I have a Sandisk Sansa that I picked up, with docking station and speakers AND a wallet style case, for $35. Once I got it home, I found out why it was so cheap. The 2 GB MicroSD was the max it could take, and when I'd play the songs in a folder, it played them ALPHABETICALLY BY NAME. Not by filename like you might expect (I could deal with that, I use very descriptive filenames), but by the TITLE of the song! Searching for a solution to this bizarre issue, I was pointed at Rockbox. Finding that there was no other fix, I decided to give Rockbox a shot. What I ended up with was COMPLETELY different from what I started with! It now supports MicroSDHC (I have a 16 in it now but it'll take a 32), plays files in a logical order, and has an interface much like a phone or tiny laptop. It even has games! Also, it has a "party mode" where files chosen are added to the end of the queue rather than overriding the current selection.
As a n00b to ham radio, and only a Technician Class (don't even have my callsign yet, just tested today), I look forward to doing some DXing in the 6 meter band. The preferred band for international DX is usually 20 meters, but solar storms that actually hit us tend to push the maximum usable frequency for skywave propagation upward in frequency (downward in wavelength). I've been hearing of people making 2000 mile contacts at 6 meters with 5 watts in the conditions from the last flare. Since I'm not licensed for the HF bands (I may soon go for the upgrade to General Class but I still won't have any HF gear), but DO currently have the ability to operate in the 6 meter band, I will have to wait for the right moment to try to reach out and QSL someone.
Incandescents are still available, you just have to buy them as photographic supplies. There is no substitute for a continuous spectrum when it comes to rendering color accurately.
Unless they plan to allow special copies for rental purposes, this spells the end of game rentals. Of course, that just might be part of the intended suite of effects rather than a side effect.
Hockey players can and do hit roughly 30 mph and have to stop very quickly (you can only go 30 mph on a 200 foot rink for so long without stopping or turning!) and throw up a lot of ice spray in the process. It's called a power slide or hockey stop. It's entirely doable on inline skates as well, but it's hell on the wheels since there is no sacrificial surface to be ablated in the process. Personally all eight of my wheels ended up sharpened with the edge to the right of center, since I tend to turn the skates to the left when executing this maneuver. (Don't even ask if I used the heel stop, that got taken off the first time I clipped skates when doing a crossover turn.) Another trick for slowing down less severely is to spread the toes but keep the heels together. This takes some strength to be sure, but if you don't have thigh strength you aren't likely to be reaching those kinds of speeds anyhow -- unless you charge down hills like you were on skis, in which case you better have a soft place to fall because you're going to wipe out a fair bit. A third option which is probably not very practical with a motor vehicle is to go into a very tight spin to dissipate momentum.
Anyhow, the problem is that such stops require a RAPID shift of the wheels to be ahead of the center of gravity, and it eats material off of them quite severely. It doesn't take very many power slides on inline skates to sharpen up the wheels, and it's going to be worse on air-filled tires. I use the inline skate analogy because it seems to be more similar to the side-by-side wheel configuration under discussion here than your bicycle analogy. The GOOD part is that if it's designed correctly you should be able to get BOTH wheels out in front of the vehicle and stop quite quickly. You're just going to chew up a lot of rubber in the process.
You probably won't own the Prius forever, so some of the difference will be made up in the resale value when you decide to replace it. Also, the Prius has continually sold out year after year despite the fact that Toyota has done virtually NO advertising for it compared to other models, so you know demand will remain high when you want to unload it. They've been proven by time -- the vast majority of the ones made are still on the road unless they've been demolished by collisions or the like. Undoubtedly this is due to the tightly controlled battery charge state, but the fact is that it WORKS. Battery packs not spec'd to outlast 10 years/100,000 miles are a few years past that and double or triple the mileage. It is not yet known if the Sonic will do as well, but it IS known that the Prius WILL.
My partner did an informal survey of the traffic passing outside (in Studio City) while on smoke breaks. The most popular vehicle, at about 5 to 6% of total traffic, was the Prius. The next most popular was the 3-series BMW, at 4.5 to 5%.
