I guess I'm just too old - twenty-four, that is. I still remember those ancient times where you actually expected to get something more than just the minimally possible when you bought something. Where software came with a printed manual instead of a ten-page PDF. And where a nice sleeve/case to go with an album was considered part of the album itself. You know, back when physical possessions were actually worth something.
Consider me an intellectual old-timer, but I think that merely getting the songs when I buy an album is not worth it.
Never happened to me. Maybe you'd want to buy keydisks that don't boldly advertise including the U3 stuff - in my experience those are easier to find and usualy cheaper than their U3 counterparts while still being very much usable and even decently fast. Buying devices that were specifically designed to offer a certain feature and then complaining about said feature is a bit weird.
CDs are just as bad. They're hard to pick up and after a while they get all scratchy. Now if there only was some kind of packaging that would make them easier to handle and at the same time protect them...
MicroSD cards are sold in ~5x4x1 cm cases. Less easy to lose. Maybe SlotMusic will come in larger cases so they can actually have cover art. In any way you won't have a dozen MicroSD cards just lying around.
There's nothing in TFA where they say you can't copy the files off of it. According to TFA they simply sell a MicroSD card with some MP3s and some bonus files on it.
1.) Amazon does not run a local brick-and-mortar music store.
2.) Amazon does not sell physical media. I don't want to have to worry about backups; in case of a catastrophic data loss all I should have to do is walk over to my CD (or SlotMusic orr whatever) rack and pull out the album so I can re-rip it.
3.) Amazon has no function where I can chat with the clerk about obscure bands or how band X really went downhill when member Y quit.
4.) Amazon does not sell physical media. When I buy something I really want to have something to own. iTunes and Amazon are neat, but when I buy an album I want an album and not just some files.
5.) Amazon's downloads do not include the assorted extras you might find on a physical album (and which TFA promises). Sure I can download them somewhere else, but I shouldn't have to.
6.) Amazon does not sell physical media. When I support a band with my money (yes, I know most only get peanuts) I want my CD rack to reflect that. Burned CDs with self-printed covers don't cut it.
You say physical distribution is dead; I say digital distribution is a no-starter. Turns out we're both wrong unless we add a "as far as I'm concerned" to the end of the sentence.
This format is DRM-free. Just don't use the original cards:
1.) Get a player with high-density storage or (if your player uses *SD) a large (8+ gig) SD card.
2.) Copy music from SlotMusic card to player/large card. This will take less than 1 gig of space since you leave the non-music stuff out and 320k MP3 still isn't that large.
3.) Store the original card somewhere safe.
4.) Listen to lots of different albums without ever having to switch cards.
If we assume an album to be about one hour in length and one such album taking 150 MiB of space, an 8 GB SD card (which should have about 7650 MiB) could contain such 51 albums; in other words you can fit 51 hours (or 2 1/8 days) of music onto an 8 GB MicroSD card. Switching should not be an issue.
A quick look at Amazon gives us a figure of 23.60 USD for a single 8 GB MicroSD card. Bearable, especially as in most cases this will be a one-time investment.
Actually, my last paragraph was firmly tongue in cheek; I thought the bit with the goth poetry made that clear. It's their game and they get to decide how it looks. Even if they decided to turn hell into a giant 70s disco and put Diablo into a leisure suit and platform shoes - it's their game. It'd also be kind of awesome, but that's beside the point.
Also, I think an "ugly mode" would actually serve to piss off the yammering fans rather than make them happy. I can really see it - the option would have the name "Ugly Mode" and the tooltip "How the game should have looked. Not WoW gay at all." And the game would have a TTS engine just for this mode so every goth poetry line (why, of course they'd implement that idea, too) could be randomly generated and they wouldn't actually have to record all that stuff.
Yup, that would be one of the most awesome insults in video game history.
Depends on whether the color is used right, though. Some of the original screenshots did look a bit weird - one dungeon appears to have blue ambient light, even though there are no blue light sources. For some reason it really did look like World of Warcraft. In those cases it might be a good idea to tone down the ambient light's chroma a bit. Of course if they put blue torches everywhere things look a bit different.
