However, I would caution you against ranting about your fair-use "rights" as though it's part of the Constitution. Fair use rights are entirely at the court's interpretation of what is "fair" or not. What you think is fair may not jive with the court's interpretation.
Indeed, however in this particular case there's court precedent, as I've seen from your first link. Specifically:
Although the legal basis is not completely settled, many lawyers believe that the following (and many other uses) are also fair uses:
Space-shifting or format-shifting - that is, taking content you own in one format and putting it into another format, for personal, non-commercial use. For instance, "ripping" an audio CD (that is, making an MP3-format version of an audio CD that you already own) is considered fair use by many lawyers, based on the 1984 Betamax decision and the 1999 Rio MP3 player decision (RIAA v. Diamond Multimedia, 180 F. 3d 1072, 1079, 9th Circ. 1999.)
Making a personal back-up copy of content you own - for instance, burning a copy of an audio CD you own.
Making the roms is both a back-up copy, and format shifting. Using the rom in an emulator is personal, non-commercial use. I think there's a real strong case there if nintendo decides to sue. Nintendo lawyers know this, and that's why Nintendo has taken up the patent. If they sue, they'll sue them for violating the patent, not for violating their copyright.
What they're doing is right. It's THEIR network, they can do whatever you want. It's not like you have a right to use the internet.
While you get no argument from me that cutting off infected machines is a good thing, I'm afraid that ISP's will start cutting off your service for all sorts of reasons they don't like.
Although it is their network, it's not like you're hijacking it, or they're letting you use it. You're paying for it. That does give you the right to use the internet and there's definitely a line they can cross.
In the ideal world, people wouldn't be morons and they'd take basic precautions to prevent their machines from getting infected. In an ideal world, corporations wouldn't abuse their power and screw their customers...I want a ticket to that world, I really do.
One EMP burst and every automobile that has an Engine Control Computer within range of the EMP is dead.
Those of us in areas where high powered EMP bursts occur routinely really get the shaft, with all these electronics being embedded everywhere...did you know desktop computers are vulnerable? I had to buy 3 over the past month...luckyly we haven't had a burst lat *[NO CARRIER]
Seriously though...yeah...hood welded shut IS stupid. From a consumer point of view anyway...from the dealership and shops everywhere, it's a great idea...if you can't service your own car, you have to go to them for normal maintenance.
Damn the corporations and their "screw the consumer" profit plan...
I've always hated how my second monitor becomes unusable during gameplay. I'd like nothing more than to be able to throw my TV app up on the second monitor so I could watch TV while waiting to respawn in Wolf
I do exactly that with my GeForce FX 5700. As long as you don't need to interact with what's on the second monitor (most games grab the mice, so you can't move it to the other monitor), it works just fine.
What I would really like to do is to be able to chat on the other monitor while waiting to respawn, etc. on the game. Alt-tabbing minimizes all games in full screen mode, though.
I don't think our opinions are as different as I thought they were when I read your first post. So, to clarify...
Fictional stories were far more "real" to me when I was a child than histories or the news.
I agree. You're not born knowing the difference between reality and fiction. Everyone gets out of that phase on their own time though...putting an ambiguous age like 17 on a product doesn't work well though. I'd like to think most people actually have a good upgringing, and I believe those would be past that phase way below 17...on the other hand, the older boy that was doing the sniper shooting supposedly copying GTA was pretty old not to know that "life isn't a videogame" (tm).
Since we can't run a test on everyone that goes out to buy a videogame to see if they're properly mature and mentally balanced, I'll leave that responsibility to the parent.
If a parent decides to buy violent game for their kid, the government shouldn't be kicking down their doors. That said, we all know that kids buy games themselves most of the time, and noone in the store gives a rat's ass about who they sell to.
Yeah, but what's he going to do? Buy the game, hide it under his bed, make sure to play it only when his parents aren't home? This is what I'm talking about when I say parents with problem kids are just not raising their children properly. When I was growing up, my parents would play the games I had with me...they frowned at mortal kombat, which I guess was the height of the violence at the time, but they knew I was playing it. Furthermore, they encouraged my participation in other activities, so that video games wasn't the whole of my life back then. Family nights!!! It's not just a board game commercial, it really did use to be fun. Family outtings...and yes, there's unsupervised fun with friends, but until I reached a "responsible age", they knew my friends, they knew my closest friends' parents, and thus, they knew what we were doing.
