>Not because I don't support a right to abortion, but because it wasn't accomplished politically, and since it wasn't accomplished politically there's no compromise involved.
So? Either a woman has the right to do such a thing or she doesn't. I doubt your supposed "crowd pleasing" solution would do anything but produce the gateway legislation the religious right/anti-abortion groups keep trying to pass in congress. Not to mention your suggestion would still be abortion in the traditional sense and the anti-abortionists probably wouldn't agree on priciple alone.
Negotiation is great for contracts, but we're talking basic human rights here, not political appeasement. That's one of the points behind a Supreme Court, they're supposed to be apolitical interpreters of the Constitution, not deal cutters.
>People who use windows often pirate copies of commercial software so they don't need or want open source software.
I'd say people as a whole don't like getting into the porn pop-under world of serial websites, P2P spyware, etc just to use a common app. It makes you wonder why the software world is such a free-market failure. Not only are the major players few in number, but they can afford to let others copy their software just for the name recognition, format dominance, and free advertising.
There's also the question of ethics. I'm sure technophobes wonder why they have to either pay through the nose or "steal" and office suite. I wonder how many acrobat users out there know there are free Windows alternatives to producing PDFs?
I think Open souce and linux can only win by becoming more prominent in the windows world. Not only will people go for the easy install and stop serial/crack hunting they'll be exposed to OSS philosophy, name recognition, etc which can only help the transition from Windows to Linux, that is if that's all you care about.
Looks a lot more like they were taken with the movie adaptation of LOTR than the source material itself. A lot of things are "Tolkien inspired," but I think its more fair to call this LOTR movie inspired. The bits of CGI, the trailer, etc all scream, "We really liked Fellowship, lets make our own" instead of,"Lets make a good Tolkien flick."
Afterall, if it didn't try to emulate the "look and feel" of LOTR it would just be another fantasy movie and probably never be posted on slashdot.
Great comment and unfortunately this isn't said often enough. Feel free to post the name and address of a spammer all over the internet, but he's only the messenger. If anyone should be harassed its the owners, marketers, etc of the companies which thrive on spam.
>Yes, it's certainly in Eisner's interests to extend copyrights (including doing it retroactively). I do not fault him for endorsing such a policy.
I do. If I was a shareholder I would much prefer an intellingent and fiscally conservsative exit-strategy for the character instead of taking a chance with the courts and congress.
Arguably, they've already distanced themselves considerably from the Steamboat Willie character. Knowing that their modern Mouse trademark is more or less immortal they took a chance extending IP and it worked. Disney wins, everyone else loses.
Its the equavilant of a pharamcetucal company demanding a few more years on their patent because they have the clout to do so.
Tivo's interface blows away any VCR interface. An easy to use GUI with an up-to-date channel guide that can list every show on television this month if need be is very handy. VCR+ is nice, but its nothing compared Tivos programming features.
No Tape Management
No one archives everything. When I use a VCR its always, "Where on this 4 hour tape is that episode I want to put on a compilation tape." Or "Hold on, its on here somewhere!" On top of that is the terrible loss of quality of a tape to tape copy. Tivo has one non-removable disk with a simple "Send to VCR" function if you want to record or capture something.
Pausing
It doesn't seem like a big deal to the uninitiated, but it sucks not having it. If I'm watching a normal TV I feel like its in controt. My instict is to hit pause when life interrupts. Its just weird being forced to miss part of a movie when you haven't missed a second of anything in months.
Fast Forward/Rewind/Slow-Mo
These are handier than you'd think. They're actually usable in digital form. Consumer level tape machines have horrible controls. Its more like a high-speed beta with a nice toggle wheel than a VCR. As cool as commercial skipping is, there's nothing like "Bad Conan guest" skipping.
Picture Quality
My tivo records the MPEG-2 stream from Direct TV directly to disk. Can't beat that.
>I could go on and on too. I swear I could strangle the jackasses who confuse the tools people use with the stupid things they do with the tools.
The tool isn't completely safe from criticism just because a person is using it. If the tool lends itself to certain behavior then the manfucaturer is liable also - to a certain degree. Think Microsoft's security. Think easy to swallow kid's toys.