What I don't get is the outcry over the magic effects being too cartoonish. Diablo always had magic effects in all the colors (and with the gravitas) of a well-stocked candy store and a poison attack wouldn't be a proper poison attack if it didn't have a bright green glow and preferably an inexplicable skull somewhere.
Of course, Blizzard could easily appease the color-hostile fans by adding a graphics option that reduces chroma by 90% and brightness by 50% everywhere but the HUD. And maybe changes all spoken text to goth poetry.
If you have too many resources, offer some to student projects. Not all student projects have connections that can garner them better equipment than whatever old junk the university gives them -- and student projects can be quite resource-intensive. I know from experience that it's fairly frustrating to do massive number crunching that would take a week for a single run on a 16-way Opteron system with 64+ gigs of RAM when all you have is a single Pentium III with 64 megs of RAM and a hard drive too small to offer enough swap space.
Getting your hands on sufficient horsepower can mean the difference between a decent project report and one with the evaluation being in the "future studies" section. If your servers are under-utilized you can offer time slots to student projects; I'm sure they will happily take them.
Have fun getting your hands on a homebrew cartridge these days though.
Amazon? amazon.com doesn't seem to have them but the German one has, for example, a CycloDS Evolution with a 4 gig SDHC card for about 57 Euros. If you want to pay less, the still very decent SuperCard DS One (SDHC) with 4 gig card comes in at about 40 Euros. Same price for an R4 with 2 gig card. All are available without cards as well. Just look if you find a seller that ships to the States.
Of course you'll lose lots of money through shipping and the strong Euro but finding the modules is trivial...
I don't see why it should take more than six hours to count all paper ballots.
In Germany every polling place counts its ballots. The counters are made up of representatives of all electable parties and both count ballots and check whether the other guys count correctly. The polling places then report their tallies to the district election supervisor (as district results are important in the German voting system); the district supervisors report to the state supervisors who in turn report to the federal supervisor.
In the USA it could look like this: The ballots are counted as in Germany. The time should be about the same, as the counting is massively parallelized. The polling places report to the county supervisor, who in turn reports to the state supervisor. If county results aren't important, the polling places report directly to the state supervisor. From there on the usual Electoral College stuff happens. And that's it.
Especially if the polling places report directly to the state supervisor, cheating the system becomes very hard -- in order to manipulate a polling place result you'd need to pay off members of all political parties; in order to manipulate the state supervisor, well, you'd need to effectively buy the entire state's vote. In any way you need to physically manipulate the (usually well accounted for) ballots as recounts are trivial.
If the media are that powerful and they do put so much pressure on the system then, well, voting has to stop six hours before midnight. Which coincidentally happens to be 18:00, the time when German polls close, as well. If the final results aren't yet in you announce the preliminary ones, but you don't switch to a known-bad, utterly overcomplicated and unreliable system just to submit to their every whim better.
I said it before and I'll say it again: Taking more than a night to tally the votes for a country can not be attributed to anything but either a broken process or sheer ineptitude. In the case of the USA "media tyrrany" is another factor, of course.
It seems that the US election system (and the foundation of democracy in the country) is broken in many, many ways.
Firstly, nondeterministic ballot counting? How did you manage to pull that off? A ballot should express one and only one value. During the counting process, no less than two people should count any stack of ballots to ensure that no miscounts or manipulations happen. Even if just 10% of all Americans vote 0.5% still means that 1.52 ballots were miscounted. With rigorous double-checking most of those errors should be caught.
Secondly, the political parties don't care enough about their own election to send people to count ballots? Come on, if not even the parties care about politics anymore, why hold an election in the first place?
Thirdly, are the media really that powerful in the US? Holy shit, seriously! Over here we learn next morning who REALLY has won while during the evening we get periodic forecasts. And even the next morning figures are non-final as some letter votes might still come in (and yes, they do count). Everybody knows and accepts that. The media should just wait until the next morning to announce the winner -- on the other hand, "American media" and "accountability" are two disparate concepts...