I bet if you saw a shootout on the local news you might say "Cool!" (after a couple months of GTA).
That's an interesting observation. It's the whole police chase phenomenon, everyone likes to see them, and everyone goes "oooh aaah" when the chase ends in a big crash. I wonder what it is, though...is it that the fake violence input is causing us to become more accepting of violence in general, or is that from watching so many violent things on tv we know to be fake, we now instinctively treat everything we see on tv as fake?
I think we emotionally don't believe the news, even though we know it is true. Think about "War of the Worlds" for example...In 1938, when people turned on their radios and heard that Earth was being attacked by aliens in what appeared to be a news format, they freaked out. What would happen if you turned the tv on today and Tom Brokaw was reporting an alien invasion where your...say...sister lives?
Tom Brokaw is a real newsanchor, so you should potentially become fearful. I bet you wouldn't though. If you decided to turn the channel, and you saw that every channel was reporting the same thing, you might get worried...the footage of klingons killing people is probably way too familiar to you, and even though it's in every channel, I doubt that you'd be afraid just yet...you might be wondering, "is this for real?" and give your sister a call to ask what the heck is going on, but I think you still wouldn't be afraid in the emotional sense.
Now, if you call her up, and she answers the telephone screaming for help, THAT will freak you out. Suddenly all this stuff that has been on tv becomes real to you. Regardless of how many stations reported it as news, you just don't trust it today like people did in '38 (and that was just one station, the people that were fooled didn't even bother flipping the channels to check out other sources). Why is that? Why are we suddenly not that gullible anymore? I propose that the effect all this fake violence has had in the
Video games are no different than any other input to our brains. Anything we experience influences us in some way, and if we experience blowing people away as a fun, of course we will have a shift in values that is more tolerant of violence. Children are especially vulnerable to programming by experience (see the results of wife-beater/drunk parents), so I could certainly see society want to stop kids having access to these ideas.
It's not "the ideas" that's influencing kids. The problem is when they get more "input to their brains" from tv and video games than they get from their parents. You can't possibly be equating a child watching their father beating his mother to a child watching something violent on TV (be it movies or videogames)...one is very real, the other is not. It's the parents' responsibility to make sure their children understand the difference between fantasy and reality.
I *love* violent movies / video games. I don't feel uncomfortable at all at seeing people getting shot/mutilated/whatever at the screen. At the same time, if I see a parent smacking their child too hard at a supermarket, that makes me cringe. If I see someone actually get shot in front of me, I'll probably scream like a woman (no disrepect intended to women, that's adjetive is intended to qualify the pitch of the scream).
As everyone knows, enforcement of the ratings system is a joke.
As well they should be. Are you telling me the governmnent needs to tell me how to raise my child? I've been watching violent movies since I was 6-7. My parents felt I knew the difference between reality and fiction, and I did. I'm as non-violent as you get today. The rating system should be a warning, just that. A way for conscious parents to know what they are buying for their kids and make the decisions themselves, not something that should be actually enforced.
Or, perhaps you just didn't follow the Windows Server 2003 Desktop guides correctly online, or your drivers weren't designed to run with an operating system like 2003?
That's absolutely fine with me. It's the reason I waited until I had the new computer to try it out, so that if it didn't work well with what I wanted to do, I could just reformat without worrying about the data. My problem isn't that it won't run certain things, I'm fine with using XP. My problem is with the bsod's. If you're going to break backwards compatibility, fine. However, keep track of exactly what it is that you're breaking compatibility with, check to make sure the drivers don't use that thing, and if they do, don't let the user install it. However, don't crash the darn operating system, that's not acceptable, particularly in a server os.
Wow...your experience with 2003 is so much different than the one I had.
I recently bought an Opteron system...and planned to use it for gaming purposes (keep the criticism to yourselves, I've heard it all). I tried installing 2003 because my school had recently given me a copy and I felt that was a good time as any to try it out, because I wouldn't have to backup everything to do a clean install with XP afterwards. If I liked it, I'd keep it.
