but without the patent system, whats to prevent one of your "friends" from saying, ahh screw you, I'm gonna go make my own, and leave you and your hard work in the cold. with no legal recourse to get rewarded for your work. corporations are especially greedy, I think we can both agree on that, and as someone else said here, whats to stop them from saying "bugger off kid, we don't want your gadget" and then go and manufacture a million of them before you have a chance to find a corporation who will produce it and pay you. so this theoretical person had the drive to pitch his idea to corporations and get some way to produce it, yet they were shoved aside and their invention is now helping the world do whatever it was intended to do yet he doesn't see a dime from his work, whats his incentive to produce another innovation? nothing. he won't invent anymore. people just steal his inventions. do that a few times, and individuals won't innovate anymore. when they have no chance to make money, money is the number one driving force for innovation. you remove that incentive and innovation is going to stall. only corporations could innovate, and its really not in their interests to innovate. it is essentially better not to innovate for corporations as they can continue to milk existing products from now til eternity. Its naive to believe that a corporation will look after the consumer's best interest. and whos to say that a corporation would even agree to an NDA from some shmoe off of the street. it again comes down to the fact that innovation isn't in the corporations interests, and essentially an NDA is similar to patent law in that respects anyway.
But they should limit the patents corporations are allowed to create and own. maybe have a seperate clause in it for corporation owned patents having a life-span of say 5 years. add another 5 years on top of that for individual persons. after that patent protection is no longer an issue, it ends.
also for individuals who don't have the resources to produce the products but have the ingenuity and drive to create the new products. and as such the patent system allows them to still reap the rewards of their hard work. I don't think corporations need patents either, but the patent system or something like it still needs to protect the little guy. disbanding the patent system punishes the little guy while rewarding the big corporations.
first forget that you know about the book, forget that you've read the book. forget everything from the book, this isn't a 1-1 translation of the book to film, its an adaptation of the book to film. now forget about the book the book doesn't exist. take the movies for what they are. you don't know that Saruman is an Istari, you don't know that he's actually a spirit. all you know is he's some big wizard who turned evil. The Ents go and attack him, the movie ends with him panicing in his tower. He is, by the appearance of the movie, routed, no longer a threat. while having a bit more, is a "nice to have" to me its not a requirement for a good movie, there is a lot going on in return of the king, and pre-maturely ending the story of saruman, won't affect the flow. You say you can assume all sorts of things that happen off screen, but aren't supposed to in a good flowing film. frankly, a good sequel is the same way. you don't bring a character in just to kill him off... you can omit him and by rights the plot will show he's no threat anymore. what happened to him? who knows, there's enough going on that it isn't important. thats why it got cut. it would actually detract from the film. it would make the flow not as smooth. and its a crappy way to end a movie so they couldn't put it in Two towers.
and yes the extended editions work better together, I never argued against that. But the ending of Two towers indicated that saruman was no longer a threat, i'm not reading more into that, I'm reading what happened at the end of the two towers. He is still a powerful wizard yes, i won't argue, but his army is gone. and since he's no longer doing anything its safe to assume he's not a threat... because he's not in the movie... therefore he's not an important character in return of the king. which if he has those 7 minutes, it'll just re-inforce that. that same sentiment that will be quite evident.
Just because the extended editions are superior, doesn't mean that the theatrical releases aren't excellent as well. one thing you have to keep in mind, the theatricals have to work together, they can't rely on extended edition footage to work. with no more saruman the average viewer who's unaware of the books will assume that it was resolved at the end of the two towers. for the die-hard fans of the series, they will know that there's more in the extended edition. as always I reserve judgement on the movie until Dec 16th. however I believe it will be good, and the extended edition will continue to excel. average viewers won't really care what happens to saruman, he's an important villain, but at the end of the two towers (theatrical), it appears he's routed... he is defeated...
yes removing the scouring of the shire removes a lot of saruman's character, but then a few short cuts they made in two towers really changed Faramir's character...
keep in mind that this is Peter Jackson's translation of the Lord of the Rings to film. some things ket cut. some things have to get the axe. and some things don't translate well. poetry and written discription gets lost in a visual medium. he has done a very good job imho.
the movie's out in a month, not enough time to reverse any cuts. plus this is RUMOUR, not fact. unless this person can show me the theatrical release of rotk tomorrow, I won't believe it until I see the movie on Dec 16th. i know certain scenes have been cut, and several of them have a lot to do with Saruman's character, but I've also heard of Saruman being in ROTK in only one scene. frankly this is very reactionary and very late. They don't have time to edit the film, especially when its probabally already gone for duplication.
