I hate mail-in rebates so much that they actually deter me from buying things. The only price I compare when shopping is the amount I have to pay at the cash register.
I can identify most crap websites in LESS than 50 milliseconds. The giveaways are one or more of the following:
The webpage takes longer than 50 milliseconds to load. (OK I am exaggerating, but if I am just surfing and I have to wait for more than a second or two for the page to start showing up, I'm gone).
The website asks me to register before I can read the article. Gone.
The website says I must have cookies enabled. Gone.
The website uses sleazy methods to get past the pop-up blocker in Firefox. Gone.
The website is ugly and disorganized. Gone.
The website uses a "creative," unique Flash-based interface (which simply means that nobody other than the developer knows how to navigate it properly). Gone.
The website uses those floaty ads that appear on top of the stuff you are trying to read. Gone.
The website has a blogroll (list of "friends" or "partners") that is longer than Gene Simmons' tongue. Gone.
The webpage has "myspace", "friendster" or "geocities" in the URL. Gone.
The webpage only informs me that I need to register before I can post comments AFTER I have written and attempted to submit a comment. Gone.
So should every newspaper and news station in the country have to get permission or a license from Major League baseball in order to give factual reports about what happened in each game? Doesn't MLB understand that having people talk about MLB and having MLB permeate popular culture in this way is beneficial to them because it is basically free advertising? Should a fee be paid every time a statment of fact like "The Yankees became the biggest chokers of all time when the Red Sox came back from a three-games-to-zero deficit in the 2004 ALCS to win four games in a row."
I think some rear-facing, side-mounted, wide-angle video cameras would be better than "blind-spot checking radar." I would never be able to trust a simple indicator light. An actual visual from a better angle would be more useful, I think.
The more and more I read these articles about all of these peripheral businesses Google is getting into, the more and more I wonder if there is any cohesive strategy to the whole thing. Are Google's executives just going bonkers with all the money they have to spend? Are they just trying to grab headlines to prop up their stock price? What's next, Google brings back the Pets.com sock puppet to serve as the mascot for their new service which lets you store up to 1 Gigabyte of email on your dog's flea-collar which is connected 24/7 to their global Wifi network and enables you to zoom in on your dog via satellite photography?
Why do you think so many people like to watch golf or tennis on TV instead of playing it themselves, or playing a videogame version of it? Watching a real professional play the game at a much higher level than you can yourself is inherently interesting/fascinating to a lot of people.
I have watched the television show "Arena" on G4 off-and-on over the past few years. Here are the problems I have noticed:
Too many different games and too many different levels make it hard for players and viewers to become familiar with strategies.
Using complex maps in which it is difficult to see where players and flags are in relation to each other. It would be better to use simpler, more open maps to help the viewer orient to what he is seeing on the screen.
The players featured on the show change too frequently and are not really that good at the games they are playing. This should actually be easy to overcome.
These points can't be emphasized enough. When you watch pretty much any sports game on television except for golf, you are watching the game played on a standardized playing field. The standardized playing field does not detract from viewer interest. In fact viewership would decline if the playing field changed from game to game, because both players and viewers would not get a chance to develop and become familiar with strategies which elevate the level of play. Also, you are normally watching the same home team play, so you become familiar with the player names and strengths/weaknesses.
IMHO, the way to successfully generate viewership for televised mutiplayer computer games would be to feature a game mode like Bombing Run in UT2004, and keep to a single, simple, wide-open map so viewers can tell where things are happening. You would need to establish franchise teams in various cities (or maybe various countries) to generate local interest and give fans an incentive to root for one team over another.
I find it offensive that Australians often refer to Americans as "seppos" (Yank rhymes with septic tank, hence "seppo"), but you don't see me whining about it now do you?
Nope, I would not want to put the security of my country in the hands of another country. It is also the reason why the United States should not to accede to European interests when deciding the best course of action for defense of the US.
This is not quite true. Testing evolution as a theory is extremely difficult (or practically speaking, impossible). However, I can imagine experiments which could be conducted to test evolution as a theory. For example, you could theoretically evolve a new variety of taller horses, or horses with longer necks by housing a random herd of horses in a place where the only available food was high up off the ground. The taller horses and the horses with longer necks would be able to reach the food better and would survive better than the short horses and the horses with short necks. Eventually the descendants would all be able to reach the food easily.
OK, I guess you're right. Should have read the whole article:) The headline and lead paragraph sure make it sound like talking about ID in the classroom was banned completely.
I still think any biology teacher who decides to ignore the evolution vs. ID debate is an idiot. It's a great opportunity to discuss the evidence in support of both theories. The evidence in support of evolution is so much stronger I don't understand why some people are even afraid to mention that ID theory even exists.
If I am a teacher, I think I have an obligation to at least let my students know about the debate over evolution vs. intelligent design. I would want to be able to explain both to my students, and explain why I think evolution is a far superior theory to intelligent design. But to do that, I would need to be able to explain to my students what intelligent design is. This ruling would prohibit that kind of legitimate, free discussion in the classroom. It has a chilling effect on public debate over a relevant current issue in our culture.
