An US law will only affect US sites. Even if the USA manage to talk Europe into adopting the law hlaf of the world will still not give a shit. Thus only tags in participating countries are somewhat reliable.
The PICS tag format is everything but convenient. Actually, when I read up on it yesterday it looked more like a way of describing color spaces in RDF. Considering the number of sites without a DTD and a stated encoding, making PICS part of the standard would lead to a slow and sporadic adoption (unless backed up by a law). Of course the UAs could refuse to read untagged sites but that's hardly going to happen, especially as it would make those parts of the Internet that haven't been updated in a while completely inaccessible.
The default settings... Hm. There we have the problem of what the majority of people want and what parents want. I could imagine that modt Mozilla devs would not want Fx to limit their ability to surf the web. Then again, that could be fixed by putting in a wizard that runs at first startup and prompts the user to configure this stuff.
Better educated web developers? Many web developers don't have any education. Explaining PICS to people who have a hard time comprehending that there are character encodings besides windows-1252 would not be fun... Today it's more common to have some kind of internet presence than not and most people don't want to know what META or PICS or a DTD or the W3C is or why they should write standard-compliant HTML when their website shows up correctly in their IE.
Having everyone use PICS or a similar mechanism would be nice, but most of them aren't simple enough to be used by your regular MS Frontpage user and backwards compatibility will ensure that people will only adopt them when it's absolutely necessary (except for the few standards geeks). If the format was really easy to use (ie. hand-codable without significant brain ativity even for non-experts) and there was some kind of incentive to use it (explicit support for such tags by major search engines; Google giving tagged sites a higher PageRank) people might adopt it.
By the way, there's one problem with a law requiring sites to state whether they contain pornographic material: What is pornography? What is art? When are the models of legal age? Do actions that are illegal in the USA but legal elsewhere get their own official tags (if the system is fine-grained enough to actually convey informations about the content)? Is there even an official set of tags? If yes, can people define their own tags?
A site containing women wearing nothing but panties in light bondage (the women, not the panties) might be art in Japan, but I'm quite sure that in the USA it would be pornography. There's clearly a conflict here. You can't apply the American standards to sites everywhere on the planet - for example, German webmasters would not be happy that they have to declare that their site shows underage models when all the models are nineteen years old.
The disparity between moral and social standards in different parts of the world would mean that you'd have to have a separate set of tags for every jurisdiction that participates in the mandatory self-rating thing - or you'd have a ratings board where the members are constantly arguing over what's acceptable. Both approaches don't work very well.
Maybe we should just go with the good old semantic web: The website has a machine-readable section that states that almost-nude women in bondage are depicted; the UA has to figure out itself if that's appropriate. Of course that makes it much harder to filter out everything you consider not suitable for your children. Maybe your government (and other organisations) can offer filter lists that contain all "evil" tags they acpect to find on the web. They could add a hotline where you can suggest further tags to be added. That seems to be the most simple and practical solution.
Yeah, but they've already broken the system. Just press F5 - poof, the article is displayed again! This way you can trick the "read twice" detection easily!
So now even if someone reverse engineers this and posts a how-to you're gonna have to do a LOT more than just d/l and run a simple executable with a few clicks. Likely you'll have to do some soldering, flash a ROM, maybe even buy a mod chip and install it.
No, you have to pay twenty bucks for a little box that goes between your TV and the antenna (or the decoder and the satellite dish/DVB-T antenna) and removes the signal. There will be such devices, whether they're legal or not.
A couple of minutes? Seriously, you should get rid of that piece of junk if possible. Even my el cheapo sat receiver boots up in ten seconds. And the program list is stored internally, so reloading it takes about 0.43 heartbeats. Either you're suffering from atrociously bad vendor lock-in (which seems to be quite common in the States) or your harware is severely outdated and needs to be replaced.
As has aleady been pointed out, there already are suitable technologies that is superior to what this law calls for. A sensible law would just state that all pornographic sites subject to American law have to use PICS, ICRA or another way of putting information about the contents of the website in the META tags. This would also benefit search engines: You could tell Google to not return websites that have a high pornography rating (or only those sites...). The sensible approach would be to encourage and promote self-labeling rather than making random demands.
Then again it's politicians talking. American politicians talking about ponorgaphy. It's utterly impossible that the result is in any way sensible or even realistic.
