that assumes they want to find us, or even find us worthy of contact. They may have found us already, reported back to their homeworld, and decided we're not worth their time to look at, maybe we're too far, (could take them a long time to get here) could be we don't (didn't) have a sufficiently advanced civlization. And heck if the probe took 250,000 years to find us, who's to say that the originating civilization hasn't given up, or disappeared, died out, sun went nova? who knows. and if it takes 500,000 years to search the galaxy, well, human civilization hasn't been around for nearly that long, we could have been one fo the first looked at 500,000 years ago, and found to be inhabited by all kinds of animals. no intelligent life. Civilizations could rise and fall in the span of time you're specifying. especially the billion years. there could be many civilizations that have risen, explored the galaxy looking for life, died out, and vanished from the universe.
There are so many assumptions necessary in this search.
the times I've quit I left the company not the boss. in fact I liked my bosses in 2 out of last 3 jobs. Now that being said the upper management (folks I never got to see who made policy) were to blame, but I don't consider them my bosses. they are the company. the other time I quit, I left the job, the Job I left would have made the company go under, had they kept me. There just wasn't enough work for me. I could see the writing on the wall, and when an opporutnity arose I took it. I loved that boss, he was a great man. and he was also the company (there were a grand total of 4 of us there. I was #2 in the chain of command...) My one job I hated the company with a passion. I loved my bosses. so much that when I wrote my resignation I felt genuinely bad for them. and bad that I would miss hanging out with them daily. that's the kind of work environment that allowed me to stay there for a year and a half when others stayed 3-6 months tops. I was blessed with good bosses.
Where I am now, I'll probabally leave because of the company, or if I change bosses probabally the boss. 8
what Reapman's going for here though, isn't that the ToS for the game overrides the laws of a sovereign nation, but that the law implies violation of the ToS. after all there was no law about taxing virtual possessions when the rules were made. That being said, there's also the issue of international law, I refuse to pay dime one to the US government for taxes on money I earned either virtually or otherwise in canada. They have no claim on my money, I get no services for those taxes, it comes down to taxation without representation. (which is kinda what made the US become the US in the first place...)
Also, Since the ToS declares that it is against the rules to convert in-game items for real-world currency, that indicates to me that said artifact contains no real-world value. I'm not allowed to trade that in-game widget for real-money therefore it's Real-world/taxable value for me is $0.00 and even at 100% taxation it's still $0.00. now that changes if I go on the black market and sell it. Afterall that's the only way to actually liquidate those assets. Doing so violates the ToS and gets me banned from the game. Do I get to claim all the assets that were taken away from me in the banning as losses? Also the whole point of black market transactions are to avoid taxes.. bringing this issue to a larger concern of taxing black market transactions. you won't see a drug dealer filing his taxes anytime soon.
Also this brings with it other difficulties, somebody finds/aquires an extremely rare item. purely in game, this person is unemployed and has been for a while, (think 16-17 year old kid/college student) this person cannot pay his taxes, since he's not working, he's simply playing a game in his spare time... this poor kid has to sell his in-game stuff to pay his taxes, risking getting banned from the game for doing so. A few people end up like this and you will see the MMOs getting shut down.
One positive however...
It will prevent dupers:P yeah i have 10 ultra-rares, nobody will buy them as they don't want to pay the taxes on it, they end up having to pay taxes on 10 of these ultra-rares.
in game advertising can be done well though..
rather than having them as true ads, throw in a couple cans of coke on the computer desk, have the car be a brand new Cadillac Escalade, They're talking about this kind of advertising for TV shows, why wouldn't they work in games? you could have the occasional poster or billboard in the game where you'd normally see them, just don't be excessive.
subtle advertising works well for a lot of people, and I think would generate more revenue for the advertisers than a blaten plug. There are lots of places for ads, heck on T-shirts,
use real world products, get advertising dollars for the real world products and it'll be good
It's been a few years since I read the Hobbit... but when did he sing in the Hobbit? I remember the long drawn out, boring part of Fellowship, (so boring the CHARACTERS fell asleep:P) But nothing in the hobbit about Tom... granted it's been a while... i'm going to listen to a book on tape i had on my 3 hour drive tonight just to make sure but i'm pretty sure he wasn't in the Hobbit... (and please don't put him in there... while I agree he should have had a part in the LOTR movies but don't go willy nilly putting characters in places they don't belong... i don't want another Arwen "you want him come and take him" incident...