First...I could *not* get directX working. It installed, but dxdiag wouldn't enable direct3d. It kept saying my driver didn't support hardware acceleration. Then I installed sound card drivers, and THAT was horrible. It BSOD'ed. Then every time it rebooted, the software that came with the audigy's drivers would start up pop up a screen which would cause the computer to bsod again. I went to safe mode, stopped that application from starting up automatically, rebooted, and used add/remove programs to remove the audigy software. In the middle of the uninstall, it bsod'ed. I tried again, it bsod'ed in the same place.
Given that 2003 is a server OS, I can draw two conclusions...it's a HORRIBLE server OS, because it's not frigging stable, or it's not meant to have graphics/sound because it's a server OS, and it's stable otherwise. WinXP has absolutely NO problems with my hardware at all.
You can't "convert" people on the inside. Until they are freed, agents are able to take over their body. It's why, in the first movie, Switch holds a gun to Neo during the entire time they're driving to see Morpheus. It's the reason for the "lady in red" training. It's the reason why, when Neo was running from Smith at the end of the first movie, and he ran into this really crowded place, he uttered "shit".
Now, sure...you can free a whole bunch of people (which Neo did...Morpheus mentions in reloaded more people had been freed in the past 6 months then had been in the past 6 years). Then you could send them all into the matrix to fight...what? The rest of the humans still plugged in? The very people you're trying to save? Heck, you'd need way too many hovercrafts to get these people up to broadcast depth, all to do something Neo can do on his own. Inside the matrix, he rules. If he can't handle something, no amount of "normal" people can. The only thing Neo was incapable of handling on a pure fight was Smith, and Smith has shown his ability to copy himself even into people that have been freed from the matrix (ie, Bane).
But yeah...I know what you mean. It would be much cooler to have a whole bunch of really good fight scenes inside the matrix than the whole boring Zion fight. Then again, I know a whole bunch of other people who think the exact opposite, were really tired of the wire-fu, and really liked the Zion battle.
I could live either way. All I needed was an explanation of what the heck happened. In an all-fantasy story like Lord of the Rings, anything goes...it's fantasy. With the matrix, the first matrix set the boundaries--the reason Neo can do all those things is because he's inside a computer program, and he can change the program somehow. Then, with Revolutions they pulled the whole "the power of the one extends beyond this world" thing. Why? The power of the one was changing the code of the matrix, what other power does he have that allows him to do things outside the matrix? Really, I wouldn't care how they approached the revolution, I just wanted a coherent storyline.
BBV wanted FOX to sign on like the other companies so they dropped the title from guarenteed status and ended up getting one or two of this title in each store effectively screwing FOX out of millions of dollars in rental revinue.
Seems to me that the method is indeed very effective when you only need to use one movie. However, if Blockbuster is trying to sway the entire movie industry, they'd have to drop the "Guaranteed in Stock" thing with every new release. If customers start getting frustrated because they can't find any of the newly released movies they want to see, they go to other rental stores...wouldn't Blockbuster thus stand to lose too much to make this tactic viable on a large scale?
Worse, filmmakers can't even make a realistic sex scene without the dreaded NC-17 kiss-of-death promise from the moralists at the censorship board, thus less realism and a damaged national cinema.
Unrealistic sex scenes are damaging the national cinema? How exactly does that happen? The important thing is the story, and how it is conveyed...now, I'll grant you that it could be very possible that having "realistic sex scenes" can be necessary to do just that, but if that's the case, no one is preventing you from going to see a movie that is NC-17 rated.
On the other hand, I don't want to walk into non-sex movies and get sex. Matrix Reloaded's rave scene comes to mind...and the movie was rated R, imagine what that would be like if they could get away with more and still have it rated the same. Having that scene even more realistic wouldn't have made the movie any better. My enjoyment of a movie depends on how good the movie is, and who I can enjoy it with, and that scene limits the amount of people I'd feel confortable watching that movie with.
You mention that mainstream movies in Europe and Asia have a lot more T&A that our NC-17 movies...I've seen european movies like that, and that's what I'm afraid of really. Love is a theme in every genre, so we'd start having these "realistic scenes" pop-up everywhere, because let's face it...sex sells. I'm no "moralist", and I'm perfectly fine with movies containing such things, but I do like to enjoy the occasional movie with my parents and grandparents, and there are some things I just don't feel comfortable watching around them. The dreaded NC-17 rating makes sure that sex doesn't make it to ALL new movies
To date, the largest genome that was synthesized was the 7,500-base-pair polio virus. But that was only semi-functional and took three years to complete
So, the one you refer to more than a year ago, was NOT a fully functional virus.
