like the machine dies when OSX support drops. Like I said, you won't get the greatest value by buying now but it's not an all round bad idea either.
Squatter: Ha ha, I'm not selling for less than a billion dollars cash. Google: Is $2billion in stock OK? Squatter: Woohoo, I'm rich. *3 seconds later* Squatter: What do you mean Google stock just bombed? Are you telling me a company that made $3billion last year _isn't_ worth $80billion?
As Kesh said, it's not looks per se, it's integration and appropriate behaviour. I did also say that I'm sure some people (like you) are happy to put up with it - I actually used Windows and Linux quite a bit before moving to Mac, and I didn't like "getting used" to each app's individual behaviour on those two either so I guess it is a personal thing.
Some people may call it eye candy. If you use OpenOffice and the only thing you do notice is that it "looks different" then that's great for you. I do feel that the subtle things do make a difference though - hit the Expose key and pay attention to the windows, you'll notice they behave differently depending in which order they are on top of each other and even though you might not pick up on it when it's happening, the visual feedback does actually help work out where things go. Another example is hitting the "page end" key in a page in Safari and seeing the entire page scroll past very quickly, far faster than you can comprehend, but showing a rough idea of the text/image ratio and page length. Conversely, Firefox just jumps to the page bottom - nothing wrong with that, but it's just not quite as helpful.
Again it probably sounds like I'm being very petty here but all these small things (there are hundreds, and I'm sure there are many more I haven't noticed because they are, by nature, subtle) are really what separates OSX from the competition in my opinion. Attention to detail from the smallest thing to the largest is what adds up to make a user interface really work. Two things in isolation may sound a bit stupid but everything together makes all the difference.
The way I read the grandparent's idea of repealing it piece by piece was that it would ensure legal precident. If the entire act is just scrapped then you guys get your rights back, which is good, but there is nothing in place to stop them being taken away at a later date, which is bad. You have the precident that "The PATRIOT act was repealed" but say someone brings in laws X, Y and Z over a period of a few years they could quite easily have the combined power of the PATRIOT act without bashing into the fact that the PATRIOT act as a whole had been shot down. If each piece runs through the courts it takes time, which is bad, but lays down in stone the fact that "Rule X is bad and should not be law", which is good. It's not the act itself that's destroyed, but the ideas it tries to implement too.
...although between M$ Office and Open Office, I find myself wondering why they're even bothering...
I don't know if you've used it or not, but OpenOffice on OSX just doesn't flow properly at all. It may sound like a small thing, and I'm sure some people are happy to put up with it, but on a computer that carries a premium for design and "Just works" it really kicks the whole thing out when you have an app that doesn't 'feel' right, especially if you use it alot. Conversely, Keynote (which I had used long before the release of Pages) had impressed me from the start by being easier and slicker than the competition and Apple has Pages going the same way. OpenOffice is functional, but iWork is above and beyond.
As for MS Office, I don't personally like it as much as iWork anyway but for those in business it's really the only option - Apple wants to have a mature office suite in place as their user base expands, that way even if MS does decide to pull their suite from OSX it won't do as much damage - Apple don't want to look like the creation of the software was reactionary to MS's assumed withdrawl of Office v.X, even if it was in fact pre-empting it.
I wouldn't (and didn't) say that uniform has a direct impact on how a person thinks, but the underlying impression I always got was that the people in charge were most bothered about how their students looked to the public and that's why they enforced uniform. When those teaching you have attitudes like that it tends to abrade how much they seem to value you as an individual. Maybe I just think about things too much, but sitting there in a room all looking identical because of an order from above just sucked the life out of me, to be honest. As for thinking about what's cool that week, it does take time and effort you could spend on other things, but you don't have to do so if you don't feel like it - nobody says you have to follow fashion, doing so is self inflicted.
It also seems from your tone that you think I'm somebody who makes a point of being "nonconformist", which is an understandable conclusion to draw from what I said. I did go through a brief phase of doing so until I realised that doing things that aren't your natural personality for the explicit reason of being different is no better than following the crowd against your better judgement.
I've always been lucky enough to have (either via my parents or my own job) the clothes I want, so I can't directly relate to the first part of your post, but during my aforementioned "Look at me, I'm different" phase I did spend some time wearing things that you would think would act like a teasing magnet. I did draw a few comments, but my philosophy from the above post held true - confident deflection of their teasing stopped it within a matter of minutes and I was left to quite happily look stupid. I sympathise with what you said, but I do think that had your reaction to the teasing been different your experience would have been too. I would also go as far as to say that the loss of self confidence induced by having to wear clothing that you didn't feel happy with could have been what brought on the teasing, not the appearance of the clothes themselves. If you didn't read my post in the Simpsons thread, that provides an elaboration on why I believe people are teased - the fact that it probably wasn't really your clothes, that was just the reason given.
