"In the end, Aiden, it's your choice. Do you want to have a car, a house and a family when you are 30? Do you love being a software engineer at the same time? If so, you literally need to get a life. Forget the dream about stuff being free and stop advocating it. It's idiocy. It's bigotry."
I'm not sure about his definitions of idiocy and bigotry, and I suspect that a remedial English class might help with that, however he does live in a world where there are numerous free things that are there for something other than marketing.
This kind of person is exactly the spirit of evil in terms of holding a gun to people's heads in favour of collecting cash, and why we put these dolts in positions of power always annoys me, because they're concerned with personal gain rather than advancing the art or contributing to the pool of knowledge.
Sure, the days of patronage might be dead (VCs are bound to be nervous know that the stock traders, having made their millions on churn'n'burn), but that doesn't mean that you can't produce something for the love of it.
Currently this is the big problem with the modern world writ large; charge for everything, charge for nothing.
Idiots tend to go for the extremes when they're trying to prove a point, erecting a strawman argument to show that their worldview is correct...really desperate idiots tend to multiply the strawmen as much as possible and as quickly as possible. The reasonable consider all sides first.
So I'm in the middle, manufacturing programs both for pay and for free. I don't give a crap that people won't know my name; fame's for the Hollywood airheads...join a stage school if you want fame. Become a lawyer if you want cash. Plastic Surgeon is you want crappy TV shows about your life. Become a programmer if you want to tinker with the flow of information.
This purient asshole is the kind of person that spammers are. They don't give a crap about the people they annoy. They don't care that occasionally they step over the lines, they just want their money. It personally irks me that these people use the fruits of other's labour (Yeah, go take a look at the standards that underpin software, or the vast 'idiotic' and 'bigotted' effort to liberate software from a few industrial combines that feed Remora like this chap) and _criticise_ altruism.
FWIW, I'm 32 and own my own home and car. Family isn't on the radar
"This unique split, with 2 development teams working on different version of the same MMO, has led to Asian-specific changes such as "a 'WASD' control scheme (no more mouse clicking movement)", a new experience curve ("players can now reach level 20 much more easily but as players reach the higher levels, it gets much more difficult"), and a general "newbie experience overhaul.""
Er...this is something that most of the MMO games are doing, because keeping the newbies playing increases the chances of subscriptions being paid...not to mention the homogenisation of difficulty ('levels').
I did notice that they centralised the 'newbie' area...I wish them luck with the more painful aspects of t'internet, such as massive latency on the newbie servers; if anything, they should be looking at decentralisation and wiping out this idea of a level playing field; you'll never achieve that given the wide variability in play-time investment from player to player.
Why do I get the impression that the designers of MMO don't really model their assumptions and just copy from other MMOs?
"I think it is wishful thinking to conclude that someone who follows a "normal" life and does not have homicidal tendencies could think of unpredictable ways to initiate terrorist acts."
Not if you're walking the problem as an abstract rather than getting into the emotive points of 'terrorism', such as just positing the question 'How do I cause the maximum disruption and loss of life with the minimum of resources'.
No matter what your upbringing or desires, that problem can produce some interesting results, and I already have my money down on a couple of possible future possibilities.
However, there is a slight problem when you start skewing your data because you fundamentally misunderstand the problem, such as making all your decisions based upon being the median group in a given environment, or assuming that playgroups are tactically 'out of bounds' or that _anything_ should be disallowed.
Personally I've always thought that things like this are better kept to mixed focus groups and think tanks, but the current state of administration in the western world has made terrorism (state sponsored and otherwise) a 'thoughtcrime', simply because 'normal' patterns of behaviour aren't supposed to include thinking about ways to bring a nation to it's knees.
"GoDaddy disabled my domain because some person sent an email to another person, and mentioned my domain in that email. It is as simple was that."
Then you have a watertight case for taking them through the legal wringer. However, you might want to get hold of their side of the story first. Nine times out of ten there's a misunderstanding or a joe job in the background that you have to clear up with an open mind.