As for quality, the trim of the Prius feels pretty cheap to me. It's pretty evident that they've stripped it down for weight savings -- not at all an unreasonable thing to do with a high-efficiency vehicle, but it doesn't exactly exude luxury. The seats aren't even all that comfortable, which seems short-sighted since GOOD seats don't have to equate to HEAVY seats (my 1989 Subaru XT6 has better seats and they're the stock racing buckets less than three inches thick). It also has some significant blind spots, most notably from the high-rise tailgate. They might need the shape for aerodynamics, but they could have improved the view lines by making it out of glass or Lexan. Then they churned them out virtually unmodified for a decade because they kept on selling. This doesn't mean they couldn't have used some tweaking, it just means they were good enough to be better than the competition. Maybe they took a tip from Dyson (the vacuum manufacturer) -- trickle out the features to remain one step ahead of your imitators.
Oddly, the pre-2000 Priuses were normal-looking, blend-into-the-crowd cars and I'd be happier with one of those than the 2000's ones. I haven't personally been around the latest models to say whether I like them or not.
(As a side note, I'm always confused why only Pizza is delivered in the U.S. but not other fast foods.)
This is simply not the case in many urban and even suburban areas. In my last apartment, my choice of multiple Chinese restaurants, a couple Italian places (serving more than just pizza), a couple Mexican places, one Thai, and two Indian restaurants were all a phone call away -- minimum order typically $10. This is admittedly in the middle of Studio City, but even in much more laid back San Pedro, we still had two Chinese places, an Italian place, and a Mexican place (Burrito Factory, mmmmm...) in addition to the usual pizza chains. There may have been more, but we had favorites and didn't really try to find others. I know that in Miami, you could get Cuban food delivered almost anywhere, and that Phoenix has similar options available as those in Los Angeles. I haven't really spent enough time in other cities to know what they offer.
No additional risk involved? Tell that to anyone who has had a drunk passenger blow chunks in the car! With an autonomous car, there's nobody to tell you that you need to clean up the car before you take Mikey to soccer practice tomorrow.
I don't know about you, but I don't drive to the disposal site every time I break or change a CFL. They sit on a shelf in a box, and when it's time to take other dead hardware to the collection site, the box goes too. The additional fuel used to do this is negligible as I'd be going there anyhow. The only downside is having to keep them on the shelf for months or years until I have enough junk hardware to want to make the trip.
Also, the LADWP has been leaving two CFLs on my doorstep every year or two for at least the last 10 years. I understand they want people to swap them out as regular bulbs die, but it seems to me that most people would have already replaced the most-used (therefore fastest-dying) bulbs in the house by now. Yet the two-per-cycle CFL allotment continues. Mind you, I do actually use them now that they've moved away from the green death colored CFLs to the warm ones, but I can only use so many at one time. They really should allow us to simply leave them where we find them, and pick them up a few days later when they hit another nearby neighborhood.
Multi-core at least lets you get the housekeeping and low-demand applications out of the way so your compute-intensive app can have one or two cores all to itself. They may not be that much (or ANY) faster than the cores of yesteryear, but at least you know you can have 100% of one or two. This, and a reduction in the number of context-switching penalties incurred, helps keep things SMOOTH, if not necessarily that much faster. True number crunchers should be prepared to farm their work out across as many cores as they can reach.
Doesn't the clean air act limit the number of parking spaces in most cities in America? Why make it fold? This feature (folding up) makes the car far more complicated-- more to fix, more upkeep, more failures... how about building a small car thats inexpensive and energy efficient?
Maybe they should ask Dean Kamen if they can have the Segway name-- it will be just as popular.
(1) Electric cars don't cause air pollution (directly). If the law doesn't account for this, then alter the law. The car isn't the problem. (2) There's a lot more world than just the United States, and even within the United States, there are large parts of it where congestion is more of a problem than air quality is.
I'm giving up. I downloaded Firefox 3.6 from Mozilla's website last night. I'm going to make it my default browser.
You know they're forcibly upgrading FF3.6.x to FF12 in April, right?
And that's when I bother to switch to another browser. I consider FF8 to be different enough (in ways I don't particularly like) to essentially be a different browser. If I'm going to go through all that trouble, I may as well switch completely. Chrome seems to be out, as (1) I don't particularly trust Google any longer, and (2) it seems to take a lot of RAM on my system (no I haven't investigated why, and I don't care to). Safari, on Windows? HAHAHA. IE8? Double fucking HAHAHA. So no, I haven't decided what to use yet.
Self-service is illegal in both Oregon and New Jersey. Everywhere else, it is pretty much the ONLY choice unless you are a special case (such as being in a wheelchair) in which case state law may require they send someone out to pump for you (usually without charge).