I don't mean any of those comments directed at you personally, I'm just taking your example as a generic situation like many others that I've seen. Obviously I'm not a psychologist nor do I have any clue about who you are, but from what I've seen the ideas would hold true in your situation as much as any other.
Going even further off on a tangent, but hey. As I'm someone who is just finishing working their way through high school, I thought you might be interested in my POV about living with the image of a geek.
I mentioned similar observations in a previous post - basically it is not really your intelligence/clothing/hairstyle/speech impediment/acne/anything else that causes teasing. It's personality traits, with lack of confidence being the greatest homing beacon for people who will give you grief. I honestly have never worked out whether the bullies realise that they tease based on their victim's personality and simply give these other things as outward reasons, or whether they believe that the outward reasoning is truly what drives them and the personality link is just subconscious.
Unfortunately I don't have any magical formula for gaining confidence, but I do know one thing. People in my school are teased for all the typical things (dressing wrong, being a geek etc.). Those 'geeks' who are calm, confident and friendly (while still spending their time messing with computers and getting top grades) are not seen as targets because the bullies (consciously or otherwise) see that all they'll get from them is a laugh and a comment like "Yeah, I sure do hate being smart. It makes life so difficult." - the bully feels that they've got nowhere and simply moves on to another victim who doesn't have the confidence and as such will probably roll over and give the response that the bully is looking for, one that makes them feel that they've "succeeded" in making this person miserable.
I've rarely, if ever, seen a situation where the bullying can't be traced back to personality. And I'm not saying that a bully-suceptible personality is a bad thing, I know that I was that suceptible person for a while, but I also feel that as I've got older I've become more strong minded, and that gives me the conviction in my opinions that will prevent other people from laughing at them. That's the other thing that must be kept in mind - humans are very good at judging each other's emotional states and as such just saying or doing the same thing as a "cool" person isn't enough; if anything it'll single you out even more since you're acting like something you aren't - saying what you think but with the unshakable belief that you are correct is what really makes a difference. I can imagine that someone like David Cohen, someone funny enough to lead Futurama and confident enough to become head writer, would have had all the personality attributes to successfully deflect bullies. That's why he had a utopian high school experience (as you put it).
Everything I've just said is completely unscientific opinion, but it is supported pretty much 100% by my observations of the social hierachy at several different schools I've attended or been associated with. The other thing to keep in mind is that I'm not saying it's right to change your personality, I'm just saying that being completely sure of yourself (whoever "yourself" may be) is important.
Competing with Photoshop because it does vector and raster imaging? Isn't that like saying a Skoda is competing with a Porsche because they both have wheels and an engine?
As another poster said, Google's got server farms and related infrastructure that aren't exactly worthless, but they are obviously barely a drop in the $80bn bucket. Having said that though, Time Warner is also an IP company. Physical DVDs, film reels etc. aren't worth too much really - it's the IP that you put on them that people are paying for.
It's still overvalued, but not necessarily for the reasons you said.
Actually, if Longhorn is to be a nice, fast, secure, modern OS it needs to be released without all the crap that ensures compatability with older versions of Windows dragging it down. They obviously can't just drop all old software, so virtualising the old Windows versions (just like Apple did with Classic under OSX) would be the way to go.
Alternatively, Longhorn will still be bogged down with all the old shit and this will just be a half assed attempt to embrace, extend and exterminate other operating systems. We'll see.
Nice idea, but $126k is not much in terms of lawyer time (to put it in perspective, that's about 1/20th of what the legal team on the iPod battery case are reportedly taking). I'd use it where it will have the greatest impact - $100k to a legal team isn't a huge amount, however $10k to 10 OSS programmers (as someone suggested higher up) is some fair motivation to achieve great things.
I didn't say that. I said buy the cartridge and then download the ROM [to save the effort of building yourself a board to dump the ROMs into your computer from your own cartridge]. It's just media-shifting via a third party - I was under the impression that it's legal to do that, although I may be mistaken.
Y'know there's nothing wrong with media-shifting games that you own. I've seen plenty of collections of old games lying around people's houses, if they own the game but want to play it on the train it's just a little more practical to use a ROM dump on a PSP than bring along a console, TV and bag of cartridges.