Not necessarily. You can always give them hormones. Estrogen can seriously hamper the activity of the male reproductive organs...
(And come on - people who expect the state to rise their children for them aren't much better then parents who chemically enforce chastity until an arbitrarily chosen age.)
What's more, if the band self-pen and self-produce they get all those writing and production royalties themselves.
This is really evident with Machinae Supremacy, who turned down a record deal because they wanted to keep the rights to their songs, which gives them the freedom to do stuff like offering everything that doesn't make it into an album (and even some songs that do) as free downloads on their website.
Yeah, once again it's the Swedes who have the best stance on music on the internet. Go Sweden.
That's true. When speaking I usually use "binary *byte" or just "*byte". When writing I make a point of using the correct abbreviations (although I still use the old words when writing the terms out).
The regular FFT had a rather dark story that was surprisingly realistic - it was about a young, idealistic nobleman getting caught up in the political schemings of his brothers who started a war so they could get more power for themselves. No matter where you went, everyone was plotting something - your brothers, the church, even your best friend. In the end some people go completely nuts and summon the game world's equivalent of Jesus who is, as it shows, pretty much nothing like what the church says he is and of course he turns out to be a boss-type monster which you have to kill; it is a Final Fantasy, after all. But apart from that part the story is much more down-to-earth than the usual FF fare and it does have a couple twists.
The characters are great, too - rather than falling into the well-known Final Fantasy roles (the oh-so-heroic hero, the oh-so-evil bad guy, the cute fuzzy party member) they are more like something you'd expect from a cloak-and-dagger movie: The hero is idealistic and doesn't want to believe that everyone he knows is jaded enough to wage a war for personal profit. His best friend changes from a friendly sidekick to the biggest schemer of them all. The high-ranking members of the church are crooked. The characterization is definitely a step above ofther Final Fantasies.
Gameplay-wise the first thing that FFT does bbetter than FFTA is that FFT actually involves tactical combat while FFTA's combat system is just Final Fantasy VII with running around. In FFTA spells and many other skills don't work immediately. The caster first has to cast the spell, which takes some time (depending on how fast the spell is and how far into the battle you are), during which you have to make sure nobody kills him. Also, as most spells affect an area around what you're targetting (which can be either a unit or an area; when you're targetting a unit and it moves so does the spell's center) the enemy can use your own spells against you by moving next to a unit before the spel goes off, so you have to consider that as well. Add to that the fact that the effectiveness of most skills is dependant on the birthsign of the user and the target, on their gender and on the weather and the variables are starting to sum up.
Also, FFT does not have the stupid referee. I mean, WTF? It's a fscking battlefield, why should there be a referee imposing completely artificial rules? What kind of sense does that make? So much for immersion... FFT manages to be hard on its own (although that depends on how you play).
I also consider FFT's job system to be superior. You don't get skills by holding a certain weapon, but rather by accumulating Job Points (which you get by fighting with a certain job or being in battle together with a team member of that job) and then spending them on what you like. It's pretty much lke Final Fantasy V.
Lastly (apart from the graphics; FFT is mostly three-dimensional) there is FFT's extremely great soundtrack. One of the best video game soundtracks ever. Orchestral and - just like the story - somewhat fitting for an old historic drama movie.
Oh, and most FFT players will probably agree that it's perversely amusing to turn Mustadio into an armor-breaking sniper (primary ability: Snipe, secondary ability: Battle Skill, movement ability: Ignore Height, using a gun) and then cripple all enemies (Arm Aim, Leg Aim, Speed Break) and send in someone with the Steal skill to strip them of their equipment before finishing them off. It's good for your war chest, as well.
The truth is: not all Linux experiences are for everybody.
True. As for me, Gentoo is superior - because I heavily depend on packages not commonly found in RPM/DEB base distros' main repositories and upgrading to a new release with third-party packages in place tends to break everything. Gentoo doesn't need release upgrades (as they don't really have distinct releases) so I have to spend less time reinstalling everything. Also, Portage is a very cool package manager.
Oh, and it has quite good 64 bit support.
However, I do understand that most people are fine with RPM or DEB. Gentoo is for you if you know what you want and how you want it. That means decisons like "I want localized X11 apps but all shell apps should not be localized", "I want 64 bit because of the extra registers" or "I need my system to use the NPTL". If you don't (want to) care about stuff like that you really don't want Gentoo.