But is that an excuse to use a known-bad process? Besides, sooner or later there is some kind of federal voting supervisor, otherwise there wouldn't be a federal election. So there's no additional protection by having everyone vote to a different standard. Of course a unified process could be corrupted but the voting and counting process used by most democratic countries is so utterly transparent and easily checked that they'd have to physically steal and manipulate the ballots before counting or pay off every member of every party in an entire county just to change that one county's results.
Really, I fail to see the big vulnerabilities in a standardized, unified voting process unless the process is mis-engineered from the start.
I wonder how you guys manage to take two weeks to count your votes. Do you use some kind of centralized system? In Germany each polling place determines their own result, with counters from all local parties being there, counting and double-checking each others results. The polling places then report to the district election supervisor, the districts report to the state election supervisor and the state reports to the federal election supervisor.
This system should scale extremely well because the only thing that can cause significant lag is having too many people use one polling place. Since you have to use a fixed polling place, however, that's just a density and assignment issue.
Of course you still need to wait for mail voters before the results are final, but you can start making pretty accurate forecasts within two or three hours and next morning's newspapers already report the results because the letter voters aren't going to change much.
Even if the counting time scaled linearly with the number of voters it should take at most eleven hours (3h * 304.4 MPeople / 82.2 MPeople) for the first predictions to be made and, say, two days for the "final" result -- still much faster than two weeks! So it's not like you need computers to count votes. Besides, you'd probably still wait for two weeks because they only give out the final result, which depends on mail voters.
No amount of expensive hardware can fix a faulty process. If you need too much time to tally your vote while other countries have no problem doing so it's clearly the process that's at fault, not the size of the country. If you're unhappy with not getting preliminary data, launch a petition for preliminary results but don't change the way the still nonpublic data is counted.
I agree but, for the sake of speed of results and convenience, we will move to an electronic system.
Do you really need realtime updates with to-the-second exact numbers? Manual counts can have the results available within a few hours if done properly. IIRC Canada does exactly that and they have the election results the next morning, with fairly accurate forecasts within three or four hours after the poll is closed. Anything longer than that is simply incompetence, not something insurmountable without computer aid.
If you really want to use computers have the computer use an optical scanner to detect the mark. If the scan fails the computer spits the ballot into a tray for manual inspection. But in the end I'd only use that for forecasts and leave a multipartisan counting comittee to determine and double-check the results. That's the safest way and a computer-based system will never get close.
THE VOTING MACHINE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL PREMIER ELECTION SOLUTIONS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE VOTING MACHINE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE VOTING MACHINE.
And now again, this time filtered through toLowerCase() so the lameness filter lets me post this:
the voting machine is provided "as is", without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including but not limited to the warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and noninfringement. in no event shall premier election solutions be liable for any claim, damages or other liability, whether in an action of contract, tort or otherwise, arising from, out of or in connection with the voting machine or the use or other dealings in the voting machine.
Wha? There is no such thing as defense. Well, there is if the suit ever reaches the courtroom, but who wants to go there? You file a suit and the defendant gives you money and/or agrees to (not) do something as part of th settlement. If you actually went to court with your suit you'd have to have a case and everything!
Or who thought that it'd be a smart move to have seven different versions of the same operating system with confusing capability differences and nontrivial inheritance, requiring people to spend half an hour trying to find out whether their new notebook will be able to burn DVDs.
Often it boils down to "I don't know much about this topic and I don't care about it, thus it's irrelevant". Thus you end up with entire fields of topics automatically getting marked for deletion - as happened to webcomics a couple months ago, with some fairly well-known comics getting tossed out for being not notable, while a page about the TV station the main character of a short-lived 80s TV series worked for survived more than thirty revisions over five years. I agree that Max Headroom was cool, but Network 23 didn't really have that big an impact in our culture, even the popular one.