Give 'em attitude and they'll flip you the bird until the lawyers get involved, and then they'll make it expensive for you.
"Don't make accusations when you don't know the facts."
Accusations always preceed the facts. ALways. Live with the fact that some people don't know you're a shining example of humanity and take a step back.
That's about enough. The main problem is the signal to noise ratio on/. has gone through the roof from all beliefs and creeds, so you have to be a tad careful about the possibility of apocryphal stories entering the mainstream, especially given that some get revived with depressing regularity by the media. By apocryphal, I mean urban myths, such as the kidney-stealing gangs.
"Canada apparently has laws against holding foreign nationals in prison when they don't have a legal reason for being in the country in the first place."
Understand that I'm not questioning you, but I don't understand how a country can treat a illegal alien as a non-entity in the eyes of the law, especially given the whole 'extradition' ballgame. I'm also slightly surprised that they didn't invoke laws about criminals benefiting from the proceeds of their crimes; banking has moved beyond the point where you can simply move a shitload of money 'out of reach', especially in cases of fraud. This is why money laundering is such big business and transfers over a certain amount are routinely questioned.
If Canada uses the equivalent of the CPS, it's more likely that they decided not to press charges because of the cost of the prosecution versus the deportation/recovery, which has royally pissed me off since my sister and girlfriend were attacked in the street by a woman who had a previous record for violence. The CPS failed to bring a case against her.
"I tried to be as succinct and brief as possible in my original post, trusting that people knew that I was simplifying the situation somewhat."
Yeah, but don't then say that you're sticking to the facts when you're the only person that has them...for all the average reader knows you could be formenting some form of nastiness against illegal immigrants, who appear to be the UK's new anti-social threat now that we've done the communists, terrorists and peadophiles.
"Actually, the story was from both the local news and from the bank manager who handled my entire case. Facts, my friend, facts."
*cough* Still haven't seen any.
You seem to be suggesting that 'the bank manager' was involved in the handling of a serious case of fraud, when usually the bank itself will have a security department that moves in to deal with such things by liasing with local police.
Are you saying that the bank didn't report the crime, or they blew it off?
Which country was the chap from? Deportation doesn't give immunity from prosecution...
"If you can, go to a supermarket or any store nearby that gives you cashback on your debit card. I can buy a pack of gum instead of paying stupid ATM fee AND get cashback with NO risk."
Only a matter of time before someone thinks that wireless tills are a neat idea, bub. Working on definates in security is a really bad idea. Plus most stores will be levying a surcharge that may or not be swallowed by the card issuer.
"The N64 certainly didn't have a problem doing anti-aliasing on 4MB of ram. While I have to agree it was kinda stupid to put so little memory in for video, you can always just stream textures."
Hmm. What's the main implication for streaming the textures from a cartridge rather than a CD/DVD? Throughput, etc?
"You're doing blending of interleaving MIPMAP levels in real-time, so it mostly cuts into your pixel thoroughput."
Which in turn impacts the framerate and upper polygon count of the scenes you're showing; personally I prefer both of those to 'making sh*t fuzzy' method of antialiasing.
And BTW, my point was that you'd be hard pressed to find a card in 1998 that could handle trilinear/bilinear antialiasing in 4Mb, I'll concede that maybe the N64 could (I can't be bothered checking at the mo), but I suspect that PS2 was dumped in favour of getting the platform out somewhere close to delivery dates or possibly even the cultural influence.
"I'm sorry, but it's just not something you want to screw with until you're 100% sure. Or can't you realize that our atmosphere is too important to us to start making wild guesses?"
Let me give you a clue:
Carbon Dioxide bad
Get back to me when you feel you've grasped that one and feel able to parse more complicated arguments.
"Start shootin in the dark"
That's never stopped America in the past. Sorry, still a bit sore about Kyoto. How did that go again?