No, not pointless, because the windows messenger service has nothing to do with e-mail. it simply pops up a message window on their screen. not in e-mail, not saved anywhere, simply a simple text message on the screen. alerting people that e-mails down, and to not deluge the helpdesk with calls of "I can't get my e-mail"
it seems rather pointless don't you think? i mean if they can read the e-mail saying "the e-mail server is back up" isn't that like saying "They sky is blue"? Just a little obvious.
the decriminalization of marijuana hasn't gone through yet. it is still a felony to be in possession. however I think he was more referring to the frequent "smoke-ins" in vancouver. where the police really do nothing but sit and watch people smoke pot in protest.
and yes decriminalization isn't legalization. I applaud you for being one of the FEW americans who actually understand that. now if you can tell your elected officials that I would be grateful. Pot is and will be illegal, but will be more like speeding, or running a red light than running someone down with your car.
Telemarking might not exactly die, but it will fade down, people will realize, that its a dying industry and it will slow down. it may even bring back the "door-to-door" salesman. whom you could slam the door on in a much more satisfying way. The Telemarking industry has gotten very cocky, especially with their auto-dialers. Its really annoying to answer the phone, hear a recording say, "please stay on the line for an important offer!" then play hold music. I mean really, why call me and put me on hold right away. and usually if you hang up it calls right back!
I have better things to do than to answer a phone to be put on hold... If i wanted to be on hold I'd call my ISP.
So according to you, we should stop breathing, burning fossil fuels, etc. on a gamble that CO2 is in fact the culprit. rather than cutting back gradually and looking for other culprits?
Moderation, Everything in moderation. that includes burning of fossil fuels. campers don't need to have SUVs with V10 engines getting 2 miles to the gallon to pull a 50 foot camper to the mountains, when a couple of tents in the back of a sedan works just as well, and makes the whole camping experience more unique and "roughing it".
See I agree with both of you, however, I don't see how he was saying leave everything as it is, maybe I missed something, but then if i am you probabally should have quoted him saying to leave everything as it is. So, Why can't you do both? cut back on emissions, AND research other possibilities. instead of focusing on CO2 emissions as the cause. it MIGHT be that way, but then it MIGHT be Chicken farts. I agree that the evidence isn't conclusive to guarntee that cutting back on CO2 emissions will stop it. heck scientists can't even agree on whether its actually warming up.
So, again I ask why don't we do both, research other possibilities and cut back on emissions? instead of focusing on CO2 as being the boogieman and that is the only cause and nothing else is the cause, like a lot of "environmentalists" are trying to lobby for these days. how they call themselves "scientists" is beyond me as they are too closed minded, and focusing on a single issue for a potentially life threatening situation. When they should be looking at ALL possibilities, and determining the best way to go about stopping the doomsday scenario.
Because frankly I'm not willing to put my faith in a single solution that hasn't been fully researched. thats the same as not doing anything. say in 50 years they find out that no its not CO2 that was causing it, but it was satellites, and now the world has warmed up too much and new york is under 10 feet of water. "Whoops guess we were wrong,"
Neither outcome is very promising.
would ease a lot of the concerns about the collection and dissemination of the data. Of course the integrity of the company has been damaged with this revelation. One thing I don't understand is this, a major concern is the fact that the votes can be traced. why don't they just use the electronic machines as a "first line" counter, have it print out a vote ballot with only the name of the party voted for, and perhaps a unique identifying symbol for each candiate for ease of sorting the re-counted ballots. the person verifies the ballot, puts it in the cardboard box, which keeps a paper-trail and allows for the re-counts. at least until the electronic voting system becomes foolproof, which knowing governments and computers will take around 200 years.
the voting machines don't need to be extremely powerful machines, in fact the most expensive portion of it would be the touch screen.