Why don't cell phones have functions that would fix all these little social problems? It would be trivial to install a signal that theaters and other venues that don't want to deal with ringers could send to set ALL phones in the area to vibrate.
Or detect the doppler shift so the person can set their phone to "don't ring when I'm driving."
Report cell phone tower to parents who give their kids cell phones in case they want to see where they're at?
Oh course it would only be fair for the owner of the cell phone to disable these features, but the industry sure isn't helping. You can put your head in the sand and pretend this purely a social problem, but its really a technological problem mixed with a social problem.
Simply put, the tools should be a lot better considering typical human behavior.
> The naturalistic approach to science (for example) assumes that all phenomena can and must be explained without reference to anyone or anything outside the observable universe. This is a prejudice
No its not prejudice, its an assumption. To do science you need to accept certain core assumptions to make any meaningful information. Assumptions like causality, materialism, uncertainty, etc.
>I have to disagree. Generally, I'd say that making more data available helps a system as a whole.
Generally, yes, but what of the privacy of the consumer? That seems to be the real issue here. Its fairly obvious we're living in a time where an incredible amount of data can be collected about an individual very cheaply. Without some kind of state-level legislation protecting what Bob-knows should be private data then there will continue to be backlash.
Perhaps the laws governing technology, research funding, etc have a place on the simplistic "liberal/conservative" spectrum, but science itself, the pursuit of knowledge is apolitical.
Your suggetion that RU-486's development or even the research that fathered its development is politically driven has a scary luddite feel to it, something like the "arguments" the populace used to buy about the religious amorality of experimenting on cadavers not so long ago. Which itself caused untold suffering by holding back medical science, which is what the Bush administration along with the religious right are planning on doing on other types of research right now. Stem cells anyone?
Is it really so "liberal" to sell RU-486 in a society in which abortions are legal? Sounds like good sense to avoid the physical abortion procedure.
I don't know whats more pathetic, that conservativism now means "in bed with big business and big religion" or that we still haven't learned the lessons of history. Not to mention co-opting the word "liberal" to mean anything that isn't religiously conservative is more than a bit disingenuous.
>And that means educating users to NOT FUCKING BUY ANYTHING SOLD THROUGH SPAM
Why the carrot and not the stick? Imagine spam honeypots luring the people who answer spam into giving up their credit cards and posting them publicly. Or listing names of people who visit honeypot sites like animalsexxxxxxx.com through a spam click. Make sure to report them to their employer if this is done during 9-5.
Then we'll see the obligatory news articles about hackers co-opting spam. Something tells me that all the spam marketers and companies that use spam won't be much of a problem when Joe Blow is worried about hackers and losing his job over spam.
A couple corrections first. Sony did not develop the MUD game system and EQ is largely a graphical DIKU MUD named Sojourn. There's no conspiracy to addict gamers. Gamers play to compete. They want to level or get the staff of smacking or whatever for primarily social reasons. I think its safe to say EQ wouldn't be such a hit if it was all offline and AI based.
So we're back to the old MUD problem: how to keep people playing for fun without it becoming a big social competition. Restricting hours playable a day is one solution, but I'm sure that would lead into more complaints about being ripped off by Sony.
> I think the people who take Creation literally is failing to see that God (if we assume there is one) was explaining this to people 2000 years ago.
That's why creationists believe what they do, because some ancient culture came up with a creation myth and it remains in modern culture today. The problems you mention regarding the "how's and why's" probably has a lot more to do with the cognitive dissonance of being aware of scientific cosmology and holding religious beliefs at the same time. The two rarely agree and its easy to mix them up in some ridiculous and impossible to falsify "God did it all" theory/philosophy.
>My God is a God of surprises which does not put answers to all of life's problems in simple, small packages.
Why are the believers always publicly rationalizing their religious beliefs? "My god is this" or "my god is that" doesn't build credibility, it just shows a someone unwilling to let go of a parasitic belief.
These lists would be a lot more useful if the editors made some effort to link to the games' official pages and especially to playable demos. I don't know what the game industry expects from consumers, but if I can't test it out I sure as hell am not going to blow $30-50 on word of mouth.
I did find the Syberia demo, but I think its being slashdotted.
While I'm at it, may web designers who embed music into html die horrible deaths.