"Before some more research is done into the whys and hows of this phenomenon I personally think that we should stay off the Big Red Button."
Dude, there is no 'big red button' for this. The closest we got was getting everyone around the table for Kyoto, and you know how that story ended.
At no point will there ever be someone who says, 'right, we have enough evidence, shutdown the sawmills...'
It took _years_ for anyone to convince people that the hole in the ozone layer was bad, and that was after clusters of skin cancer in _Glasgow_.
It's probably going to take a good couple of decades before anything happens, and so far the entire argument has been based on 'oh well, it's happened before'. Not with this many people alive. Not with this much hazardous material around.
"bit on the alarmist side of reporting"
You have my apologies for going into 'attack dog', but I thought that it was fairly balanced, and I want people to avoid the assumption that there is a binary go-nogo decision in the offing about whether something is done about this, simply because nature could make the decision for us by wiping out a major city through a mega-tsunami (tsunamai caused by land slippage through erosion rather than fault slippage), or the steady encroachment of rising seas. As land mammals we sorta need the land to do something about it and keep ourselves fed and spread out from each other.
"There are a lot of scientists (and not just ordinary citizens) that are going "ok, slow down, it's not neccessarily a catastrophe"."
First of all, I'm not troll. Go look up the definition before chucking around the ad homenims, I'm just a tad tired that people think that a closed system can't possibly be effected by man and that all this has happened before.
For one thing we generate heat from chemical energy stored in the planet. We have changed the content of the atmosphere. I could mention background radiation, but that's not that much of a threat at the moment. That's also cyclical on geologic timescales.
"And lets face it, this whole piece was about pointing a finger at mankind's evil technological ways and saying "see what we're doing to the Earth?""
You consider pollution, land erosion and short term planning to be better than actually stopping and taking a moment to go 'umm...hang on'?
Quite frankly, I personally don't care if I leave a smoking ruin for someone else's children to look after because I don't really plan on kids, but I'll be buggered sideways if I let _politicians_ ignore evidence that there is a change in this _closed_ system because they don't feel comfy with hitting pollutors, or have a problem with taxing industries to cleanup. I also detest people that tend to claim that Contemporary Earth is the same as it was in the late Triassic with more digital watches. Catch a clue.
"The Earth's sea level has risen and fallen over the centuries many times, without any input from man."
And Florida used to be swamp. It isn't now. And you can't bomb the tide. Think about it for five seconds. If the glimmering of a hint of an idea doesn't start to emerge, then go get a decent geographic map and plot the ten foot line around the coast. Consider what happens to aquifiers. Faultlines.
My personal feelings are not an 'agenda', they're an opinion. Strive for some accuracy, even if you're engaging in debating tricks. Makes the intended target feel a little less insulted by your posting.
"Hiibel's wife isn't going to help either, she went off in the video, like a screeching hag. And nobody had touched her yet!"
Daughter. At least have the decency to deal with facts rather than assumptions.
She was a seventeen year old girl watching her father get cuffed for an argument that she was having with him. It's bound to be a little stressful, and you have to wonder whether a heavily armed man really needs to sit on a girl to 'restrain her'.
"I can see how the cop would definitely have his guard up."
That's because he was prepared to make an arrest before he was prepared to find out what the situation was. Start confrontational, no matter how polite, and things will remain confrontational, especially where one party is armed and twitchy because they don't know if the other party is armed. Fear isn't a good thing to take into any discussion.
Instead of smiling and trying to find out what the situation was, he did that ludicrously polite demanding that has more in common with a four year old than a trained officer of the law. After being told once that he couldn't see ID is when a decision should be made, but he should have made at least some effort to see if a crime had actually been committed.
Firstly, the statutes tend to deal with innocence before guilt. Secondly, a dangerous precedence is being set up by 'resisting arrest' being the only reason that someone should be arrested.
The main problem is that events like these only serve to reduce the faith that people have in the body that is supposed to be protecting them, and trying to whitewash the incident or dodge the culpability only makes matters worse.