On the other side of the coin, if I wanted to play Sonic 3 on my PSP (since it's one of my favourite games) I'd be quite happy to pay a few £ on eBay for an original cartridge so I'm then completely legit in downloading a ROM of that cartridge and running it under emulation.
Yes, many people need better parenting, but that doesn't mean a good teacher who engages with the class and makes them want to learn can't help the best (or worst) of students achieve more than someone who sits there and dishes out text books. Of course the parents have a large impact, but it's rediculous to say that a good teacher doesn't have a part to play - maybe even a greater part in the case of those who have a gap to fill that their parents left.
I'd also have to strongly disagree with the school uniform comment. As someone who wore a uniform for many years (UK schooling) I have to say there is practically no benefit to it. What most people don't realise is that competition over things like clothing is practically metaphorical - while outwardly a child may be teased for dressing "wrongly", they have actually been singled out because of a personality trait. Whether the bullies realise this or not I don't know, but it's always been the case in my experience. If you look at the classroom, the "cool kids" can dress like fucking idiots and pass it off as trendy whereas the "geeks" could emulate them nearly exactly and be called "wannabes". It's not _really_ what you look like that causes competition, it's who you are - it's just manifested in terms of clothing since that's the obvious thing; if you enforce uniform the same people will be teased, the bullies will just give a different reason.
Uniform also instills some very negative values: conformity is more valued than creativity, personal expression is something to stamped out and you must obey what someone above tells you rather than what you feel you should do.
If you read this, I'd appreciate hearing what you think, because I feel that many people outside of the school system only see how it works superficially rather than how the students interaction actually happens.
Hate to break it to ya, but Sony's already had to pay $90million to Immersion, a "minor player" who claimed a patent on the Dual Shock pad.
It's going to go the same way as the software industry is headed: everyone's infringing everyone else's patents so the only way to ensure your own safety is to have enough patents that you could turn them against the attacking party. This has the side effect of killing any small company who doesn't have a portfolio big enough to be a threat.
It's long been known that Intel run a little hot, so Zalman have gone extreme with a cooling solution that finally does the biz.
Pumping an impressive 25 cubic metres of air per second Zalman are confident that the 'Big Boy Turbo Mega Fan 2' will be able to keep any Intel CPU, up to and including the Pentium 4 670 3.8GHz, running cool in even the warmest conditions.
Developed with the help of the British Aerospace wind tunnel engineers, the BBTMF can pump enough air to pop you double glazing out, so it comes with several precautionary notes, mainly involving the suction and loss of small pets whilst in the vicinity of your machine.
Drawing an impressive 1400Watts of power, Zalman include a full instruction booklet on how to daisy chain 5 300W PSU's together to power the fan, and you get 50 starter cartridges free to get it spinning in the first place. Of course, you'll need a serious case upgrade too, and we would recommend the CoolerMaster 821 Garage, which comes with a tasteful variety of electronic doors and leaves enough room for even the largest GFX cards in SLI and a Nissan Micra too.
Slashdot Mirror
Score: 4, Insightful!? Aren't we supposed to be geeks? Aren't geeks supposed to like problem solving? There's a simple fix here: use a thin wire (with associated size, flexibility and weight advantages) which has plugs on both ends and will, as such, disconnect under tension. It's also easy to replace if it does break.
So I'm guilty until proven innocent of automatically having no care about the safety of myself and others purely due to my age?
I enjoy a debate and if you feel that under 25s are unsafe to drive I'd be interested in hearing why, but sweeping emotional generalisations don't really help to advance your point.
Errm, what exactly might I be doing wrong?
I'm not pushing up these numbers to make a point - if I can get £300-£500 insurance on a vaguely decent car I'll be interested, but filling in my exact details (but assuming I hold a full license) on the forms on the website spit out roughly the values given in my post above every time. I'm well aware that it's over 10 times the value of the car - that's why I was complaining in the first place!
There is a known gap between costs male and female drivers, although not as wide as what we're seeing, so I'm truly stumped as to why it's so low for your girlfriend, because my experience seems to be echoed by many people I know. Anything you can think of would be interesting to know.
Online quote from Churchill.com (who are considered fairly good for young people) for me to drive that Volvo (assuming I learned to drive) would be £2409.75, or about US$4250 comprehensive, or £2283.75 ($4050) for third party.