By opening the source even just for the back end portions, leaving the interface and customization part of it closed is not a problem. just have an open source back end, so that you can see where the votes go, how the data is structured. It appears that one of the bigger issues is not voter fraud, but identifying each individual vote. that would be easily identified and removed. and different versions can be more easily certified.
they have a limit, Telus has a limit. Videon used to have a much stricter limit. (if you went over you were charged per Megabyte)
I've known a guy who was consistantly downloading well above Shaw's "limit" and only recieved warning letters, they didn't charge extra, they didn't cut him off, they just continually warned him. they did ultimately throttle his modem down, I download around 10 gig a month, and have never seen shaw get mad at me. never wrote a nasty e-mail, never contacted me about it. because they're more concerned with the people downloading 50 gig a month. who are cutting into the bandwidth of the other people. Bandwidth is not free for shaw, they have to pay for it too. And if one person's hogging a T3(equivalent) all to themselves, for the cost of cable internet, they're going to do something about it. its costing them more to supply the internet than they're taking in from that person. now while they do work on the principle that not everyone's downloading at the same time, it generally works out, but if to accomidate this person they have to do some work, puting in more lines into a neighborhood, they're going to seek out alternate means of resolving the issue. and sending "threatening" letters is one way to get them to ease off. besides shaw mostly cares about upload bandwith more.
well, a lot of other websites disagree.. googling for "largest countries" comes up with different numbers.
Here are four sites which agree with me. which happen to the first four relevant sites from the google search.
http://www.aneki.com/largest.html
http://geography.about.com/library/misc/bllgcountr ies.htm
http://www.countrywatch.com/@school/largest_countr ies_area.htm
http://www.gesource.ac.uk/guide_largestcountries.h tml
and the area given in those sites is accurate to what our government says our area is.
http://atlas.gc.ca/site/english/facts/supergeneral.html
I'm not ignorant, I just check facts before I blindly agree with one site...
a lot of places don't include the islands to the north in "Canada" despite the fact that they are all part of Canada.
They aren't legislating the advance of technology, they're setting goals for a government agency which currently has no set goals other than "explore space". It's not unlike an executive setting a goal to have 2 Billion dollars revenue by 2010, they can't force that. Its simply a goal. a goal for NASA to strive for. Its not a demand that they get there by that time, but it gives them something definitive to work towards.
Lots of people think the phone is a convenience item for them, not to allow other people to reach you. well what about the phone number you're dialing? do they feel the same way as you? then aren't you just as bad as that big bad person calling you? In my previous job I hated people like that, who would never pick up the phone until I called 10 times, instead choosing to verbally abuse me after they finally pick up,without knowing why i was calling, or who I was. Dispite the fact that I was calling back to solve a problem they were having with their computer, calling back to solve it any way possible. the caller ID didn't say who i was, Just which line I was calling out of, it didn't even have my proper line. Answering machines are better, then I can leave a message. but the people who only use caller ID are very arrogant. what if the number was that of a hospital which didn't come up as "hospital" but just as a number you didn't know. Would you ignore it? dispite the fact that they are attempting to contact you about, for example, your child, your parent, your sibling, your spouse. The phone is a two way street. like it or lump it, it is a two way street.
back when Voodoo was king, and stand alone 3d accelerators were common. While the Riva128 was ugly (especially in comparison to some of the other choices out there) it was fast. and it was fast at higher resolutions, the Voodoo 1 did 320x200. where the riva 128 would get comparable framerates at 800x600, not to mention the fact that it could do 32 bit. (at a huge performance decrease however) The Riva128 was a good 2D card to hook up to your Voodoo2 however.
Other countries being able to have their own Laws and regulations. what a concept. typical American attitude. "They need us as a market, therefore they must do what we say" a rather arrogant attitude. #1 they aren't going to be spending all those trillions of yen developing the OS. heck by their collaberation, they'll probabaly not even spend NEAR the amount that MS spends on windows. these governments have other things to spend their money on. besides which they only recieve a small fraction of the GDP in taxes, so comparing the countries GDP to how much MS is worth is well, comparing Apples to Lug nuts. not a real good comparison. And if you take your last part, "considering how little of the MS software in use throughout asia was paid for." MS should be glad for a little competition. especially Local competition. you can bet the local OS would be a fee based, (governments don't usually throw money away even in subsidies, when they subsidize something they'll usually get the amount back and change through job creation, votes, and taxes from the improved business)
I say its good, I hope they make the OS available in the US and Canada as well. Let the free market decide which is the "better" OS. (better meaning the accepted OS by the masses). maybe bring down the price of Windows... its getting a bit out of hand.
very sloppy journalism. Cell phones have been around a lot longer than even the internet. and you can bet that in their first 6 years they weren't pulling in the numbers they are now. and they were charging more for the privilege at that time, My father got his first cell phone back in '88, before internet was even an option, he was an early adopter of cell phone technology remember those old motorola "Brick" cell phones... To compare "Broadband" (highspeed) internet connectivity to current cell phone usage is downright silly. give it a few more years or compare it to when cell phones were 6 years old. I'm sure it didn't have as good of a userbase at that time either. They aren't "voting" for mobility over speed, They're waiting for broadband to be "proven". and to see which is better DSL or Cable. a debate which will continue from now til the end of time. or something better than both comes out.