The mercury in the bulbs is far less than the mercury emitted by coal-fired plants providing electricity to drive conventional incandescent bulbs. For the moment at least, half the power we have is dirty power.
Speaking with a HAM (I currently live with one), he said even the smaller flare from a couple days ago was creating highly unusual conditions that made DXing far easier in the 6 meter band than is ordinarily the case. Guys with modest 100 watt transmitters in California were being heard in New Zealand, and vice versa. If you've ever wanted to add countries to your DX contact list, this might be just the time to do it!
I think I'd probably want to punch someone who refused to believe in gravity.
Wouldn't it be more fitting to just knock them over? Besides, for someone to SERIOUSLY not believe in the EFFECTS of gravity (regardless of what they think the cause may be), they'd pretty much have to be immune to it. If they were, you might not be terribly inclined to argue with them.
I have a pair of these I bought refurbished for less than $200 each. I'd love to find two more but they're getting thin on the ground. They're wonderful computer displays for the desktop user, and horrible for anything else. Forget about laying down on the couch and watching a movie, off-axis performance is TERRIBLE. But when you've got them pointed straight at you, they're quite amazing.
Not ALL DVI ports have the analog portion. Note that HDMI has only HALF the wiring that DVI does (and there are some DVI ports that omit half of the digital lines).
And that is precisely the problem for me. My monitors exceed 1080p specs (2048x1152 to be exact) and therefore require that ALL of those digital lines are in place. If I use an HDMI port (or a single-link DVI cable), I get only 1920x1080 -- either stretched or letterboxed, my choice. I had to specifically choose my last graphics card based on it having two DVI ports natively because nothing else will do. What becomes of those of us who prefer to drive monitors in excess of 1080p specs?
It also so happens that my monitors completely lack pin holes for the analog lines, so I physically had to break them off one end of the cable.
Note that HDMI has only HALF the wiring that DVI does (and there are some DVI ports that omit half of the digital lines).
And that is precisely the problem for me. My monitors exceed 1080p specs (2048x1152 to be exact) and therefore require that ALL of those digital lines are in place. If I use an HDMI port (or a single-link DVI cable), I get only 1920x1080 -- either stretched or letterboxed, my choice. I had to specifically choose my last graphics card based on it having two DVI ports natively because nothing else will do. What becomes of those of us who prefer to drive monitors in excess of 1080p specs?
Ron Paul has some arguably insane views, but so long as he agrees that it is NOT HIS RESPONSIBILITY to enforce these positions on others, then I am fine with him holding those positions. He's entitled to his opinion as much as anyone else. Unfortunately, most people who seek power seek to wield it over others rather than exercise restraint. Only time would tell if Ron Paul is capable of such restraint, should he actually obtain the power he seeks.
Smoking is not ALWAYS a net negative on health. I know several people for whom smoking AS NEEDED (not habitually) is an effective means to control headaches before they can get out of control. I am one of them. I smoke about HALF a cigarette (not half a pack, half a single cigarette) a MONTH. I never buy them, that would be stupid -- I just bum a hit or two when required. I suppose I could use the lowest strength nicotine gum to the same effect, but at this rate the smoking is not going to catch up with me -- my central nervous system will have quit long before then. If I couldn't borrow a hit from other smokers, I'd probably just use a pipe and loose tobacco.
Four (or All) Wheel Drive is exactly that -- all the wheels receive power from the drive train. It is NOT "four wheel steer" or "four wheel control" or "four wheel stop". People who don't know that the benefits of 4WD/AWD are only achieved when the wheels are being driven will not see those benefits -- it requires a conscious change in driving habits to make effective use of them.
I turned my back on the NFL when they went all gung-ho on the second Iraq war. They have since backed off that stance to a degree (most likely due to the Pat Tillman backlash), but I found that I really didn't miss their product all that much. I still don't. I don't actively avoid it any longer, but I also don't seek it out. American football (not just the NFL) is a series of kludges designed to keep the game from getting too lopsided toward either offense OR defense -- no major sports league in the world changes rules as frequently as the NFL (though the NBA is starting to catch up). Every year the team owners meet to discuss rule changes, but what they don't discuss is whether or not it is even necessary to consider changing any rules. It's just a given that some tweaking needs to be done EVERY off-season. Any truly imaginitive way to exploit the rules first gets copied, then gets nerfed. The NFL has become a live-action video game.
