> and the keyboard/mouse configuration is less intuitive > then a gamepad.
If you're NOT kidding, you're completely out of your mind.
Back in college, I had a group of non-CS-major friends who thought they were hot stuff on Goldeneye, for the N64. As I understand it, Goldeneye is STILL considered just about the best console FPS, and one of the best N64 games, ever released. I thought it was rather low-quality and pedestrian, myself. But whatever. A couple of them could even beat the game on "00 Level". Oooooo...
Eventually, I finally got them to come into the lab at night, and set up a Quake 2 deathmatch. For starters, only being able to play a game with just four people at a time, and being confined to one corner of the screen is lame. But I digress. I spanked them... even the "I finished Goldeneye on 00 Level" guys. And I don't just mean I won. I totally dominated. And on real FPSs, I was never really even that GOOD.... strictly average. But playing with those POS console controllers, and their associated crutches (cheats like auto-aim, for example) instilled so many bad habits into them that even the best were all but helpless against just an average "mouse and keyboard" player.
It'll be interesting to see if the xBox2 and PS3 versions of Q4 will be able to play on-line against the real version. Specifically, it'd be interesting to see the deathmatch kill stats between them. I'd bet good money that said stats would bear me out.
> Where do you think your daily food comes from? A farm.
In the era of routine, easy, and cheap interstellar FTL travel, I'd expect that it would come from a replicator. And even if you take away the FTL drive by cranking Firefly's tech level down several notches with that silly "one solar system" model; you're still up in the protein re-sequencer and hydroponics pod zone.
Either way, there's no WAY that the most efficient way to get $X amount of protein from point $a to point $b is to load a bunch of walking shit-factories into the hold.
Now here's a flip... Me being the one who's on the side against Apple, and the other guy being a sycophantic fanboi. Apple vs. almost anybody else, and it'd be the other way around and I'd be getting flamed by the trolls.
But DRM is still DRM, even when it's implemented by Apple. And Steve Jobs' reality distortion field cannot change that.
But I remember the story. It was a short story by Larry Niven. I remember it being in one of his anthologies, either "Playgrounds of the Mind" or "N-Space". Dunno where else he it was published, but it was definitely in one or the other of those two.
Well, when some prick decides to falsely accuse you of some wrongdoing that you... well... haven't DONE; I think it's a perfectly natural reaction to want to rip the SOB a new A-hole as viciously as possible.
To what degree you give in to that temptation, that's another story. But it's clear, that once the other party starts the lying, they deserve not the slightest sympathy for anything bad that happens to them.
In the parent's case, I would have made damn well sure that I WAS in the right, that the parking space was mine, and told the SOB go go fuck himself. Then, if I ever found his car there, I'd have it towed.
Oh.... did I mention that that IS, in fact, my #1 pet peeve of all time, the surefire way to get me to loathe and resent you forever.... to attempt to blame me fore a wrong I didn't do?
> when I buy music, I buy the actual album, supporting my local > independant record store.
Do what I do:
When you buy that album, but it *USED* from your indie record store. That way you not only support your local record store (moreso... they usually have a higher profit margin on their used merch than on new); but you save yourself a few bucks; and you deny the likes of the RIAA/Metallica the bucks that you DO spend.
This way I get to have my cake, and eat it too. And there's a local record shop within walking distance of my work; so it's no problem to drop in every so often and see what's in the used bin. And I'm more than willing to wait until a used copy shows up, if that'll deny a little bit of money to hillary and lars.
.... and not just with movies, but with television shows as well.
A guy I used to work with was a big fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Now, apparently, the DVDs for Buffy got released in the UK before they were available here. Since WB or UPN or whoever wound up owning Buffy wouldn't sell him the DVDs legitimately, he bought the UK versions from some grey-market website. Then he hooked up with a guy who had a DVD-ROM set to the UK's region, and got them re-encoded from PAL into NTSC VCDs so he could watch them on his own television. Major pain in the ass, if you ask me.
And just to spite hollywood for making him go through so much hassle to PAY to see his favorite show, guess what he did? That's right... those VCDs became available to all takers on IRC and Gnutella and Kazaa and probably quite a few other places as well (this predates bittorrent).