Just explaining it. if every crime had the same penalty, that would be twisted. plus the chances of you getting the maximum fine for downloading one song off the internet is slim. it would have to go to court and a judge would have to administer the sentence. but you missed a major point i was making. With piracy, be it copying a cd, or downloading a song, as the law sees it you are hurting the creator of that product. Its not much different than corporate espionage or patent theft. you are preventing that person from earning money from their hard work by your greed. now, theft from a store is an entirely different crime. the creator has been paid for the copy already, the store is out that money until they get paid by the consumer for that product. thus physical theft of a cd is a different crime. the artist and the RIAA have been paid for that cd, you're hurting the record store owner. not the RIAA or the artist. Now burning multiple copies of that cd for friends aquantences and people off the street is hurting the RIAA and the artist. it is the difference between copyright law and criminal law. copyright law has stiffer penalties because if you steal chances are its not hurting them a lot, if so then its grand larceny which has a stiffer penalty. however by sharing a cd, you're costing the RIAA and artist lost profits from many cds, which could raise the cost from anywhere from $10-$100,000. depending on how many people get a copy. where stealing from walmart puts walmart out $10 bucks. Now any judge worth his salt wouldn't give anyone the maximum charge per offence for downloading one song. it depends on a lot of factors which I really don't want to get into. but regardless, they are both illegal, they are both "harming" someone, whether you like them or not you are harming the RIAA by downloading songs, I don't like some people I meet that doesn't give me the right to loot through their wallets. copyright infringement is illegal, its not theft, its a different crime and thus the punishments are different. just like stabbing a guy is a different crime than just beating him with your fists.
Slashdot Mirror
but without the patent system, whats to prevent one of your "friends" from saying, ahh screw you, I'm gonna go make my own, and leave you and your hard work in the cold. with no legal recourse to get rewarded for your work. corporations are especially greedy, I think we can both agree on that, and as someone else said here, whats to stop them from saying "bugger off kid, we don't want your gadget" and then go and manufacture a million of them before you have a chance to find a corporation who will produce it and pay you. so this theoretical person had the drive to pitch his idea to corporations and get some way to produce it, yet they were shoved aside and their invention is now helping the world do whatever it was intended to do yet he doesn't see a dime from his work, whats his incentive to produce another innovation? nothing. he won't invent anymore. people just steal his inventions. do that a few times, and individuals won't innovate anymore. when they have no chance to make money, money is the number one driving force for innovation. you remove that incentive and innovation is going to stall. only corporations could innovate, and its really not in their interests to innovate. it is essentially better not to innovate for corporations as they can continue to milk existing products from now til eternity. Its naive to believe that a corporation will look after the consumer's best interest. and whos to say that a corporation would even agree to an NDA from some shmoe off of the street. it again comes down to the fact that innovation isn't in the corporations interests, and essentially an NDA is similar to patent law in that respects anyway.
But they should limit the patents corporations are allowed to create and own. maybe have a seperate clause in it for corporation owned patents having a life-span of say 5 years. add another 5 years on top of that for individual persons. after that patent protection is no longer an issue, it ends.
also for individuals who don't have the resources to produce the products but have the ingenuity and drive to create the new products. and as such the patent system allows them to still reap the rewards of their hard work. I don't think corporations need patents either, but the patent system or something like it still needs to protect the little guy. disbanding the patent system punishes the little guy while rewarding the big corporations.
