Everything you say is true. However, we have a lot to gain from gathering precious minerals and raw materials from other planetary bodies, moons, etc. The fact is we are running out of a lot of important resources, many of which could be easily obtained from elsewhere if we only had the means to reach "elsewhere".
It also sounds like this technology functions like the body armor most Eldar use in Warhammer 40k. It's really more of a semi-popular sci-fi concept, which is where a lot of these ideas come from.
This is going before what most would consider Medieval Times, but the Romans were generally pretty open about homosexuality. They actually had a whole legion at one point, and every member was bisexual or homosexual. Their idea with that was that people will fight harder to save a lover than their country. They were right about it too. That legion was one of their most decorated.
I am fairly sure that the term "gay" has only been applied to homosexuality in fairly recent times. My evidence is that people almost automatically associate it with homosexuality, but if you ask my great grandfather he's pretty sure it doesn't mean anything but "happy".
One thing I'd like to point out as well is that homo- and bisexuality were probably far more accepted in the ancient world than now. Two of the most practiced religions in the world, Islam and Christianity, specifically forbid it. These religions have affected our laws, and their ideals are taught in school and broadcasted on the news. Those religions have not always been dominant, and many older religions, the ones they kind of replaced, didn't have any issues with homo- or bisexuality. At the time, the ones that did didn't have the propaganda machine known as a television to spread their beliefs.
Did you completely ignore what I said at the beginning of my post? They own the TV here so Sprint DSL is not advertised at all. It's not advertised on the TV or the radio. The only way I even found out I could get it was because a friend of mine who works for the phone company told me it was available in my town. He said that less than 20 people in my town have it.
So, you're right, it is not a complete monopoly in the broadband sense. However, they abuse their TV monopoly (they are the only cable provider) to make sure that the only DSL offerings advertised are ones which are not available in this area. Each commercial is also followed by a commercial for their own cable broadband.
I hear that! In my area there are two broadband providers, the local cable company (Armstrong) and Sprint, which will provide DSL. However, nobody knows DSL is even available because the TV of course never runs commercials for it. So, the cable provider has a crazy monopoly and they abuse it horribly. Here's some of the stupid stuff they do:
They offer two "speeds" of their service, called Zoom 100 and Zoom 500. However, the numbers after the name don't have anything at all to do with the speed. Zoom 100 is a 128k connection that usually gives you more like 56k of actual throughput, whereas there are different "versions" of Zoom 500, going all the way up to 5Mb/s. In commercials they say Zoom 500 is 5Mb/s for like 40.00 a month, but the 40.00/month Zoom 500 is actually 1.5Mb/s I think.
If someone tries to brute force or break into your e-mail account they turn your internet off. This actually happened to my girlfriend. They turned her internet connection off and said they wouldn't turn it back on until she downloaded (...how?) a virus scanner and removed the virus from her computer. There was no virus. They said she was checking her mail 10 times a second.... her computer was not even on.
They block asbolutely all inbound connections to any port used by anything. You can't even transfer files using AIM unless you do it on an odd port.
They don't run enough cable runs around town, so most people don't even get half of the speed they pay for.
Service goes out for about 1 hour a week; usually on Fridays. I've asked other people in town and they concur that it really does happen, so it's not just my observation. Of course, if you complain they will not give you a discount on your next bill. Oh, and they offer VOIP by the way, so that 1 hour a week on Friday get's old fast.
They will sell you a static IP and unblock connections to your IP. However, this costs over 100.00 a month extra. Yeah, that is in addition to what you pay for the connection. Oh, and do do that you have to give them a written reason why you need each port unblocked.
They offer a "deal" where you can use more than one computer on your internet connection. It costs something like 10.00 a month extra per computer, and they come put a router in your house, usually a wifi one. When they set these up they typically do not use WEP (they're supposed to). When they remember to use it they like to use the same default WEP-key...
They block the MAC addresses of Linksys, Netgear, and D-Link products.
If they know you use Linux they refuse to provide technical support for your internet connection.
So, yeah, needless to say, they abuse their monopoly like crazy. I don't have to deal with it anymore because switched to Sprint. Remarkably, I've had no problems with Sprint at all. They were even cool that I had my own DSL modem I wanted to use instead of their's, and they don't give a crap what you do with your connection.