I don't know whether you'll read this, but you might want to know that you've made some completely incorrect assumptions about me. Firstly I have not had 6 months of experience - I don't drive at all since I simply can't afford insurance (yes, I could afford to save up for a car and petrol, but I can't pay over the cost of the car again to insure it). Secondly, I quite understand that the insurers need to charge more for statistically unsafe groups, but the figures they talk about are inflated at best - so a teenager is about twice as likely to have an accident, why is my premium raised by a factor of ten?
What I would give a shit about is the implications for the insurance companies to rip you off even worse than they already do. As an American you probably don't know how bad it already is - for me (a 17 year old male) to be insured on a basic, old car (say a VW bug) would cost somewhere between $2300 and $3500 (converted to US$ for your convenience). If they're mining all this data about exactly how and where I travel, they'll do anything in their power to declare me unsafe and raise my premiums. If I refuse to have a GPS tracker they'll assume I have something to hide and stick a statutory (and massive) penalty on me.
I may have low expectations, but I agree.
A recent example would be Apple - odd since shooflot seems to have had bad experience, but anyway - I recieved an iMac with a dead power supply, unfortunate but inevitably possible. Went to the website, found 'self service' warranty support, ordered a new PSU and had it in my machine the next day, as well as having a prepaid shipping box to get the old one back to them. No questions asked, no mess, no "please wait up to 28 days", just getting what I asked for and having it delivered as fast as could be expected was enough to make a good impression on me. They also shipped me a copy of Tiger for about £10 through their "up to date" program back when that was released, again no fuss, just providing what they promised if not more.
People seem to be either very happy or very annoyed with Apple support though, so maybe my experience is just lucky.
I may be mistaken, but didn't they announce they were switching the low end manchines first? They also said the switch would be completed by 2007, which means there won't be a machine to match a dual 2.7GHz G5 for a good two years yet (assuming they _do_ complete on time). While Macs do tend to outlive PCs, two years of use minimum plus a decent resale value isn't too bad a deal if you need a machine any time soon, and it will be supported for longer if you don't feel a need for the latest and greatest. Not a great deal, but not too bad.
Also it's a nice number cruncher in its own right - Linux PPC will be around for a long time yet so it's not like the machine dies when OSX support drops. Like I said, you won't get the greatest value by buying now but it's not an all round bad idea either.
Don't worry, it'll go something like this:
Squatter: Ha ha, I'm not selling for less than a billion dollars cash.
Google: Is $2billion in stock OK?
Squatter: Woohoo, I'm rich.
*3 seconds later*
Squatter: What do you mean Google stock just bombed? Are you telling me a company that made $3billion last year _isn't_ worth $80billion?
As Kesh said, it's not looks per se, it's integration and appropriate behaviour. I did also say that I'm sure some people (like you) are happy to put up with it - I actually used Windows and Linux quite a bit before moving to Mac, and I didn't like "getting used" to each app's individual behaviour on those two either so I guess it is a personal thing.
Some people may call it eye candy. If you use OpenOffice and the only thing you do notice is that it "looks different" then that's great for you. I do feel that the subtle things do make a difference though - hit the Expose key and pay attention to the windows, you'll notice they behave differently depending in which order they are on top of each other and even though you might not pick up on it when it's happening, the visual feedback does actually help work out where things go. Another example is hitting the "page end" key in a page in Safari and seeing the entire page scroll past very quickly, far faster than you can comprehend, but showing a rough idea of the text/image ratio and page length. Conversely, Firefox just jumps to the page bottom - nothing wrong with that, but it's just not quite as helpful.
Again it probably sounds like I'm being very petty here but all these small things (there are hundreds, and I'm sure there are many more I haven't noticed because they are, by nature, subtle) are really what separates OSX from the competition in my opinion. Attention to detail from the smallest thing to the largest is what adds up to make a user interface really work. Two things in isolation may sound a bit stupid but everything together makes all the difference.
The way I read the grandparent's idea of repealing it piece by piece was that it would ensure legal precident. If the entire act is just scrapped then you guys get your rights back, which is good, but there is nothing in place to stop them being taken away at a later date, which is bad. You have the precident that "The PATRIOT act was repealed" but say someone brings in laws X, Y and Z over a period of a few years they could quite easily have the combined power of the PATRIOT act without bashing into the fact that the PATRIOT act as a whole had been shot down. If each piece runs through the courts it takes time, which is bad, but lays down in stone the fact that "Rule X is bad and should not be law", which is good. It's not the act itself that's destroyed, but the ideas it tries to implement too.