Linuxquestions is a great resource, that's true. In fact, it's very much what I was thinking about and I feel a bit stupid for not thinking of it (but then again I'm a Gentoo user. All of my questions can be entered by googling for $QUESTION gentoo). It might need a section about the Linux community, though - informations about things like why "Which distro is the best?" is not a good question or what a LUG is.
By the way, there's one thing "wrong" with Linuxquestions: The articles are no presented in the most straightforward way possible. I'm thinking about a FAQ page where the individual questions link to articles explaining the answer. Something that barely needs a navigation. Just questions, answers, done.
There are a lot of snobs, that's true. The fact that most newbie questions tend to ignite flamewars ("Which distribution should I use?") doesn't help either... Newbies are supposed to pick up the basics by themselves and only ask more interesting questions, which obviously doesn't work for everyone. Maybe there should be more (and better) FAQs. You know, sites which answer common questions in easily understandable terms.
However, part of the problem is also the perceived snobbery. Sometimes people automatically assume that you're a snob just because you're a Linux user (seems like Linux has replaced the Mac in that regard), especially when talking about OSes; I have been in a discussion about WinXP vs. Win2k which quickly detoriated into "Microsoft apologists vs. Linux snobs" as one user assumed that all Linux users saying "I prefer Win2k because XP's interface is too damn annoying" use Windows 2000 as a clever analogy for Linux...
Interesting. If my GBA hadn't been stolen I'd try it... But when the DS lite comes out I'll probably buy one and the DS is GBA-compatible as far as I know. (And I do hope that so is the lite.)
Don't mention it or they might release another drekfest like FFTA! (Warning: Rabid FFT fanboy who hates Squarenix for releasing a sequel which lacked everything that made FFT great)
What I'd like to see would be an X-Com for the DS. The interface could very much take advantage of the two screens and, let's face it, there hasn't been an X-Com for too long. And no, I'm not talking about Interceptor or the hideous abortion that is Enforcer. Just a remake of the first game. Maybe with modernized graphics, although I'd also take the old ones.
But without the Groundhog Day Bug.
Yeah, probably. But our americomania has lost most of it's momentum since the Nineties. The USA aren't that hot around here anymore. We still consume American pop culture like there was nothing else, but we aren't desperately trying to become like them anymore.
Well, we have Blätterkrokant (which is very much Easter-related over here), filled wafer eggs, filled chocolade eggs (usually with something nut-related)... Nut-related stuff in general (mostly almond and hazelnut). And, for the children, egg-shaped candy consisting of sugar and food dye. Oh, of course the Krokant also comes in egg shape. Easter is not exactly a time of many shapes.
Except, of course, for hollow chocolade bunnies. Those are a must-have for children (just like the hollow chocolade Santas at christmas). Two companies (Lindt and Milka) start spamming TV stations with their chocolade bunny ads during March and the things are brands by themselves (with excellent brand recognition). Maybe not exactly traditional stuff, but traditional enough that I grew up having a Milka bunny a reliable (and easily noticable) part of my Easter "harvest".
Almost correct, except for two details: It was a god and he was spelled "Astaire". Fred Astaire saw a dying bird and he danced for it. He danced so well that the bird became a completely healthy hare out of sheer amazement. Inspired by its great idol the hare changed his name to Roger Rabbit and began a mildly successful acting career.
Concerning the eggs, it is widely accepted that Astaire liked his sacrifices scrambled, with a side-order of bacon.
I would actually not be surprised if this -is- indeed a north-american curiosity at worst, and something sold in e.g. the UK+Ireland, Australia and perhaps Germany at best.
Germany isn't exactly known for our international candy stores. Besides, everybody knows that Easter is all about Blätterkrokant. By the way, I was surprised to find no English translation as clearly Blätterkrokant is the One True Easter Food that rules, nay, owns the world. Marshmellow *s are just an US American fad.
That makes sense, but my point is that even though the majority of users (would) install every single patch and thus don't need detailed information about what it does to which parts of the system some very large customers need this very information to identify potentially harmful updates - and while Joe Sixpack might lose a couple dollars worth of data when his system goes haywire a company with a large datacenter might lose much more money and might want it back from Microsoft when it turns out that they could have avoided the problem had they had the information.