> "disorderly conduct" sounds like legal bullshit to me
That's all it is, really. "Disorderly conduct", and its siblings: "disturbing the peace", "malicious mischief", and "resisting arrest without violence", are really only there to give the pigs a justification to harass you when they take a disliking to you, but you haven't actually done anything legitimately wrong. When I was a teenager, I was arrested on one or another about half a dozen times... and wasn't ever actually prosecuted.... not even once. Lawyers may be a bit slimey, but remember, they're STILL several steps on the evolutionary ladder above the filth. And the local DA recognized that said "offenses" were only there to give them an excuse to hassle kids, and was a believer in "no harm, no foul" and "boys will be boys".
Of course, the fact that said offenses are total bullshit won't keep you from getting arrested. Uniforms LOVE their power trips, after all. And some DAs might actually be co-conspirators with the filth themselves. So YMMV.
> (anyone out there know if Great Whites have any natural > predators besides humans?)
I don't think they actually EAT the things, but pods of Dolphin and Orca are known to attack and kill sharks that get too close to a pod that includes calves. Even in the wild, intelligence and teamwork win out over "nature's most perfect killing machine". Jaws, meet your doom. His name is flipper.
OTOH, if they don't haves calves to protect, those very same cetaceans are content to give sharks a wide berth. It's not like jaws is being hunted for food or sport; so the example probably fails your "top predator" test.
> Well, perhaps most people don't use GPS directly, but they > would notice all right. It would cause a major disturbance to > shipping and aircraft communications, with economic > upheavals as a consequence.
Hardly. Lack of GPS might make life difficult for the "boys with toys" in the air and at sea, but the professionals who conduct actual commerce there would hardly bat an eye. GPS only gained widespread popularity in the last decade or so. How do you suppose aircraft navigated in the decades before? How do you suppose ships have navigated for the CENTURIES before GPS?
Walk into a flight school right now, and you'll still have to learn to navigate with a gyrocompass, VORs, ODBs, and a sectional chart, to get your instrument rating. The FAA's not going to change this any time soon either. And to fly 747s around, you need YEARS of experience doing so. GPS is a supplement to traditional navigation, not a replacement. The only pilots who will suffer for lack of GPS are the JFK Jr's of the world, who never actually bothered to learn IFR, but who think they're hot shit because they can punch some GPS coordinates into a computer. Not exactly the lynchpins of the economy, these.
Likewise, at sea.... Do you really think that the navigators of the world's freighters, tankers, cruise ships, and such, chucked their paper charts, sextants, chronometers, and Loran gear over the side the day they put in that GPS receiver with it's fancy-schmancy electronic charts? Not a chance. GPS goes down, and a professional navigator will simply take the last good fix, keep his position by dead-reckoning and the ship's log, and correct it every so often with his sextant and chronometer. No big deal. It's the wankers in their Boston Whalers, who have no business on the open sea in the first place, who will get themselves lost. Again, no big economic disruption there.
The problems of ariel and nautical navigation were solved problems, for professionals, many Many MANY years before GPS. And they knowledge has not gone away. It's the professionals on whom our economy relies. And, for them, GPS is a useful supplement to traditional navigation. But it's not a replacement, and they don't rely on it as their sole means of knowing where they are. As useful a toy as it is for us amateurs, the professionals would get along quite fine without it.
Am I alone in being disappointed in just about all Babylon 5 after season four?
I mean... I understand that JMS had to rush to get the "President Clark/Earth's Civil War" storyline resolved by the end of S4, because it wasn't certain if there WAS going to be a season five. But after the drama, tension, and climax of S4, five was a long, drawn-out, letdown. "Whiney goths in space" is NOT good television; and it was all I could do not to change the channel every time that wanker Byron was on screen.
After that, "In The Beginning" and "Thirdspace" got my hopes up. But "Call To Arms", and "River of Souls" were lackluster. And "Crusade" was sad.... just plain sad. I saw the first ten minutes of "Legend of the Rangers", at a friend's house, and could only think that I wasn't missing much, not having cable.
This movie is going to have to be seriously spectacular in order to convince me that B5, as good as it USED to be, isn't played out.
But when the Angels return, and your precious little tanks smash themselves in a pathetic show of futility against their AT fields; THEN you'll be thanking the Japanese for getting a head start on the development of mecha necessary to actually fight, and kill, an Angel.
