Because in America, credit cards are just about the only way to build up a good credit score. Without a good credit score, you end up paying much more for big purchases (if you have to take out a mortgage for them, which is usually the case).
I would be totally fine just using my debit card all the time - except that does nothing for my credit score, which means I have to use a credit card if I ever want to do anything outrageous like buy a house.
The best part of it is that when Glenn Beck's lawyers originally filed a complaint with the WIPO, the site's lawyer responded hilariously:
Beck's skin is too thin to take the criticism, so he wants the site down. Beck is represented by a learned and respected legal team. Accordingly, it is beyond doubt that his counsel advised him that under the First Amendment to the United States' Constitution, no action in a U.S. Court would be successful. Accordingly, Beck is attempting to use this transnational body to circumvent and subvert the Respondent's constitutional rights.
It's funny really - Beck is all for the Constitution, except when it's inconvenient for him. Then he appeals to those same transnational bodies he rails against on his show to get around it.
It's a parody of what he does when he reports "news". He makes ridiculous statements, but phrases them such that when people call him on his bullshit he can say "I'm just asking questions". He'll then badger people about neither confirming or denying his "questions" - and they won't confirm or deny them because the questions are not even wrong.
That's the point of this site - it's just asking a question, did Glenn Beck rape and murder a young girl in 1990? Obviously he didn't, but why won't he confirm or deny it? That's interesting, isn't it?
The worst part is that he actually has a TV show on Fox News. If you look on YouTube, you can find some of his spiels. They're pretty horrible, and yet somehow Americans still watch him. He sounds like that crazy homeless dude on the corner, except he's wearing a suit and he's in a television studio.
(this same sort of thing was tried with Ann Coulter, because she does the same shit. Unfortunately it didn't go anywhere because people actually believed she was a transsexual.)
Did you actually, you know, read your own link? As explained in that very article, the closed source binary checking program wouldn't work. Hacking that sort of thing is ridiculously easy - it's identical to a no-cd patch, and those come out minutes after a CD rip.
Even when Quake was closed source, (and again, I'm citing your article) there were proxy aimbots that would sit between the client and server and "correct" the client's aim. Making it open source only let hackers build those features into the client itself.
Carmack chose for Quake to be performant; as a result, it's inherently insecure. (again, a direct paraphrase from your article) This is true regardless of Quake's openness.
You missed half the argument. It's hard, and it's pointless.
The grandma who has a netbook running ARM and a desktop running x86 will install software by going into Add/Remove Programs and picking "Fun Times Photo Album for Grandmas" out of a list. The package manager will figure out what needs to be installed for her, on both her ARM and her x86 computers.
She's not going to go to some random website and download a random installer file and use it on both her computers - her kids have told her over and over again that that's not safe, and she may lose her knitting patterns if she does it.
Seriously, the people who advocate this junk seem to be entirely unaware of the joys of package management. All FatELF does is re-solve a problem that package management has had licked for a couple of years now, and it solves the problem in a less efficient way.
It's hard, yes - but it's not worth doing just because it's hard.
What competing Ghosts? I don't think anyone's bought a copy of Ghost since Ghost 8. If you look hard enough anywhere there are more than fifteen computers in the same room, you can find a copy of the Ghost 8 executable. I think it just gets spontaneously created after a certain silicon threshold.
Microsoft actually explicitly supports ghosting nowadays, assuming you do it their way. Check out the Windows AIK and this guide. It's pretty nice, and if you want to automate things you just need to mount the boot image (using dism) and edit Windows\System32\startnet.cmd
God damn it, this again? All these "sudden acceleration" accidents are caused by morons "suddenly" putting their foot on the gas pedal. Afterwards, they say that the car accelerated by itself - and it's impossible to prove them wrong.
And yet I, on the other hand, loved Anathem. It was very much a book where the joy is in the journey, not the destination - you don't read it to get to the conclusion, you read it to read it. I didn't read it as "Stephenson boorishly showing off his obvious intelligence" so much as "Here's a thousand pages about how awesome modern math and science can be with some incidental plot". It's closer to Godel, Escher Bach-lite than Rainbows End.
The good thing about Brandon Sanderson is that he's rather prolific, almost to an Asimovian degree. While writing Mistborn, he's also published Elantris, Warbreaker, some Young Adult novels about a kid detective named Alcatraz. He's also sent The Way of Kings off to the editors recently (and it should be out in three-four months IIRC), though out of respect for Robert Jordan he hasn't been pimping it very much on his blog.
Basically, although he's current finishing the Wheel of Time, you can also expect quite a few pure Sanderson books in the next couple of years.
It's just that the vast majority of this genre is little better than unillustrated comic books
What.
Go read the Sandman series and see if you can still say that again. Go read Transmetropolitan and see if your statement still makes sense. Go read Watchmen and see if you still have that opinion.