Re:Okay ... a few things that really bug me here .
on
The End of Solotrek
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
>What benefit would a personal flying machine have?
Umm, ariel urban combat perhaps?
>Are we trying to increase the death rate?
Only of the enemy.
>how the hell could you fire a weapon etc. with no hands?
HUD with a weapons system control on one of the sticks. This is like asking how a pilot can use the stick and fire a weapon at the same time.
Nitpicking aside, I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with the strap-on helicopter concept, but just because SoloTrek can't do it doesn't mean its necessarily a bad idea.
>I believe there are a fair number of other ways through which to obtain this someone's name from their plate, e.g. if you have friends in the police or DMV.
Hell, just goto the local Jiffy Lube. Name, address, phone, license, etc all get put into the computer and get this, they're using wifi. From now on I'm John Smithe, 666 Mockingbird Lane.
I'd like to see this done on a $199 Lindows/Ly-whatever Walmart PC just in time for the holiday season. Or just install Mandrake on there. Show them they can do all the Windows/Mac stuff from a free OS.
I'd start off with Phoenix loading up five or six homepages on boot and playing around with features like outline and search, pop-up blocking, middle-click opens new tab, tabbed bookmarks, etc.
Move on over to some popular site and do something. Goto fark.com and 'photoshop' a photo using gimp. Make it funny.
Show off evolution's Outlook-like interface. Show them the features. Make sure they know its free and Outlook sure isn't. Install a client side spam filter and show it off.
Fire up Open Office and edit a Word document.
In a nutshell, make it as 'windowsy' and non-threatening as possible.
>So really, I don't consider there to be any difference between traditional addictions like nicotine
Sorry, but that's just stupid. You will not experience real physical withdrawal when coming off MUDs or THC. You will do so coming off opiates and other addictive substances. People have died during withdrawal. Psychological addiction is NOT physical addiction, not by a long shot.
Slashdot Mirror
>Medieval Fantasy meets LEGO Again
Medieval Fanatic fails to impress girls with LEGOs. Again.
>Not because I don't support a right to abortion, but because it wasn't accomplished politically, and since it wasn't accomplished politically there's no compromise involved.
So? Either a woman has the right to do such a thing or she doesn't. I doubt your supposed "crowd pleasing" solution would do anything but produce the gateway legislation the religious right/anti-abortion groups keep trying to pass in congress. Not to mention your suggestion would still be abortion in the traditional sense and the anti-abortionists probably wouldn't agree on priciple alone.
Negotiation is great for contracts, but we're talking basic human rights here, not political appeasement. That's one of the points behind a Supreme Court, they're supposed to be apolitical interpreters of the Constitution, not deal cutters.
>People who use windows often pirate copies of commercial software so they don't need or want open source software.
I'd say people as a whole don't like getting into the porn pop-under world of serial websites, P2P spyware, etc just to use a common app. It makes you wonder why the software world is such a free-market failure. Not only are the major players few in number, but they can afford to let others copy their software just for the name recognition, format dominance, and free advertising.
There's also the question of ethics. I'm sure technophobes wonder why they have to either pay through the nose or "steal" and office suite. I wonder how many acrobat users out there know there are free Windows alternatives to producing PDFs?
I think Open souce and linux can only win by becoming more prominent in the windows world. Not only will people go for the easy install and stop serial/crack hunting they'll be exposed to OSS philosophy, name recognition, etc which can only help the transition from Windows to Linux, that is if that's all you care about.
Looks a lot more like they were taken with the movie adaptation of LOTR than the source material itself. A lot of things are "Tolkien inspired," but I think its more fair to call this LOTR movie inspired. The bits of CGI, the trailer, etc all scream, "We really liked Fellowship, lets make our own" instead of ,"Lets make a good Tolkien flick."
Afterall, if it didn't try to emulate the "look and feel" of LOTR it would just be another fantasy movie and probably never be posted on slashdot.
>It is the business sponsoring it.
Great comment and unfortunately this isn't said often enough. Feel free to post the name and address of a spammer all over the internet, but he's only the messenger. If anyone should be harassed its the owners, marketers, etc of the companies which thrive on spam.