Why is it that it's suddenly so important to convert everybody's grandma to Linux? Improving X is great, and I don't have anything against that, but no one will decide for me that gnome is better than kde or windowmaker, or whatever. If some things are too hard for the average windows user to learn, let him continue using windows. This isn't a competition, this is about using what works best for you, and if that's windows there's absolutely nothing wrong with it.
I like my choices, and no one...I mean NO ONE is taking my command-line away. NO ONE you hear me???
What "had been" a second world country? Unlike first world and third world denominations which depend on how industrialized you are, "second world" just means a socialist or communist state. They can be the most successful country on the planet and still be a second world country if they're communist, so I don't think that particular denomination will shame NASA.
It worked well during the cold war, because there was the whole "capitalism must win over communism before communists take over the world" mindset. Today, if China does a good job, the most change that you'll see happen will be NASA buying more chinese components.
NPD also found that the number of households acquiring digital music via peer-to-peer file-sharing services declined by 11 percent from August to September, during the traditional summer holiday for college students.
What exactly would attribute this to a success of the RIAA's anti-piracy tactics rather than the fact that students are leaving their T3 connected dorms and returning to their parents dial-up?
To be fair, the article didn't state any connection of these numbers to the RIAA's tactics, but given that it is in an article about millions deleting files out of fear, I'll go ahead and assume they meant to use it as a supporting statistic
If you're on windows, but using an e-mail client other than outlook (such as outlook express, which SpamBayes doesn't work with), consider PopFile.
It intercepts your pop3 mail first, then sends the mail with a classication you specify, which can be filtered using mail rules. Since it works pretty much by getting mail from your pop server directly, and setting up its own mail server for the mail program to connect to, it really should work with any e-mail program. It's written in perl, and although it has binaries for windows, you can get a cross-platform version for other platforms capable of running perl.
Like all things, it's not perfect though. No IMAP spport (although their faq indicates they're working on it).
These folks are the ones who piss away their money, so folks like me can get useless and obsolete hardware, like the terribly out-of-date Radeon 9700, for cheap cheap cheap.
Yeah, you're absolutely right. These folks piss away their money so that you can buy your old (and still good) hardware. Because guess what...if everybody waited for the price of the top of the line to come down, or if everybody waited until they needed faster hardware for their system, prices wouldn't come down as fast, and the 9700 would still be too expensive for you to buy (not to mention that development of faster hardware would slow down). Supply and demand, pal.
You should thank those people, not complain about them. If they have the money to spend, why shouldn't they? Good for you that you can save money and still get a great system.
If you'd like to trap the Ctrl-Alt-Del combination in Linux, and use it for something else, edit your inittab. Look for a comment along the lines of #trap CTRL-ALT-DEL. Below it there will be a command such as
ca::ctrlaltdel:/sbin/shutdown -r now
Yep...you might recognize that as the reboot command. You can go ahead and change it so that it shuts down your computer or run anything else you desire (although it'll run it with root privileges so, don't put something stupid in there unless you're running Lindows and therefore are always root, I guess)
And so help me, the next time I have someone point to the monitor and call it the "Computer"...
Unfortunately, that one is propagated by action movies. It happens in a lot of movies, but the last Tomb Raider comes to mind (don't ask why I went to see it...alright, heck...I'm a nerd, and there was a hot chick on screen). Croft needs to destroy computer so bad guy doesn't get the results of the stuff he was running...so she starts shooting monitors.
I swear it...I can't help but laugh each time it happens in a movie, and then I get the funny looks from the people around me who are wondering what in that action packed, high-tension situation I find funny.
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed, however in this particular case there's court precedent, as I've seen from your first link. Specifically:
Although the legal basis is not completely settled, many lawyers believe that the following (and many other uses) are also fair uses:
Making the roms is both a back-up copy, and format shifting. Using the rom in an emulator is personal, non-commercial use. I think there's a real strong case there if nintendo decides to sue. Nintendo lawyers know this, and that's why Nintendo has taken up the patent. If they sue, they'll sue them for violating the patent, not for violating their copyright.
While you get no argument from me that cutting off infected machines is a good thing, I'm afraid that ISP's will start cutting off your service for all sorts of reasons they don't like.