Of course Microsoft can't solve all of their problems for them but pushing updates to them without telling them what they do falls into the realm of Microsoft directly causing problems.
Now, be honest, do you really drink for the taste? If someone suggested fruit juice instead of wine what would you think?
Yes, I do drink for the taste. I positively hate beer, wine and most other tame alcoholic beverages; the stuff I like usually has about 40 Vol%. This would be quite suitable for fast, hard drinking binges but another thing I positively hate is losing control of my brain. I was drunk once - and after noticing that I had lost my sense of time and that I started pointing out spelling mistakes in my own thoughts I decided that being drunk is not fun at all. Besides, being with drunk people is even less fun so I avoid drinking-heavy occasions anyway.
That means that I have to drink carefully, as my taste isn't particularly suited towards my goals (enjoy the taste but avoid the effects as much as possible).
As for fruit juice: Actually, I prefer water. Towards the end of an evening with about three or four single malts I drink about two liters of water, as drinking much water is a way of avoiding hangovers (the headache comes partially from dehydration). If asked whether I would refrain from drinking anything alcoholic I'd probably agree - I can have fun without alcohol (arguably even more so as my kind of fun tends to be cerebral).
The average Joe is not the customer who loses twenty million dollars when a patch unexpectedly breaks a legacy app three months after it was installed, leading to downtimes as a suitable old version of Windows has to be found and redeployed.
Also, as far as I know DU tends to self-ignite when penetrating armor so you get a great armor-piercing round with added incendiary effect. It's still a bitch to clean up, though.
Best. HTTP filter. Ever.
Seriously, the Proxomitron is the single best Windows app in existance - and a really good reason to install Wine on a Linux box. You can modify both incoming and outgoing headers, replace annoying or broken parts of a webpage using regexp-like expressions... It's essentially Greasemonkey on steroids as a local proxy.
Slashdot Mirror
- An US law will only affect US sites. Even if the USA manage to talk Europe into adopting the law hlaf of the world will still not give a shit. Thus only tags in participating countries are somewhat reliable.
- The PICS tag format is everything but convenient. Actually, when I read up on it yesterday it looked more like a way of describing color spaces in RDF. Considering the number of sites without a DTD and a stated encoding, making PICS part of the standard would lead to a slow and sporadic adoption (unless backed up by a law). Of course the UAs could refuse to read untagged sites but that's hardly going to happen, especially as it would make those parts of the Internet that haven't been updated in a while completely inaccessible.
- The default settings... Hm. There we have the problem of what the majority of people want and what parents want. I could imagine that modt Mozilla devs would not want Fx to limit their ability to surf the web. Then again, that could be fixed by putting in a wizard that runs at first startup and prompts the user to configure this stuff.
- Better educated web developers? Many web developers don't have any education. Explaining PICS to people who have a hard time comprehending that there are character encodings besides windows-1252 would not be fun... Today it's more common to have some kind of internet presence than not and most people don't want to know what META or PICS or a DTD or the W3C is or why they should write standard-compliant HTML when their website shows up correctly in their IE.
Having everyone use PICS or a similar mechanism would be nice, but most of them aren't simple enough to be used by your regular MS Frontpage user and backwards compatibility will ensure that people will only adopt them when it's absolutely necessary (except for the few standards geeks). If the format was really easy to use (ie. hand-codable without significant brain ativity even for non-experts) and there was some kind of incentive to use it (explicit support for such tags by major search engines; Google giving tagged sites a higher PageRank) people might adopt it.By the way, there's one problem with a law requiring sites to state whether they contain pornographic material: What is pornography? What is art? When are the models of legal age? Do actions that are illegal in the USA but legal elsewhere get their own official tags (if the system is fine-grained enough to actually convey informations about the content)? Is there even an official set of tags? If yes, can people define their own tags?
A site containing women wearing nothing but panties in light bondage (the women, not the panties) might be art in Japan, but I'm quite sure that in the USA it would be pornography. There's clearly a conflict here. You can't apply the American standards to sites everywhere on the planet - for example, German webmasters would not be happy that they have to declare that their site shows underage models when all the models are nineteen years old.