The problem is that the Wikipedia editors and admins are still human beings with imperfect knowledge and opinions and while some people would say that The Simpsons or Schlock Mercenary have or had actual cultural impact* others would note that they only read SciFi books for entertainment and they had a perfectly fine childhood without ever telling someone to have bovines. Thus that article about neologisms coined by The Simpsons is only relevant to some fans and not notable -- but nobody dare touching that alphabetical listing of all characters found in the Foundation series! And then it devolves into a discussion over who has the bigger, er, childhood and thus gets to be right.
I have no idea to improve upon this situation. Correctly judging what's notable and what isn't requires superhuman wisdom and cultural insight. And the wisdom of the crowds only gets you so far, especially with a small crowd.
* E.g. The Simpsons by inventing new - although often short-lived - slang and Schlock Mercenary through the rules found in the in-universe book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Pirates, some of which have since found their way into the wild.
Q: How does the current generation of stereoscopic 3D tech differ from what gamers saw 5 years ago?
AF: You no longer have to crank that little handle on the glasses. Just kidding. The new software technology we are working on has come a long way. Today our driver supports NVIDIA SLI, GeForce 8 series, Windows Vista, and DirectX 10. So it's a cutting edge, terrific gaming platform to start with.
Our driver now supports the latest Zalman Trimon 3D Ready displays and will add support for new 3D Ready displays (ViewSonic and Mitsubishi) working with our new 3D glasses laster this year. The underlying technology works the same, but the experience has improved with support for more games, more graphics cards, and new hardware.
Translation: "Our new 3D glasses have drivers for operating systems that aren't Windows 98. And we now enforce that you only use them with displays from certain companies. Everything's still the same, but now it's more expensive and that really improves the experience. Well, at least it does for Zalman, ViewSonic and Mitsubishi."
Slashdot Mirror
Colossus, eh? Neat. Just a litte word of advice, though: If Colossus tells you there is another system DON'T CONNECT THEM WITH EACH OTHER!
The Japanese already have developed the prerequisite technology.
Nanaaa nana nanana na naa na Katamari Damacy~
I guess I'm just too old - twenty-four, that is. I still remember those ancient times where you actually expected to get something more than just the minimally possible when you bought something. Where software came with a printed manual instead of a ten-page PDF. And where a nice sleeve/case to go with an album was considered part of the album itself. You know, back when physical possessions were actually worth something.
Consider me an intellectual old-timer, but I think that merely getting the songs when I buy an album is not worth it.
Never happened to me. Maybe you'd want to buy keydisks that don't boldly advertise including the U3 stuff - in my experience those are easier to find and usualy cheaper than their U3 counterparts while still being very much usable and even decently fast. Buying devices that were specifically designed to offer a certain feature and then complaining about said feature is a bit weird.
CDs are just as bad. They're hard to pick up and after a while they get all scratchy. Now if there only was some kind of packaging that would make them easier to handle and at the same time protect them...
MicroSD cards are sold in ~5x4x1 cm cases. Less easy to lose. Maybe SlotMusic will come in larger cases so they can actually have cover art. In any way you won't have a dozen MicroSD cards just lying around.
There's nothing in TFA where they say you can't copy the files off of it. According to TFA they simply sell a MicroSD card with some MP3s and some bonus files on it.
Let's see...
1.) Amazon does not run a local brick-and-mortar music store.
2.) Amazon does not sell physical media. I don't want to have to worry about backups; in case of a catastrophic data loss all I should have to do is walk over to my CD (or SlotMusic orr whatever) rack and pull out the album so I can re-rip it.
3.) Amazon has no function where I can chat with the clerk about obscure bands or how band X really went downhill when member Y quit.
4.) Amazon does not sell physical media. When I buy something I really want to have something to own. iTunes and Amazon are neat, but when I buy an album I want an album and not just some files.
5.) Amazon's downloads do not include the assorted extras you might find on a physical album (and which TFA promises). Sure I can download them somewhere else, but I shouldn't have to.