They went from being the organization that put a man on the moon less than a decade after setting out to do so; to the organization that's done nothing but dick around in LEO for the last twenty years.... using hardware that was broken by design ten years before.
They've botched and cancelled every shuttle replacement since, and have fumbled the space station down into an almost pathetic shadow of what it was supposed to be. Oh, and those twelve men are STILL, thirty-five years later, the only humans ever to set foot an any astronomical body other than the Earth.
When I was a kid, some of my most favorite books were a set of aerospace encyclopedias my dad found in a thrift store. They were published in 1968, when NASA was competent, and about to land men on the moon. They were written with the assumption that NASA in particular, and the US aerospace industry in general, were going to REMAIN competent and continue the pace they had set. To go back and look at those books NOW, to see where we're SUPPOSED to be in space and on the moon and on Mars... it makes a sad mockery of the pathetic creature NASA has become.... just another petty bureaucracy, dominated by the ass-kissers and the ass-coverers. To hell with them.
By the time NASA gets their sorry selves back to the moon; I wouldn't be surprised if Burt Rutan has already relocated Scaled Composites headquarters there, and you can take a Virgin flight to Richard Branson's Tranquility Resort, Casino, and Historic Landmark Museum.
I have a fairly low-end Nokia (3595) that does exactly that.
It's "time of day" (Return to "normal" profile at 2230.) based, rather than "timer" (Return to "normal" profile in two hours.) based, though. But it's the same general idea.
I use it so often, I don't even have to look at the screen to set up an expiring silent profile. It's [Menu]-[3]-[2]-[3], punch in the time of day the phone should start ringing again, [OK] (Same button that used to be [Menu]), and I'm good to go.
I can't even remember the last time I had my phone ring at a movie. See... no jammers necessary.
There's a simple and easy way to counter that, though.
Just recognize it, and account for it. If you assume that it's all roasted darker than normal, just buy one step lighter than you normally would. Don't bother with their french roast at all, and if you like other french roasts, go with italian roast, and so on.
> they are unwilling to pay 99 cents to download a song, they > are unwilling to buy music at the retail level -- there is no > excuse left.
Yes there *IS* an excuse. A fairly major and important one.
When you buy that $.99 song from the iTMS, the majority of your money... I believe it's $.67... goes to the record label, which then.... maybe.... gives a tiny cut of that to the artist. That is just not acceptable. When, after Apple takes their cut, the money goes ENTIRELY and ONLY to the artist, and NOT to anyone affiliated in any way with the RIAA; then, and only then, will the iTMS be a proper way to buy music.
ANY solution, including the $.99 iTMS downloads (And yes, on other issues, I probably COULD be fairly called an Apple fanboi.), that delivers even a single penny to the likes of hillary rosen and lars ulrich is entirely unacceptable.
The last "Elite-like" game I bought was Terminus. Not only did it promise an "Elite-like" game; it had a nifty (in theory( multiplayer model; a nifty (in theory) build-your-own-ship model; and was released simultaneously (as in: in the same box) for Macintosh, Linux AND pc, something I wholeheartedly wanted to support.
The actual game (including the aforementioned niftiness) was so badly executed that I was turned off to the entire genre for quite a long time.
.... was nothing more than a ripoff of Kurosawa's "The Hidden Fortress", Lucas and his fanboys have no business in the world complaining about "The Last Starfighter", or anything else, ripping off Star Wars.
> If she had some Force juice in her blood, it was dormant and > undetectable (as per the plan).
It's exactly that "force juice" in hre blood that is a BIG part of the problem.
Leia was in Vader's direct custody for quite some time in ANH. With hardly a doubt, she had to undergo a medical examination at some point during her time in custody; if only to determine just how far they could go in extracting the location of the rebel base from her. (After all, it wouldn't do if she turned out to have an allergy to the truth serum the torture droid uses, and dies from a histamine reaction.)
Even if Leia wasn't an active force user, it *IS* explicitly stated, in ROTJ, that she has the potential. And THAT means she has a high midichlorian count. And THAT shows up on a simple blood test.
Remember, Vader is taking a PERSONAL interest in this case. And he KNOWS that he has at least one long-lost child out there. (He expressed no surprise when Palpatine informed him that the "son of Skywalker" was out and about.) The guy's not stupid. Where there's one, there could easily be more. And he's always on the lookout for a new force-user to help him usurp the emperor... no reason a girl wouldn't do as well as a boy.