...although between M$ Office and Open Office, I find myself wondering why they're even bothering...
I don't know if you've used it or not, but OpenOffice on OSX just doesn't flow properly at all. It may sound like a small thing, and I'm sure some people are happy to put up with it, but on a computer that carries a premium for design and "Just works" it really kicks the whole thing out when you have an app that doesn't 'feel' right, especially if you use it alot. Conversely, Keynote (which I had used long before the release of Pages) had impressed me from the start by being easier and slicker than the competition and Apple has Pages going the same way. OpenOffice is functional, but iWork is above and beyond.
As for MS Office, I don't personally like it as much as iWork anyway but for those in business it's really the only option - Apple wants to have a mature office suite in place as their user base expands, that way even if MS does decide to pull their suite from OSX it won't do as much damage - Apple don't want to look like the creation of the software was reactionary to MS's assumed withdrawl of Office v.X, even if it was in fact pre-empting it.
I wouldn't (and didn't) say that uniform has a direct impact on how a person thinks, but the underlying impression I always got was that the people in charge were most bothered about how their students looked to the public and that's why they enforced uniform. When those teaching you have attitudes like that it tends to abrade how much they seem to value you as an individual. Maybe I just think about things too much, but sitting there in a room all looking identical because of an order from above just sucked the life out of me, to be honest. As for thinking about what's cool that week, it does take time and effort you could spend on other things, but you don't have to do so if you don't feel like it - nobody says you have to follow fashion, doing so is self inflicted.
It also seems from your tone that you think I'm somebody who makes a point of being "nonconformist", which is an understandable conclusion to draw from what I said. I did go through a brief phase of doing so until I realised that doing things that aren't your natural personality for the explicit reason of being different is no better than following the crowd against your better judgement.
I've always been lucky enough to have (either via my parents or my own job) the clothes I want, so I can't directly relate to the first part of your post, but during my aforementioned "Look at me, I'm different" phase I did spend some time wearing things that you would think would act like a teasing magnet. I did draw a few comments, but my philosophy from the above post held true - confident deflection of their teasing stopped it within a matter of minutes and I was left to quite happily look stupid. I sympathise with what you said, but I do think that had your reaction to the teasing been different your experience would have been too. I would also go as far as to say that the loss of self confidence induced by having to wear clothing that you didn't feel happy with could have been what brought on the teasing, not the appearance of the clothes themselves. If you didn't read my post in the Simpsons thread, that provides an elaboration on why I believe people are teased - the fact that it probably wasn't really your clothes, that was just the reason given.
I don't mean any of those comments directed at you personally, I'm just taking your example as a generic situation like many others that I've seen. Obviously I'm not a psychologist nor do I have any clue about who you are, but from what I've seen the ideas would hold true in your situation as much as any other.
Going even further off on a tangent, but hey. As I'm someone who is just finishing working their way through high school, I thought you might be interested in my POV about living with the image of a geek.
I mentioned similar observations in a previous post - basically it is not really your intelligence/clothing/hairstyle/speech impediment/acne/anything else that causes teasing. It's personality traits, with lack of confidence being the greatest homing beacon for people who will give you grief. I honestly have never worked out whether the bullies realise that they tease based on their victim's personality and simply give these other things as outward reasons, or whether they believe that the outward reasoning is truly what drives them and the personality link is just subconscious.
Unfortunately I don't have any magical formula for gaining confidence, but I do know one thing. People in my school are teased for all the typical things (dressing wrong, being a geek etc.). Those 'geeks' who are calm, confident and friendly (while still spending their time messing with computers and getting top grades) are not seen as targets because the bullies (consciously or otherwise) see that all they'll get from them is a laugh and a comment like "Yeah, I sure do hate being smart. It makes life so difficult." - the bully feels that they've got nowhere and simply moves on to another victim who doesn't have the confidence and as such will probably roll over and give the response that the bully is looking for, one that makes them feel that they've "succeeded" in making this person miserable.
I've rarely, if ever, seen a situation where the bullying can't be traced back to personality. And I'm not saying that a bully-suceptible personality is a bad thing, I know that I was that suceptible person for a while, but I also feel that as I've got older I've become more strong minded, and that gives me the conviction in my opinions that will prevent other people from laughing at them. That's the other thing that must be kept in mind - humans are very good at judging each other's emotional states and as such just saying or doing the same thing as a "cool" person isn't enough; if anything it'll single you out even more since you're acting like something you aren't - saying what you think but with the unshakable belief that you are correct is what really makes a difference. I can imagine that someone like David Cohen, someone funny enough to lead Futurama and confident enough to become head writer, would have had all the personality attributes to successfully deflect bullies. That's why he had a utopian high school experience (as you put it).