6.) Amazon does not sell physical media. When I support a band with my money (yes, I know most only get peanuts) I want my CD rack to reflect that. Burned CDs with self-printed covers don't cut it.
You say physical distribution is dead; I say digital distribution is a no-starter. Turns out we're both wrong unless we add a "as far as I'm concerned" to the end of the sentence.
This format is DRM-free. Just don't use the original cards:
1.) Get a player with high-density storage or (if your player uses *SD) a large (8+ gig) SD card.
2.) Copy music from SlotMusic card to player/large card. This will take less than 1 gig of space since you leave the non-music stuff out and 320k MP3 still isn't that large.
3.) Store the original card somewhere safe.
4.) Listen to lots of different albums without ever having to switch cards.
If we assume an album to be about one hour in length and one such album taking 150 MiB of space, an 8 GB SD card (which should have about 7650 MiB) could contain such 51 albums; in other words you can fit 51 hours (or 2 1/8 days) of music onto an 8 GB MicroSD card. Switching should not be an issue.
A quick look at Amazon gives us a figure of 23.60 USD for a single 8 GB MicroSD card. Bearable, especially as in most cases this will be a one-time investment.
Actually, my last paragraph was firmly tongue in cheek; I thought the bit with the goth poetry made that clear. It's their game and they get to decide how it looks. Even if they decided to turn hell into a giant 70s disco and put Diablo into a leisure suit and platform shoes - it's their game. It'd also be kind of awesome, but that's beside the point.
Also, I think an "ugly mode" would actually serve to piss off the yammering fans rather than make them happy. I can really see it - the option would have the name "Ugly Mode" and the tooltip "How the game should have looked. Not WoW gay at all." And the game would have a TTS engine just for this mode so every goth poetry line (why, of course they'd implement that idea, too) could be randomly generated and they wouldn't actually have to record all that stuff.
Yup, that would be one of the most awesome insults in video game history.
Depends on whether the color is used right, though. Some of the original screenshots did look a bit weird - one dungeon appears to have blue ambient light, even though there are no blue light sources. For some reason it really did look like World of Warcraft. In those cases it might be a good idea to tone down the ambient light's chroma a bit. Of course if they put blue torches everywhere things look a bit different.
What I don't get is the outcry over the magic effects being too cartoonish. Diablo always had magic effects in all the colors (and with the gravitas) of a well-stocked candy store and a poison attack wouldn't be a proper poison attack if it didn't have a bright green glow and preferably an inexplicable skull somewhere.
Of course, Blizzard could easily appease the color-hostile fans by adding a graphics option that reduces chroma by 90% and brightness by 50% everywhere but the HUD. And maybe changes all spoken text to goth poetry.
If you have too many resources, offer some to student projects. Not all student projects have connections that can garner them better equipment than whatever old junk the university gives them -- and student projects can be quite resource-intensive. I know from experience that it's fairly frustrating to do massive number crunching that would take a week for a single run on a 16-way Opteron system with 64+ gigs of RAM when all you have is a single Pentium III with 64 megs of RAM and a hard drive too small to offer enough swap space.
Getting your hands on sufficient horsepower can mean the difference between a decent project report and one with the evaluation being in the "future studies" section. If your servers are under-utilized you can offer time slots to student projects; I'm sure they will happily take them.
Amazon? amazon.com doesn't seem to have them but the German one has, for example, a CycloDS Evolution with a 4 gig SDHC card for about 57 Euros. If you want to pay less, the still very decent SuperCard DS One (SDHC) with 4 gig card comes in at about 40 Euros. Same price for an R4 with 2 gig card. All are available without cards as well. Just look if you find a seller that ships to the States.
Of course you'll lose lots of money through shipping and the strong Euro but finding the modules is trivial...
alias nano='nano -w'
I don't see why it should take more than six hours to count all paper ballots.
In Germany every polling place counts its ballots. The counters are made up of representatives of all electable parties and both count ballots and check whether the other guys count correctly. The polling places then report their tallies to the district election supervisor (as district results are important in the German voting system); the district supervisors report to the state supervisors who in turn report to the federal supervisor.