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I have a Sandisk Sansa that I picked up, with docking station and speakers AND a wallet style case, for $35. Once I got it home, I found out why it was so cheap. The 2 GB MicroSD was the max it could take, and when I'd play the songs in a folder, it played them ALPHABETICALLY BY NAME. Not by filename like you might expect (I could deal with that, I use very descriptive filenames), but by the TITLE of the song! Searching for a solution to this bizarre issue, I was pointed at Rockbox. Finding that there was no other fix, I decided to give Rockbox a shot. What I ended up with was COMPLETELY different from what I started with! It now supports MicroSDHC (I have a 16 in it now but it'll take a 32), plays files in a logical order, and has an interface much like a phone or tiny laptop. It even has games! Also, it has a "party mode" where files chosen are added to the end of the queue rather than overriding the current selection.
As a n00b to ham radio, and only a Technician Class (don't even have my callsign yet, just tested today), I look forward to doing some DXing in the 6 meter band. The preferred band for international DX is usually 20 meters, but solar storms that actually hit us tend to push the maximum usable frequency for skywave propagation upward in frequency (downward in wavelength). I've been hearing of people making 2000 mile contacts at 6 meters with 5 watts in the conditions from the last flare. Since I'm not licensed for the HF bands (I may soon go for the upgrade to General Class but I still won't have any HF gear), but DO currently have the ability to operate in the 6 meter band, I will have to wait for the right moment to try to reach out and QSL someone.
If I don't get first post, I guess I was busy changing my shoes.
Seriously, the system is going to break the first time these developers are introduced to WOMEN.
Incandescents are still available, you just have to buy them as photographic supplies. There is no substitute for a continuous spectrum when it comes to rendering color accurately.
Unless they plan to allow special copies for rental purposes, this spells the end of game rentals. Of course, that just might be part of the intended suite of effects rather than a side effect.
Hockey players can and do hit roughly 30 mph and have to stop very quickly (you can only go 30 mph on a 200 foot rink for so long without stopping or turning!) and throw up a lot of ice spray in the process. It's called a power slide or hockey stop. It's entirely doable on inline skates as well, but it's hell on the wheels since there is no sacrificial surface to be ablated in the process. Personally all eight of my wheels ended up sharpened with the edge to the right of center, since I tend to turn the skates to the left when executing this maneuver. (Don't even ask if I used the heel stop, that got taken off the first time I clipped skates when doing a crossover turn.) Another trick for slowing down less severely is to spread the toes but keep the heels together. This takes some strength to be sure, but if you don't have thigh strength you aren't likely to be reaching those kinds of speeds anyhow -- unless you charge down hills like you were on skis, in which case you better have a soft place to fall because you're going to wipe out a fair bit. A third option which is probably not very practical with a motor vehicle is to go into a very tight spin to dissipate momentum.
Anyhow, the problem is that such stops require a RAPID shift of the wheels to be ahead of the center of gravity, and it eats material off of them quite severely. It doesn't take very many power slides on inline skates to sharpen up the wheels, and it's going to be worse on air-filled tires. I use the inline skate analogy because it seems to be more similar to the side-by-side wheel configuration under discussion here than your bicycle analogy. The GOOD part is that if it's designed correctly you should be able to get BOTH wheels out in front of the vehicle and stop quite quickly. You're just going to chew up a lot of rubber in the process.
You probably won't own the Prius forever, so some of the difference will be made up in the resale value when you decide to replace it. Also, the Prius has continually sold out year after year despite the fact that Toyota has done virtually NO advertising for it compared to other models, so you know demand will remain high when you want to unload it. They've been proven by time -- the vast majority of the ones made are still on the road unless they've been demolished by collisions or the like. Undoubtedly this is due to the tightly controlled battery charge state, but the fact is that it WORKS. Battery packs not spec'd to outlast 10 years/100,000 miles are a few years past that and double or triple the mileage. It is not yet known if the Sonic will do as well, but it IS known that the Prius WILL.
My partner did an informal survey of the traffic passing outside (in Studio City) while on smoke breaks. The most popular vehicle, at about 5 to 6% of total traffic, was the Prius. The next most popular was the 3-series BMW, at 4.5 to 5%.