Although it is their network, it's not like you're hijacking it, or they're letting you use it. You're paying for it. That does give you the right to use the internet and there's definitely a line they can cross.
In the ideal world, people wouldn't be morons and they'd take basic precautions to prevent their machines from getting infected. In an ideal world, corporations wouldn't abuse their power and screw their customers...I want a ticket to that world, I really do.
Those of us in areas where high powered EMP bursts occur routinely really get the shaft, with all these electronics being embedded everywhere...did you know desktop computers are vulnerable? I had to buy 3 over the past month...luckyly we haven't had a burst lat *[NO CARRIER]
Seriously though...yeah...hood welded shut IS stupid. From a consumer point of view anyway...from the dealership and shops everywhere, it's a great idea...if you can't service your own car, you have to go to them for normal maintenance.
Damn the corporations and their "screw the consumer" profit plan...
I do exactly that with my GeForce FX 5700. As long as you don't need to interact with what's on the second monitor (most games grab the mice, so you can't move it to the other monitor), it works just fine.
What I would really like to do is to be able to chat on the other monitor while waiting to respawn, etc. on the game. Alt-tabbing minimizes all games in full screen mode, though.
I never laughed so much at anybody's sig before. Thank you.
Fictional stories were far more "real" to me when I was a child than histories or the news.
I agree. You're not born knowing the difference between reality and fiction. Everyone gets out of that phase on their own time though...putting an ambiguous age like 17 on a product doesn't work well though. I'd like to think most people actually have a good upgringing, and I believe those would be past that phase way below 17...on the other hand, the older boy that was doing the sniper shooting supposedly copying GTA was pretty old not to know that "life isn't a videogame" (tm).
Since we can't run a test on everyone that goes out to buy a videogame to see if they're properly mature and mentally balanced, I'll leave that responsibility to the parent.
If a parent decides to buy violent game for their kid, the government shouldn't be kicking down their doors. That said, we all know that kids buy games themselves most of the time, and noone in the store gives a rat's ass about who they sell to.
Yeah, but what's he going to do? Buy the game, hide it under his bed, make sure to play it only when his parents aren't home? This is what I'm talking about when I say parents with problem kids are just not raising their children properly. When I was growing up, my parents would play the games I had with me...they frowned at mortal kombat, which I guess was the height of the violence at the time, but they knew I was playing it. Furthermore, they encouraged my participation in other activities, so that video games wasn't the whole of my life back then. Family nights!!! It's not just a board game commercial, it really did use to be fun. Family outtings...and yes, there's unsupervised fun with friends, but until I reached a "responsible age", they knew my friends, they knew my closest friends' parents, and thus, they knew what we were doing.
I bet if you saw a shootout on the local news you might say "Cool!" (after a couple months of GTA).
That's an interesting observation. It's the whole police chase phenomenon, everyone likes to see them, and everyone goes "oooh aaah" when the chase ends in a big crash. I wonder what it is, though...is it that the fake violence input is causing us to become more accepting of violence in general, or is that from watching so many violent things on tv we know to be fake, we now instinctively treat everything we see on tv as fake?
I think we emotionally don't believe the news, even though we know it is true. Think about "War of the Worlds" for example...In 1938, when people turned on their radios and heard that Earth was being attacked by aliens in what appeared to be a news format, they freaked out. What would happen if you turned the tv on today and Tom Brokaw was reporting an alien invasion where your...say...sister lives?
Tom Brokaw is a real newsanchor, so you should potentially become fearful. I bet you wouldn't though. If you decided to turn the channel, and you saw that every channel was reporting the same thing, you might get worried...the footage of klingons killing people is probably way too familiar to you, and even though it's in every channel, I doubt that you'd be afraid just yet...you might be wondering, "is this for real?" and give your sister a call to ask what the heck is going on, but I think you still wouldn't be afraid in the emotional sense.
Now, if you call her up, and she answers the telephone screaming for help, THAT will freak you out. Suddenly all this stuff that has been on tv becomes real to you. Regardless of how many stations reported it as news, you just don't trust it today like people did in '38 (and that was just one station, the people that were fooled didn't even bother flipping the channels to check out other sources). Why is that? Why are we suddenly not that gullible anymore? I propose that the effect all this fake violence has had in the
It's not "the ideas" that's influencing kids. The problem is when they get more "input to their brains" from tv and video games than they get from their parents. You can't possibly be equating a child watching their father beating his mother to a child watching something violent on TV (be it movies or videogames)...one is very real, the other is not. It's the parents' responsibility to make sure their children understand the difference between fantasy and reality.