"There's just no reason for them to exist anymore, unless they can somehow sell for less."
The _reason_ for their existence is to break the monoculture of a specific quantity of streamed product that people will be presented with via clearchannel, and to reduce the homogenous wash of pap that the latest groomed teenager puts out to the detriment of less popular genres.
FFS, it's bad enough that the TV companies are cancelling shows to make room for more reality TV programmes, but model the bloody problem, will you.
"The fact is, record stores are going out of business because, they are TOO STUPID to adapt to even simple changes in the business environment."
God, you're dumb.
If you knew anything about the subject, you'd know that the record companies distribute through distributors and they set the price that the stores pay, and the stores put their markup on top of that. The smaller stores _cannot_ put markup on items enough to beat the massive trading volumes that the supermarkets buy *direct* without going through the distributors.
That's extremely simple economics, and nothing has changed in the business environment; your model cuts out distribution, and that's a lot of people who can lobby, not to mention the warehousing and supply chain.
"They own it, everyone downloading it is pirating it under the law, they have every right to take legal action and they are. This should be no surprise, they are simply using the laws we have allowed to be created. End of story"
Did you miss the article? It isn't the end of the story because someone is using the laws we created to fight back against the other side using the laws 'we' created to extort money rather than actually change anything but negative PR and maybe a little fear.
"The Playstation 2 can't even do anti-aliasing and trilinear filtering. Something that a bottom-of-the-range 3Dfx graphics accelerator could easily do in 1998."
"In any case, the question of productization in politics is a very real one, and should be discussed."
In a couple of years or so, we should be able to bid for our representation, much as goes on with the corporate sponsors, although I think they should wear badges to make such things obvious.
As for Dean, he was doing quite well until Trippi advised him that big, nasty lockdowns on personal PCs was the way to go, coincidentally somethng that Wave Systems (Trippi's company) would have cleaned up on. Palladium/DRM from a Democrat?
"(and I'm not trying to criticise, I really would like to know... the apostrophe has annoyed me for years, so I'd just like to understand what you're on about)."
No, you're right, it's the contactive mode rather than the possessive, but I was fired up into full sarcasm mode and didn't check that bit.
"Hell, I look forward to the day I can just load up my cart with groceries and head out of the store without bothering to stop at a cash register."
I look forward to cloning your tag and doing the same thing.
What's the figure on global credit card fraud? Something in the billions?
Re:Tracking? No, more like targetting!
on
The Trouble with RFID
·
· Score: 2, Informative
"You're thinking about this all wrong. Take off your tin-foil hats, nobody really wants to 'track' you."
So, totally unlike the inroads that have been made with pinpointing the location of mobile phones?
It doesn't take a genius (note: I don't mean you) to figure out that it's not the application of something that matters, but the possible application, and given that corruption exists, and the ability to track will exist, someone will use it.
Hell, just go take a look at how much tracking has infiltrated the internet from the early days of relative anonymity; historically the people with the ability to do tracking have tended to just do it.
"By most calculations it would have made less than a 1% decrease in total global warming"
'Most' calculations? How about the others?
The thing that's most annoying is the refusal to consider something because of calculations or 'hypotheses' without a willingness to experiment or test the bloody hypothesis, which is kinda essential is 'most' calculations give one result and a lesser number don't.
The actual reason for not signing up to Kyoto was the f**ing expense, not the science.
"There is no law of nature that says change is going to be detrimental."
You occupy a niche that is admittedly quite wide-ranging, but don't make the mistake of assuming that the planet might become uninhabitable by members of your niche within short order at some point. The natural history museums are full of species whose niche disappeared.
Oh, and any change away from the conditions that are viable for life can be considered detrimental.
Slashdot Mirror
They settled and ponied up to SCO for licenses a while back.
Gutless. Utterly gutless.