My concern is that they'll put Orlando Bloom in Mirkwood... or replace Bard with a more familiar face (Aragorn?)
that being said I want Elrond (Hugo Weaving), Gandalf (Sir Ian McKellan), Bilbo (Ian Holm), Played by the same as the LOTR movies. Especially Elrond and Gandalf. Bilbo can be replaced because he is technically younger... and Ian Holm is no spring chicken...
Alright, I agree patents do by default create a monopoly. but not necessarily stifle competition... say Bob invents a widget which can cut keys one per second,. Joe makes a widget that can cut keys 60 at a time but takes a minute to do. they're both patented, they both do the same job, cutting keys at the rate of 60/minute (I'm not creative today so that's my funky invention for the day...:P) Now they are different products producing the same thing, and both can be patented. the patent only covers the widget. not the process of cutting keys. That being said. a patent here is useful, Joe can't steal Bob's device, but he can try to improve upon it, (and in this case fail but produce an equally good device which can compete with Bob's) Patents were designed not to create monopolies, but to protect inventors for a limited time to encourage innovation and to reward innovation. Without patents, there is no incentive for Bob or Joe to invent a widget. Since Megacorp can see this widget that Bob invented, mass produce it, sell them for cheaper than Bob can ever hope to build them for. and Bob gets nothing for his invention. and relying on Megacorp to innovate... you get Microsoft's "innovation".
I don't believe that patents are an admission that supply and demand capitalism doesn't work... It started as a means to protect the little guy. and to enhance innovation. Personally I think Patents should have a strict SHORT term. say 10 years. 10 years should be enough to earn your investment back in an invention. if not, you haven't marketed it well enough. and that's nobody's fault but your own. Now for a process which really requires little innovation, (renting movies has been done for years, all that's new is doing it online and no late fees) isn't really an innovation and shouldn't be patentable. it would be similar to a grocery store patenting the idea of groceries on shelves that are easy to grab for customers. it's such an obvious idea now that it's out there, that it shouldn't be able to be patented.
and you're right, the only question is how high to set the bar, and how long should the protection last. and that's for much larger brains than mine.
heck you could do patent reform this way. The patent holder isn't able to have a monopoly but is able to set the price of their widget or process. That way they'd be able to compete on a level playing field with megacorp, and megacorp would be less able to pummel bob or joe into the ground.
Wow, reading that made me wonder why the hell that is acceptable...
It's basically using the Patent office to generate monopolies. as long as you can create a new business process you can hold a monopoly on it. This is not a fair use of the patent laws. I for one am glad that it's not possible in Canada. Anti competitive behaviour should not be patentable. Maybe someone should have patented the process for making money off of patenting processes to establish a monopoly.
different biologic processes... basically what i've understood about stem cells is that they don't "grow an organ" rather they use the cells, which aren't specialized yet, to basically "regrow" your own tissues. So rather than transplant, give your body the cells it needs to rebuild itself.
hmm, I've been to many cattle ranches,
never seen a large overcrowded stinking building full of cows... i've seen pastures with tons of cows. mostly huddled together since they're social animals. and tend to herd naturally. spending most of their day eating grass... however they are fed a feed as well, and sure sometimes it contains antibiotics, but thats when they're sick, not for any other purpose. because just like people cows get sick too, and never giving them antibiotics would be like never giving a sick person antibiotics. the feed is usually just a combination of grains. usually designed to give a good combination of fat and protein. again depending on the health of the animals. the ranchers i know are more concerned about their cattle's health than their own. after all, the cows are their livelyhood, and if they don't produce good quality cattle the price drops and their profits drop.
So you have to eat all food raw to be "natural" how long does a practice have to be done by a species before it is considered "natural" 1000 years? 2000? 5000? we've been cooking and slaughtering meat for millenia. since the discovery of fire, we've learned that "meat... Fire... Good!" all we've done since then is agriculturalize meat, then industrialize meat...