I *love* violent movies / video games. I don't feel uncomfortable at all at seeing people getting shot/mutilated/whatever at the screen. At the same time, if I see a parent smacking their child too hard at a supermarket, that makes me cringe. If I see someone actually get shot in front of me, I'll probably scream like a woman (no disrepect intended to women, that's adjetive is intended to qualify the pitch of the scream).
As everyone knows, enforcement of the ratings system is a joke.
As well they should be. Are you telling me the governmnent needs to tell me how to raise my child? I've been watching violent movies since I was 6-7. My parents felt I knew the difference between reality and fiction, and I did. I'm as non-violent as you get today. The rating system should be a warning, just that. A way for conscious parents to know what they are buying for their kids and make the decisions themselves, not something that should be actually enforced.
That's absolutely fine with me. It's the reason I waited until I had the new computer to try it out, so that if it didn't work well with what I wanted to do, I could just reformat without worrying about the data. My problem isn't that it won't run certain things, I'm fine with using XP. My problem is with the bsod's. If you're going to break backwards compatibility, fine. However, keep track of exactly what it is that you're breaking compatibility with, check to make sure the drivers don't use that thing, and if they do, don't let the user install it. However, don't crash the darn operating system, that's not acceptable, particularly in a server os.
I recently bought an Opteron system...and planned to use it for gaming purposes (keep the criticism to yourselves, I've heard it all). I tried installing 2003 because my school had recently given me a copy and I felt that was a good time as any to try it out, because I wouldn't have to backup everything to do a clean install with XP afterwards. If I liked it, I'd keep it.
First...I could *not* get directX working. It installed, but dxdiag wouldn't enable direct3d. It kept saying my driver didn't support hardware acceleration. Then I installed sound card drivers, and THAT was horrible. It BSOD'ed. Then every time it rebooted, the software that came with the audigy's drivers would start up pop up a screen which would cause the computer to bsod again. I went to safe mode, stopped that application from starting up automatically, rebooted, and used add/remove programs to remove the audigy software. In the middle of the uninstall, it bsod'ed. I tried again, it bsod'ed in the same place.
Given that 2003 is a server OS, I can draw two conclusions...it's a HORRIBLE server OS, because it's not frigging stable, or it's not meant to have graphics/sound because it's a server OS, and it's stable otherwise. WinXP has absolutely NO problems with my hardware at all.
Now, sure...you can free a whole bunch of people (which Neo did...Morpheus mentions in reloaded more people had been freed in the past 6 months then had been in the past 6 years). Then you could send them all into the matrix to fight...what? The rest of the humans still plugged in? The very people you're trying to save? Heck, you'd need way too many hovercrafts to get these people up to broadcast depth, all to do something Neo can do on his own. Inside the matrix, he rules. If he can't handle something, no amount of "normal" people can. The only thing Neo was incapable of handling on a pure fight was Smith, and Smith has shown his ability to copy himself even into people that have been freed from the matrix (ie, Bane).
But yeah...I know what you mean. It would be much cooler to have a whole bunch of really good fight scenes inside the matrix than the whole boring Zion fight. Then again, I know a whole bunch of other people who think the exact opposite, were really tired of the wire-fu, and really liked the Zion battle.
I could live either way. All I needed was an explanation of what the heck happened. In an all-fantasy story like Lord of the Rings, anything goes...it's fantasy. With the matrix, the first matrix set the boundaries--the reason Neo can do all those things is because he's inside a computer program, and he can change the program somehow. Then, with Revolutions they pulled the whole "the power of the one extends beyond this world" thing. Why? The power of the one was changing the code of the matrix, what other power does he have that allows him to do things outside the matrix? Really, I wouldn't care how they approached the revolution, I just wanted a coherent storyline.
Oh...that was the sound of a million auxiliary generators being turned on to counter the increased power needs of all these processors.
Seems to me that the method is indeed very effective when you only need to use one movie. However, if Blockbuster is trying to sway the entire movie industry, they'd have to drop the "Guaranteed in Stock" thing with every new release. If customers start getting frustrated because they can't find any of the newly released movies they want to see, they go to other rental stores...wouldn't Blockbuster thus stand to lose too much to make this tactic viable on a large scale?