"In the end, Aiden, it's your choice. Do you want to have a car, a house and a family when you are 30? Do you love being a software engineer at the same time? If so, you literally need to get a life. Forget the dream about stuff being free and stop advocating it. It's idiocy. It's bigotry."
I'm not sure about his definitions of idiocy and bigotry, and I suspect that a remedial English class might help with that, however he does live in a world where there are numerous free things that are there for something other than marketing.
This kind of person is exactly the spirit of evil in terms of holding a gun to people's heads in favour of collecting cash, and why we put these dolts in positions of power always annoys me, because they're concerned with personal gain rather than advancing the art or contributing to the pool of knowledge.
Sure, the days of patronage might be dead (VCs are bound to be nervous know that the stock traders, having made their millions on churn'n'burn), but that doesn't mean that you can't produce something for the love of it.
Currently this is the big problem with the modern world writ large; charge for everything, charge for nothing.
Idiots tend to go for the extremes when they're trying to prove a point, erecting a strawman argument to show that their worldview is correct...really desperate idiots tend to multiply the strawmen as much as possible and as quickly as possible. The reasonable consider all sides first.
So I'm in the middle, manufacturing programs both for pay and for free. I don't give a crap that people won't know my name; fame's for the Hollywood airheads...join a stage school if you want fame. Become a lawyer if you want cash. Plastic Surgeon is you want crappy TV shows about your life. Become a programmer if you want to tinker with the flow of information.
This purient asshole is the kind of person that spammers are. They don't give a crap about the people they annoy. They don't care that occasionally they step over the lines, they just want their money. It personally irks me that these people use the fruits of other's labour (Yeah, go take a look at the standards that underpin software, or the vast 'idiotic' and 'bigotted' effort to liberate software from a few industrial combines that feed Remora like this chap) and _criticise_ altruism.
FWIW, I'm 32 and own my own home and car. Family isn't on the radar
Funnily enough, I concur completely with your assessment of the post. It's not often you're right, AC, but this time you're bang on.
I can only blame the heady rush to karma someone up in a new thread. For shame on you hairtrigger moderators...
"This unique split, with 2 development teams working on different version of the same MMO, has led to Asian-specific changes such as "a 'WASD' control scheme (no more mouse clicking movement)", a new experience curve ("players can now reach level 20 much more easily but as players reach the higher levels, it gets much more difficult"), and a general "newbie experience overhaul.""
Er...this is something that most of the MMO games are doing, because keeping the newbies playing increases the chances of subscriptions being paid...not to mention the homogenisation of difficulty ('levels').
I did notice that they centralised the 'newbie' area...I wish them luck with the more painful aspects of t'internet, such as massive latency on the newbie servers; if anything, they should be looking at decentralisation and wiping out this idea of a level playing field; you'll never achieve that given the wide variability in play-time investment from player to player.
Why do I get the impression that the designers of MMO don't really model their assumptions and just copy from other MMOs?
"I think it is wishful thinking to conclude that someone who follows a "normal" life and does not have homicidal tendencies could think of unpredictable ways to initiate terrorist acts."
Not if you're walking the problem as an abstract rather than getting into the emotive points of 'terrorism', such as just positing the question 'How do I cause the maximum disruption and loss of life with the minimum of resources'.
No matter what your upbringing or desires, that problem can produce some interesting results, and I already have my money down on a couple of possible future possibilities.
However, there is a slight problem when you start skewing your data because you fundamentally misunderstand the problem, such as making all your decisions based upon being the median group in a given environment, or assuming that playgroups are tactically 'out of bounds' or that _anything_ should be disallowed.
Personally I've always thought that things like this are better kept to mixed focus groups and think tanks, but the current state of administration in the western world has made terrorism (state sponsored and otherwise) a 'thoughtcrime', simply because 'normal' patterns of behaviour aren't supposed to include thinking about ways to bring a nation to it's knees.
"GoDaddy disabled my domain because some person sent an email to another person, and mentioned my domain in that email. It is as simple was that."