In the USA it could look like this: The ballots are counted as in Germany. The time should be about the same, as the counting is massively parallelized. The polling places report to the county supervisor, who in turn reports to the state supervisor. If county results aren't important, the polling places report directly to the state supervisor. From there on the usual Electoral College stuff happens. And that's it.
Especially if the polling places report directly to the state supervisor, cheating the system becomes very hard -- in order to manipulate a polling place result you'd need to pay off members of all political parties; in order to manipulate the state supervisor, well, you'd need to effectively buy the entire state's vote. In any way you need to physically manipulate the (usually well accounted for) ballots as recounts are trivial.
If the media are that powerful and they do put so much pressure on the system then, well, voting has to stop six hours before midnight. Which coincidentally happens to be 18:00, the time when German polls close, as well. If the final results aren't yet in you announce the preliminary ones, but you don't switch to a known-bad, utterly overcomplicated and unreliable system just to submit to their every whim better.
I said it before and I'll say it again: Taking more than a night to tally the votes for a country can not be attributed to anything but either a broken process or sheer ineptitude. In the case of the USA "media tyrrany" is another factor, of course.
It seems that the US election system (and the foundation of democracy in the country) is broken in many, many ways.
Firstly, nondeterministic ballot counting? How did you manage to pull that off? A ballot should express one and only one value. During the counting process, no less than two people should count any stack of ballots to ensure that no miscounts or manipulations happen. Even if just 10% of all Americans vote 0.5% still means that 1.52 ballots were miscounted. With rigorous double-checking most of those errors should be caught.
Secondly, the political parties don't care enough about their own election to send people to count ballots? Come on, if not even the parties care about politics anymore, why hold an election in the first place?
Thirdly, are the media really that powerful in the US? Holy shit, seriously! Over here we learn next morning who REALLY has won while during the evening we get periodic forecasts. And even the next morning figures are non-final as some letter votes might still come in (and yes, they do count). Everybody knows and accepts that. The media should just wait until the next morning to announce the winner -- on the other hand, "American media" and "accountability" are two disparate concepts...
But is that an excuse to use a known-bad process? Besides, sooner or later there is some kind of federal voting supervisor, otherwise there wouldn't be a federal election. So there's no additional protection by having everyone vote to a different standard. Of course a unified process could be corrupted but the voting and counting process used by most democratic countries is so utterly transparent and easily checked that they'd have to physically steal and manipulate the ballots before counting or pay off every member of every party in an entire county just to change that one county's results.
Really, I fail to see the big vulnerabilities in a standardized, unified voting process unless the process is mis-engineered from the start.
I wonder how you guys manage to take two weeks to count your votes. Do you use some kind of centralized system? In Germany each polling place determines their own result, with counters from all local parties being there, counting and double-checking each others results. The polling places then report to the district election supervisor, the districts report to the state election supervisor and the state reports to the federal election supervisor.
This system should scale extremely well because the only thing that can cause significant lag is having too many people use one polling place. Since you have to use a fixed polling place, however, that's just a density and assignment issue.
Of course you still need to wait for mail voters before the results are final, but you can start making pretty accurate forecasts within two or three hours and next morning's newspapers already report the results because the letter voters aren't going to change much.
Even if the counting time scaled linearly with the number of voters it should take at most eleven hours (3h * 304.4 MPeople / 82.2 MPeople) for the first predictions to be made and, say, two days for the "final" result -- still much faster than two weeks! So it's not like you need computers to count votes. Besides, you'd probably still wait for two weeks because they only give out the final result, which depends on mail voters.
No amount of expensive hardware can fix a faulty process. If you need too much time to tally your vote while other countries have no problem doing so it's clearly the process that's at fault, not the size of the country. If you're unhappy with not getting preliminary data, launch a petition for preliminary results but don't change the way the still nonpublic data is counted.