The disparity between moral and social standards in different parts of the world would mean that you'd have to have a separate set of tags for every jurisdiction that participates in the mandatory self-rating thing - or you'd have a ratings board where the members are constantly arguing over what's acceptable. Both approaches don't work very well.
Maybe we should just go with the good old semantic web: The website has a machine-readable section that states that almost-nude women in bondage are depicted; the UA has to figure out itself if that's appropriate. Of course that makes it much harder to filter out everything you consider not suitable for your children. Maybe your government (and other organisations) can offer filter lists that contain all "evil" tags they acpect to find on the web. They could add a hotline where you can suggest further tags to be added. That seems to be the most simple and practical solution.
Yeah, but they've already broken the system. Just press F5 - poof, the article is displayed again! This way you can trick the "read twice" detection easily!
Score one for the hackers!
Heh. I'm waiting for the day when people demand that Congress is disbanded and replaced with a democratic entity...
So now even if someone reverse engineers this and posts a how-to you're gonna have to do a LOT more than just d/l and run a simple executable with a few clicks. Likely you'll have to do some soldering, flash a ROM, maybe even buy a mod chip and install it.
No, you have to pay twenty bucks for a little box that goes between your TV and the antenna (or the decoder and the satellite dish/DVB-T antenna) and removes the signal. There will be such devices, whether they're legal or not.
A couple of minutes? Seriously, you should get rid of that piece of junk if possible. Even my el cheapo sat receiver boots up in ten seconds. And the program list is stored internally, so reloading it takes about 0.43 heartbeats. Either you're suffering from atrociously bad vendor lock-in (which seems to be quite common in the States) or your harware is severely outdated and needs to be replaced.
As has aleady been pointed out, there already are suitable technologies that is superior to what this law calls for. A sensible law would just state that all pornographic sites subject to American law have to use PICS, ICRA or another way of putting information about the contents of the website in the META tags. This would also benefit search engines: You could tell Google to not return websites that have a high pornography rating (or only those sites...). The sensible approach would be to encourage and promote self-labeling rather than making random demands.
Then again it's politicians talking. American politicians talking about ponorgaphy. It's utterly impossible that the result is in any way sensible or even realistic.
Not necessarily. You can always give them hormones. Estrogen can seriously hamper the activity of the male reproductive organs...
(And come on - people who expect the state to rise their children for them aren't much better then parents who chemically enforce chastity until an arbitrarily chosen age.)
What's more, if the band self-pen and self-produce they get all those writing and production royalties themselves.
This is really evident with Machinae Supremacy, who turned down a record deal because they wanted to keep the rights to their songs, which gives them the freedom to do stuff like offering everything that doesn't make it into an album (and even some songs that do) as free downloads on their website.
Yeah, once again it's the Swedes who have the best stance on music on the internet. Go Sweden.
That's true. When speaking I usually use "binary *byte" or just "*byte". When writing I make a point of using the correct abbreviations (although I still use the old words when writing the terms out).
You're off by .0001% there, buddy. Next time don't do the calculation on an old Pentium.
Oh, come on. They can't all be real!
The regular FFT had a rather dark story that was surprisingly realistic - it was about a young, idealistic nobleman getting caught up in the political schemings of his brothers who started a war so they could get more power for themselves. No matter where you went, everyone was plotting something - your brothers, the church, even your best friend. In the end some people go completely nuts and summon the game world's equivalent of Jesus who is, as it shows, pretty much nothing like what the church says he is and of course he turns out to be a boss-type monster which you have to kill; it is a Final Fantasy, after all. But apart from that part the story is much more down-to-earth than the usual FF fare and it does have a couple twists.
The characters are great, too - rather than falling into the well-known Final Fantasy roles (the oh-so-heroic hero, the oh-so-evil bad guy, the cute fuzzy party member) they are more like something you'd expect from a cloak-and-dagger movie: The hero is idealistic and doesn't want to believe that everyone he knows is jaded enough to wage a war for personal profit. His best friend changes from a friendly sidekick to the biggest schemer of them all. The high-ranking members of the church are crooked. The characterization is definitely a step above ofther Final Fantasies.