> Tell you what, can you get me new boards for an IBM RT pc? I > highly doubt it.
I've actually dealt with IBM in the "we need support and replacement parts for legacy hardware" capacity before.
And yes, if you've bought IBM in a professional/enterprise capacity, you've also bought the support contract. And if you've bought the support contract (And if you didn't, you deserve to be fired. Why the hell would you pay the IBM premium except for their support?), you can get parts and expert support for damn near everything IBM's ever made; all the way back to card punches/readers, and farther I'd bet. Remember, when you buy IBM, you're buying a MTBF of thirty YEARS.
But in a whole topic about Star Trek nerddom, I just couldn't resist.
Cone to think of it, Chinese characters HAVE been notably scarce in Trek. We've had Japanese on two different bridge crews, a Korean on another, and a handful of miscellaneous Japanese characters amongst the rest of the crew; but I'm having a hard time coming up with even a single actual Chinese character. Curious oversight, that.
FUN FACT: Though George Takei and Gene Roddenberry have both said, in interviews, that the character is most definitely Japanese-American, Sulu is NOT a Japanese name (Hikaru is though.). In fact, you can't even SAY Sulu in Japanese. Sulu got his last name from the Sulu sea, down by the Philippines. When Star Trek is dubbed into Japanese, Mr. Sulu becomes Mr Tato.
An extended Apollo program, culminating in a permanent colony on the moon, would've been the "critical training grounds for anything more ambitious". If we had kept at the rate we were going into space during the '60s, we'd have already HAVE a permanent outpost in space, and probably have already sent manned missions to Mars.
Dicking around in LEO is a massive step back from where we used to be, and from where we should be.
Slashdot Mirror
> and the keyboard/mouse configuration is less intuitive
> then a gamepad.
If you're NOT kidding, you're completely out of your mind.
Back in college, I had a group of non-CS-major friends who thought they were hot stuff on Goldeneye, for the N64. As I understand it, Goldeneye is STILL considered just about the best console FPS, and one of the best N64 games, ever released. I thought it was rather low-quality and pedestrian, myself. But whatever. A couple of them could even beat the game on "00 Level". Oooooo...
Eventually, I finally got them to come into the lab at night, and set up a Quake 2 deathmatch. For starters, only being able to play a game with just four people at a time, and being confined to one corner of the screen is lame. But I digress. I spanked them... even the "I finished Goldeneye on 00 Level" guys. And I don't just mean I won. I totally dominated. And on real FPSs, I was never really even that GOOD.... strictly average. But playing with those POS console controllers, and their associated crutches (cheats like auto-aim, for example) instilled so many bad habits into them that even the best were all but helpless against just an average "mouse and keyboard" player.
It'll be interesting to see if the xBox2 and PS3 versions of Q4 will be able to play on-line against the real version. Specifically, it'd be interesting to see the deathmatch kill stats between them. I'd bet good money that said stats would bear me out.
cya,
john
> Where do you think your daily food comes from? A farm.
In the era of routine, easy, and cheap interstellar FTL travel, I'd expect that it would come from a replicator. And even if you take away the FTL drive by cranking Firefly's tech level down several notches with that silly "one solar system" model; you're still up in the protein re-sequencer and hydroponics pod zone.
Either way, there's no WAY that the most efficient way to get $X amount of protein from point $a to point $b is to load a bunch of walking shit-factories into the hold.
cya,
john
Now here's a flip... Me being the one who's on the side against Apple, and the other guy being a sycophantic fanboi. Apple vs. almost anybody else, and it'd be the other way around and I'd be getting flamed by the trolls.
But DRM is still DRM, even when it's implemented by Apple. And Steve Jobs' reality distortion field cannot change that.
cya,
john
But I remember the story. It was a short story by Larry Niven. I remember it being in one of his anthologies, either "Playgrounds of the Mind" or "N-Space". Dunno where else he it was published, but it was definitely in one or the other of those two.
cya,
john
Well, when some prick decides to falsely accuse you of some wrongdoing that you... well... haven't DONE; I think it's a perfectly natural reaction to want to rip the SOB a new A-hole as viciously as possible.