I am glad I decided to wait until spring before deciding between the 360 and the PS3. I would be pissed if I spent $400 plus $60 per game only to discover all these crashes, overheating, and bugs, and realize that Microsoft left no time for themselves to do proper quality control before launch and I am now serving as their guinea pig. I never buy at launch because the second wave of console manufacturing is less likely to be buggy.
I got a few other names for DRM: "Defective Retarded Malware", "Disingenuous Rights Massacre", "Dinosaur Rescussitation Maneuver", "Desperate Royalty Milking",...
I am so sick of all this DRM crap. It just makes things a pain in the butt for average customers who aren't trying to pirate anything. If the DRM makes the product a pain in the ass to use, I won't buy it.
You're right. And the sad fact is that it is in France where the government and the media collude to deceive the public, by doing things such as no longer conducting research or collecting statistics on topics which prove embarrassing to government policies, and not reporting news stories which may be embarrassing to the government. But still the French see themselves as more civilized and advanced than us stupid Americans.
Slashdot readers may be savvy about checking around the web to see if a piece of software contains spyware before they install it, but the average user has no idea how to tell if a given software program is spyware-free. If they could just see an easy-to-identify "spyware-free" certification on the package or website somewhere (and that certification actually means what it says), then that would help a lot. It would be kind of like seeing the "UL tested" stamp on an electrical device. Software companies that used the seal without authorization would be committing a felony. Even if the certification didn't eliminate spyware, it might at least force software makers to do a full disclosure, get the user's permission to install 3rd-party applications, give the user an easy way to later uninstall those 3rd party applications, and make it so that uninstallation completely removed every bit of the installed software from the system.
Was this Sony crap malware on Everquest 2 media?
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Bad Day To Be Sony
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· Score: 1
I'm just asking because I haven't bought any Sony/BMG music CDs rescently, but I did install Everquest 2 about 6 months ago.
Sony should pay tens of billions in damages
on
Bad Day To Be Sony
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· Score: 1
The RIAA is so cavalier about sueing grandmothers for tens of thousands of dollars, so why should Sony's customers, and those whose systems were put at risk by Sony's malware be any less cavalier about suing this company enough to make all the executives and stockholders cry for mercy. Hit the stockholders, and they will take care of the executives very quickly. Sony's stockholder's should sue the personal estates of the executives who made this incompetent and most likely illegal decision. If the music companies want to play hardball, then they should be ready to get hit in the teeth when they violate the law.
I also read that the code used in Sony's malware infringed on the LGPL because they did not freely distribute the source code along with the executable, so that is another violation of the copyright and intellectual property laws Sony love so much.
Of course if someone steals a novel and republishes it without permission that would be copyright infringement. But that is a complex piece of IP that it would be nearly impossible to duplicate simply by chance when someone writes a novel from scratch. Rather than having written a specific and unique novel, what Amazon has done is the equivalent of patenting the idea/concept of a printed document that contains a work of fiction.
Any moron who is given 3 years of warning ought to be able to save enough money to afford a set-top converter box if they do not want to buy a new TV. And if they are using cable, like 95% of everybody, they don't need to buy anything. If we have to waste 3 billion dollars why don't we spend it on studies of ways we can get lazy people to stop mooching off of taxpayers, and studies of ways to get Congress to stop spending money on stupid crap.
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How much incentive would your roofer have to build you a solid leak-proof roof, if he new he could get you to pay extra to fix leaks in your new roof?
I hate mail-in rebates so much that they actually deter me from buying things. The only price I compare when shopping is the amount I have to pay at the cash register.
So should every newspaper and news station in the country have to get permission or a license from Major League baseball in order to give factual reports about what happened in each game? Doesn't MLB understand that having people talk about MLB and having MLB permeate popular culture in this way is beneficial to them because it is basically free advertising? Should a fee be paid every time a statment of fact like "The Yankees became the biggest chokers of all time when the Red Sox came back from a three-games-to-zero deficit in the 2004 ALCS to win four games in a row."
I think some rear-facing, side-mounted, wide-angle video cameras would be better than "blind-spot checking radar." I would never be able to trust a simple indicator light. An actual visual from a better angle would be more useful, I think.
The more and more I read these articles about all of these peripheral businesses Google is getting into, the more and more I wonder if there is any cohesive strategy to the whole thing. Are Google's executives just going bonkers with all the money they have to spend? Are they just trying to grab headlines to prop up their stock price? What's next, Google brings back the Pets.com sock puppet to serve as the mascot for their new service which lets you store up to 1 Gigabyte of email on your dog's flea-collar which is connected 24/7 to their global Wifi network and enables you to zoom in on your dog via satellite photography?
Why do you think so many people like to watch golf or tennis on TV instead of playing it themselves, or playing a videogame version of it? Watching a real professional play the game at a much higher level than you can yourself is inherently interesting/fascinating to a lot of people.