Electricity, Gas, water... internet?
That's how I treat it... those are my utilities. I have to pay for them all. they're all just there when i turn it on, it's nothing different. just like Cable tv and the telephone. I have to pay more per month for gas than for internet, that being said, I don't expect cable tv and internet on a plane. and if they do they'll be extra. granted 10 bucks a day or more is a bit excessive. try $5 a day and that's reasonable. Internet isn't a required utility though like gas water and electricity. i can't live without gas in the winter, i can't live without water, and the heat runs off of electricity as well as gas so without power inadequate heat... (furnace will still burn, but won't blow the heat around the house)
hence the 500 unit real-world test environment...
if this was a 5 million unit deployment... I'd understand this post having validity... but this is a 500 unit deployment... a real-world test...
I don't understand your getting irritated calling this "snake oil" because it hasn't been tested... well, this article is a bunch of propaganda about the product, based around the 500 unit test.
don't call it snake-oil yet. let the real-world test go through its paces before you get defensive...
see and a lot of people in my area use the scroll lock key a lot... mostly with KVMs you hit scroll lock twice and up arrow to switch computers...
I personally use all the keys on the keyboard with the exceptions of the right click button... or menu button... i hate that key... i have used it, in emergencies and in emergencies i love it...
so hands off my keyboard!
but if we get rid of scroll lock how will i quickly switch computers on my KVM?
frankly, get used to it... people aren't going to stop putting the capslock on keyboards anytime soon. too many HIGH up people in corporations use them. Lawyers use them lots in declarations, using all caps is used a lot in headers, acryonyms, logos, warnings etc. Killing the Caps lock key is stupid, and a waste of resources. and will piss many many people off, and the capslock key will return anew... there isn't a single key on the keyboard i don't used with the exception of the "right click" key, howver I use that in emergencies when the mouse is dead and i'm just navigating by keyboard alone.. I've had days like that, oh sure some/.ers will be talking about you don't use those keys in linux... well, I work in an office with thousands of windows boxes. i like being able to use the winkey shortcuts... saves me headaches and time... so frankly... it ain't gonna happen.
I use my ISP's spam filter, and just delete whatever gets through... it's not hard the subjects are easy enough to filter. wastes little time.
I however am extremely lucky, where I used to get 100s of spam e-mails a day, I now get less than 5... I have an easy brute-force email addy to get, (3 characters long,) and yet I get very little spam. even my hotmail is getting less spam now (on the average of 5 a day). it seems that i'm winning the spam war... just by ignoring it...:P
technically we didn't "NEED" a 1 GB HDD, assuming that DOS stayed the primary OS, you don't do image, audio, video files. which is what the people who said that back then implied. any data that wasn't used was stored on Floppy or tape backup. and hdds were nicely organized and kept clean because space was a limiting factor
I now have 360GB of hdd space, (a 200 and a 160) and i have had an average of 100 GB free.. i've gone down to 180 free, and could clean up a lot more if I burned the data to cd... i could theoretically live with a 10 gig hdd. I do on my laptop, but only need the excess due to windows bloat and laziness.
Most people actually tend to purchase systems like Dells, HP, Compaq, Gateway, eMachines. Those you seldom have to hunt for drivers for. as they usually come on the recovery cds. They make it even easier to install windows. often taking several clicks out of it. reducing it to a select the type of recovery and are you sure...
D&D 3 and 3.5 are not games in their own right, they're game systems. The rpg aspects come in how the DM runs his game. yes a DM can run a purely combat oriented game, or a very rpg type game. the rules are very flexible in that regard... which of course is part of the reason it's a system not a game.
what purpose does a.50 cal have in civilian life? it would tear any game animal to shreds, leaving very little left for food or trophy. It is to cumbersome to use for home defense. about the only thing it is good for is military use. which i suppose is the only purpose. hmm. same with fully automatic rifles. i never understood why civilians would be allowed to purchase those.
that's not the point of the court case... the problem is the slander of the "rip-off" comment. which to be honest, yes DOS was for all intents and purposes a cheap CP/M alternative which "borrowed" certain features... which in my interpretation of "ripped-off" is very close to what happened...
the question isn't whether people make money off of DOS or not, but rather because of the slanderous comments made in the book. which yes it is slanderous, but it's also true...