Gameplay-wise the first thing that FFT does bbetter than FFTA is that FFT actually involves tactical combat while FFTA's combat system is just Final Fantasy VII with running around. In FFTA spells and many other skills don't work immediately. The caster first has to cast the spell, which takes some time (depending on how fast the spell is and how far into the battle you are), during which you have to make sure nobody kills him. Also, as most spells affect an area around what you're targetting (which can be either a unit or an area; when you're targetting a unit and it moves so does the spell's center) the enemy can use your own spells against you by moving next to a unit before the spel goes off, so you have to consider that as well. Add to that the fact that the effectiveness of most skills is dependant on the birthsign of the user and the target, on their gender and on the weather and the variables are starting to sum up.
Also, FFT does not have the stupid referee. I mean, WTF? It's a fscking battlefield, why should there be a referee imposing completely artificial rules? What kind of sense does that make? So much for immersion... FFT manages to be hard on its own (although that depends on how you play).
I also consider FFT's job system to be superior. You don't get skills by holding a certain weapon, but rather by accumulating Job Points (which you get by fighting with a certain job or being in battle together with a team member of that job) and then spending them on what you like. It's pretty much lke Final Fantasy V.
Lastly (apart from the graphics; FFT is mostly three-dimensional) there is FFT's extremely great soundtrack. One of the best video game soundtracks ever. Orchestral and - just like the story - somewhat fitting for an old historic drama movie.
Oh, and most FFT players will probably agree that it's perversely amusing to turn Mustadio into an armor-breaking sniper (primary ability: Snipe, secondary ability: Battle Skill, movement ability: Ignore Height, using a gun) and then cripple all enemies (Arm Aim, Leg Aim, Speed Break) and send in someone with the Steal skill to strip them of their equipment before finishing them off. It's good for your war chest, as well.
The truth is: not all Linux experiences are for everybody.
True. As for me, Gentoo is superior - because I heavily depend on packages not commonly found in RPM/DEB base distros' main repositories and upgrading to a new release with third-party packages in place tends to break everything. Gentoo doesn't need release upgrades (as they don't really have distinct releases) so I have to spend less time reinstalling everything. Also, Portage is a very cool package manager.
Oh, and it has quite good 64 bit support.
However, I do understand that most people are fine with RPM or DEB. Gentoo is for you if you know what you want and how you want it. That means decisons like "I want localized X11 apps but all shell apps should not be localized", "I want 64 bit because of the extra registers" or "I need my system to use the NPTL". If you don't (want to) care about stuff like that you really don't want Gentoo.
Linuxquestions is a great resource, that's true. In fact, it's very much what I was thinking about and I feel a bit stupid for not thinking of it (but then again I'm a Gentoo user. All of my questions can be entered by googling for $QUESTION gentoo). It might need a section about the Linux community, though - informations about things like why "Which distro is the best?" is not a good question or what a LUG is.
By the way, there's one thing "wrong" with Linuxquestions: The articles are no presented in the most straightforward way possible. I'm thinking about a FAQ page where the individual questions link to articles explaining the answer. Something that barely needs a navigation. Just questions, answers, done.
There are a lot of snobs, that's true. The fact that most newbie questions tend to ignite flamewars ("Which distribution should I use?") doesn't help either... Newbies are supposed to pick up the basics by themselves and only ask more interesting questions, which obviously doesn't work for everyone. Maybe there should be more (and better) FAQs. You know, sites which answer common questions in easily understandable terms.
However, part of the problem is also the perceived snobbery. Sometimes people automatically assume that you're a snob just because you're a Linux user (seems like Linux has replaced the Mac in that regard), especially when talking about OSes; I have been in a discussion about WinXP vs. Win2k which quickly detoriated into "Microsoft apologists vs. Linux snobs" as one user assumed that all Linux users saying "I prefer Win2k because XP's interface is too damn annoying" use Windows 2000 as a clever analogy for Linux...
Interesting. If my GBA hadn't been stolen I'd try it... But when the DS lite comes out I'll probably buy one and the DS is GBA-compatible as far as I know. (And I do hope that so is the lite.)
A DS tactical RPG, a la Final Fantasy Tactics.
Don't mention it or they might release another drekfest like FFTA! (Warning: Rabid FFT fanboy who hates Squarenix for releasing a sequel which lacked everything that made FFT great)
What I'd like to see would be an X-Com for the DS. The interface could very much take advantage of the two screens and, let's face it, there hasn't been an X-Com for too long. And no, I'm not talking about Interceptor or the hideous abortion that is Enforcer. Just a remake of the first game. Maybe with modernized graphics, although I'd also take the old ones.