The problem is that so much software requires you to run as admin, especially games. I know any game that uses the popular cheat prevention system Punk Buster isn't able to play on any internet servers unless you're logged in as administrator. I'm not sure who is really at fault here, though. It could be software designers for assuming the end user is logged in as admin, or could be MS for making regular, non-admin accounts so crippled.
StarCraft used them too to sort of explain the story. What I meant when I said Dawn of War used them was in some cases you'd find out really important things about the mission if you watched the cutscene that you wouldn't know about if you just read the mission description.
I personally feel that cut scenes are really only useful in RPG's, but only sometimes. I think the Final Fantasy series of games (the later ones anyway) did just fine with the cut scenes.
I have also seen one RTS game which uses cutscenes effectively, Dawn of War. The cut scenes in the story mode of the game actually tell you what's going on. Yeah, you can read the mission description, but you get a lot more info if you watch the cut scenes.
It doesn't make sense anymore for ISP's to offer asynchronous lines. Once upon a time most of the people on the web were just reading the content, not creating it, so asynchronous lines were fine. Now people want to blog, send large files (like family movies and pictures), post on forums, and do all kinds of things which require higher upload speeds.
What's stupid is that my ISP won't even sell me a synchronous line even though they do offer them to businesses. I have the money for one, as well as all of the equipment needed, and I know I am within the area they offer it to. But, since I do not have a business they won't sell it to me.
Another idea is to package the music/software/game with something that is above and beyond what you would normally get from just a plain disc. Add something to the packaging that makes people want to buy the product and not just download it. You could add writing, pictures or objects that people could enjoy that can't be easily reproduced with a copy program.
You're absolutely right about that. The movie industry figured this out a long time ago. I can spend 15 dollars or so on a DVD, and I get a movie as well as things like bloppers, deleted scenes, commentary, and all many of other things with it. I get several hours of entertainment for under 20.00. When you buy a CD you get a little over an hour of music and a lyric book if you're lucky, and it costs more than a money.
Pricing is another place the music industry needs to get a clue. It costs more to make a movie than an album. It often takes less time as well. So... why does a music CD cost more for so much less?
Actually, most of the nuclear waste we hear about all the time isn't related to nuclear energy production at all. Anything which comes in contact with anything radioactive has to be considered nuclear waste. Therefore, x-ray vests and old medical equipment have to be counted as nuclear waste. Most of the supposed nuclear waste isn't anything more than regular garbage (I heard this from a nuclear engineer).
Also, as far as the stuff which is actually hazardous, we could always put it in geologically formed salt domes. Salt domes require great stability and a lack of water to form, so if we put it in a salt dome we can say for sure it won't get in our water supply, at least not for thousands of years, at which point it won't be radioactive anymore.
Why not test stem cell research on terminally ill patients, providing they are able to make an informed decision as far as consent goes. There is no sane reason a person should be denied experimental treatments if they want them and can pay for them.
Yeah, I'd say we are addicted to technology. We're a narcissistic people who are obsessed with the things we have created. I don't mean just Americans, I mean humans in general. It's perfecttly normal. The only way it becomes dangerous is when we reach a point where we rely on technology so much we literally could not survive without it.
People can say all they like about technology causing people to slack off, but there is no reason why it shouldn't. Why build things that can make work easier when we can build things that remove the need for work? They say that modern civilization is only possible because we have an abundance of food and can spend our time on other endeavors. We are now experiencing what will turn into an abundance of time. After enough time passes we will eventually reach a level of advancement where we won't need to work anymore, and will have developed safe guards so that we don't have to worry about losing our technology. This, of course, is assuming that we don't blow ourselves up first.
You know, I am fairly sure that Congress never issued an official declaration of war. I thought wars had to be approved by Congress or the troops had to be pulled out after 60 days.. Did this change or something? Did they vote and not tell anybody?
But more importantly, I see the whole Blu-Ray vs HD-HVD issue as all but moot. Regardless of who wins, we'll only see at best a roughly 10x increase in optical storage capacity per disc, and even that only at the tail end of the effective lifetime of the media (ie, look at writeable dual-layer DVDs - Oh wait, I can't, I've never even seen one in person, and they cost a few bucks each).