first forget that you know about the book, forget that you've read the book. forget everything from the book, this isn't a 1-1 translation of the book to film, its an adaptation of the book to film. now forget about the book the book doesn't exist. take the movies for what they are. you don't know that Saruman is an Istari, you don't know that he's actually a spirit. all you know is he's some big wizard who turned evil. The Ents go and attack him, the movie ends with him panicing in his tower. He is, by the appearance of the movie, routed, no longer a threat. while having a bit more, is a "nice to have" to me its not a requirement for a good movie, there is a lot going on in return of the king, and pre-maturely ending the story of saruman, won't affect the flow. You say you can assume all sorts of things that happen off screen, but aren't supposed to in a good flowing film. frankly, a good sequel is the same way. you don't bring a character in just to kill him off... you can omit him and by rights the plot will show he's no threat anymore. what happened to him? who knows, there's enough going on that it isn't important. thats why it got cut. it would actually detract from the film. it would make the flow not as smooth. and its a crappy way to end a movie so they couldn't put it in Two towers.
and yes the extended editions work better together, I never argued against that. But the ending of Two towers indicated that saruman was no longer a threat, i'm not reading more into that, I'm reading what happened at the end of the two towers. He is still a powerful wizard yes, i won't argue, but his army is gone. and since he's no longer doing anything its safe to assume he's not a threat... because he's not in the movie... therefore he's not an important character in return of the king. which if he has those 7 minutes, it'll just re-inforce that. that same sentiment that will be quite evident.
Just because the extended editions are superior, doesn't mean that the theatrical releases aren't excellent as well. one thing you have to keep in mind, the theatricals have to work together, they can't rely on extended edition footage to work. with no more saruman the average viewer who's unaware of the books will assume that it was resolved at the end of the two towers. for the die-hard fans of the series, they will know that there's more in the extended edition. as always I reserve judgement on the movie until Dec 16th. however I believe it will be good, and the extended edition will continue to excel. average viewers won't really care what happens to saruman, he's an important villain, but at the end of the two towers (theatrical), it appears he's routed... he is defeated...
yes removing the scouring of the shire removes a lot of saruman's character, but then a few short cuts they made in two towers really changed Faramir's character...
keep in mind that this is Peter Jackson's translation of the Lord of the Rings to film. some things ket cut. some things have to get the axe. and some things don't translate well. poetry and written discription gets lost in a visual medium. he has done a very good job imho.
the movie's out in a month, not enough time to reverse any cuts. plus this is RUMOUR, not fact. unless this person can show me the theatrical release of rotk tomorrow, I won't believe it until I see the movie on Dec 16th. i know certain scenes have been cut, and several of them have a lot to do with Saruman's character, but I've also heard of Saruman being in ROTK in only one scene. frankly this is very reactionary and very late. They don't have time to edit the film, especially when its probabally already gone for duplication.
No, not pointless, because the windows messenger service has nothing to do with e-mail. it simply pops up a message window on their screen. not in e-mail, not saved anywhere, simply a simple text message on the screen. alerting people that e-mails down, and to not deluge the helpdesk with calls of "I can't get my e-mail"
it seems rather pointless don't you think? i mean if they can read the e-mail saying "the e-mail server is back up" isn't that like saying "They sky is blue"? Just a little obvious.
how do you e-mail the fact that the e-mail server is down?, and then again when its up.
the decriminalization of marijuana hasn't gone through yet. it is still a felony to be in possession. however I think he was more referring to the frequent "smoke-ins" in vancouver. where the police really do nothing but sit and watch people smoke pot in protest.
and yes decriminalization isn't legalization. I applaud you for being one of the FEW americans who actually understand that. now if you can tell your elected officials that I would be grateful. Pot is and will be illegal, but will be more like speeding, or running a red light than running someone down with your car.
Telemarking might not exactly die, but it will fade down, people will realize, that its a dying industry and it will slow down. it may even bring back the "door-to-door" salesman. whom you could slam the door on in a much more satisfying way. The Telemarking industry has gotten very cocky, especially with their auto-dialers. Its really annoying to answer the phone, hear a recording say, "please stay on the line for an important offer!" then play hold music. I mean really, why call me and put me on hold right away. and usually if you hang up it calls right back!
I have better things to do than to answer a phone to be put on hold... If i wanted to be on hold I'd call my ISP.
