It would have been better if Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel had never been released at all. Its only excuse was that it seemed to have been made by a third party developer - Black Isle should have been ashamed to put their logo on this game. It was full of bugs, lacked most of the humor of the orginal, lacked most of the choices of the orginal, and had more bugs then the orginal. You couldn't walk across the map without running into endless fights. And by endless I mean: you run into one and you escape cause you don't want to fight it it, the screen flashes back to the map but before you even really begin to move, your back in a new fight so you fight that one hoping you won't have to fight again, only the map flashes again just like before and your in another fight - and you've only moved one single dot in all that time.
The jokes we're mostly lame attempts at cheap knock offs of the some of the orginal jokes. instead of meeting the bridge keeper you meet king arthurs knights from monty python, etc.. And the worse was lack of choices. The game became a destroy target, get new mission to destroy new target. You couldn't go off to explore becuase the towns would only appear when you got to the missions that needed them. You didn't have the freedom of the orginals to search however way you wished, instead you had to keep doing mission after boring repetitive mission. And all the missions were the same. They might say something about peace but when it came down to it it was search out target, eradicate target, get new target. You couldn't be bad or anything either because in order to get the next mission you had to go back to the brotherhood who'd kill you for being evil. Imagine having to play the military base part of Fallout 1 over and over again except instead of having to fiddle with forcefields you just had to kill people. That was the whole game and quite frankly it sucked. If it wasn't for the fact that R. Lee Ermy did one of the voices, the game itself would have no redeeming qualities whatsoever.
Re:Culture of Empire vs. Culture of Exploration.
on
The Future of NASA
·
· Score: 1
Actually one could argue that this follows the pattern for all great democracies and republics. Athens at its height was just as militaristic as Rome and as we are becoming. Athens declared at one point that any state that was not its ally was its enemy and literally wiped out whole towns. One that attempted to remain nuetral was slaughtered (women, children as well) and its dead nailed to boards and left to rot as a signal to everyone else. The athenians were said to fight as if they did not fear death. Rome had a very similiar history of militaristic attitudes and commited similiar atrosities. It's probably were we are headed. The rise is over, now for the decadence and destruction, the militaristic attudes and atrosities, and the inevitable decline.
Your making one mistake: these virtual worlds are supposed to be escapes from reality, not substitutes. If I want reality, I'll go outdoors or to work and get the real thing. I want an escape when I go online, a place were I can escape my normal responisbilities. A place were I can act as who I am and not who I am at work. If they make these virtual worlds mirrors of this one with all the restrictions and censorship as this one, how will it be an escape? It won't be. If these games becomes political where all that has to happen is one person out of 1,000,000 complains and we get instant censorship, then were will we escape too? A video game inside one of these virtual communities? And if these virtual worlds become too restrictive, they won't be fun anymore and who will be paying to play them then?
"I guess I may be the only one buying 15 year old games you cant get anywhere else..."
There are a few of us who are going to different shops and collecting the orginal carts, but most don't actually play those carts and are content to play around with emulators. You don't have to worry about the cart getting damaged, the console breaking, or the control pads or joysticks wearing out. Plus you get a far larger variety of joysticks and such to choose from that if they wear out can easily be replaced (as opposed to say the vectrex control bars or the coco's joysticks.) The greatest benefits of emulators however are the fact that they act sort as an archive system for older games. How many vectrex carts will still be in existance in fifty years? How many nintendos will still be functioning by 2050? Huge numbers of games and consoles will be lost in the pages of history by then, but I bet you that the emulator market for those games will still be strong, even though the actul games and systems will have long since disappeared. And if everything this article says comes to pass, then its in the world of emulators that you'll find me. I have played a lot of NES, SNES, and Genesis games but I probably haven't even played 33% of them yet. Let's not even mention Mame...
Bottom Line: If the gaming market gets taken over by a bunch of control-freaks like this article believes, there are already enough games in existance that aren't imprisioned to keep us all busy till the lard-ass money-hogs go broke.
"In a racing game like Gran Turismo, the harder you push on the joystick, the faster the semi-delicate irreplacable touch sensors wear out, while pulling back slows down joystick wear."
The more I read about the more I have come to the opinion it must be one of three conclusions:
1. These companies seem to want to sell remote computing power - as in they'll help whenever the needs of your busines overload your comapnies computers or at peak times.
2. These companies seem to want to set up your comapnies computers so they run seemlessly (in other words, they never crash, never fail, are always connected to each other, you never have problems with them in any way, etc) possibly by being linked to an outside source like say an ms update network and that everything will be automatic. Basically, you buy the computers, set them up, turn them on, and that's it. From their they take care of themselves - with a little help from and a little money every month to the company that you bought them from of course.
3. They want to run your server and computer network for you. You give them your site or database, they maintain and run it. You log in to their computer network, access your stuff on their resources, and they take care of it so you can concentrate on your business.
From reading what's out there and attempting to make sense from the multitude of buzzwords these ceos seem to spout every couple of minutes, I figure it has to be one of these. The companies themselves might not known; they might still be deciding. It seems obvious the CEO's of these companies don't know. They spout buzzwords that don't mean anything, pretend they know at least something about the products their company is making (Carly F. it is blantaly obvious doesn't know the first thing about networks or computers - probably thinks you can handle computers like you would sell sowing machines or radios, a clasic mistake in the world of tech), and are not giving anyone in their respective companies a clear idea of what their own companies are doing. In other words, the leadership doesn't know what the hell is going on anymore in these companies and hence no one else is sure either. The ppl who do know (the techs) are probably too busy trying to make it work than to try spending a year explaining it to their business major ceo who still won't get it.
As far as technological restrictions are concerned: Bring em on. Someone will find a way around them eventually (I'll help). I would much rather have technoligical restrictions than laws. With either a tech solution or a set of dranconian laws, there will always be a group that will not allow those restrictions to stop them. In tech, it is anyone who is willing to go that extra mile to do something the average user can't. In law it is someone who is willing to take the risk of being caught. What is the punishment for going around a tech restriction? They just find a way to block your method and you have to find a new one. What's the penality for doing something illegal? A lot worse.
In addition, lawmakers have the foolish notation that just becuase they legislate, what they legislate can and will happen. In tech this doesn't work. You want to know what they're going to say after this meeting? Let's build a completely foolproof system that doesn't allow the dling of copyrighted material and yet still works at the same level of quality as p2p's do now. Yet they don't realize that building such a system with no workarounds is impossible. So let's say that is what they legislate. Now two years down the line they find it doesn't work. So they go back to the old law to see if they can change it to fix the problems. That's the catch! Even if the law is perfect, the implementation of that law will never be. So they'll go back to a renewed vigor stance and the problems with the law will remain. Once they focus on tougher tech restrictions, they are as good as beat cause the restrictions are bound to fail.
But the real worry is not tech restrictions or law. It is both working in unison as we see now. You have tech restrictions on the copyright laws fair uses and in addition you have draconian laws like the DMCA that makes it a crime to circumvent those restrictions. That's the real danger. Not only will things be restricted by law to a set of fair uses, but those fair uses will then be removed throught the use of tech restrictions. What isn't covered by one will be covered by the other and both will work together to destroy what little culture we have that remains. In the end, we will have a culture forcefed us by corporations, a culture with a big price tag stuck to it, a culture that will be little more than a marketing scheme. Farenheit 451, here we come. Buy CD's from the RIAA and help support the firemen of the future and rest assured everything will be taken care of so you may go back to living your lives (as sheep).
According to the article: "Infinium Labs' proposed console, the Phantom, has made a showing at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas as announced by the company earlier this week, but only in the form of a box which was not switched on."
Does this remind anyone else of the "three wheeled car" scam they had on unsolved mysteries once... you know the one where they had a big factory and claimed to be making three wheeled cars and had a whole mess of employees and looked completey legit and impressive but when the investigators finally raided the place, all the company had to show for it was an empty factory with a ripped up car with two by fours holding a third wheel on the back. Could the 'phantom' console be the same - a nice looking box that looked nice and legit until you realize for all you know it could just be a nice looking plastic box with a brick sitting inside it to give it weight? Did anyone actually open up the console to check? Is it really a prototype of some sort? Or is the 'phantom' console nothing but a phantom?
You want to know where legos help you most: comp sci, spatial relations and physics. Back in high school you could ask any of us physics honors students what we did as kids, and you could bet nealry everyone of us had a set of legos. Gears, levers, pulleys? Already had them down solid. Examining a widget and designing a process to make that wdiget? We had years of experience. Go to Level 2 and you get the kids who played football. Level 3 was filled with tv watchers.
No words in any langauge translate perfectly from one language to another. Latin in particular is famous for having a very limited vocabulary with every word having multiple modern equivalents based on context. As a result it is up to the translator often to examine in what contexts the romans used a particular word and how they used it, and then compare that to the current context in order to determine its correct meaning.
How else would he have heard about Carly Fiorina's attack on music sharing? It seems not only is she a lousy CEO but also is in the pockets of the music industry. Read and hear about the heart wrenching story of rapper 50 cents who having sold 6.5 million records this year alone now feels the need to take away some college kid's lunch and car. Or the tale of a company that for the sake of innovation is attempting to destroy everyone's freedom to innovate...
It would be nice of things went that way. Unfortunately these types of things usually don't stop till the situation gets out of hand and it won't because someone started asking questions. Chances are it will be:
They go and try to bust a bigger name priate then just a guy in a parking lot, but this guy is different. Where the parking lot guys immediately cave, this guy instead looses his cool, panics, pulls out his shotgun thinking these are real police officers, and blows them all away. Then you get the PR backlash. It could go two ways:
1) the media stands with the common ppl, see the RIAA as having done something criminal, and public opinion turns against the RIAA
or
2) the media (whose owners also are members of the RIAA) side with the RIAA 'officers' and turn public opinion towards a "send to jail the dangerous pirates on our streets". Pirates end up with an image equivalent to drug dealers, anyone who supports them look like criminals too, and you also end up with the police involved in 'cracking down'. The pendulum swings in their favor and the next thing you know you end up with file sharers being treated like drug addicts. Copyright issues no longer become a concern to the public becuase the RIAA now has 'pirates are dangerous' trump card.
I seriously hope I am wrong, but I can't help but think that the RIAA has seen this scenario from the get-go and it is eactly what they want. These RIAA 'officers' are fall guys - they get sued then its these 'officers' that take the heat, if they get whacked by some trigger happy street vendor they end up getting the RIAA everything they want, if not either then the RIAA wins and pirates are taken down. I hope the real authorities step in soon. There is a reason vigilantism is illegal - this situation could easily get out of hand.
They already have: its called shooting yourself in the foot. SCO recently tried threatening ppl by claiming ownership of header files they obviously don't own. The RIAA is now breaking the law in attempting to fight pirates. Both just flushed their public images down the drain. In an attempt to give their claims legitimacy, SCO has complelty destroyed any shadow of legitimacy their claims had. In attempt to stop 'criminals' from breaking copyright policy, the RIAA just became real criminals. We have been wasting our time arguing and fighting these people, they can defeat themsleves just fine on their own.
Actually we're essentially destroying our own economy. Most of the goods we make our luxury items. Good quality furniture, computers, cell phones, etc, are all stuff most of the world does without. When we're all working for minimum wage trying to compete against thrid world ppl doing stuff for near free, who is going to buy the software we produce, the dvd's and movies? When we're all in the poor house, who is going to purchase what we produce? Rich indian programmers who will end up with a better life style than us... we are selling our standard of living to the lowest bidder.
Wake up, dude. Not only can you not live on minimum wage (even with two jobs), there is the added concern for college costs. Education cost money. It isn't like a blue collar job where you can get along on a high school diploma that's free to get. In order to get those white collar jobs, you need a diploma that will cost you on average some $80,000 from a decent school to get. That isn't free, you have to pay back loans. You can't do that on minimum wage. Now, I'm not saying it entitles you to a good paying job, but you shoudl get payed what your worth - and having a college education (notice I didn't say diploma - just because you have a diploma doesn't mean your educated) and working a job that requires such an eduication entitles you to a higher wage then someone just out of high school (which is probably the minimum wage standard). How many good doctors work for minimum wage?
You can't get by on minimum wage (that's single - forget having a family), you certianly can't pay school loans back on minimum wage, and you definitely can't send your kids to college on minimum wage. Someone with a college education that works for minimum wage insures that their children probably won't even make it to college. As it stands the system cannot support itself. The avergae us worker cannot compete against a guy who only makes $10,000 a year. And foregt this baloney about balancing out lifestyles and setting us eqaul to the rest of the world. You want to know how the rest of the world lives? Read "Nectar in a Sieve". That's where life styles are going to balance out. The way things are going, BladeRunner would end up looking like paradise. The reality would be more like the slums of south america or africa.
That most ppl have already dled all the music they want by now. So it makes sense that file trading would go down; how many 30 year olds are going to trade Spear's latest album? Once you've dled all the music you like and wanted, its only new stuff that you would be dling. And let's face it, there isn't that much out there that's new that's worth going out to Kazaa to get. Lesser decent new stuff, lesser dling.
Back in sophmore year of college I was addcited to the stuff. I was drinking 3-4 mountain dews a day and only sleeping 4 hours a night. A little caffeine is alright but at the levels most people drink it your best bet is probably to just quit. Like most addictions, the best solution is to not drink the stuff. What you probably need is a good kick in the ass to stop yourself. With me it was a week with only 20 hours of sleep total. Afterwards I slept 15 hours a day, three days in a row. Of the six hours I was awake, I had one of the worst headache's you could possibly imagine. It was two weeks before the headaches went away, and a full month before I was sleeping like a normal human being. If you have the time, cold turkey is probably the best route. If you don't, your best bet is to drop coffee and mountain dew and stick with normal soda.
In the meantime, try to limit your intake and get as much sleep as possible. It is not just the caffeine but also the lack of sleep that is the big danger of it. A chronic lack of sleep has all kinds of harmful neurological side effects. Add that to the damage your probably doing to your heart from the elevated blood pressure you get from the stuff and your setting yourself up for a world of future health problems. Treat caffeine the same way you would treat any other drug: it has its occasional uses nd beenfits but long term use of it in any significant quantity outweighs those benefits. Any other time, drink water.
It's like Rad Racer 2 if you don't make the checkpoint in time. Your engine switches off and you roll to a stop. Only difference here is you can roll into an intersection. Imagine your car stalling out in the middle of Time Square or in the middle of the highway.
Actually, Venus is not what Earth was once like. It is what Earth could have been like. At some point in the distant past, when the condensation from volcanic activity etc collected to form Earth's oceans, Venus's water evaporated (due to the slightly higher temperature due to its closer proximity to the sun.) The CO2(i think) that remains trapped in limestone and in the oceans of earth on venus evaportaed and combined with other gases to form its super thick atmosphere. The dense clouds insulated the planet and caused the further evaporation of moisture on the planet until it was all gone. At which point Venus was trapped in a runaway greenhouse effect - dense clouds cuase high pressure, heat is kept in and absorbed from the sun, acid rain constanly falls, evaportaes immediately only to fall again. Venus is what could have been and isn't (and hopefully won't be.) Mars is a possible future.
Actually, C++ == (C = C + 1) but lets not split hairs.
As far as the langauge goes, according to a big graph I got on the wall from CrossTalk: CPL - 1963 BCPL - July 1967 B - 1969 C - 1971 C(K&R) - 1978 C with Classes - April 1980 C++ - July 1983 Objective C - 1983 Concurrent C - 1984 ANSI C - 1989
Slashdot Mirror
It would have been better if Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel had never been released at all. Its only excuse was that it seemed to have been made by a third party developer - Black Isle should have been ashamed to put their logo on this game. It was full of bugs, lacked most of the humor of the orginal, lacked most of the choices of the orginal, and had more bugs then the orginal. You couldn't walk across the map without running into endless fights. And by endless I mean: you run into one and you escape cause you don't want to fight it it, the screen flashes back to the map but before you even really begin to move, your back in a new fight so you fight that one hoping you won't have to fight again, only the map flashes again just like before and your in another fight - and you've only moved one single dot in all that time.
The jokes we're mostly lame attempts at cheap knock offs of the some of the orginal jokes. instead of meeting the bridge keeper you meet king arthurs knights from monty python, etc.. And the worse was lack of choices. The game became a destroy target, get new mission to destroy new target. You couldn't go off to explore becuase the towns would only appear when you got to the missions that needed them. You didn't have the freedom of the orginals to search however way you wished, instead you had to keep doing mission after boring repetitive mission. And all the missions were the same. They might say something about peace but when it came down to it it was search out target, eradicate target, get new target. You couldn't be bad or anything either because in order to get the next mission you had to go back to the brotherhood who'd kill you for being evil. Imagine having to play the military base part of Fallout 1 over and over again except instead of having to fiddle with forcefields you just had to kill people. That was the whole game and quite frankly it sucked. If it wasn't for the fact that R. Lee Ermy did one of the voices, the game itself would have no redeeming qualities whatsoever.
Actually one could argue that this follows the pattern for all great democracies and republics. Athens at its height was just as militaristic as Rome and as we are becoming. Athens declared at one point that any state that was not its ally was its enemy and literally wiped out whole towns. One that attempted to remain nuetral was slaughtered (women, children as well) and its dead nailed to boards and left to rot as a signal to everyone else. The athenians were said to fight as if they did not fear death. Rome had a very similiar history of militaristic attitudes and commited similiar atrosities. It's probably were we are headed. The rise is over, now for the decadence and destruction, the militaristic attudes and atrosities, and the inevitable decline.
How about:
Sound/Song/Special Handlers in Trade(SHIT)
Copy Restrictor and Protector(CRAP)
Media Oriented Restrictions Enforcer Support Handler Intended To Harass End-users And Destroy Systems(MORE SHITHEADS)
Your making one mistake: these virtual worlds are supposed to be escapes from reality, not substitutes. If I want reality, I'll go outdoors or to work and get the real thing. I want an escape when I go online, a place were I can escape my normal responisbilities. A place were I can act as who I am and not who I am at work. If they make these virtual worlds mirrors of this one with all the restrictions and censorship as this one, how will it be an escape? It won't be. If these games becomes political where all that has to happen is one person out of 1,000,000 complains and we get instant censorship, then were will we escape too? A video game inside one of these virtual communities? And if these virtual worlds become too restrictive, they won't be fun anymore and who will be paying to play them then?
"I guess I may be the only one buying 15 year old games you cant get anywhere else..."
There are a few of us who are going to different shops and collecting the orginal carts, but most don't actually play those carts and are content to play around with emulators. You don't have to worry about the cart getting damaged, the console breaking, or the control pads or joysticks wearing out. Plus you get a far larger variety of joysticks and such to choose from that if they wear out can easily be replaced (as opposed to say the vectrex control bars or the coco's joysticks.) The greatest benefits of emulators however are the fact that they act sort as an archive system for older games. How many vectrex carts will still be in existance in fifty years? How many nintendos will still be functioning by 2050? Huge numbers of games and consoles will be lost in the pages of history by then, but I bet you that the emulator market for those games will still be strong, even though the actul games and systems will have long since disappeared. And if everything this article says comes to pass, then its in the world of emulators that you'll find me. I have played a lot of NES, SNES, and Genesis games but I probably haven't even played 33% of them yet. Let's not even mention Mame...
Bottom Line: If the gaming market gets taken over by a bunch of control-freaks like this article believes, there are already enough games in existance that aren't imprisioned to keep us all busy till the lard-ass money-hogs go broke.
"In a racing game like Gran Turismo, the harder you push on the joystick, the faster the semi-delicate irreplacable touch sensors wear out, while pulling back slows down joystick wear."
The more I read about the more I have come to the opinion it must be one of three conclusions:
1. These companies seem to want to sell remote computing power - as in they'll help whenever the needs of your busines overload your comapnies computers or at peak times.
2. These companies seem to want to set up your comapnies computers so they run seemlessly (in other words, they never crash, never fail, are always connected to each other, you never have problems with them in any way, etc) possibly by being linked to an outside source like say an ms update network and that everything will be automatic. Basically, you buy the computers, set them up, turn them on, and that's it. From their they take care of themselves - with a little help from and a little money every month to the company that you bought them from of course.
3. They want to run your server and computer network for you. You give them your site or database, they maintain and run it. You log in to their computer network, access your stuff on their resources, and they take care of it so you can concentrate on your business.
From reading what's out there and attempting to make sense from the multitude of buzzwords these ceos seem to spout every couple of minutes, I figure it has to be one of these. The companies themselves might not known; they might still be deciding. It seems obvious the CEO's of these companies don't know. They spout buzzwords that don't mean anything, pretend they know at least something about the products their company is making (Carly F. it is blantaly obvious doesn't know the first thing about networks or computers - probably thinks you can handle computers like you would sell sowing machines or radios, a clasic mistake in the world of tech), and are not giving anyone in their respective companies a clear idea of what their own companies are doing. In other words, the leadership doesn't know what the hell is going on anymore in these companies and hence no one else is sure either. The ppl who do know (the techs) are probably too busy trying to make it work than to try spending a year explaining it to their business major ceo who still won't get it.
As far as technological restrictions are concerned: Bring em on. Someone will find a way around them eventually (I'll help). I would much rather have technoligical restrictions than laws. With either a tech solution or a set of dranconian laws, there will always be a group that will not allow those restrictions to stop them. In tech, it is anyone who is willing to go that extra mile to do something the average user can't. In law it is someone who is willing to take the risk of being caught. What is the punishment for going around a tech restriction? They just find a way to block your method and you have to find a new one. What's the penality for doing something illegal? A lot worse.
In addition, lawmakers have the foolish notation that just becuase they legislate, what they legislate can and will happen. In tech this doesn't work. You want to know what they're going to say after this meeting? Let's build a completely foolproof system that doesn't allow the dling of copyrighted material and yet still works at the same level of quality as p2p's do now. Yet they don't realize that building such a system with no workarounds is impossible. So let's say that is what they legislate. Now two years down the line they find it doesn't work. So they go back to the old law to see if they can change it to fix the problems. That's the catch! Even if the law is perfect, the implementation of that law will never be. So they'll go back to a renewed vigor stance and the problems with the law will remain. Once they focus on tougher tech restrictions, they are as good as beat cause the restrictions are bound to fail.
But the real worry is not tech restrictions or law. It is both working in unison as we see now. You have tech restrictions on the copyright laws fair uses and in addition you have draconian laws like the DMCA that makes it a crime to circumvent those restrictions. That's the real danger. Not only will things be restricted by law to a set of fair uses, but those fair uses will then be removed throught the use of tech restrictions. What isn't covered by one will be covered by the other and both will work together to destroy what little culture we have that remains. In the end, we will have a culture forcefed us by corporations, a culture with a big price tag stuck to it, a culture that will be little more than a marketing scheme. Farenheit 451, here we come. Buy CD's from the RIAA and help support the firemen of the future and rest assured everything will be taken care of so you may go back to living your lives (as sheep).
Its called slashdot.
Adam Cassidy? Nicholas Wyatt? Sounds like a bad porn story already...
They are doomed... again. nuff said.
According to the article: "Infinium Labs' proposed console, the Phantom, has made a showing at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas as announced by the company earlier this week, but only in the form of a box which was not switched on."
Does this remind anyone else of the "three wheeled car" scam they had on unsolved mysteries once... you know the one where they had a big factory and claimed to be making three wheeled cars and had a whole mess of employees and looked completey legit and impressive but when the investigators finally raided the place, all the company had to show for it was an empty factory with a ripped up car with two by fours holding a third wheel on the back. Could the 'phantom' console be the same - a nice looking box that looked nice and legit until you realize for all you know it could just be a nice looking plastic box with a brick sitting inside it to give it weight? Did anyone actually open up the console to check? Is it really a prototype of some sort? Or is the 'phantom' console nothing but a phantom?
You want to know where legos help you most: comp sci, spatial relations and physics. Back in high school you could ask any of us physics honors students what we did as kids, and you could bet nealry everyone of us had a set of legos. Gears, levers, pulleys? Already had them down solid. Examining a widget and designing a process to make that wdiget? We had years of experience. Go to Level 2 and you get the kids who played football. Level 3 was filled with tv watchers.
lego (2) legere legi lectum [to collect , gather, pick, pick up]; 'fila', [to wind up, spin]; 'vela', [to furl]; of places, [to pass through, traverse, coast along]; with the eyes, [to survey, scan, read, peruse]; out of a number, [to pick out, choose, select]. Hence partic. lectus -a -um, [chosen, selected; choice, excellent].
Taken from The University of Notre Dame
No words in any langauge translate perfectly from one language to another. Latin in particular is famous for having a very limited vocabulary with every word having multiple modern equivalents based on context. As a result it is up to the translator often to examine in what contexts the romans used a particular word and how they used it, and then compare that to the current context in order to determine its correct meaning.
How else would he have heard about Carly Fiorina's attack on music sharing? It seems not only is she a lousy CEO but also is in the pockets of the music industry. Read and hear about the heart wrenching story of rapper 50 cents who having sold 6.5 million records this year alone now feels the need to take away some college kid's lunch and car. Or the tale of a company that for the sake of innovation is attempting to destroy everyone's freedom to innovate...
It would be nice of things went that way. Unfortunately these types of things usually don't stop till the situation gets out of hand and it won't because someone started asking questions. Chances are it will be:
They go and try to bust a bigger name priate then just a guy in a parking lot, but this guy is different. Where the parking lot guys immediately cave, this guy instead looses his cool, panics, pulls out his shotgun thinking these are real police officers, and blows them all away. Then you get the PR backlash. It could go two ways:
1) the media stands with the common ppl, see the RIAA as having done something criminal, and public opinion turns against the RIAA
or
2) the media (whose owners also are members of the RIAA) side with the RIAA 'officers' and turn public opinion towards a "send to jail the dangerous pirates on our streets". Pirates end up with an image equivalent to drug dealers, anyone who supports them look like criminals too, and you also end up with the police involved in 'cracking down'. The pendulum swings in their favor and the next thing you know you end up with file sharers being treated like drug addicts. Copyright issues no longer become a concern to the public becuase the RIAA now has 'pirates are dangerous' trump card.
I seriously hope I am wrong, but I can't help but think that the RIAA has seen this scenario from the get-go and it is eactly what they want. These RIAA 'officers' are fall guys - they get sued then its these 'officers' that take the heat, if they get whacked by some trigger happy street vendor they end up getting the RIAA everything they want, if not either then the RIAA wins and pirates are taken down. I hope the real authorities step in soon. There is a reason vigilantism is illegal - this situation could easily get out of hand.
They already have: its called shooting yourself in the foot. SCO recently tried threatening ppl by claiming ownership of header files they obviously don't own. The RIAA is now breaking the law in attempting to fight pirates. Both just flushed their public images down the drain. In an attempt to give their claims legitimacy, SCO has complelty destroyed any shadow of legitimacy their claims had. In attempt to stop 'criminals' from breaking copyright policy, the RIAA just became real criminals. We have been wasting our time arguing and fighting these people, they can defeat themsleves just fine on their own.
Not to mention the 5 jets she's buying to replace the 2 they have from the late 90's while simultaneously firing 1000's of engineers to 'cut costs'.
Actually we're essentially destroying our own economy. Most of the goods we make our luxury items. Good quality furniture, computers, cell phones, etc, are all stuff most of the world does without. When we're all working for minimum wage trying to compete against thrid world ppl doing stuff for near free, who is going to buy the software we produce, the dvd's and movies? When we're all in the poor house, who is going to purchase what we produce? Rich indian programmers who will end up with a better life style than us... we are selling our standard of living to the lowest bidder.
Wake up, dude. Not only can you not live on minimum wage (even with two jobs), there is the added concern for college costs. Education cost money. It isn't like a blue collar job where you can get along on a high school diploma that's free to get. In order to get those white collar jobs, you need a diploma that will cost you on average some $80,000 from a decent school to get. That isn't free, you have to pay back loans. You can't do that on minimum wage. Now, I'm not saying it entitles you to a good paying job, but you shoudl get payed what your worth - and having a college education (notice I didn't say diploma - just because you have a diploma doesn't mean your educated) and working a job that requires such an eduication entitles you to a higher wage then someone just out of high school (which is probably the minimum wage standard). How many good doctors work for minimum wage?
You can't get by on minimum wage (that's single - forget having a family), you certianly can't pay school loans back on minimum wage, and you definitely can't send your kids to college on minimum wage. Someone with a college education that works for minimum wage insures that their children probably won't even make it to college. As it stands the system cannot support itself. The avergae us worker cannot compete against a guy who only makes $10,000 a year. And foregt this baloney about balancing out lifestyles and setting us eqaul to the rest of the world. You want to know how the rest of the world lives? Read "Nectar in a Sieve". That's where life styles are going to balance out. The way things are going, BladeRunner would end up looking like paradise. The reality would be more like the slums of south america or africa.
That most ppl have already dled all the music they want by now. So it makes sense that file trading would go down; how many 30 year olds are going to trade Spear's latest album? Once you've dled all the music you like and wanted, its only new stuff that you would be dling. And let's face it, there isn't that much out there that's new that's worth going out to Kazaa to get. Lesser decent new stuff, lesser dling.
Back in sophmore year of college I was addcited to the stuff. I was drinking 3-4 mountain dews a day and only sleeping 4 hours a night. A little caffeine is alright but at the levels most people drink it your best bet is probably to just quit. Like most addictions, the best solution is to not drink the stuff. What you probably need is a good kick in the ass to stop yourself. With me it was a week with only 20 hours of sleep total. Afterwards I slept 15 hours a day, three days in a row. Of the six hours I was awake, I had one of the worst headache's you could possibly imagine. It was two weeks before the headaches went away, and a full month before I was sleeping like a normal human being. If you have the time, cold turkey is probably the best route. If you don't, your best bet is to drop coffee and mountain dew and stick with normal soda.
In the meantime, try to limit your intake and get as much sleep as possible. It is not just the caffeine but also the lack of sleep that is the big danger of it. A chronic lack of sleep has all kinds of harmful neurological side effects. Add that to the damage your probably doing to your heart from the elevated blood pressure you get from the stuff and your setting yourself up for a world of future health problems. Treat caffeine the same way you would treat any other drug: it has its occasional uses nd beenfits but long term use of it in any significant quantity outweighs those benefits. Any other time, drink water.
It's like Rad Racer 2 if you don't make the checkpoint in time. Your engine switches off and you roll to a stop. Only difference here is you can roll into an intersection. Imagine your car stalling out in the middle of Time Square or in the middle of the highway.
Actually, Venus is not what Earth was once like. It is what Earth could have been like. At some point in the distant past, when the condensation from volcanic activity etc collected to form Earth's oceans, Venus's water evaporated (due to the slightly higher temperature due to its closer proximity to the sun.) The CO2(i think) that remains trapped in limestone and in the oceans of earth on venus evaportaed and combined with other gases to form its super thick atmosphere. The dense clouds insulated the planet and caused the further evaporation of moisture on the planet until it was all gone. At which point Venus was trapped in a runaway greenhouse effect - dense clouds cuase high pressure, heat is kept in and absorbed from the sun, acid rain constanly falls, evaportaes immediately only to fall again. Venus is what could have been and isn't (and hopefully won't be.) Mars is a possible future.
Actually, C++ == (C = C + 1) but lets not split hairs.
As far as the langauge goes, according to a big graph I got on the wall from CrossTalk:
CPL - 1963
BCPL - July 1967
B - 1969
C - 1971
C(K&R) - 1978
C with Classes - April 1980
C++ - July 1983
Objective C - 1983
Concurrent C - 1984
ANSI C - 1989
No C+.