Then you have a watertight case for taking them through the legal wringer. However, you might want to get hold of their side of the story first. Nine times out of ten there's a misunderstanding or a joe job in the background that you have to clear up with an open mind.
Give 'em attitude and they'll flip you the bird until the lawyers get involved, and then they'll make it expensive for you.
"Don't make accusations when you don't know the facts."
Accusations always preceed the facts. ALways. Live with the fact that some people don't know you're a shining example of humanity and take a step back.
"What more do you want?"
/. has gone through the roof from all beliefs and creeds, so you have to be a tad careful about the possibility of apocryphal stories entering the mainstream, especially given that some get revived with depressing regularity by the media. By apocryphal, I mean urban myths, such as the kidney-stealing gangs.
That's about enough. The main problem is the signal to noise ratio on
"Canada apparently has laws against holding foreign nationals in prison when they don't have a legal reason for being in the country in the first place."
Understand that I'm not questioning you, but I don't understand how a country can treat a illegal alien as a non-entity in the eyes of the law, especially given the whole 'extradition' ballgame. I'm also slightly surprised that they didn't invoke laws about criminals benefiting from the proceeds of their crimes; banking has moved beyond the point where you can simply move a shitload of money 'out of reach', especially in cases of fraud. This is why money laundering is such big business and transfers over a certain amount are routinely questioned.
If Canada uses the equivalent of the CPS, it's more likely that they decided not to press charges because of the cost of the prosecution versus the deportation/recovery, which has royally pissed me off since my sister and girlfriend were attacked in the street by a woman who had a previous record for violence. The CPS failed to bring a case against her.
"I tried to be as succinct and brief as possible in my original post, trusting that people knew that I was simplifying the situation somewhat."
Yeah, but don't then say that you're sticking to the facts when you're the only person that has them...for all the average reader knows you could be formenting some form of nastiness against illegal immigrants, who appear to be the UK's new anti-social threat now that we've done the communists, terrorists and peadophiles.
"Actually, the story was from both the local news and from the bank manager who handled my entire case. Facts, my friend, facts."
*cough* Still haven't seen any.
You seem to be suggesting that 'the bank manager' was involved in the handling of a serious case of fraud, when usually the bank itself will have a security department that moves in to deal with such things by liasing with local police.
Are you saying that the bank didn't report the crime, or they blew it off?
Which country was the chap from? Deportation doesn't give immunity from prosecution...
"If you can, go to a supermarket or any store nearby that gives you cashback on your debit card. I can buy a pack of gum instead of paying stupid ATM fee AND get cashback with NO risk."
Only a matter of time before someone thinks that wireless tills are a neat idea, bub. Working on definates in security is a really bad idea. Plus most stores will be levying a surcharge that may or not be swallowed by the card issuer.
I'm going back to cash.
"The N64 certainly didn't have a problem doing anti-aliasing on 4MB of ram. While I have to agree it was kinda stupid to put so little memory in for video, you can always just stream textures."
Hmm. What's the main implication for streaming the textures from a cartridge rather than a CD/DVD? Throughput, etc?
"You're doing blending of interleaving MIPMAP levels in real-time, so it mostly cuts into your pixel thoroughput."
Which in turn impacts the framerate and upper polygon count of the scenes you're showing; personally I prefer both of those to 'making sh*t fuzzy' method of antialiasing.
And BTW, my point was that you'd be hard pressed to find a card in 1998 that could handle trilinear/bilinear antialiasing in 4Mb, I'll concede that maybe the N64 could (I can't be bothered checking at the mo), but I suspect that PS2 was dumped in favour of getting the platform out somewhere close to delivery dates or possibly even the cultural influence.
"I'm sorry, but it's just not something you want to screw with until you're 100% sure. Or can't you realize that our atmosphere is too important to us to start making wild guesses?"
Let me give you a clue:
Carbon Dioxide bad
Get back to me when you feel you've grasped that one and feel able to parse more complicated arguments.