Unrealistic sex scenes are damaging the national cinema? How exactly does that happen? The important thing is the story, and how it is conveyed...now, I'll grant you that it could be very possible that having "realistic sex scenes" can be necessary to do just that, but if that's the case, no one is preventing you from going to see a movie that is NC-17 rated.
On the other hand, I don't want to walk into non-sex movies and get sex. Matrix Reloaded's rave scene comes to mind...and the movie was rated R, imagine what that would be like if they could get away with more and still have it rated the same. Having that scene even more realistic wouldn't have made the movie any better. My enjoyment of a movie depends on how good the movie is, and who I can enjoy it with, and that scene limits the amount of people I'd feel confortable watching that movie with.
You mention that mainstream movies in Europe and Asia have a lot more T&A that our NC-17 movies...I've seen european movies like that, and that's what I'm afraid of really. Love is a theme in every genre, so we'd start having these "realistic scenes" pop-up everywhere, because let's face it...sex sells. I'm no "moralist", and I'm perfectly fine with movies containing such things, but I do like to enjoy the occasional movie with my parents and grandparents, and there are some things I just don't feel comfortable watching around them. The dreaded NC-17 rating makes sure that sex doesn't make it to ALL new movies
To date, the largest genome that was synthesized was the 7,500-base-pair polio virus. But that was only semi-functional and took three years to complete
So, the one you refer to more than a year ago, was NOT a fully functional virus.
Holy...You know what...I'm going home. I don't think I can be productive at work today. That's just messed up.
I'll just blame this on the command-line I love so much and claim I typed the comment above using lynx...yeah...that's it.
Why is it that it's suddenly so important to convert everybody's grandma to Linux? Improving X is great, and I don't have anything against that, but no one will decide for me that gnome is better than kde or windowmaker, or whatever. If some things are too hard for the average windows user to learn, let him continue using windows. This isn't a competition, this is about using what works best for you, and if that's windows there's absolutely nothing wrong with it.
I like my choices, and no one...I mean NO ONE is taking my command-line away. NO ONE you hear me???
It worked well during the cold war, because there was the whole "capitalism must win over communism before communists take over the world" mindset. Today, if China does a good job, the most change that you'll see happen will be NASA buying more chinese components.
Internet shopping is becoming really widespread. If the public gets a taste for it, this could be the end of malls.
NPD also found that the number of households acquiring digital music via peer-to-peer file-sharing services declined by 11 percent from August to September, during the traditional summer holiday for college students.
What exactly would attribute this to a success of the RIAA's anti-piracy tactics rather than the fact that students are leaving their T3 connected dorms and returning to their parents dial-up?
To be fair, the article didn't state any connection of these numbers to the RIAA's tactics, but given that it is in an article about millions deleting files out of fear, I'll go ahead and assume they meant to use it as a supporting statistic
It intercepts your pop3 mail first, then sends the mail with a classication you specify, which can be filtered using mail rules. Since it works pretty much by getting mail from your pop server directly, and setting up its own mail server for the mail program to connect to, it really should work with any e-mail program. It's written in perl, and although it has binaries for windows, you can get a cross-platform version for other platforms capable of running perl.
Like all things, it's not perfect though. No IMAP spport (although their faq indicates they're working on it).
that you've never had a pet.
You should thank those people, not complain about them. If they have the money to spend, why shouldn't they? Good for you that you can save money and still get a great system.
ca::ctrlaltdel:/sbin/shutdown -r now
Yep...you might recognize that as the reboot command. You can go ahead and change it so that it shuts down your computer or run anything else you desire (although it'll run it with root privileges so, don't put something stupid in there unless you're running Lindows and therefore are always root, I guess)
Unfortunately, that one is propagated by action movies. It happens in a lot of movies, but the last Tomb Raider comes to mind (don't ask why I went to see it...alright, heck...I'm a nerd, and there was a hot chick on screen). Croft needs to destroy computer so bad guy doesn't get the results of the stuff he was running...so she starts shooting monitors.
I swear it...I can't help but laugh each time it happens in a movie, and then I get the funny looks from the people around me who are wondering what in that action packed, high-tension situation I find funny.