So according to you, we should stop breathing, burning fossil fuels, etc. on a gamble that CO2 is in fact the culprit. rather than cutting back gradually and looking for other culprits? Moderation, Everything in moderation. that includes burning of fossil fuels. campers don't need to have SUVs with V10 engines getting 2 miles to the gallon to pull a 50 foot camper to the mountains, when a couple of tents in the back of a sedan works just as well, and makes the whole camping experience more unique and "roughing it". See I agree with both of you, however, I don't see how he was saying leave everything as it is, maybe I missed something, but then if i am you probabally should have quoted him saying to leave everything as it is. So, Why can't you do both? cut back on emissions, AND research other possibilities. instead of focusing on CO2 emissions as the cause. it MIGHT be that way, but then it MIGHT be Chicken farts. I agree that the evidence isn't conclusive to guarntee that cutting back on CO2 emissions will stop it. heck scientists can't even agree on whether its actually warming up. So, again I ask why don't we do both, research other possibilities and cut back on emissions? instead of focusing on CO2 as being the boogieman and that is the only cause and nothing else is the cause, like a lot of "environmentalists" are trying to lobby for these days. how they call themselves "scientists" is beyond me as they are too closed minded, and focusing on a single issue for a potentially life threatening situation. When they should be looking at ALL possibilities, and determining the best way to go about stopping the doomsday scenario. Because frankly I'm not willing to put my faith in a single solution that hasn't been fully researched. thats the same as not doing anything. say in 50 years they find out that no its not CO2 that was causing it, but it was satellites, and now the world has warmed up too much and new york is under 10 feet of water. "Whoops guess we were wrong," Neither outcome is very promising.
would ease a lot of the concerns about the collection and dissemination of the data. Of course the integrity of the company has been damaged with this revelation. One thing I don't understand is this, a major concern is the fact that the votes can be traced. why don't they just use the electronic machines as a "first line" counter, have it print out a vote ballot with only the name of the party voted for, and perhaps a unique identifying symbol for each candiate for ease of sorting the re-counted ballots. the person verifies the ballot, puts it in the cardboard box, which keeps a paper-trail and allows for the re-counts. at least until the electronic voting system becomes foolproof, which knowing governments and computers will take around 200 years. the voting machines don't need to be extremely powerful machines, in fact the most expensive portion of it would be the touch screen.
By opening the source even just for the back end portions, leaving the interface and customization part of it closed is not a problem. just have an open source back end, so that you can see where the votes go, how the data is structured. It appears that one of the bigger issues is not voter fraud, but identifying each individual vote. that would be easily identified and removed. and different versions can be more easily certified.
they have a limit, Telus has a limit. Videon used to have a much stricter limit. (if you went over you were charged per Megabyte) I've known a guy who was consistantly downloading well above Shaw's "limit" and only recieved warning letters, they didn't charge extra, they didn't cut him off, they just continually warned him. they did ultimately throttle his modem down, I download around 10 gig a month, and have never seen shaw get mad at me. never wrote a nasty e-mail, never contacted me about it. because they're more concerned with the people downloading 50 gig a month. who are cutting into the bandwidth of the other people. Bandwidth is not free for shaw, they have to pay for it too. And if one person's hogging a T3(equivalent) all to themselves, for the cost of cable internet, they're going to do something about it. its costing them more to supply the internet than they're taking in from that person. now while they do work on the principle that not everyone's downloading at the same time, it generally works out, but if to accomidate this person they have to do some work, puting in more lines into a neighborhood, they're going to seek out alternate means of resolving the issue. and sending "threatening" letters is one way to get them to ease off. besides shaw mostly cares about upload bandwith more.
well, a lot of other websites disagree.. googling for "largest countries" comes up with different numbers. Here are four sites which agree with me. which happen to the first four relevant sites from the google search. http://www.aneki.com/largest.html http://geography.about.com/library/misc/bllgcountr ies.htm
http://www.countrywatch.com/@school/largest_countr ies_area.htm
http://www.gesource.ac.uk/guide_largestcountries.h tml
and the area given in those sites is accurate to what our government says our area is.
http://atlas.gc.ca/site/english/facts/supergeneral .html
I'm not ignorant, I just check facts before I blindly agree with one site...
a lot of places don't include the islands to the north in "Canada" despite the fact that they are all part of Canada.
Second to Russia.