I used one once to back up a movie for a friend. We had to drive to walmart to buy them, and they only had one brand. The box was clear on the top shelf behind stuff, and it cost 12.99 or so for 3 of them. The only reason we even needed it was because he wanted a full backup of a whole DVD movie (the lion in winter) and the asshats at the movie label decided to put it on a dual-layer disk so they could fit all kinds of stupid commentary and the like. I halfway think the whole dual-layer thing is just an indirect way to make it too expensive for people to copy DVD's.
I've tried Opera and I do like it. It really does seem to do better than Firefox from a performance standpoint. However, it's support for JavaScript is a little lacking for my tastes, and the fact that it comes with the mail client and the chat program is just plain annoying. Also, it doesn't have extensions. Extensions are on of the things that make Firefox so cool. Now what I would like to see is Firefox with Opera's user interface.
This same thing happened to my girlfriend's HP Pavilion (running Windows 2k Pro at the time) a few times. Basically, the power went out and when it came back on Windows would boot to the black screen with the half-ass bar going across the bottom and hang, no matter what boot options it was given. There wasn't anything wrong with the computer though. Reinstalling fixed it.
Get a $10 crappy PC.. throw in 2 NE2000 (or similar) ISA based NICs (you've probably thrown them away before.. I have). Then you have a very VERY useful firewall, that DOES a helluva lot more than these little failure prone Linksys devices.
You really should not use ISA network cards for this. It might be fine if you're just using your connection for web browsing or e-mail, but if you use it for anything else (like gaming or bittorrent) they'll give you some serious problems. I made that mistake a few times.
I have to agree. A lot of stuff in the book seemed rushed through like he just wanted to get it finished. When Martin first described the Tower and stuff on that beach in the first book it made it sound... well kinda scary. To me, the 7th book was kind of an anti-climax.
Another thing that just sort of had me asking "why?! why?!" was if that one kid at the end could make stuff he drew real how come he didn't fix Roland's hand?
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Everything you say is true. However, we have a lot to gain from gathering precious minerals and raw materials from other planetary bodies, moons, etc. The fact is we are running out of a lot of important resources, many of which could be easily obtained from elsewhere if we only had the means to reach "elsewhere".
It also sounds like this technology functions like the body armor most Eldar use in Warhammer 40k. It's really more of a semi-popular sci-fi concept, which is where a lot of these ideas come from.
This is going before what most would consider Medieval Times, but the Romans were generally pretty open about homosexuality. They actually had a whole legion at one point, and every member was bisexual or homosexual. Their idea with that was that people will fight harder to save a lover than their country. They were right about it too. That legion was one of their most decorated.
I am fairly sure that the term "gay" has only been applied to homosexuality in fairly recent times. My evidence is that people almost automatically associate it with homosexuality, but if you ask my great grandfather he's pretty sure it doesn't mean anything but "happy".
One thing I'd like to point out as well is that homo- and bisexuality were probably far more accepted in the ancient world than now. Two of the most practiced religions in the world, Islam and Christianity, specifically forbid it. These religions have affected our laws, and their ideals are taught in school and broadcasted on the news. Those religions have not always been dominant, and many older religions, the ones they kind of replaced, didn't have any issues with homo- or bisexuality. At the time, the ones that did didn't have the propaganda machine known as a television to spread their beliefs.
Monopoly...switched. The words don't quite mesh.
Did you completely ignore what I said at the beginning of my post? They own the TV here so Sprint DSL is not advertised at all. It's not advertised on the TV or the radio. The only way I even found out I could get it was because a friend of mine who works for the phone company told me it was available in my town. He said that less than 20 people in my town have it.
So, you're right, it is not a complete monopoly in the broadband sense. However, they abuse their TV monopoly (they are the only cable provider) to make sure that the only DSL offerings advertised are ones which are not available in this area. Each commercial is also followed by a commercial for their own cable broadband.
I hear that! In my area there are two broadband providers, the local cable company (Armstrong) and Sprint, which will provide DSL. However, nobody knows DSL is even available because the TV of course never runs commercials for it. So, the cable provider has a crazy monopoly and they abuse it horribly. Here's some of the stupid stuff they do:
They offer two "speeds" of their service, called Zoom 100 and Zoom 500. However, the numbers after the name don't have anything at all to do with the speed. Zoom 100 is a 128k connection that usually gives you more like 56k of actual throughput, whereas there are different "versions" of Zoom 500, going all the way up to 5Mb/s. In commercials they say Zoom 500 is 5Mb/s for like 40.00 a month, but the 40.00/month Zoom 500 is actually 1.5Mb/s I think.