"Start shootin in the dark"
That's never stopped America in the past. Sorry, still a bit sore about Kyoto. How did that go again?
"Before some more research is done into the whys and hows of this phenomenon I personally think that we should stay off the Big Red Button."
Dude, there is no 'big red button' for this. The closest we got was getting everyone around the table for Kyoto, and you know how that story ended.
At no point will there ever be someone who says, 'right, we have enough evidence, shutdown the sawmills...'
It took _years_ for anyone to convince people that the hole in the ozone layer was bad, and that was after clusters of skin cancer in _Glasgow_.
It's probably going to take a good couple of decades before anything happens, and so far the entire argument has been based on 'oh well, it's happened before'. Not with this many people alive. Not with this much hazardous material around.
"bit on the alarmist side of reporting"
You have my apologies for going into 'attack dog', but I thought that it was fairly balanced, and I want people to avoid the assumption that there is a binary go-nogo decision in the offing about whether something is done about this, simply because nature could make the decision for us by wiping out a major city through a mega-tsunami (tsunamai caused by land slippage through erosion rather than fault slippage), or the steady encroachment of rising seas. As land mammals we sorta need the land to do something about it and keep ourselves fed and spread out from each other.
"There are a lot of scientists (and not just ordinary citizens) that are going "ok, slow down, it's not neccessarily a catastrophe"."
First of all, I'm not troll. Go look up the definition before chucking around the ad homenims, I'm just a tad tired that people think that a closed system can't possibly be effected by man and that all this has happened before.
For one thing we generate heat from chemical energy stored in the planet. We have changed the content of the atmosphere. I could mention background radiation, but that's not that much of a threat at the moment. That's also cyclical on geologic timescales.
"And lets face it, this whole piece was about pointing a finger at mankind's evil technological ways and saying "see what we're doing to the Earth?""
You consider pollution, land erosion and short term planning to be better than actually stopping and taking a moment to go 'umm...hang on'?
Quite frankly, I personally don't care if I leave a smoking ruin for someone else's children to look after because I don't really plan on kids, but I'll be buggered sideways if I let _politicians_ ignore evidence that there is a change in this _closed_ system because they don't feel comfy with hitting pollutors, or have a problem with taxing industries to cleanup. I also detest people that tend to claim that Contemporary Earth is the same as it was in the late Triassic with more digital watches. Catch a clue.
"The Earth's sea level has risen and fallen over the centuries many times, without any input from man."
And Florida used to be swamp. It isn't now. And you can't bomb the tide. Think about it for five seconds. If the glimmering of a hint of an idea doesn't start to emerge, then go get a decent geographic map and plot the ten foot line around the coast. Consider what happens to aquifiers. Faultlines.
My personal feelings are not an 'agenda', they're an opinion. Strive for some accuracy, even if you're engaging in debating tricks. Makes the intended target feel a little less insulted by your posting.
"Hiibel's wife isn't going to help either, she went off in the video, like a screeching hag. And nobody had touched her yet!"
Daughter. At least have the decency to deal with facts rather than assumptions.
She was a seventeen year old girl watching her father get cuffed for an argument that she was having with him. It's bound to be a little stressful, and you have to wonder whether a heavily armed man really needs to sit on a girl to 'restrain her'.
"I can see how the cop would definitely have his guard up."
That's because he was prepared to make an arrest before he was prepared to find out what the situation was. Start confrontational, no matter how polite, and things will remain confrontational, especially where one party is armed and twitchy because they don't know if the other party is armed. Fear isn't a good thing to take into any discussion.
Instead of smiling and trying to find out what the situation was, he did that ludicrously polite demanding that has more in common with a four year old than a trained officer of the law. After being told once that he couldn't see ID is when a decision should be made, but he should have made at least some effort to see if a crime had actually been committed.
Firstly, the statutes tend to deal with innocence before guilt. Secondly, a dangerous precedence is being set up by 'resisting arrest' being the only reason that someone should be arrested.