Just because you have read shitty comics does not mean that all comics are shitty.
If I have deadly disease A and it can be treated with drug B, I will pay $X for B, with $X being in the range of [0, all my goddamn money].
Now: Drug company E has a patent on drug B. What is a rational price for them to charge me for B? There is no lower limit, because there's no competition. The upper limit is all my goddamn money. Which will they charge?
I don't understand why the OS would keep all those other files. The user's not very likely to take the hard drive out and stick it in a PowerPC box sometime in the future, so why not just delete all the files that aren't for your architecture?
In fact, why would you even download all those extra files in the first place? Wouldn't it be nice if you had some application that would selectively download just the files you need to install the software?
In fact, how is this at all better than the current package management solutions the various Linux distributions use?
If you were railing against divorce and philandering in defense of the sanctity of marriage, I would have a much easier time listening to your anti-gay rhetoric, but since the only time the "sanctity" of marriage comes up is with regards to homosexuality, I have a hard time respecting that argument. (Here's looking at you, Rush, the three time divorcee, for single handedly making this argument for me.)
So what? Homosexuals are people, not saints. A law was passed with the only purpose of taking away one of their rights. Some of them got pissed off and did shitty things. Yet, I don't really blame them; after all, we haven't seen discrimination of this caliber since Plessy v. Ferguson - except in this case the marriages are separate but unequal.
I see your sort of response all too often - it's basically "you guys should sit down, shut up, and take whatever we feel like dishing out. Stop protesting for your rights, it's rude. And if some of your group decide to go over the line (which I get to define), it's not just because they're assholes, it's because you're all violent."
I guess I was asking, what's in it for the tuna? Why should a tuna let itself be eaten by a shark, when the tuna is a citizen of a democracy where it can vote to outlaw sharks?
Because these tuna dream that, someday, they might become sharks.
And even though it's physically impossible, they're happy to be eaten - after all, that's sort of like turning into a shark, right?
Vestigial != useless. A vestigial organ is an organ that has lost most of its original function. In animals with a fully developed appendix (though it's not an appendix at that point, it's sort of the main event), the organ serves as something like a fermentation chamber where cellulose and other hard to digest plant matter is broken down by bacteria, producing nutrients for the animal.
It's still vestigial in humansm, even though evolution seems to have found some use for it - which, incidentally, is not really outweighed by the fact that it might explode and kill you. After all, your gut flora will be repopulated anyway from the food you eat, unless you only eat sterilized food.
Source: this Pharyngula post, reviewing the paper you're probably referring to.
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Because in America, credit cards are just about the only way to build up a good credit score. Without a good credit score, you end up paying much more for big purchases (if you have to take out a mortgage for them, which is usually the case).
I would be totally fine just using my debit card all the time - except that does nothing for my credit score, which means I have to use a credit card if I ever want to do anything outrageous like buy a house.
Soon - right now they only know it can be done, they're still working out how to actually do it.
You mean like the Touch Book? I'll be excited about that thing if it lives long enough to spawn another hardware generation.
Further: how quickly we forget the threat of those 235 patents. If that's not patent trolling, what is?
It's funny really - Beck is all for the Constitution, except when it's inconvenient for him. Then he appeals to those same transnational bodies he rails against on his show to get around it.
It's a parody of what he does when he reports "news". He makes ridiculous statements, but phrases them such that when people call him on his bullshit he can say "I'm just asking questions". He'll then badger people about neither confirming or denying his "questions" - and they won't confirm or deny them because the questions are not even wrong.
That's the point of this site - it's just asking a question, did Glenn Beck rape and murder a young girl in 1990? Obviously he didn't, but why won't he confirm or deny it? That's interesting, isn't it?
The worst part is that he actually has a TV show on Fox News. If you look on YouTube, you can find some of his spiels. They're pretty horrible, and yet somehow Americans still watch him. He sounds like that crazy homeless dude on the corner, except he's wearing a suit and he's in a television studio.
(this same sort of thing was tried with Ann Coulter, because she does the same shit. Unfortunately it didn't go anywhere because people actually believed she was a transsexual.)
Finally, e-mail can start making headway against the telegraph!
Did you actually, you know, read your own link? As explained in that very article, the closed source binary checking program wouldn't work. Hacking that sort of thing is ridiculously easy - it's identical to a no-cd patch, and those come out minutes after a CD rip.
Even when Quake was closed source, (and again, I'm citing your article) there were proxy aimbots that would sit between the client and server and "correct" the client's aim. Making it open source only let hackers build those features into the client itself.
Carmack chose for Quake to be performant; as a result, it's inherently insecure. (again, a direct paraphrase from your article) This is true regardless of Quake's openness.
You missed half the argument. It's hard, and it's pointless.