If someone tries to brute force or break into your e-mail account they turn your internet off. This actually happened to my girlfriend. They turned her internet connection off and said they wouldn't turn it back on until she downloaded (...how?) a virus scanner and removed the virus from her computer. There was no virus. They said she was checking her mail 10 times a second.... her computer was not even on.
They block asbolutely all inbound connections to any port used by anything. You can't even transfer files using AIM unless you do it on an odd port.
They don't run enough cable runs around town, so most people don't even get half of the speed they pay for. Service goes out for about 1 hour a week; usually on Fridays. I've asked other people in town and they concur that it really does happen, so it's not just my observation. Of course, if you complain they will not give you a discount on your next bill. Oh, and they offer VOIP by the way, so that 1 hour a week on Friday get's old fast.
They will sell you a static IP and unblock connections to your IP. However, this costs over 100.00 a month extra. Yeah, that is in addition to what you pay for the connection. Oh, and do do that you have to give them a written reason why you need each port unblocked.
They offer a "deal" where you can use more than one computer on your internet connection. It costs something like 10.00 a month extra per computer, and they come put a router in your house, usually a wifi one. When they set these up they typically do not use WEP (they're supposed to). When they remember to use it they like to use the same default WEP-key...
They block the MAC addresses of Linksys, Netgear, and D-Link products.
If they know you use Linux they refuse to provide technical support for your internet connection.
So, yeah, needless to say, they abuse their monopoly like crazy. I don't have to deal with it anymore because switched to Sprint. Remarkably, I've had no problems with Sprint at all. They were even cool that I had my own DSL modem I wanted to use instead of their's, and they don't give a crap what you do with your connection.
The problem is that so much software requires you to run as admin, especially games. I know any game that uses the popular cheat prevention system Punk Buster isn't able to play on any internet servers unless you're logged in as administrator. I'm not sure who is really at fault here, though. It could be software designers for assuming the end user is logged in as admin, or could be MS for making regular, non-admin accounts so crippled.
The only reason you can't is because of Apple. There is no reason aside from the greed of corporations.
StarCraft used them too to sort of explain the story. What I meant when I said Dawn of War used them was in some cases you'd find out really important things about the mission if you watched the cutscene that you wouldn't know about if you just read the mission description.
I personally feel that cut scenes are really only useful in RPG's, but only sometimes. I think the Final Fantasy series of games (the later ones anyway) did just fine with the cut scenes.
I have also seen one RTS game which uses cutscenes effectively, Dawn of War. The cut scenes in the story mode of the game actually tell you what's going on. Yeah, you can read the mission description, but you get a lot more info if you watch the cut scenes.
My BIOS does have that. I've seen a lot of motherboards that have a "write-protect" jumper.
It doesn't make sense anymore for ISP's to offer asynchronous lines. Once upon a time most of the people on the web were just reading the content, not creating it, so asynchronous lines were fine. Now people want to blog, send large files (like family movies and pictures), post on forums, and do all kinds of things which require higher upload speeds.
What's stupid is that my ISP won't even sell me a synchronous line even though they do offer them to businesses. I have the money for one, as well as all of the equipment needed, and I know I am within the area they offer it to. But, since I do not have a business they won't sell it to me.
Another idea is to package the music/software/game with something that is above and beyond what you would normally get from just a plain disc. Add something to the packaging that makes people want to buy the product and not just download it. You could add writing, pictures or objects that people could enjoy that can't be easily reproduced with a copy program.
You're absolutely right about that. The movie industry figured this out a long time ago. I can spend 15 dollars or so on a DVD, and I get a movie as well as things like bloppers, deleted scenes, commentary, and all many of other things with it. I get several hours of entertainment for under 20.00. When you buy a CD you get a little over an hour of music and a lyric book if you're lucky, and it costs more than a money.
Pricing is another place the music industry needs to get a clue. It costs more to make a movie than an album. It often takes less time as well. So... why does a music CD cost more for so much less?