As for quality, the trim of the Prius feels pretty cheap to me. It's pretty evident that they've stripped it down for weight savings -- not at all an unreasonable thing to do with a high-efficiency vehicle, but it doesn't exactly exude luxury. The seats aren't even all that comfortable, which seems short-sighted since GOOD seats don't have to equate to HEAVY seats (my 1989 Subaru XT6 has better seats and they're the stock racing buckets less than three inches thick). It also has some significant blind spots, most notably from the high-rise tailgate. They might need the shape for aerodynamics, but they could have improved the view lines by making it out of glass or Lexan. Then they churned them out virtually unmodified for a decade because they kept on selling. This doesn't mean they couldn't have used some tweaking, it just means they were good enough to be better than the competition. Maybe they took a tip from Dyson (the vacuum manufacturer) -- trickle out the features to remain one step ahead of your imitators.
Oddly, the pre-2000 Priuses were normal-looking, blend-into-the-crowd cars and I'd be happier with one of those than the 2000's ones. I haven't personally been around the latest models to say whether I like them or not.
(As a side note, I'm always confused why only Pizza is delivered in the U.S. but not other fast foods.)
This is simply not the case in many urban and even suburban areas. In my last apartment, my choice of multiple Chinese restaurants, a couple Italian places (serving more than just pizza), a couple Mexican places, one Thai, and two Indian restaurants were all a phone call away -- minimum order typically $10. This is admittedly in the middle of Studio City, but even in much more laid back San Pedro, we still had two Chinese places, an Italian place, and a Mexican place (Burrito Factory, mmmmm...) in addition to the usual pizza chains. There may have been more, but we had favorites and didn't really try to find others. I know that in Miami, you could get Cuban food delivered almost anywhere, and that Phoenix has similar options available as those in Los Angeles. I haven't really spent enough time in other cities to know what they offer.
No additional risk involved? Tell that to anyone who has had a drunk passenger blow chunks in the car! With an autonomous car, there's nobody to tell you that you need to clean up the car before you take Mikey to soccer practice tomorrow.
I don't know about you, but I don't drive to the disposal site every time I break or change a CFL. They sit on a shelf in a box, and when it's time to take other dead hardware to the collection site, the box goes too. The additional fuel used to do this is negligible as I'd be going there anyhow. The only downside is having to keep them on the shelf for months or years until I have enough junk hardware to want to make the trip.
Also, the LADWP has been leaving two CFLs on my doorstep every year or two for at least the last 10 years. I understand they want people to swap them out as regular bulbs die, but it seems to me that most people would have already replaced the most-used (therefore fastest-dying) bulbs in the house by now. Yet the two-per-cycle CFL allotment continues. Mind you, I do actually use them now that they've moved away from the green death colored CFLs to the warm ones, but I can only use so many at one time. They really should allow us to simply leave them where we find them, and pick them up a few days later when they hit another nearby neighborhood.
Multi-core at least lets you get the housekeeping and low-demand applications out of the way so your compute-intensive app can have one or two cores all to itself. They may not be that much (or ANY) faster than the cores of yesteryear, but at least you know you can have 100% of one or two. This, and a reduction in the number of context-switching penalties incurred, helps keep things SMOOTH, if not necessarily that much faster. True number crunchers should be prepared to farm their work out across as many cores as they can reach.
Doesn't the clean air act limit the number of parking spaces in most cities in America?
Why make it fold? This feature (folding up) makes the car far more complicated-- more to fix, more upkeep, more failures... how about building a small car thats inexpensive and energy efficient?
Maybe they should ask Dean Kamen if they can have the Segway name-- it will be just as popular.
(1) Electric cars don't cause air pollution (directly). If the law doesn't account for this, then alter the law. The car isn't the problem.
(2) There's a lot more world than just the United States, and even within the United States, there are large parts of it where congestion is more of a problem than air quality is.
I'm giving up. I downloaded Firefox 3.6 from Mozilla's website last night. I'm going to make it my default browser.
You know they're forcibly upgrading FF3.6.x to FF12 in April, right?
And that's when I bother to switch to another browser. I consider FF8 to be different enough (in ways I don't particularly like) to essentially be a different browser. If I'm going to go through all that trouble, I may as well switch completely. Chrome seems to be out, as (1) I don't particularly trust Google any longer, and (2) it seems to take a lot of RAM on my system (no I haven't investigated why, and I don't care to). Safari, on Windows? HAHAHA. IE8? Double fucking HAHAHA. So no, I haven't decided what to use yet.
Self-service is illegal in both Oregon and New Jersey. Everywhere else, it is pretty much the ONLY choice unless you are a special case (such as being in a wheelchair) in which case state law may require they send someone out to pump for you (usually without charge).