Everything I've just said is completely unscientific opinion, but it is supported pretty much 100% by my observations of the social hierachy at several different schools I've attended or been associated with. The other thing to keep in mind is that I'm not saying it's right to change your personality, I'm just saying that being completely sure of yourself (whoever "yourself" may be) is important.
This is a Skoda (or at least what they were stereotypically like before they sorted out their image, as many other posters have pointed out)
Competing with Photoshop because it does vector and raster imaging? Isn't that like saying a Skoda is competing with a Porsche because they both have wheels and an engine?
Nitpick, but IMO mouses are dumb when it comes to graphical work too - I find a tablet much nicer.
As another poster said, Google's got server farms and related infrastructure that aren't exactly worthless, but they are obviously barely a drop in the $80bn bucket. Having said that though, Time Warner is also an IP company. Physical DVDs, film reels etc. aren't worth too much really - it's the IP that you put on them that people are paying for.
It's still overvalued, but not necessarily for the reasons you said.
Actually, if Longhorn is to be a nice, fast, secure, modern OS it needs to be released without all the crap that ensures compatability with older versions of Windows dragging it down. They obviously can't just drop all old software, so virtualising the old Windows versions (just like Apple did with Classic under OSX) would be the way to go.
Alternatively, Longhorn will still be bogged down with all the old shit and this will just be a half assed attempt to embrace, extend and exterminate other operating systems. We'll see.
Nice idea, but $126k is not much in terms of lawyer time (to put it in perspective, that's about 1/20th of what the legal team on the iPod battery case are reportedly taking). I'd use it where it will have the greatest impact - $100k to a legal team isn't a huge amount, however $10k to 10 OSS programmers (as someone suggested higher up) is some fair motivation to achieve great things.
I didn't say that. I said buy the cartridge and then download the ROM [to save the effort of building yourself a board to dump the ROMs into your computer from your own cartridge]. It's just media-shifting via a third party - I was under the impression that it's legal to do that, although I may be mistaken.
And yes, I'll take three bridges please.
Y'know there's nothing wrong with media-shifting games that you own. I've seen plenty of collections of old games lying around people's houses, if they own the game but want to play it on the train it's just a little more practical to use a ROM dump on a PSP than bring along a console, TV and bag of cartridges.
On the other side of the coin, if I wanted to play Sonic 3 on my PSP (since it's one of my favourite games) I'd be quite happy to pay a few £ on eBay for an original cartridge so I'm then completely legit in downloading a ROM of that cartridge and running it under emulation.
Yes, many people need better parenting, but that doesn't mean a good teacher who engages with the class and makes them want to learn can't help the best (or worst) of students achieve more than someone who sits there and dishes out text books. Of course the parents have a large impact, but it's rediculous to say that a good teacher doesn't have a part to play - maybe even a greater part in the case of those who have a gap to fill that their parents left.
I'd also have to strongly disagree with the school uniform comment. As someone who wore a uniform for many years (UK schooling) I have to say there is practically no benefit to it. What most people don't realise is that competition over things like clothing is practically metaphorical - while outwardly a child may be teased for dressing "wrongly", they have actually been singled out because of a personality trait. Whether the bullies realise this or not I don't know, but it's always been the case in my experience. If you look at the classroom, the "cool kids" can dress like fucking idiots and pass it off as trendy whereas the "geeks" could emulate them nearly exactly and be called "wannabes". It's not _really_ what you look like that causes competition, it's who you are - it's just manifested in terms of clothing since that's the obvious thing; if you enforce uniform the same people will be teased, the bullies will just give a different reason.
Uniform also instills some very negative values: conformity is more valued than creativity, personal expression is something to stamped out and you must obey what someone above tells you rather than what you feel you should do.
If you read this, I'd appreciate hearing what you think, because I feel that many people outside of the school system only see how it works superficially rather than how the students interaction actually happens.
Hate to break it to ya, but Sony's already had to pay $90million to Immersion, a "minor player" who claimed a patent on the Dual Shock pad.
It's going to go the same way as the software industry is headed: everyone's infringing everyone else's patents so the only way to ensure your own safety is to have enough patents that you could turn them against the attacking party. This has the side effect of killing any small company who doesn't have a portfolio big enough to be a threat.
Also the print friendly page and article text: