Why is everyone getting all worked up over this? It's not like they are getting rid of books? They are just converting one of their library facilities into a internet/hangout/study facilities.
The article even states that the books were moved to other facilities on campus. It seems like a good idea to me...why not move the books to a central location, and have another facility dedicated to some of the other things people use libraries for? That way, if you want books, you can go to the book location. If you want to get together with your friends and study or surf the web, go to the other location.
It's not like this is even really a new concept. My university had two "libraries" right next to each other, the "undergrad" where there were desks, computers, etc, and the real library next door where they kept the books. It worked out perfectly.
Their claims to fame include having four supercomputers of the 50 fastest in the world, and creating Mosaic, the first graphical web browser.
If you have doubts about the influence of Mosaic, load up internet explorer, click "Help" in the menu, then click "About Internet Explorer" and read the blurb....
That's how China does it. All one big time zone. Where I'm at, it's not bad, but from what I hear, the people out west have crazy working hours, sometime like 11am to 8pm, since it get light so late over there.
Other than the fact that it is illegal, can you please provide a cogent argument for why it is wrong to drive 45 in a 35 zone at 3:00 AM on a country road 10 miles from the nearest house?
It's not wrong by itself. But for any given time and driver and road condition, there is a safe speed, and an unsafe speed. Now, we have four options for how to make that work legally:
Unsafe driving isn't illegal. Ok, that's stupid. Unsafe driving puts other people at risk
We make an incredibly complex system of laws to determine the speed limit based on all possible factors (weather + drivers age divided by driver's reflexes multiplied by time of day percentile combined with standard deviation of that road's normal traffic). Ok, that's stupid too
We leave the driver to choose what is unsafe. So in effect, all driving is legal, as long as you don't have an accident. That would be ok, except that the point of traffic laws is to PREVENT accidents, not just decide who is to blame for them. Under this system, you'd have lots of crazy people driving at 120 mph, thinking "it's safe for me!" Thus a lot more accidents
That leaves just one option: someone makes an arbitrary speed limit. It's too slow for some instances, maybe too fast in others, but generally, it provides a guideline for what is too fast, so that people will drive more safely
So is it wrong in your description? Not if you are driving safely. But is it wise for law enforcement to limit you to 35? You bet.
Yeah, but the bad guys aren't coming after you in 23 seconds. The firewall (or even NAS) will keep most of the average zombie machines and worms from killing you.
It's called virus checking. A lot of the home-level virus checkers do some kind of nasty cpu-grinding voodoo that they call "checking your word document for viruses", which causes word to take YEARS to load.
I had this problem on a machine with very similar specs to the authors. I couldn't believe how slow it was to load word. Then I disabled my virus checker, and word became normal again (loads in 1-5 seconds)
The technical people in India and other third-world countries already have a standard of living that's equal or above their counterparts in the USA and Europe. Their wages only seem so low because the money exchanges aren't linear.
Where do you get this stuff? This is NOT TRUE. How do I know? I am an American, working in China, for a software outsourcing company in one of the richest cities in the country. My coworkers are all software engineers, considering this a GOOD JOB, and their standard of living is NOT equal to or above mine in the US, and my job in the US paid under 40K.
For example:
How many of them can afford to live in apartments that are high enough quality to have safe wiring and elevators? Maybe half.
How many of them feel like they can afford to run the air condioning (or even have air conditioning), even when it's above 90 outside? Less than half.
How many engineers in my company can afford a car? None. Everyone takes an hour long bus when a car ride would only take 15 minutes.
I showed some pictures of my home back in the US, and talked about my life there, and people said it would be like a dream to have the life I lived there.
Maybe India is different, but I'm sorry, at least in China, you have no idea what you're talking about.
Well, I'm currently living in china, and most of the sarcasm I use isn't understood by my coworkers. Things like "wow, that work looks like fun"....my coworkers seriously reply "no....it's work..why would it be fun?"
Hey, I'm not saying it'd be any harder than it is in English. I'm just saying it'd be much harder to read a newspaper than it is to read left, right, entrance, exit, and noodles.
A newspaper is just a good benchmark for your fluency in a written language.
Lots of the tech companies need English speakers with some tech skill, to help communicate. As long as you are willing to settle for a salary much less than your fancy US salary, you could probably find an opportunity over here. I spend my days doing a mix of technical work, and communicating with US customers about the work, then using SLOW, CLEAR english, re-explaining it to my Chinese coworkers (I know a tiny bit of Chinese, but not enough to communicate about work).
The food being better? Well, I'm starting to get tired of cubes of congealed pork blood, and large amounts of tofu. I'm not so keen on the pig intestines either, or the cubes of fat. The dog hotpot wasn't so bad, if you can get over the gutted dog hanging on the display rack. And I'm not sure what you mean about the food not being diverse. The local food is incredibly diverse (they have a lot more things than your local chinese carry-out would like you to believe), and there's plenty of foreign food (all with a bit of a Chinese taste, just like our American "foreign" restaurants all have been American-ized).
People here are generally really friendly towards foreigners, especially ones that look foreign (my white face and big nose earn me plenty of "Hello!" and stares as I walk down the street). If you learn the tiniest bit of Chinese (Mandarin), and can operate chopsticks, people will think you're pretty cool. Then learn to sing karaoke of one of the 5 popular western songs (My heart will go on, Yesterday once more, Sealed with a kiss, Take me to your heart, Hotel California), and you'll be in great shape.
Nah, it'd be simple to find a wife, depending on what you are looking for. Being a foreigner (laowai!), you are a hot commodity. Foreign passport, foreign money, opportunities. Of course, you might not WANT the attention of people just looking to advance themselves socially, but it'd be simple to find a wife.
Also, there are AT LEAST 4 different dialects: mandarin, cantonese, fuchanese, taiwanese, hakka, jin, etc etc etc. But luckily, most people can speak mandarin, so you will be ok if you can just learn the one. Plus the written langauge is more or less the same across all the dialects, so don't have to worry about that. Of course, that's assuming you can remember the thousands of characters necessary just to read a newspaper.
As far as regional cuisines, every region has it's own food, and almost every city is "famous" for some special food. Beijing is famous for it's duck, some other city is famous for it's rice balls, Lanzhou is famous for it's pulled noodles, etc etc etc. People take their regional tastes pretty similarly. (I regularly hear things like "I don't eat noodles, because I am from the south!")
Hong Kond is part of China, but it is what is known as an "SAR", or Special Autonomous Region. It is part of China, but has a certain amount of it's own laws, regulations, governing bodies, etc.
For example, you still have to go through customs to go between HK and the mainland China. US citizens can visit HK without getting a visa ahead of time, where you need one to visit the mainland.
But they do care about things like spitting in the street, littering, crossing the street without getting a walk signal, letting your dog poop in public, etc etc etc. Really, they'll fine you for about anything over here. Believe me, I live here, I know.
The other funny thing is the contstant public service announcements. The popular TV channels have a thousand commercials a day of "don't litter", "keep your gutters clean so you don't get bitten by mosquitos and die", "don't touch live poultry", "always eat at clean restaurants, and when you do, use serving chopsticks", "be careful when you cross the street", "use earplugs if there are loud noises", "don't play too much mah-jongg or video games", etc etc etc. It's amazing.
Nope. GBA and GBA SP have the same hardware internals.
GBA - 32 bit ARM7 16.7 Mhz processor GBA SP - 32 bit ARM7 16.7 Mhz processor
The SP has some changes like the rechargeable battery, backlight, no built-in-headphone jack (!?), but as far as functionality, they are the exact same.
As a programmer, you can't even detect which platform the game is running on. (which would be nice, because it would be great to be able to adjust the screen coloring based on whether there is a backlight present). Some commercial games, like I think Legend of Zelda 4 swords, allow you to switch the palette manually based on whether you have an SP or not, but no games can do it automatically.
So if it works on the SP, it works on the GBA, unless the actual physical form factor of the cartridge is huge and bulky and strangely shaped, and is designed to not fit into the regular GBA.
Is sandbox really a good term to use for video games? Maybe it's just me, but when I think of sandboxes, I think of something that's gritty and irritating to my eyes, usually full of crap, and that after you're done playing in it you haven't accomplished anything.
In that case, it's ABSOLUTELY a good term to use for video games.
If ISPs can succesfully filter spam, users will stop getting spam. If nobody receives spam, nobody will respond and purchase from the spam. Thus there will be no money to be made off spam. Thus there will be no more spam.
Sure, until that whole effect trickles through the system, there will be plenty of spam hitting the ISPs. But eventually the market will dry up.
I find it ironic and funny that the same wacky Christian ultra-right wingers who support this (the right to choose with respect to DVD's), don't support the right to choose when it comes to abortions.
Abortion is a more complicated issue, no matter who is correct. The abortion debate is so heated because both sides are arguing for rights of someone. Pro-choicers want the right for the woman to control her body. Pro-lifers want the right for the fetus to control it's body. The debate then comes down to the issue of when does a fetus become its own person, and not just part of the body of the mother. But people get so upset arguing their own side of the debate, that they forget to use their brains to consider the opposing side of the argument, and end up just assuming that the opposite side is "wacky", "evil", etc
Comparing this to censoring DVD players is at best ignorance, at worst, lies and FUD. There is no question such as "is there a possible right to the DVD itself to not be censored?" when it comes to the DVD players.
But, to continue this discussion, let's flip your statement around:
I find it ironic and funny that the same wacky Pagan ultra-left wingers who support abortion (The right to choose with respect to a woman's body), don't support the right to choose when it comes to DVD censoring hardware.
Stupid, eh? Everyone spends so much time adamantly crapping on other people's opinions, that we hardly ever stop to think about the valid points and reasons of the opposing side.
Why don't we change that around here? I disagree with this guy about these DVD players, but he at least responded with a well thought-through discussion, which will enable both of us to understand the other side, and form educated, intelligent stances on this.
You'd like to know the thought processes of those that support this?
OK. It's called the right to choose. That's not so difficult.
You want to watch the full movie, boobies and all.
For some odd reason, which (although completely illogical to you) shouldn't matter if you truly believe in freedom (it's not freedom if everyone else has to approve of your motivations), my neighbor's grandma would like to see that movie, sans boobies.
With this product, she can do that. Without infringing on YOUR freedom to see boobies.
Doesn't this sound like a much nicer solution than grandma (Whether she has a good reason or not) pushing for stupid laws (like every DVD that contains naked boobies being on shelves at least 5 feet high, etc,etc)?
I'd like to know why folks like you get so scared of an object that solves a problem in a way that doesn't reduce anyone's freedom, but is geared towards people with a self-imposed religious or moral code.
Just because some of those people are over-the-top and obnoxious, doesn't mean you should be against any product that helps the rest of them get what they want without harming you.
I've had the exact opposite experience. The GBA games I've enjoyed are the slower, strategic ones:
Advance Wars 1 & 2
Ogre Tactics
FF tactics
Fire Emblem
I'm the kind of guy that LOVES button mashing, and usually can't handle slow, in depth games, but something about the GBA makes me want to slow down and think...actually, I haven't played a button masher on GBA that I enjoyed. (unless you count chu-chu rocket, which was pure genius)
It seemed to me that the people who ported it (Mass Media) had never really actually played Rock N Roll racing.
It's not anything you'd notice from an intial quick play, as the graphics, sound, etc are all well done.
The problem is more subtle. Anyone who has played the game extensively on the SNES would know that the best time to use your nitros is while turning corners (although completely unintuitive!) But mass media set up the GBA control scheme (thanks to Nintendo's oh-so-wise decision to not include X and Y buttons) so you CAN'T nitro while cornering. It sounds like it might not be a big deal, but it really turned me off from playing it, after being a huge fan of the SNES version.
I know they had limitations in dealing with the GBA's limited controller, but C'MON, at least PLAY the original enough to know what options are important when!
Of course, I seriously doubt that those controls made a difference to anyone in deciding whether to purchase the game. Fans of the game (like me) bought it and were disappointed. Nobody else (including reviewers) knew a difference. I guess nobody else bought it either. A pity...I for one would LOVE some more classic ports....
No they won't.
They'll find a local teenager who can "fix" their computer. Said teenager has an illegal copy of windows xp that doesn't require product activation. Computer is fixed. Joe is happy.
See, I don't agree. As much as I think the first NGage was a waste, I was thinking yesterday, and I would be incredibly happy if my GBA-SP functioned as a phone also.
I think people would love a phone/gaming device, if and only if it was actually good at doing both.
Their goal isn't to make money off these people via these lawsuits. Like someone else mentioned, these lawsuits probably barely pay for themselves, what with legal costs and all.
Instead, their goal is to scare file-traders into stopping. Right now, everyone knows file-trading of copyrighted works is illegal, but everyone thinks "I won't get caught, so who cares?" The RIAA is trying to change that. They are suddenly making it so you MIGHT get caught. If people think "hmmm....I might get caught and fined thousands of dollars for doing this," then you will have a large percentage of those people decide it's not worth the risk.
THIS is exactly what the RIAA and record companies want.
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Why is everyone getting all worked up over this? It's not like they are getting rid of books? They are just converting one of their library facilities into a internet/hangout/study facilities.
The article even states that the books were moved to other facilities on campus. It seems like a good idea to me...why not move the books to a central location, and have another facility dedicated to some of the other things people use libraries for? That way, if you want books, you can go to the book location. If you want to get together with your friends and study or surf the web, go to the other location.
It's not like this is even really a new concept. My university had two "libraries" right next to each other, the "undergrad" where there were desks, computers, etc, and the real library next door where they kept the books. It worked out perfectly.
National Center for Supercomputing Applications, a research branch of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Their claims to fame include having four supercomputers of the 50 fastest in the world, and creating Mosaic, the first graphical web browser.
If you have doubts about the influence of Mosaic, load up internet explorer, click "Help" in the menu, then click "About Internet Explorer" and read the blurb....
That's how China does it. All one big time zone. Where I'm at, it's not bad, but from what I hear, the people out west have crazy working hours, sometime like 11am to 8pm, since it get light so late over there.
It's not wrong by itself. But for any given time and driver and road condition, there is a safe speed, and an unsafe speed. Now, we have four options for how to make that work legally:
- Unsafe driving isn't illegal. Ok, that's stupid. Unsafe driving puts other people at risk
- We make an incredibly complex system of laws to determine the speed limit based on all possible factors (weather + drivers age divided by driver's reflexes multiplied by time of day percentile combined with standard deviation of that road's normal traffic). Ok, that's stupid too
- We leave the driver to choose what is unsafe. So in effect, all driving is legal, as long as you don't have an accident. That would be ok, except that the point of traffic laws is to PREVENT accidents, not just decide who is to blame for them. Under this system, you'd have lots of crazy people driving at 120 mph, thinking "it's safe for me!" Thus a lot more accidents
- That leaves just one option: someone makes an arbitrary speed limit. It's too slow for some instances, maybe too fast in others, but generally, it provides a guideline for what is too fast, so that people will drive more safely
So is it wrong in your description? Not if you are driving safely. But is it wise for law enforcement to limit you to 35? You bet.Yeah, but the bad guys aren't coming after you in 23 seconds. The firewall (or even NAS) will keep most of the average zombie machines and worms from killing you.
It's called virus checking. A lot of the home-level virus checkers do some kind of nasty cpu-grinding voodoo that they call "checking your word document for viruses", which causes word to take YEARS to load.
I had this problem on a machine with very similar specs to the authors. I couldn't believe how slow it was to load word. Then I disabled my virus checker, and word became normal again (loads in 1-5 seconds)
The technical people in India and other third-world countries already have a standard of living that's equal or above their counterparts in the USA and Europe. Their wages only seem so low because the money exchanges aren't linear.
Where do you get this stuff? This is NOT TRUE. How do I know? I am an American, working in China, for a software outsourcing company in one of the richest cities in the country. My coworkers are all software engineers, considering this a GOOD JOB, and their standard of living is NOT equal to or above mine in the US, and my job in the US paid under 40K.
For example:
How many of them can afford to live in apartments that are high enough quality to have safe wiring and elevators? Maybe half.
How many of them feel like they can afford to run the air condioning (or even have air conditioning), even when it's above 90 outside? Less than half.
How many engineers in my company can afford a car? None. Everyone takes an hour long bus when a car ride would only take 15 minutes.
I showed some pictures of my home back in the US, and talked about my life there, and people said it would be like a dream to have the life I lived there.
Maybe India is different, but I'm sorry, at least in China, you have no idea what you're talking about.
Well, I'm currently living in china, and most of the sarcasm I use isn't understood by my coworkers. Things like "wow, that work looks like fun"....my coworkers seriously reply "no....it's work..why would it be fun?"
Hey, I'm not saying it'd be any harder than it is in English. I'm just saying it'd be much harder to read a newspaper than it is to read left, right, entrance, exit, and noodles.
A newspaper is just a good benchmark for your fluency in a written language.
That's what I did.
Lots of the tech companies need English speakers with some tech skill, to help communicate. As long as you are willing to settle for a salary much less than your fancy US salary, you could probably find an opportunity over here. I spend my days doing a mix of technical work, and communicating with US customers about the work, then using SLOW, CLEAR english, re-explaining it to my Chinese coworkers (I know a tiny bit of Chinese, but not enough to communicate about work).
The food being better? Well, I'm starting to get tired of cubes of congealed pork blood, and large amounts of tofu. I'm not so keen on the pig intestines either, or the cubes of fat. The dog hotpot wasn't so bad, if you can get over the gutted dog hanging on the display rack. And I'm not sure what you mean about the food not being diverse. The local food is incredibly diverse (they have a lot more things than your local chinese carry-out would like you to believe), and there's plenty of foreign food (all with a bit of a Chinese taste, just like our American "foreign" restaurants all have been American-ized).
People here are generally really friendly towards foreigners, especially ones that look foreign (my white face and big nose earn me plenty of "Hello!" and stares as I walk down the street). If you learn the tiniest bit of Chinese (Mandarin), and can operate chopsticks, people will think you're pretty cool. Then learn to sing karaoke of one of the 5 popular western songs (My heart will go on, Yesterday once more, Sealed with a kiss, Take me to your heart, Hotel California), and you'll be in great shape.
Nah, it'd be simple to find a wife, depending on what you are looking for. Being a foreigner (laowai!), you are a hot commodity. Foreign passport, foreign money, opportunities. Of course, you might not WANT the attention of people just looking to advance themselves socially, but it'd be simple to find a wife.
Also, there are AT LEAST 4 different dialects: mandarin, cantonese, fuchanese, taiwanese, hakka, jin, etc etc etc. But luckily, most people can speak mandarin, so you will be ok if you can just learn the one. Plus the written langauge is more or less the same across all the dialects, so don't have to worry about that. Of course, that's assuming you can remember the thousands of characters necessary just to read a newspaper.
As far as regional cuisines, every region has it's own food, and almost every city is "famous" for some special food. Beijing is famous for it's duck, some other city is famous for it's rice balls, Lanzhou is famous for it's pulled noodles, etc etc etc. People take their regional tastes pretty similarly. (I regularly hear things like "I don't eat noodles, because I am from the south!")
Hong Kond is part of China, but it is what is known as an "SAR", or Special Autonomous Region. It is part of China, but has a certain amount of it's own laws, regulations, governing bodies, etc.
For example, you still have to go through customs to go between HK and the mainland China. US citizens can visit HK without getting a visa ahead of time, where you need one to visit the mainland.
But they do care about things like spitting in the street, littering, crossing the street without getting a walk signal, letting your dog poop in public, etc etc etc. Really, they'll fine you for about anything over here. Believe me, I live here, I know.
The other funny thing is the contstant public service announcements. The popular TV channels have a thousand commercials a day of "don't litter", "keep your gutters clean so you don't get bitten by mosquitos and die", "don't touch live poultry", "always eat at clean restaurants, and when you do, use serving chopsticks", "be careful when you cross the street", "use earplugs if there are loud noises", "don't play too much mah-jongg or video games", etc etc etc. It's amazing.
Nope. GBA and GBA SP have the same hardware internals.
GBA - 32 bit ARM7 16.7 Mhz processor
GBA SP - 32 bit ARM7 16.7 Mhz processor
The SP has some changes like the rechargeable battery, backlight, no built-in-headphone jack (!?), but as far as functionality, they are the exact same.
As a programmer, you can't even detect which platform the game is running on. (which would be nice, because it would be great to be able to adjust the screen coloring based on whether there is a backlight present). Some commercial games, like I think Legend of Zelda 4 swords, allow you to switch the palette manually based on whether you have an SP or not, but no games can do it automatically.
So if it works on the SP, it works on the GBA, unless the actual physical form factor of the cartridge is huge and bulky and strangely shaped, and is designed to not fit into the regular GBA.
I'm using firefox 0.9.1, and that link does nothing. If I type it into the address bar manually, it works. :)
Just thought you'd like to know.
In that case, it's ABSOLUTELY a good term to use for video games.
Nah.
If ISPs can succesfully filter spam, users will stop getting spam. If nobody receives spam, nobody will respond and purchase from the spam. Thus there will be no money to be made off spam. Thus there will be no more spam.
Sure, until that whole effect trickles through the system, there will be plenty of spam hitting the ISPs. But eventually the market will dry up.
I find it ironic and funny that the same wacky Christian ultra-right wingers who support this (the right to choose with respect to DVD's), don't support the right to choose when it comes to abortions.
Abortion is a more complicated issue, no matter who is correct. The abortion debate is so heated because both sides are arguing for rights of someone. Pro-choicers want the right for the woman to control her body. Pro-lifers want the right for the fetus to control it's body. The debate then comes down to the issue of when does a fetus become its own person, and not just part of the body of the mother. But people get so upset arguing their own side of the debate, that they forget to use their brains to consider the opposing side of the argument, and end up just assuming that the opposite side is "wacky", "evil", etc
Comparing this to censoring DVD players is at best ignorance, at worst, lies and FUD. There is no question such as "is there a possible right to the DVD itself to not be censored?" when it comes to the DVD players.
But, to continue this discussion, let's flip your statement around:
I find it ironic and funny that the same wacky Pagan ultra-left wingers who support abortion (The right to choose with respect to a woman's body), don't support the right to choose when it comes to DVD censoring hardware.
Stupid, eh? Everyone spends so much time adamantly crapping on other people's opinions, that we hardly ever stop to think about the valid points and reasons of the opposing side.
Why don't we change that around here? I disagree with this guy about these DVD players, but he at least responded with a well thought-through discussion, which will enable both of us to understand the other side, and form educated, intelligent stances on this.
You'd like to know the thought processes of those that support this?
OK. It's called the right to choose. That's not so difficult.
You want to watch the full movie, boobies and all.
For some odd reason, which (although completely illogical to you) shouldn't matter if you truly believe in freedom (it's not freedom if everyone else has to approve of your motivations), my neighbor's grandma would like to see that movie, sans boobies.
With this product, she can do that. Without infringing on YOUR freedom to see boobies.
Doesn't this sound like a much nicer solution than grandma (Whether she has a good reason or not) pushing for stupid laws (like every DVD that contains naked boobies being on shelves at least 5 feet high, etc,etc)?
I'd like to know why folks like you get so scared of an object that solves a problem in a way that doesn't reduce anyone's freedom, but is geared towards people with a self-imposed religious or moral code.
Just because some of those people are over-the-top and obnoxious, doesn't mean you should be against any product that helps the rest of them get what they want without harming you.
I've had the exact opposite experience. The GBA games I've enjoyed are the slower, strategic ones: Advance Wars 1 & 2 Ogre Tactics FF tactics Fire Emblem I'm the kind of guy that LOVES button mashing, and usually can't handle slow, in depth games, but something about the GBA makes me want to slow down and think...actually, I haven't played a button masher on GBA that I enjoyed. (unless you count chu-chu rocket, which was pure genius)
well, I did get it, and they screwed it up.
It seemed to me that the people who ported it (Mass Media) had never really actually played Rock N Roll racing.
It's not anything you'd notice from an intial quick play, as the graphics, sound, etc are all well done.
The problem is more subtle. Anyone who has played the game extensively on the SNES would know that the best time to use your nitros is while turning corners (although completely unintuitive!) But mass media set up the GBA control scheme (thanks to Nintendo's oh-so-wise decision to not include X and Y buttons) so you CAN'T nitro while cornering. It sounds like it might not be a big deal, but it really turned me off from playing it, after being a huge fan of the SNES version.
I know they had limitations in dealing with the GBA's limited controller, but C'MON, at least PLAY the original enough to know what options are important when!
Of course, I seriously doubt that those controls made a difference to anyone in deciding whether to purchase the game. Fans of the game (like me) bought it and were disappointed. Nobody else (including reviewers) knew a difference. I guess nobody else bought it either. A pity...I for one would LOVE some more classic ports....
No they won't. They'll find a local teenager who can "fix" their computer. Said teenager has an illegal copy of windows xp that doesn't require product activation. Computer is fixed. Joe is happy.
See, I don't agree. As much as I think the first NGage was a waste, I was thinking yesterday, and I would be incredibly happy if my GBA-SP functioned as a phone also.
I think people would love a phone/gaming device, if and only if it was actually good at doing both.
(I know I would)
Um, no.
Think about it for a little while.
Their goal isn't to make money off these people via these lawsuits. Like someone else mentioned, these lawsuits probably barely pay for themselves, what with legal costs and all.
Instead, their goal is to scare file-traders into stopping. Right now, everyone knows file-trading of copyrighted works is illegal, but everyone thinks "I won't get caught, so who cares?" The RIAA is trying to change that. They are suddenly making it so you MIGHT get caught. If people think "hmmm....I might get caught and fined thousands of dollars for doing this," then you will have a large percentage of those people decide it's not worth the risk.
THIS is exactly what the RIAA and record companies want.
oh yeah, i left out the good part.
So when the system gives you your #, it also gives you the # of some other anonymous person that voted for the opposite party.
So if you are being threatened to vote Democrat, you just give your union boss the alternate # that appeared on the screen.