These points can't be emphasized enough. When you watch pretty much any sports game on television except for golf, you are watching the game played on a standardized playing field. The standardized playing field does not detract from viewer interest. In fact viewership would decline if the playing field changed from game to game, because both players and viewers would not get a chance to develop and become familiar with strategies which elevate the level of play. Also, you are normally watching the same home team play, so you become familiar with the player names and strengths/weaknesses.
IMHO, the way to successfully generate viewership for televised mutiplayer computer games would be to feature a game mode like Bombing Run in UT2004, and keep to a single, simple, wide-open map so viewers can tell where things are happening. You would need to establish franchise teams in various cities (or maybe various countries) to generate local interest and give fans an incentive to root for one team over another.
I find it offensive that Australians often refer to Americans as "seppos" (Yank rhymes with septic tank, hence "seppo"), but you don't see me whining about it now do you?
...because he thought of this before I did :-) Talk about the easiest job in the world.
Nope, I would not want to put the security of my country in the hands of another country. It is also the reason why the United States should not to accede to European interests when deciding the best course of action for defense of the US.
This is not quite true. Testing evolution as a theory is extremely difficult (or practically speaking, impossible). However, I can imagine experiments which could be conducted to test evolution as a theory. For example, you could theoretically evolve a new variety of taller horses, or horses with longer necks by housing a random herd of horses in a place where the only available food was high up off the ground. The taller horses and the horses with longer necks would be able to reach the food better and would survive better than the short horses and the horses with short necks. Eventually the descendants would all be able to reach the food easily.
I still think any biology teacher who decides to ignore the evolution vs. ID debate is an idiot. It's a great opportunity to discuss the evidence in support of both theories. The evidence in support of evolution is so much stronger I don't understand why some people are even afraid to mention that ID theory even exists.
If I am a teacher, I think I have an obligation to at least let my students know about the debate over evolution vs. intelligent design. I would want to be able to explain both to my students, and explain why I think evolution is a far superior theory to intelligent design. But to do that, I would need to be able to explain to my students what intelligent design is. This ruling would prohibit that kind of legitimate, free discussion in the classroom. It has a chilling effect on public debate over a relevant current issue in our culture.
I am glad I decided to wait until spring before deciding between the 360 and the PS3. I would be pissed if I spent $400 plus $60 per game only to discover all these crashes, overheating, and bugs, and realize that Microsoft left no time for themselves to do proper quality control before launch and I am now serving as their guinea pig. I never buy at launch because the second wave of console manufacturing is less likely to be buggy.
I got a few other names for DRM: "Defective Retarded Malware", "Disingenuous Rights Massacre", "Dinosaur Rescussitation Maneuver", "Desperate Royalty Milking",...
I am so sick of all this DRM crap. It just makes things a pain in the butt for average customers who aren't trying to pirate anything. If the DRM makes the product a pain in the ass to use, I won't buy it.
You're right. And the sad fact is that it is in France where the government and the media collude to deceive the public, by doing things such as no longer conducting research or collecting statistics on topics which prove embarrassing to government policies, and not reporting news stories which may be embarrassing to the government. But still the French see themselves as more civilized and advanced than us stupid Americans.
You play Guild Wars too much.
Slashdot readers may be savvy about checking around the web to see if a piece of software contains spyware before they install it, but the average user has no idea how to tell if a given software program is spyware-free. If they could just see an easy-to-identify "spyware-free" certification on the package or website somewhere (and that certification actually means what it says), then that would help a lot. It would be kind of like seeing the "UL tested" stamp on an electrical device. Software companies that used the seal without authorization would be committing a felony. Even if the certification didn't eliminate spyware, it might at least force software makers to do a full disclosure, get the user's permission to install 3rd-party applications, give the user an easy way to later uninstall those 3rd party applications, and make it so that uninstallation completely removed every bit of the installed software from the system.
I'm just asking because I haven't bought any Sony/BMG music CDs rescently, but I did install Everquest 2 about 6 months ago.
I also read that the code used in Sony's malware infringed on the LGPL because they did not freely distribute the source code along with the executable, so that is another violation of the copyright and intellectual property laws Sony love so much.
Of course if someone steals a novel and republishes it without permission that would be copyright infringement. But that is a complex piece of IP that it would be nearly impossible to duplicate simply by chance when someone writes a novel from scratch. Rather than having written a specific and unique novel, what Amazon has done is the equivalent of patenting the idea/concept of a printed document that contains a work of fiction.
Seriously, who is working in the US patent office? Gomer Pyle? Woody from Cheers? Radar from MASH? Joey from Friends?
Any moron who is given 3 years of warning ought to be able to save enough money to afford a set-top converter box if they do not want to buy a new TV. And if they are using cable, like 95% of everybody, they don't need to buy anything. If we have to waste 3 billion dollars why don't we spend it on studies of ways we can get lazy people to stop mooching off of taxpayers, and studies of ways to get Congress to stop spending money on stupid crap.