I knew they were planting subliminal messages in my mp3s... because as soon as I got my ipod I started craving other mac products, like an ibook, or an imac.
*puts on tinfoil hat* It's a conspiracy and this "study" proves it's working!!
there have been few pictures of standard btx boards, if you compare the micro-BTX boards that have been shown to micro-atx the slots are the same (2 memory maybe 2-3 expansion slots)
i've actually been able to see a gigabyte BTX system in action with a standard btx board in it, it actually had 4 memory slots, and a PCI-X 16 and 4 PCI-X slots, as well as 2 traditional pci slots. for a grand total of 7 slots... at least iirc... its been a few months. I was worried about it too, until I talked to the gigabyte rep about btx.
so clarify yourself, by stating "faster for you". seeing as the vast majority of computer users are not *nix admins, with a staggering array of command line commands memorized complete with switches, arguing your point is perfectly valid but completely specific to a select group of individuals.
I hope I get this post to meta moderate because it surely isn't a troll. I was educated by canadians, russians, germans, and a couple Brits. I'm not dumb because I wasn't educated by Americans.
Without immigration the US wouldn't exist. Everyone with the exception of the north american indiginous peoples, (Cree, Blackfoot, Cherokee, Apache, Inuit, etc) everyone is an immigrant or a child of immigration. Einstein was an immigrant, Eli Whitney was an immigrant. many of the people who worked on the early space program were immigrants. heck a bunch of Canadians from Avro worked on Gemini. I think julesh has an excelent point to be made, and definately doesn't deserve to be moderated as a troll.
Slashdot Mirror
that assumes they want to find us, or even find us worthy of contact. They may have found us already, reported back to their homeworld, and decided we're not worth their time to look at, maybe we're too far, (could take them a long time to get here) could be we don't (didn't) have a sufficiently advanced civlization. And heck if the probe took 250,000 years to find us, who's to say that the originating civilization hasn't given up, or disappeared, died out, sun went nova? who knows. and if it takes 500,000 years to search the galaxy, well, human civilization hasn't been around for nearly that long, we could have been one fo the first looked at 500,000 years ago, and found to be inhabited by all kinds of animals. no intelligent life. Civilizations could rise and fall in the span of time you're specifying. especially the billion years. there could be many civilizations that have risen, explored the galaxy looking for life, died out, and vanished from the universe. There are so many assumptions necessary in this search.
the times I've quit I left the company not the boss. in fact I liked my bosses in 2 out of last 3 jobs. Now that being said the upper management (folks I never got to see who made policy) were to blame, but I don't consider them my bosses. they are the company. the other time I quit, I left the job, the Job I left would have made the company go under, had they kept me. There just wasn't enough work for me. I could see the writing on the wall, and when an opporutnity arose I took it. I loved that boss, he was a great man. and he was also the company (there were a grand total of 4 of us there. I was #2 in the chain of command...) My one job I hated the company with a passion. I loved my bosses. so much that when I wrote my resignation I felt genuinely bad for them. and bad that I would miss hanging out with them daily. that's the kind of work environment that allowed me to stay there for a year and a half when others stayed 3-6 months tops. I was blessed with good bosses. Where I am now, I'll probabally leave because of the company, or if I change bosses probabally the boss. 8
what Reapman's going for here though, isn't that the ToS for the game overrides the laws of a sovereign nation, but that the law implies violation of the ToS. after all there was no law about taxing virtual possessions when the rules were made. That being said, there's also the issue of international law, I refuse to pay dime one to the US government for taxes on money I earned either virtually or otherwise in canada. They have no claim on my money, I get no services for those taxes, it comes down to taxation without representation. (which is kinda what made the US become the US in the first place...)
:P yeah i have 10 ultra-rares, nobody will buy them as they don't want to pay the taxes on it, they end up having to pay taxes on 10 of these ultra-rares.