They aren't legislating the advance of technology, they're setting goals for a government agency which currently has no set goals other than "explore space". It's not unlike an executive setting a goal to have 2 Billion dollars revenue by 2010, they can't force that. Its simply a goal. a goal for NASA to strive for. Its not a demand that they get there by that time, but it gives them something definitive to work towards.
or a minivan. there are other alternatives to an SUV for hauling many people
Lots of people think the phone is a convenience item for them, not to allow other people to reach you. well what about the phone number you're dialing? do they feel the same way as you? then aren't you just as bad as that big bad person calling you? In my previous job I hated people like that, who would never pick up the phone until I called 10 times, instead choosing to verbally abuse me after they finally pick up,without knowing why i was calling, or who I was. Dispite the fact that I was calling back to solve a problem they were having with their computer, calling back to solve it any way possible. the caller ID didn't say who i was, Just which line I was calling out of, it didn't even have my proper line. Answering machines are better, then I can leave a message. but the people who only use caller ID are very arrogant. what if the number was that of a hospital which didn't come up as "hospital" but just as a number you didn't know. Would you ignore it? dispite the fact that they are attempting to contact you about, for example, your child, your parent, your sibling, your spouse. The phone is a two way street. like it or lump it, it is a two way street.
back when Voodoo was king, and stand alone 3d accelerators were common. While the Riva128 was ugly (especially in comparison to some of the other choices out there) it was fast. and it was fast at higher resolutions, the Voodoo 1 did 320x200. where the riva 128 would get comparable framerates at 800x600, not to mention the fact that it could do 32 bit. (at a huge performance decrease however) The Riva128 was a good 2D card to hook up to your Voodoo2 however.
Other countries being able to have their own Laws and regulations. what a concept. typical American attitude. "They need us as a market, therefore they must do what we say" a rather arrogant attitude. #1 they aren't going to be spending all those trillions of yen developing the OS. heck by their collaberation, they'll probabaly not even spend NEAR the amount that MS spends on windows. these governments have other things to spend their money on. besides which they only recieve a small fraction of the GDP in taxes, so comparing the countries GDP to how much MS is worth is well, comparing Apples to Lug nuts. not a real good comparison. And if you take your last part, "considering how little of the MS software in use throughout asia was paid for." MS should be glad for a little competition. especially Local competition. you can bet the local OS would be a fee based, (governments don't usually throw money away even in subsidies, when they subsidize something they'll usually get the amount back and change through job creation, votes, and taxes from the improved business)
I say its good, I hope they make the OS available in the US and Canada as well. Let the free market decide which is the "better" OS. (better meaning the accepted OS by the masses). maybe bring down the price of Windows... its getting a bit out of hand.
very sloppy journalism. Cell phones have been around a lot longer than even the internet. and you can bet that in their first 6 years they weren't pulling in the numbers they are now. and they were charging more for the privilege at that time, My father got his first cell phone back in '88, before internet was even an option, he was an early adopter of cell phone technology remember those old motorola "Brick" cell phones... To compare "Broadband" (highspeed) internet connectivity to current cell phone usage is downright silly. give it a few more years or compare it to when cell phones were 6 years old. I'm sure it didn't have as good of a userbase at that time either. They aren't "voting" for mobility over speed, They're waiting for broadband to be "proven". and to see which is better DSL or Cable. a debate which will continue from now til the end of time. or something better than both comes out.
agreed 100%
Just explaining it. if every crime had the same penalty, that would be twisted. plus the chances of you getting the maximum fine for downloading one song off the internet is slim. it would have to go to court and a judge would have to administer the sentence. but you missed a major point i was making. With piracy, be it copying a cd, or downloading a song, as the law sees it you are hurting the creator of that product. Its not much different than corporate espionage or patent theft. you are preventing that person from earning money from their hard work by your greed. now, theft from a store is an entirely different crime. the creator has been paid for the copy already, the store is out that money until they get paid by the consumer for that product. thus physical theft of a cd is a different crime. the artist and the RIAA have been paid for that cd, you're hurting the record store owner. not the RIAA or the artist. Now burning multiple copies of that cd for friends aquantences and people off the street is hurting the RIAA and the artist. it is the difference between copyright law and criminal law. copyright law has stiffer penalties because if you steal chances are its not hurting them a lot, if so then its grand larceny which has a stiffer penalty. however by sharing a cd, you're costing the RIAA and artist lost profits from many cds, which could raise the cost from anywhere from $10-$100,000. depending on how many people get a copy. where stealing from walmart puts walmart out $10 bucks. Now any judge worth his salt wouldn't give anyone the maximum charge per offence for downloading one song. it depends on a lot of factors which I really don't want to get into. but regardless, they are both illegal, they are both "harming" someone, whether you like them or not you are harming the RIAA by downloading songs, I don't like some people I meet that doesn't give me the right to loot through their wallets. copyright infringement is illegal, its not theft, its a different crime and thus the punishments are different. just like stabbing a guy is a different crime than just beating him with your fists.