Nice, I also maintain one here for those interested:
http://www.everythingisnt.com/hosts.html
http://www.everythingisnt.com/features/segway.html
>Yes, it's certainly in Eisner's interests to extend copyrights (including doing it retroactively). I do not fault him for endorsing such a policy.
I do. If I was a shareholder I would much prefer an intellingent and fiscally conservsative exit-strategy for the character instead of taking a chance with the courts and congress.
Arguably, they've already distanced themselves considerably from the Steamboat Willie character. Knowing that their modern Mouse trademark is more or less immortal they took a chance extending IP
and it worked. Disney wins, everyone else loses.
Its the equavilant of a pharamcetucal company demanding a few more years on their patent because they have the clout to do so.
Not only is it New Years, but I just wasted my 1,000th post on this. Talk about geek cred.
Interface
Tivo's interface blows away any VCR interface. An easy to use GUI with an up-to-date channel guide that can list every show on television this month if need be is very handy. VCR+ is nice, but its nothing compared Tivos programming features.
No Tape Management
No one archives everything. When I use a VCR its always, "Where on this 4 hour tape is that episode I want to put on a compilation tape." Or "Hold on, its on here somewhere!" On top of that is the terrible loss of quality of a tape to tape copy. Tivo has one non-removable disk with a simple "Send to VCR" function if you want to record or capture something.
Pausing
It doesn't seem like a big deal to the uninitiated, but it sucks not having it. If I'm watching a normal TV I feel like its in controt. My instict is to hit pause when life interrupts. Its just weird being forced to miss part of a movie when you haven't missed a second of anything in months.
Fast Forward/Rewind/Slow-Mo
These are handier than you'd think. They're actually usable in digital form. Consumer level tape machines have horrible controls. Its more like a high-speed beta with a nice toggle wheel than a VCR. As cool as commercial skipping is, there's nothing like "Bad Conan guest" skipping.
Picture Quality
My tivo records the MPEG-2 stream from Direct TV directly to disk. Can't beat that.
>I could go on and on too. I swear I could strangle the jackasses who confuse the tools people use with the stupid things they do with the tools.
The tool isn't completely safe from criticism just because a person is using it. If the tool lends itself to certain behavior then the manfucaturer is liable also - to a certain degree. Think Microsoft's security. Think easy to swallow kid's toys.
Why don't cell phones have functions that would fix all these little social problems? It would be trivial to install a signal that theaters and other venues that don't want to deal with ringers could send to set ALL phones in the area to vibrate.
Or detect the doppler shift so the person can set their phone to "don't ring when I'm driving."
Report cell phone tower to parents who give their kids cell phones in case they want to see where they're at?
Oh course it would only be fair for the owner of the cell phone to disable these features, but the industry sure isn't helping. You can put your head in the sand and pretend this purely a social problem, but its really a technological problem mixed with a social problem.
Simply put, the tools should be a lot better considering typical human behavior.
I think you're stretching and misusing the definition of prejudice. Oh well, there's always solipsism for the non-"prejudiced."
> The naturalistic approach to science (for example) assumes that all phenomena can and must be explained without reference to anyone or anything outside the observable universe. This is a prejudice
No its not prejudice, its an assumption. To do science you need to accept certain core assumptions to make any meaningful information. Assumptions like causality, materialism, uncertainty, etc.
>I have to disagree. Generally, I'd say that making more data available helps a system as a whole.
Generally, yes, but what of the privacy of the consumer? That seems to be the real issue here. Its fairly obvious we're living in a time where an incredible amount of data can be collected about an individual very cheaply. Without some kind of state-level legislation protecting what Bob-knows should be private data then there will continue to be backlash.
Perhaps the laws governing technology, research funding, etc have a place on the simplistic "liberal/conservative" spectrum, but science itself, the pursuit of knowledge is apolitical.
Your suggetion that RU-486's development or even the research that fathered its development is politically driven has a scary luddite feel to it, something like the "arguments" the populace used to buy about the religious amorality of experimenting on cadavers not so long ago. Which itself caused untold suffering by holding back medical science, which is what the Bush administration along with the religious right are planning on doing on other types of research right now. Stem cells anyone?
Is it really so "liberal" to sell RU-486 in a society in which abortions are legal? Sounds like good sense to avoid the physical abortion procedure.