To what degree you give in to that temptation, that's another story. But it's clear, that once the other party starts the lying, they deserve not the slightest sympathy for anything bad that happens to them.
In the parent's case, I would have made damn well sure that I WAS in the right, that the parking space was mine, and told the SOB go go fuck himself. Then, if I ever found his car there, I'd have it towed.
Oh.... did I mention that that IS, in fact, my #1 pet peeve of all time, the surefire way to get me to loathe and resent you forever.... to attempt to blame me fore a wrong I didn't do?
cya,
john
> when I buy music, I buy the actual album, supporting my local
> independant record store.
Do what I do:
When you buy that album, but it *USED* from your indie record store. That way you not only support your local record store (moreso... they usually have a higher profit margin on their used merch than on new); but you save yourself a few bucks; and you deny the likes of the RIAA/Metallica the bucks that you DO spend.
This way I get to have my cake, and eat it too. And there's a local record shop within walking distance of my work; so it's no problem to drop in every so often and see what's in the used bin. And I'm more than willing to wait until a used copy shows up, if that'll deny a little bit of money to hillary and lars.
cya,
john
.... and not just with movies, but with television shows as well.
A guy I used to work with was a big fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Now, apparently, the DVDs for Buffy got released in the UK before they were available here. Since WB or UPN or whoever wound up owning Buffy wouldn't sell him the DVDs legitimately, he bought the UK versions from some grey-market website. Then he hooked up with a guy who had a DVD-ROM set to the UK's region, and got them re-encoded from PAL into NTSC VCDs so he could watch them on his own television. Major pain in the ass, if you ask me.
And just to spite hollywood for making him go through so much hassle to PAY to see his favorite show, guess what he did? That's right... those VCDs became available to all takers on IRC and Gnutella and Kazaa and probably quite a few other places as well (this predates bittorrent).
cya,
john
I want the Hello Kitty Ferrari!!!
Very kawaii. Very cool. Must have.
cya,
john
> "disorderly conduct" sounds like legal bullshit to me
That's all it is, really. "Disorderly conduct", and its siblings: "disturbing the peace", "malicious mischief", and "resisting arrest without violence", are really only there to give the pigs a justification to harass you when they take a disliking to you, but you haven't actually done anything legitimately wrong. When I was a teenager, I was arrested on one or another about half a dozen times... and wasn't ever actually prosecuted.... not even once. Lawyers may be a bit slimey, but remember, they're STILL several steps on the evolutionary ladder above the filth. And the local DA recognized that said "offenses" were only there to give them an excuse to hassle kids, and was a believer in "no harm, no foul" and "boys will be boys".
Of course, the fact that said offenses are total bullshit won't keep you from getting arrested. Uniforms LOVE their power trips, after all. And some DAs might actually be co-conspirators with the filth themselves. So YMMV.
cya,
john
> (anyone out there know if Great Whites have any natural
> predators besides humans?)
I don't think they actually EAT the things, but pods of Dolphin and Orca are known to attack and kill sharks that get too close to a pod that includes calves. Even in the wild, intelligence and teamwork win out over "nature's most perfect killing machine". Jaws, meet your doom. His name is flipper.
OTOH, if they don't haves calves to protect, those very same cetaceans are content to give sharks a wide berth. It's not like jaws is being hunted for food or sport; so the example probably fails your "top predator" test.
cya,
john
> Well, perhaps most people don't use GPS directly, but they
> would notice all right. It would cause a major disturbance to
> shipping and aircraft communications, with economic
> upheavals as a consequence.
Hardly. Lack of GPS might make life difficult for the "boys with toys" in the air and at sea, but the professionals who conduct actual commerce there would hardly bat an eye. GPS only gained widespread popularity in the last decade or so. How do you suppose aircraft navigated in the decades before? How do you suppose ships have navigated for the CENTURIES before GPS?
Walk into a flight school right now, and you'll still have to learn to navigate with a gyrocompass, VORs, ODBs, and a sectional chart, to get your instrument rating. The FAA's not going to change this any time soon either. And to fly 747s around, you need YEARS of experience doing so. GPS is a supplement to traditional navigation, not a replacement. The only pilots who will suffer for lack of GPS are the JFK Jr's of the world, who never actually bothered to learn IFR, but who think they're hot shit because they can punch some GPS coordinates into a computer. Not exactly the lynchpins of the economy, these.