Do you really need realtime updates with to-the-second exact numbers? Manual counts can have the results available within a few hours if done properly. IIRC Canada does exactly that and they have the election results the next morning, with fairly accurate forecasts within three or four hours after the poll is closed. Anything longer than that is simply incompetence, not something insurmountable without computer aid.
If you really want to use computers have the computer use an optical scanner to detect the mark. If the scan fails the computer spits the ballot into a tray for manual inspection. But in the end I'd only use that for forecasts and leave a multipartisan counting comittee to determine and double-check the results. That's the safest way and a computer-based system will never get close.
Quoth the EULA:
THE VOTING MACHINE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL PREMIER ELECTION SOLUTIONS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE VOTING MACHINE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE VOTING MACHINE.
And now again, this time filtered through toLowerCase() so the lameness filter lets me post this:
the voting machine is provided "as is", without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including but not limited to the warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and noninfringement. in no event shall premier election solutions be liable for any claim, damages or other liability, whether in an action of contract, tort or otherwise, arising from, out of or in connection with the voting machine or the use or other dealings in the voting machine.
Wha? There is no such thing as defense. Well, there is if the suit ever reaches the courtroom, but who wants to go there? You file a suit and the defendant gives you money and/or agrees to (not) do something as part of th settlement. If you actually went to court with your suit you'd have to have a case and everything!
Then they will attempt to close the "Seinfeld-less hole" by making new TV shows incompatible with TV sets that don't show Seinfeld's mug on the frame.
The people behind "America's Funniest Home Videos" would disagree.
And yes, I know that their disagreement is a very good argument in favor of it being profoundly unfunny.
Or who thought that it'd be a smart move to have seven different versions of the same operating system with confusing capability differences and nontrivial inheritance, requiring people to spend half an hour trying to find out whether their new notebook will be able to burn DVDs.
Often it boils down to "I don't know much about this topic and I don't care about it, thus it's irrelevant". Thus you end up with entire fields of topics automatically getting marked for deletion - as happened to webcomics a couple months ago, with some fairly well-known comics getting tossed out for being not notable, while a page about the TV station the main character of a short-lived 80s TV series worked for survived more than thirty revisions over five years. I agree that Max Headroom was cool, but Network 23 didn't really have that big an impact in our culture, even the popular one.
The problem is that the Wikipedia editors and admins are still human beings with imperfect knowledge and opinions and while some people would say that The Simpsons or Schlock Mercenary have or had actual cultural impact* others would note that they only read SciFi books for entertainment and they had a perfectly fine childhood without ever telling someone to have bovines. Thus that article about neologisms coined by The Simpsons is only relevant to some fans and not notable -- but nobody dare touching that alphabetical listing of all characters found in the Foundation series! And then it devolves into a discussion over who has the bigger, er, childhood and thus gets to be right.
I have no idea to improve upon this situation. Correctly judging what's notable and what isn't requires superhuman wisdom and cultural insight. And the wisdom of the crowds only gets you so far, especially with a small crowd.
* E.g. The Simpsons by inventing new - although often short-lived - slang and Schlock Mercenary through the rules found in the in-universe book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Pirates, some of which have since found their way into the wild.
Q: How does the current generation of stereoscopic 3D tech differ from what gamers saw 5 years ago?
AF: You no longer have to crank that little handle on the glasses. Just kidding. The new software technology we are working on has come a long way. Today our driver supports NVIDIA SLI, GeForce 8 series, Windows Vista, and DirectX 10. So it's a cutting edge, terrific gaming platform to start with.
Our driver now supports the latest Zalman Trimon 3D Ready displays and will add support for new 3D Ready displays (ViewSonic and Mitsubishi) working with our new 3D glasses laster this year. The underlying technology works the same, but the experience has improved with support for more games, more graphics cards, and new hardware.
Translation: "Our new 3D glasses have drivers for operating systems that aren't Windows 98. And we now enforce that you only use them with displays from certain companies. Everything's still the same, but now it's more expensive and that really improves the experience. Well, at least it does for Zalman, ViewSonic and Mitsubishi."