The mercury in the bulbs is far less than the mercury emitted by coal-fired plants providing electricity to drive conventional incandescent bulbs. For the moment at least, half the power we have is dirty power.
Speaking with a HAM (I currently live with one), he said even the smaller flare from a couple days ago was creating highly unusual conditions that made DXing far easier in the 6 meter band than is ordinarily the case. Guys with modest 100 watt transmitters in California were being heard in New Zealand, and vice versa. If you've ever wanted to add countries to your DX contact list, this might be just the time to do it!
I think I'd probably want to punch someone who refused to believe in gravity.
Wouldn't it be more fitting to just knock them over? Besides, for someone to SERIOUSLY not believe in the EFFECTS of gravity (regardless of what they think the cause may be), they'd pretty much have to be immune to it. If they were, you might not be terribly inclined to argue with them.
I have a pair of these I bought refurbished for less than $200 each. I'd love to find two more but they're getting thin on the ground. They're wonderful computer displays for the desktop user, and horrible for anything else. Forget about laying down on the couch and watching a movie, off-axis performance is TERRIBLE. But when you've got them pointed straight at you, they're quite amazing.
Not ALL DVI ports have the analog portion. Note that HDMI has only HALF the wiring that DVI does (and there are some DVI ports that omit half of the digital lines).
And that is precisely the problem for me. My monitors exceed 1080p specs (2048x1152 to be exact) and therefore require that ALL of those digital lines are in place. If I use an HDMI port (or a single-link DVI cable), I get only 1920x1080 -- either stretched or letterboxed, my choice. I had to specifically choose my last graphics card based on it having two DVI ports natively because nothing else will do. What becomes of those of us who prefer to drive monitors in excess of 1080p specs?
It also so happens that my monitors completely lack pin holes for the analog lines, so I physically had to break them off one end of the cable.
Note that HDMI has only HALF the wiring that DVI does (and there are some DVI ports that omit half of the digital lines).
And that is precisely the problem for me. My monitors exceed 1080p specs (2048x1152 to be exact) and therefore require that ALL of those digital lines are in place. If I use an HDMI port (or a single-link DVI cable), I get only 1920x1080 -- either stretched or letterboxed, my choice. I had to specifically choose my last graphics card based on it having two DVI ports natively because nothing else will do. What becomes of those of us who prefer to drive monitors in excess of 1080p specs?
Ron Paul has some arguably insane views, but so long as he agrees that it is NOT HIS RESPONSIBILITY to enforce these positions on others, then I am fine with him holding those positions. He's entitled to his opinion as much as anyone else. Unfortunately, most people who seek power seek to wield it over others rather than exercise restraint. Only time would tell if Ron Paul is capable of such restraint, should he actually obtain the power he seeks.
There are "Molly mules" that can get pregnant and bear colts, though the males ARE all infertile.
Smoking is not ALWAYS a net negative on health. I know several people for whom smoking AS NEEDED (not habitually) is an effective means to control headaches before they can get out of control. I am one of them. I smoke about HALF a cigarette (not half a pack, half a single cigarette) a MONTH. I never buy them, that would be stupid -- I just bum a hit or two when required. I suppose I could use the lowest strength nicotine gum to the same effect, but at this rate the smoking is not going to catch up with me -- my central nervous system will have quit long before then. If I couldn't borrow a hit from other smokers, I'd probably just use a pipe and loose tobacco.
Four (or All) Wheel Drive is exactly that -- all the wheels receive power from the drive train. It is NOT "four wheel steer" or "four wheel control" or "four wheel stop". People who don't know that the benefits of 4WD/AWD are only achieved when the wheels are being driven will not see those benefits -- it requires a conscious change in driving habits to make effective use of them.
I turned my back on the NFL when they went all gung-ho on the second Iraq war. They have since backed off that stance to a degree (most likely due to the Pat Tillman backlash), but I found that I really didn't miss their product all that much. I still don't. I don't actively avoid it any longer, but I also don't seek it out. American football (not just the NFL) is a series of kludges designed to keep the game from getting too lopsided toward either offense OR defense -- no major sports league in the world changes rules as frequently as the NFL (though the NBA is starting to catch up). Every year the team owners meet to discuss rule changes, but what they don't discuss is whether or not it is even necessary to consider changing any rules. It's just a given that some tweaking needs to be done EVERY off-season. Any truly imaginitive way to exploit the rules first gets copied, then gets nerfed. The NFL has become a live-action video game.