Likewise, at sea.... Do you really think that the navigators of the world's freighters, tankers, cruise ships, and such, chucked their paper charts, sextants, chronometers, and Loran gear over the side the day they put in that GPS receiver with it's fancy-schmancy electronic charts? Not a chance. GPS goes down, and a professional navigator will simply take the last good fix, keep his position by dead-reckoning and the ship's log, and correct it every so often with his sextant and chronometer. No big deal. It's the wankers in their Boston Whalers, who have no business on the open sea in the first place, who will get themselves lost. Again, no big economic disruption there.
The problems of ariel and nautical navigation were solved problems, for professionals, many Many MANY years before GPS. And they knowledge has not gone away. It's the professionals on whom our economy relies. And, for them, GPS is a useful supplement to traditional navigation. But it's not a replacement, and they don't rely on it as their sole means of knowing where they are. As useful a toy as it is for us amateurs, the professionals would get along quite fine without it.
cya,
john
Am I alone in being disappointed in just about all Babylon 5 after season four?
I mean... I understand that JMS had to rush to get the "President Clark/Earth's Civil War" storyline resolved by the end of S4, because it wasn't certain if there WAS going to be a season five. But after the drama, tension, and climax of S4, five was a long, drawn-out, letdown. "Whiney goths in space" is NOT good television; and it was all I could do not to change the channel every time that wanker Byron was on screen.
After that, "In The Beginning" and "Thirdspace" got my hopes up. But "Call To Arms", and "River of Souls" were lackluster. And "Crusade" was sad.... just plain sad. I saw the first ten minutes of "Legend of the Rangers", at a friend's house, and could only think that I wasn't missing much, not having cable.
This movie is going to have to be seriously spectacular in order to convince me that B5, as good as it USED to be, isn't played out.
cya,
john
But when the Angels return, and your precious little tanks smash themselves in a pathetic show of futility against their AT fields; THEN you'll be thanking the Japanese for getting a head start on the development of mecha necessary to actually fight, and kill, an Angel.
cya,
john
They went from being the organization that put a man on the moon less than a decade after setting out to do so; to the organization that's done nothing but dick around in LEO for the last twenty years.... using hardware that was broken by design ten years before.
They've botched and cancelled every shuttle replacement since, and have fumbled the space station down into an almost pathetic shadow of what it was supposed to be. Oh, and those twelve men are STILL, thirty-five years later, the only humans ever to set foot an any astronomical body other than the Earth.
When I was a kid, some of my most favorite books were a set of aerospace encyclopedias my dad found in a thrift store. They were published in 1968, when NASA was competent, and about to land men on the moon. They were written with the assumption that NASA in particular, and the US aerospace industry in general, were going to REMAIN competent and continue the pace they had set. To go back and look at those books NOW, to see where we're SUPPOSED to be in space and on the moon and on Mars... it makes a sad mockery of the pathetic creature NASA has become.... just another petty bureaucracy, dominated by the ass-kissers and the ass-coverers. To hell with them.
By the time NASA gets their sorry selves back to the moon; I wouldn't be surprised if Burt Rutan has already relocated Scaled Composites headquarters there, and you can take a Virgin flight to Richard Branson's Tranquility Resort, Casino, and Historic Landmark Museum.
cya,
john
I have a fairly low-end Nokia (3595) that does exactly that.
It's "time of day" (Return to "normal" profile at 2230.) based, rather than "timer" (Return to "normal" profile in two hours.) based, though. But it's the same general idea.
I use it so often, I don't even have to look at the screen to set up an expiring silent profile. It's [Menu]-[3]-[2]-[3], punch in the time of day the phone should start ringing again, [OK] (Same button that used to be [Menu]), and I'm good to go.
I can't even remember the last time I had my phone ring at a movie. See... no jammers necessary.
cya,
john
There's a simple and easy way to counter that, though.
Just recognize it, and account for it. If you assume that it's all roasted darker than normal, just buy one step lighter than you normally would. Don't bother with their french roast at all, and if you like other french roasts, go with italian roast, and so on.
cya,
john
> they are unwilling to pay 99 cents to download a song, they
> are unwilling to buy music at the retail level -- there is no
> excuse left.
Yes there *IS* an excuse. A fairly major and important one.