But without the Groundhog Day Bug.
Yeah, probably. But our americomania has lost most of it's momentum since the Nineties. The USA aren't that hot around here anymore. We still consume American pop culture like there was nothing else, but we aren't desperately trying to become like them anymore.
Well, we have Blätterkrokant (which is very much Easter-related over here), filled wafer eggs, filled chocolade eggs (usually with something nut-related)... Nut-related stuff in general (mostly almond and hazelnut). And, for the children, egg-shaped candy consisting of sugar and food dye. Oh, of course the Krokant also comes in egg shape. Easter is not exactly a time of many shapes.
Except, of course, for hollow chocolade bunnies. Those are a must-have for children (just like the hollow chocolade Santas at christmas). Two companies (Lindt and Milka) start spamming TV stations with their chocolade bunny ads during March and the things are brands by themselves (with excellent brand recognition). Maybe not exactly traditional stuff, but traditional enough that I grew up having a Milka bunny a reliable (and easily noticable) part of my Easter "harvest".
Almost correct, except for two details: It was a god and he was spelled "Astaire". Fred Astaire saw a dying bird and he danced for it. He danced so well that the bird became a completely healthy hare out of sheer amazement. Inspired by its great idol the hare changed his name to Roger Rabbit and began a mildly successful acting career.
Concerning the eggs, it is widely accepted that Astaire liked his sacrifices scrambled, with a side-order of bacon.
I would actually not be surprised if this -is- indeed a north-american curiosity at worst, and something sold in e.g. the UK+Ireland, Australia and perhaps Germany at best.
Germany isn't exactly known for our international candy stores. Besides, everybody knows that Easter is all about Blätterkrokant. By the way, I was surprised to find no English translation as clearly Blätterkrokant is the One True Easter Food that rules, nay, owns the world. Marshmellow *s are just an US American fad.
That makes sense, but my point is that even though the majority of users (would) install every single patch and thus don't need detailed information about what it does to which parts of the system some very large customers need this very information to identify potentially harmful updates - and while Joe Sixpack might lose a couple dollars worth of data when his system goes haywire a company with a large datacenter might lose much more money and might want it back from Microsoft when it turns out that they could have avoided the problem had they had the information.
Of course Microsoft can't solve all of their problems for them but pushing updates to them without telling them what they do falls into the realm of Microsoft directly causing problems.
Fermented grape juice is a partial answer to the question, "what have the Romans done to us and how can we get back at them for it?"
Now, be honest, do you really drink for the taste? If someone suggested fruit juice instead of wine what would you think?
Yes, I do drink for the taste. I positively hate beer, wine and most other tame alcoholic beverages; the stuff I like usually has about 40 Vol%. This would be quite suitable for fast, hard drinking binges but another thing I positively hate is losing control of my brain. I was drunk once - and after noticing that I had lost my sense of time and that I started pointing out spelling mistakes in my own thoughts I decided that being drunk is not fun at all. Besides, being with drunk people is even less fun so I avoid drinking-heavy occasions anyway.
That means that I have to drink carefully, as my taste isn't particularly suited towards my goals (enjoy the taste but avoid the effects as much as possible).
As for fruit juice: Actually, I prefer water. Towards the end of an evening with about three or four single malts I drink about two liters of water, as drinking much water is a way of avoiding hangovers (the headache comes partially from dehydration). If asked whether I would refrain from drinking anything alcoholic I'd probably agree - I can have fun without alcohol (arguably even more so as my kind of fun tends to be cerebral).
The average Joe is not the customer who loses twenty million dollars when a patch unexpectedly breaks a legacy app three months after it was installed, leading to downtimes as a suitable old version of Windows has to be found and redeployed.
Also, as far as I know DU tends to self-ignite when penetrating armor so you get a great armor-piercing round with added incendiary effect. It's still a bitch to clean up, though.
http://www.proxomitron.info/
Best. HTTP filter. Ever.
Seriously, the Proxomitron is the single best Windows app in existance - and a really good reason to install Wine on a Linux box. You can modify both incoming and outgoing headers, replace annoying or broken parts of a webpage using regexp-like expressions... It's essentially Greasemonkey on steroids as a local proxy.