Also, Since the ToS declares that it is against the rules to convert in-game items for real-world currency, that indicates to me that said artifact contains no real-world value. I'm not allowed to trade that in-game widget for real-money therefore it's Real-world/taxable value for me is $0.00 and even at 100% taxation it's still $0.00. now that changes if I go on the black market and sell it. Afterall that's the only way to actually liquidate those assets. Doing so violates the ToS and gets me banned from the game. Do I get to claim all the assets that were taken away from me in the banning as losses? Also the whole point of black market transactions are to avoid taxes.. bringing this issue to a larger concern of taxing black market transactions. you won't see a drug dealer filing his taxes anytime soon.
Also this brings with it other difficulties, somebody finds/aquires an extremely rare item. purely in game, this person is unemployed and has been for a while, (think 16-17 year old kid/college student) this person cannot pay his taxes, since he's not working, he's simply playing a game in his spare time... this poor kid has to sell his in-game stuff to pay his taxes, risking getting banned from the game for doing so. A few people end up like this and you will see the MMOs getting shut down.
One positive however...
It will prevent dupers
in game advertising can be done well though.. rather than having them as true ads, throw in a couple cans of coke on the computer desk, have the car be a brand new Cadillac Escalade, They're talking about this kind of advertising for TV shows, why wouldn't they work in games? you could have the occasional poster or billboard in the game where you'd normally see them, just don't be excessive. subtle advertising works well for a lot of people, and I think would generate more revenue for the advertisers than a blaten plug. There are lots of places for ads, heck on T-shirts, use real world products, get advertising dollars for the real world products and it'll be good
It does it over here too Pudge...
IE version 6.0.2900.2180.xpsp_sp2_gdr.050301-1519 here
Under discussion style where it would normally in firefox etc, show the check boxes... it shows nothing. THere is
Discussion Style
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Email Display
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Disable Sigs
(periods not there, but to add extra lines for effect of what is seen)
want a screenie... i'll post one maybe later i'm working late tonight and I can't upload from work.
as for steps to get there... click preferences... then click comments... that's what there is, no way to change it back.
It's been a few years since I read the Hobbit... but when did he sing in the Hobbit? I remember the long drawn out, boring part of Fellowship, (so boring the CHARACTERS fell asleep :P) But nothing in the hobbit about Tom... granted it's been a while... i'm going to listen to a book on tape i had on my 3 hour drive tonight just to make sure but i'm pretty sure he wasn't in the Hobbit... (and please don't put him in there... while I agree he should have had a part in the LOTR movies but don't go willy nilly putting characters in places they don't belong... i don't want another Arwen "you want him come and take him" incident...
My concern is that they'll put Orlando Bloom in Mirkwood... or replace Bard with a more familiar face (Aragorn?)
that being said I want Elrond (Hugo Weaving), Gandalf (Sir Ian McKellan), Bilbo (Ian Holm), Played by the same as the LOTR movies. Especially Elrond and Gandalf. Bilbo can be replaced because he is technically younger... and Ian Holm is no spring chicken...
Alright, I agree patents do by default create a monopoly. but not necessarily stifle competition... say Bob invents a widget which can cut keys one per second,. Joe makes a widget that can cut keys 60 at a time but takes a minute to do. they're both patented, they both do the same job, cutting keys at the rate of 60/minute (I'm not creative today so that's my funky invention for the day... :P) Now they are different products producing the same thing, and both can be patented. the patent only covers the widget. not the process of cutting keys. That being said. a patent here is useful, Joe can't steal Bob's device, but he can try to improve upon it, (and in this case fail but produce an equally good device which can compete with Bob's) Patents were designed not to create monopolies, but to protect inventors for a limited time to encourage innovation and to reward innovation. Without patents, there is no incentive for Bob or Joe to invent a widget. Since Megacorp can see this widget that Bob invented, mass produce it, sell them for cheaper than Bob can ever hope to build them for. and Bob gets nothing for his invention. and relying on Megacorp to innovate... you get Microsoft's "innovation".