I don't know whats more pathetic, that conservativism now means "in bed with big business and big religion" or that we still haven't learned the lessons of history. Not to mention co-opting the word "liberal" to mean anything that isn't religiously conservative is more than a bit disingenuous.
>And that means educating users to NOT FUCKING BUY ANYTHING SOLD THROUGH SPAM
Why the carrot and not the stick? Imagine spam honeypots luring the people who answer spam into giving up their credit cards and posting them publicly. Or listing names of people who visit honeypot sites like animalsexxxxxxx.com through a spam click. Make sure to report them to their employer if this is done during 9-5.
Then we'll see the obligatory news articles about hackers co-opting spam. Something tells me that all the spam marketers and companies that use spam won't be much of a problem when Joe Blow is worried about hackers and losing his job over spam.
A couple corrections first. Sony did not develop the MUD game system and EQ is largely a graphical DIKU MUD named Sojourn. There's no conspiracy to addict gamers. Gamers play to compete. They want to level or get the staff of smacking or whatever for primarily social reasons. I think its safe to say EQ wouldn't be such a hit if it was all offline and AI based.
So we're back to the old MUD problem: how to keep people playing for fun without it becoming a big social competition. Restricting hours playable a day is one solution, but I'm sure that would lead into more complaints about being ripped off by Sony.
> I think the people who take Creation literally is failing to see that God (if we assume there is one) was explaining this to people 2000 years ago.
That's why creationists believe what they do, because some ancient culture came up with a creation myth and it remains in modern culture today. The problems you mention regarding the "how's and why's" probably has a lot more to do with the cognitive dissonance of being aware of scientific cosmology and holding religious beliefs at the same time. The two rarely agree and its easy to mix them up in some ridiculous and impossible to falsify "God did it all" theory/philosophy.
>My God is a God of surprises which does not put answers to all of life's problems in simple, small packages.
Why are the believers always publicly rationalizing their religious beliefs? "My god is this" or "my god is that" doesn't build credibility, it just shows a someone unwilling to let go of a parasitic belief.
Yes, provided you're a paid member, at least for most of the demos.
These lists would be a lot more useful if the editors made some effort to link to the games' official pages and especially to playable demos. I don't know what the game industry expects from consumers, but if I can't test it out I sure as hell am not going to blow $30-50 on word of mouth.
I did find the Syberia demo, but I think its being slashdotted.
While I'm at it, may web designers who embed music into html die horrible deaths.
>What benefit would a personal flying machine have?
Umm, ariel urban combat perhaps?
>Are we trying to increase the death rate?
Only of the enemy.
>how the hell could you fire a weapon etc. with no hands?
HUD with a weapons system control on one of the sticks. This is like asking how a pilot can use the stick and fire a weapon at the same time.
Nitpicking aside, I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with the strap-on helicopter concept, but just because SoloTrek can't do it doesn't mean its necessarily a bad idea.
>I believe there are a fair number of other ways through which to obtain this someone's name from their plate, e.g. if you have friends in the police or DMV.
Hell, just goto the local Jiffy Lube. Name, address, phone, license, etc all get put into the computer and get this, they're using wifi. From now on I'm John Smithe, 666 Mockingbird Lane.
The parent post is great.
I'd like to see this done on a $199 Lindows/Ly-whatever Walmart PC just in time for the holiday season. Or just install Mandrake on there. Show them they can do all the Windows/Mac stuff from a free OS.
I'd start off with Phoenix loading up five or six homepages on boot and playing around with features like outline and search, pop-up blocking, middle-click opens new tab, tabbed bookmarks, etc.
Move on over to some popular site and do something. Goto fark.com and 'photoshop' a photo using gimp. Make it funny.
Show off evolution's Outlook-like interface. Show them the features. Make sure they know its free and Outlook sure isn't. Install a client side spam filter and show it off.
Fire up Open Office and edit a Word document.
In a nutshell, make it as 'windowsy' and non-threatening as possible.
>So really, I don't consider there to be any difference between traditional addictions like nicotine
Sorry, but that's just stupid. You will not experience real physical withdrawal when coming off MUDs or THC. You will do so coming off opiates and other addictive substances. People have died during withdrawal. Psychological addiction is NOT physical addiction, not by a long shot.