The grandma who has a netbook running ARM and a desktop running x86 will install software by going into Add/Remove Programs and picking "Fun Times Photo Album for Grandmas" out of a list. The package manager will figure out what needs to be installed for her, on both her ARM and her x86 computers.
She's not going to go to some random website and download a random installer file and use it on both her computers - her kids have told her over and over again that that's not safe, and she may lose her knitting patterns if she does it.
Seriously, the people who advocate this junk seem to be entirely unaware of the joys of package management. All FatELF does is re-solve a problem that package management has had licked for a couple of years now, and it solves the problem in a less efficient way.
It's hard, yes - but it's not worth doing just because it's hard.
What competing Ghosts? I don't think anyone's bought a copy of Ghost since Ghost 8. If you look hard enough anywhere there are more than fifteen computers in the same room, you can find a copy of the Ghost 8 executable. I think it just gets spontaneously created after a certain silicon threshold.
Microsoft actually explicitly supports ghosting nowadays, assuming you do it their way. Check out the Windows AIK and this guide. It's pretty nice, and if you want to automate things you just need to mount the boot image (using dism) and edit Windows\System32\startnet.cmd
God damn it, this again? All these "sudden acceleration" accidents are caused by morons "suddenly" putting their foot on the gas pedal. Afterwards, they say that the car accelerated by itself - and it's impossible to prove them wrong.
And yet I, on the other hand, loved Anathem. It was very much a book where the joy is in the journey, not the destination - you don't read it to get to the conclusion, you read it to read it. I didn't read it as "Stephenson boorishly showing off his obvious intelligence" so much as "Here's a thousand pages about how awesome modern math and science can be with some incidental plot". It's closer to Godel, Escher Bach-lite than Rainbows End.
The good thing about Brandon Sanderson is that he's rather prolific, almost to an Asimovian degree. While writing Mistborn, he's also published Elantris, Warbreaker, some Young Adult novels about a kid detective named Alcatraz. He's also sent The Way of Kings off to the editors recently (and it should be out in three-four months IIRC), though out of respect for Robert Jordan he hasn't been pimping it very much on his blog. Basically, although he's current finishing the Wheel of Time, you can also expect quite a few pure Sanderson books in the next couple of years.
What.
Go read the Sandman series and see if you can still say that again. Go read Transmetropolitan and see if your statement still makes sense. Go read Watchmen and see if you still have that opinion.
Just because you have read shitty comics does not mean that all comics are shitty.
I know, they might even end up working in the Swiss patent office just to feed their families!
No.
If I have deadly disease A and it can be treated with drug B, I will pay $X for B, with $X being in the range of [0, all my goddamn money].
Now: Drug company E has a patent on drug B. What is a rational price for them to charge me for B? There is no lower limit, because there's no competition. The upper limit is all my goddamn money. Which will they charge?
I don't understand why the OS would keep all those other files. The user's not very likely to take the hard drive out and stick it in a PowerPC box sometime in the future, so why not just delete all the files that aren't for your architecture?
In fact, why would you even download all those extra files in the first place? Wouldn't it be nice if you had some application that would selectively download just the files you need to install the software?
In fact, how is this at all better than the current package management solutions the various Linux distributions use?
I have to point to this protester: http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2009/10/badass_sign_of_the_day.php
So what? Homosexuals are people, not saints. A law was passed with the only purpose of taking away one of their rights. Some of them got pissed off and did shitty things. Yet, I don't really blame them; after all, we haven't seen discrimination of this caliber since Plessy v. Ferguson - except in this case the marriages are separate but unequal.
I see your sort of response all too often - it's basically "you guys should sit down, shut up, and take whatever we feel like dishing out. Stop protesting for your rights, it's rude. And if some of your group decide to go over the line (which I get to define), it's not just because they're assholes, it's because you're all violent."
So in your scenario, someone is involved a crash and the following happen:
I think we can safely ignore this eventuality.
On the other hand, just because you're a poor bastard doesn't mean that people who are rich and successful are responsible or motivated.
Because these tuna dream that, someday, they might become sharks.
And even though it's physically impossible, they're happy to be eaten - after all, that's sort of like turning into a shark, right?
Feces in your cake? It's more likely than you think.
Vestigial != useless. A vestigial organ is an organ that has lost most of its original function. In animals with a fully developed appendix (though it's not an appendix at that point, it's sort of the main event), the organ serves as something like a fermentation chamber where cellulose and other hard to digest plant matter is broken down by bacteria, producing nutrients for the animal.
It's still vestigial in humansm, even though evolution seems to have found some use for it - which, incidentally, is not really outweighed by the fact that it might explode and kill you. After all, your gut flora will be repopulated anyway from the food you eat, unless you only eat sterilized food.
Source: this Pharyngula post, reviewing the paper you're probably referring to.