Actually, most of the nuclear waste we hear about all the time isn't related to nuclear energy production at all. Anything which comes in contact with anything radioactive has to be considered nuclear waste. Therefore, x-ray vests and old medical equipment have to be counted as nuclear waste. Most of the supposed nuclear waste isn't anything more than regular garbage (I heard this from a nuclear engineer).
Also, as far as the stuff which is actually hazardous, we could always put it in geologically formed salt domes. Salt domes require great stability and a lack of water to form, so if we put it in a salt dome we can say for sure it won't get in our water supply, at least not for thousands of years, at which point it won't be radioactive anymore.
I shall.
I actually know the person who did the voice for AOL. He lives not more than a 5 minute drive away. I may have to see if I can get him to record that.
Why not test stem cell research on terminally ill patients, providing they are able to make an informed decision as far as consent goes. There is no sane reason a person should be denied experimental treatments if they want them and can pay for them.
Yeah, I'd say we are addicted to technology. We're a narcissistic people who are obsessed with the things we have created. I don't mean just Americans, I mean humans in general. It's perfecttly normal. The only way it becomes dangerous is when we reach a point where we rely on technology so much we literally could not survive without it.
People can say all they like about technology causing people to slack off, but there is no reason why it shouldn't. Why build things that can make work easier when we can build things that remove the need for work? They say that modern civilization is only possible because we have an abundance of food and can spend our time on other endeavors. We are now experiencing what will turn into an abundance of time. After enough time passes we will eventually reach a level of advancement where we won't need to work anymore, and will have developed safe guards so that we don't have to worry about losing our technology. This, of course, is assuming that we don't blow ourselves up first.
You know, I am fairly sure that Congress never issued an official declaration of war. I thought wars had to be approved by Congress or the troops had to be pulled out after 60 days.. Did this change or something? Did they vote and not tell anybody?
But more importantly, I see the whole Blu-Ray vs HD-HVD issue as all but moot. Regardless of who wins, we'll only see at best a roughly 10x increase in optical storage capacity per disc, and even that only at the tail end of the effective lifetime of the media (ie, look at writeable dual-layer DVDs - Oh wait, I can't, I've never even seen one in person, and they cost a few bucks each).
I used one once to back up a movie for a friend. We had to drive to walmart to buy them, and they only had one brand. The box was clear on the top shelf behind stuff, and it cost 12.99 or so for 3 of them. The only reason we even needed it was because he wanted a full backup of a whole DVD movie (the lion in winter) and the asshats at the movie label decided to put it on a dual-layer disk so they could fit all kinds of stupid commentary and the like. I halfway think the whole dual-layer thing is just an indirect way to make it too expensive for people to copy DVD's.
I've tried Opera and I do like it. It really does seem to do better than Firefox from a performance standpoint. However, it's support for JavaScript is a little lacking for my tastes, and the fact that it comes with the mail client and the chat program is just plain annoying. Also, it doesn't have extensions. Extensions are on of the things that make Firefox so cool. Now what I would like to see is Firefox with Opera's user interface.
This same thing happened to my girlfriend's HP Pavilion (running Windows 2k Pro at the time) a few times. Basically, the power went out and when it came back on Windows would boot to the black screen with the half-ass bar going across the bottom and hang, no matter what boot options it was given. There wasn't anything wrong with the computer though. Reinstalling fixed it.
Maybe the people who released this publicly are in opposition to full-disclosure practices and are trying to prove their point?
Yeah, it's missing a lot of very wealthy fictional characters, like Bill Gates. Come on! We all knows he's not really a person!
Get a $10 crappy PC .. throw in 2 NE2000 (or similar) ISA based NICs (you've probably thrown them away before .. I have). Then you have a very VERY useful firewall, that DOES a helluva lot more than these little failure prone Linksys devices.
You really should not use ISA network cards for this. It might be fine if you're just using your connection for web browsing or e-mail, but if you use it for anything else (like gaming or bittorrent) they'll give you some serious problems. I made that mistake a few times.
I have to agree. A lot of stuff in the book seemed rushed through like he just wanted to get it finished. When Martin first described the Tower and stuff on that beach in the first book it made it sound... well kinda scary. To me, the 7th book was kind of an anti-climax.
Another thing that just sort of had me asking "why?! why?!" was if that one kid at the end could make stuff he drew real how come he didn't fix Roland's hand?