When you buy that $.99 song from the iTMS, the majority of your money... I believe it's $.67... goes to the record label, which then.... maybe.... gives a tiny cut of that to the artist. That is just not acceptable. When, after Apple takes their cut, the money goes ENTIRELY and ONLY to the artist, and NOT to anyone affiliated in any way with the RIAA; then, and only then, will the iTMS be a proper way to buy music.
ANY solution, including the $.99 iTMS downloads (And yes, on other issues, I probably COULD be fairly called an Apple fanboi.), that delivers even a single penny to the likes of hillary rosen and lars ulrich is entirely unacceptable.
And that's why I DON'T use iTMS.
cya,
john
The last "Elite-like" game I bought was Terminus. Not only did it promise an "Elite-like" game; it had a nifty (in theory( multiplayer model; a nifty (in theory) build-your-own-ship model; and was released simultaneously (as in: in the same box) for Macintosh, Linux AND pc, something I wholeheartedly wanted to support.
The actual game (including the aforementioned niftiness) was so badly executed that I was turned off to the entire genre for quite a long time.
*sigh*
cya,
john
.... was nothing more than a ripoff of Kurosawa's "The Hidden Fortress", Lucas and his fanboys have no business in the world complaining about "The Last Starfighter", or anything else, ripping off Star Wars.
cya,
john
> If she had some Force juice in her blood, it was dormant and
> undetectable (as per the plan).
It's exactly that "force juice" in hre blood that is a BIG part of the problem.
Leia was in Vader's direct custody for quite some time in ANH. With hardly a doubt, she had to undergo a medical examination at some point during her time in custody; if only to determine just how far they could go in extracting the location of the rebel base from her. (After all, it wouldn't do if she turned out to have an allergy to the truth serum the torture droid uses, and dies from a histamine reaction.)
Even if Leia wasn't an active force user, it *IS* explicitly stated, in ROTJ, that she has the potential. And THAT means she has a high midichlorian count. And THAT shows up on a simple blood test.
Remember, Vader is taking a PERSONAL interest in this case. And he KNOWS that he has at least one long-lost child out there. (He expressed no surprise when Palpatine informed him that the "son of Skywalker" was out and about.) The guy's not stupid. Where there's one, there could easily be more. And he's always on the lookout for a new force-user to help him usurp the emperor... no reason a girl wouldn't do as well as a boy.
cya,
john
> Tell you what, can you get me new boards for an IBM RT pc? I
> highly doubt it.
I've actually dealt with IBM in the "we need support and replacement parts for legacy hardware" capacity before.
And yes, if you've bought IBM in a professional/enterprise capacity, you've also bought the support contract. And if you've bought the support contract (And if you didn't, you deserve to be fired. Why the hell would you pay the IBM premium except for their support?), you can get parts and expert support for damn near everything IBM's ever made; all the way back to card punches/readers, and farther I'd bet. Remember, when you buy IBM, you're buying a MTBF of thirty YEARS.
cya,
john
.... that the main problems were going to be the Zombies and the Damn Dirty Apes?
At least, that's what they tell me at the NRA meeting.
cya,
john
But in a whole topic about Star Trek nerddom, I just couldn't resist.
Cone to think of it, Chinese characters HAVE been notably scarce in Trek. We've had Japanese on two different bridge crews, a Korean on another, and a handful of miscellaneous Japanese characters amongst the rest of the crew; but I'm having a hard time coming up with even a single actual Chinese character. Curious oversight, that.
FUN FACT: Though George Takei and Gene Roddenberry have both said, in interviews, that the character is most definitely Japanese-American, Sulu is NOT a Japanese name (Hikaru is though.). In fact, you can't even SAY Sulu in Japanese. Sulu got his last name from the Sulu sea, down by the Philippines. When Star Trek is dubbed into Japanese, Mr. Sulu becomes Mr Tato.
cya,
john
Who was Chinese-American on ANY of the Star Trek bridge crews? Not a one that I can think of.
cya,
john
No...
An extended Apollo program, culminating in a permanent colony on the moon, would've been the "critical training grounds for anything more ambitious". If we had kept at the rate we were going into space during the '60s, we'd have already HAVE a permanent outpost in space, and probably have already sent manned missions to Mars.
Dicking around in LEO is a massive step back from where we used to be, and from where we should be.
cya,
john