I don't believe that patents are an admission that supply and demand capitalism doesn't work... It started as a means to protect the little guy. and to enhance innovation. Personally I think Patents should have a strict SHORT term. say 10 years. 10 years should be enough to earn your investment back in an invention. if not, you haven't marketed it well enough. and that's nobody's fault but your own. Now for a process which really requires little innovation, (renting movies has been done for years, all that's new is doing it online and no late fees) isn't really an innovation and shouldn't be patentable. it would be similar to a grocery store patenting the idea of groceries on shelves that are easy to grab for customers. it's such an obvious idea now that it's out there, that it shouldn't be able to be patented.
and you're right, the only question is how high to set the bar, and how long should the protection last. and that's for much larger brains than mine.
heck you could do patent reform this way. The patent holder isn't able to have a monopoly but is able to set the price of their widget or process. That way they'd be able to compete on a level playing field with megacorp, and megacorp would be less able to pummel bob or joe into the ground.
Wow, reading that made me wonder why the hell that is acceptable... It's basically using the Patent office to generate monopolies. as long as you can create a new business process you can hold a monopoly on it. This is not a fair use of the patent laws. I for one am glad that it's not possible in Canada. Anti competitive behaviour should not be patentable. Maybe someone should have patented the process for making money off of patenting processes to establish a monopoly.
different biologic processes... basically what i've understood about stem cells is that they don't "grow an organ" rather they use the cells, which aren't specialized yet, to basically "regrow" your own tissues. So rather than transplant, give your body the cells it needs to rebuild itself.
hmm, I've been to many cattle ranches, never seen a large overcrowded stinking building full of cows... i've seen pastures with tons of cows. mostly huddled together since they're social animals. and tend to herd naturally. spending most of their day eating grass... however they are fed a feed as well, and sure sometimes it contains antibiotics, but thats when they're sick, not for any other purpose. because just like people cows get sick too, and never giving them antibiotics would be like never giving a sick person antibiotics. the feed is usually just a combination of grains. usually designed to give a good combination of fat and protein. again depending on the health of the animals. the ranchers i know are more concerned about their cattle's health than their own. after all, the cows are their livelyhood, and if they don't produce good quality cattle the price drops and their profits drop. So you have to eat all food raw to be "natural" how long does a practice have to be done by a species before it is considered "natural" 1000 years? 2000? 5000? we've been cooking and slaughtering meat for millenia. since the discovery of fire, we've learned that "meat... Fire... Good!" all we've done since then is agriculturalize meat, then industrialize meat...
Electricity, Gas, water... internet? That's how I treat it... those are my utilities. I have to pay for them all. they're all just there when i turn it on, it's nothing different. just like Cable tv and the telephone. I have to pay more per month for gas than for internet, that being said, I don't expect cable tv and internet on a plane. and if they do they'll be extra. granted 10 bucks a day or more is a bit excessive. try $5 a day and that's reasonable. Internet isn't a required utility though like gas water and electricity. i can't live without gas in the winter, i can't live without water, and the heat runs off of electricity as well as gas so without power inadequate heat... (furnace will still burn, but won't blow the heat around the house)
hence the 500 unit real-world test environment... if this was a 5 million unit deployment... I'd understand this post having validity... but this is a 500 unit deployment... a real-world test... I don't understand your getting irritated calling this "snake oil" because it hasn't been tested... well, this article is a bunch of propaganda about the product, based around the 500 unit test. don't call it snake-oil yet. let the real-world test go through its paces before you get defensive...
see and a lot of people in my area use the scroll lock key a lot... mostly with KVMs you hit scroll lock twice and up arrow to switch computers... I personally use all the keys on the keyboard with the exceptions of the right click button... or menu button... i hate that key... i have used it, in emergencies and in emergencies i love it... so hands off my keyboard!
but if we get rid of scroll lock how will i quickly switch computers on my KVM? frankly, get used to it... people aren't going to stop putting the capslock on keyboards anytime soon. too many HIGH up people in corporations use them. Lawyers use them lots in declarations, using all caps is used a lot in headers, acryonyms, logos, warnings etc. Killing the Caps lock key is stupid, and a waste of resources. and will piss many many people off, and the capslock key will return anew... there isn't a single key on the keyboard i don't used with the exception of the "right click" key, howver I use that in emergencies when the mouse is dead and i'm just navigating by keyboard alone.. I've had days like that, oh sure some /.ers will be talking about you don't use those keys in linux... well, I work in an office with thousands of windows boxes. i like being able to use the winkey shortcuts... saves me headaches and time... so frankly... it ain't gonna happen.