The main problem is that events like these only serve to reduce the faith that people have in the body that is supposed to be protecting them, and trying to whitewash the incident or dodge the culpability only makes matters worse.
"There's just no reason for them to exist anymore, unless they can somehow sell for less."
The _reason_ for their existence is to break the monoculture of a specific quantity of streamed product that people will be presented with via clearchannel, and to reduce the homogenous wash of pap that the latest groomed teenager puts out to the detriment of less popular genres.
FFS, it's bad enough that the TV companies are cancelling shows to make room for more reality TV programmes, but model the bloody problem, will you.
"The fact is, record stores are going out of business because, they are TOO STUPID to adapt to even simple changes in the business environment."
God, you're dumb.
If you knew anything about the subject, you'd know that the record companies distribute through distributors and they set the price that the stores pay, and the stores put their markup on top of that. The smaller stores _cannot_ put markup on items enough to beat the massive trading volumes that the supermarkets buy *direct* without going through the distributors.
That's extremely simple economics, and nothing has changed in the business environment; your model cuts out distribution, and that's a lot of people who can lobby, not to mention the warehousing and supply chain.
"They own it, everyone downloading it is pirating it under the law, they have every right to take legal action and they are. This should be no surprise, they are simply using the laws we have allowed to be created. End of story"
Did you miss the article? It isn't the end of the story because someone is using the laws we created to fight back against the other side using the laws 'we' created to extort money rather than actually change anything but negative PR and maybe a little fear.
Geeze.
"The Playstation 2 can't even do anti-aliasing and trilinear filtering. Something that a bottom-of-the-range 3Dfx graphics accelerator could easily do in 1998."
In 4mb of Rambus? I don't think so.
"In any case, the question of productization in politics is a very real one, and should be discussed."
In a couple of years or so, we should be able to bid for our representation, much as goes on with the corporate sponsors, although I think they should wear badges to make such things obvious.
As for Dean, he was doing quite well until Trippi advised him that big, nasty lockdowns on personal PCs was the way to go, coincidentally somethng that Wave Systems (Trippi's company) would have cleaned up on. Palladium/DRM from a Democrat?
...or do we not consider them anything but debris these days?
"(and I'm not trying to criticise, I really would like to know... the apostrophe has annoyed me for years, so I'd just like to understand what you're on about)."
No, you're right, it's the contactive mode rather than the possessive, but I was fired up into full sarcasm mode and didn't check that bit.
"Hell, I look forward to the day I can just load up my cart with groceries and head out of the store without bothering to stop at a cash register."
I look forward to cloning your tag and doing the same thing.
What's the figure on global credit card fraud? Something in the billions?
"You're thinking about this all wrong. Take off your tin-foil hats, nobody really wants to 'track' you."
So, totally unlike the inroads that have been made with pinpointing the location of mobile phones?
It doesn't take a genius (note: I don't mean you) to figure out that it's not the application of something that matters, but the possible application, and given that corruption exists, and the ability to track will exist, someone will use it.
Hell, just go take a look at how much tracking has infiltrated the internet from the early days of relative anonymity; historically the people with the ability to do tracking have tended to just do it.
"seriously, the Kyoto protocol was a joke."
That may be, but it was a step in a direction.
"By most calculations it would have made less than a 1% decrease in total global warming"
'Most' calculations? How about the others?
The thing that's most annoying is the refusal to consider something because of calculations or 'hypotheses' without a willingness to experiment or test the bloody hypothesis, which is kinda essential is 'most' calculations give one result and a lesser number don't.
The actual reason for not signing up to Kyoto was the f**ing expense, not the science.
"There is no law of nature that says change is going to be detrimental."
You occupy a niche that is admittedly quite wide-ranging, but don't make the mistake of assuming that the planet might become uninhabitable by members of your niche within short order at some point. The natural history museums are full of species whose niche disappeared.
Oh, and any change away from the conditions that are viable for life can be considered detrimental.