I use my ISP's spam filter, and just delete whatever gets through... it's not hard the subjects are easy enough to filter. wastes little time. I however am extremely lucky, where I used to get 100s of spam e-mails a day, I now get less than 5... I have an easy brute-force email addy to get, (3 characters long,) and yet I get very little spam. even my hotmail is getting less spam now (on the average of 5 a day). it seems that i'm winning the spam war... just by ignoring it... :P
technically we didn't "NEED" a 1 GB HDD, assuming that DOS stayed the primary OS, you don't do image, audio, video files. which is what the people who said that back then implied. any data that wasn't used was stored on Floppy or tape backup. and hdds were nicely organized and kept clean because space was a limiting factor I now have 360GB of hdd space, (a 200 and a 160) and i have had an average of 100 GB free.. i've gone down to 180 free, and could clean up a lot more if I burned the data to cd... i could theoretically live with a 10 gig hdd. I do on my laptop, but only need the excess due to windows bloat and laziness.
Most people actually tend to purchase systems like Dells, HP, Compaq, Gateway, eMachines. Those you seldom have to hunt for drivers for. as they usually come on the recovery cds. They make it even easier to install windows. often taking several clicks out of it. reducing it to a select the type of recovery and are you sure...
D&D 3 and 3.5 are not games in their own right, they're game systems. The rpg aspects come in how the DM runs his game. yes a DM can run a purely combat oriented game, or a very rpg type game. the rules are very flexible in that regard... which of course is part of the reason it's a system not a game.
what purpose does a .50 cal have in civilian life? it would tear any game animal to shreds, leaving very little left for food or trophy. It is to cumbersome to use for home defense. about the only thing it is good for is military use. which i suppose is the only purpose. hmm. same with fully automatic rifles. i never understood why civilians would be allowed to purchase those.
that's not the point of the court case... the problem is the slander of the "rip-off" comment. which to be honest, yes DOS was for all intents and purposes a cheap CP/M alternative which "borrowed" certain features... which in my interpretation of "ripped-off" is very close to what happened... the question isn't whether people make money off of DOS or not, but rather because of the slanderous comments made in the book. which yes it is slanderous, but it's also true...
I knew they were planting subliminal messages in my mp3s... because as soon as I got my ipod I started craving other mac products, like an ibook, or an imac. *puts on tinfoil hat* It's a conspiracy and this "study" proves it's working!!
there have been few pictures of standard btx boards, if you compare the micro-BTX boards that have been shown to micro-atx the slots are the same (2 memory maybe 2-3 expansion slots) i've actually been able to see a gigabyte BTX system in action with a standard btx board in it, it actually had 4 memory slots, and a PCI-X 16 and 4 PCI-X slots, as well as 2 traditional pci slots. for a grand total of 7 slots... at least iirc... its been a few months. I was worried about it too, until I talked to the gigabyte rep about btx.
so clarify yourself, by stating "faster for you". seeing as the vast majority of computer users are not *nix admins, with a staggering array of command line commands memorized complete with switches, arguing your point is perfectly valid but completely specific to a select group of individuals.
funny how that post didn't get moded :P
I agree with you on the previous point however...
I hope I get this post to meta moderate because it surely isn't a troll. I was educated by canadians, russians, germans, and a couple Brits. I'm not dumb because I wasn't educated by Americans. Without immigration the US wouldn't exist. Everyone with the exception of the north american indiginous peoples, (Cree, Blackfoot, Cherokee, Apache, Inuit, etc) everyone is an immigrant or a child of immigration. Einstein was an immigrant, Eli Whitney was an immigrant. many of the people who worked on the early space program were immigrants. heck a bunch of Canadians from Avro worked on Gemini. I think julesh has an excelent point to be made, and definately doesn't deserve to be moderated as a troll.