Those who want to be soft on sex offenders are most likely not parents, and most definitely not parents of a child who has been abused.
Wow, watch those strawmen fly!
I'm a parent, and I'm guessing that under your worldview, I want to be `soft on sex offenders'. But I don't see it that way -- instead, I want the punishment to fit the crime. If you're 17 and have sex with your 15 year old girlfriend, you should be grounded for a week, perhaps have your cell phone taken away. Peeing on the side of a building? $50 fine. Rape a 3 year old girl to within an inch of her life? Life in prison, perhaps even the death penalty.
`Sex offender registration' is a huge crock. All it really does is let us take some people, found guilty of certain offenses, and make them pariahs for life. I imagine the original premise was to protect society from these dangerous predators, but in many cases they're not predators at all! And why only sex crimes? I'd be FAR more concerned if the guy next door killed his neighbor in a fight 10 years ago than if he got caught diddling the 16 year old girl next door when he was 19 -- but guess which one has to register?
I might be better able to support registration as either further punishment or to protect society if it applied to all crimes of a certain level, not just `sex crimes'. But even then I can't really support it -- when you've paid your debt to society, that should be the end of it. And if you're too dangerous to be let out, then you shouldn't be let out -- the sex offender registry should not be a `last ditch' sort of thing.
And what good does the sex offender registry do? Sure, it gives people a list of names of people to harass, to run out of town, to lynch, to kill. And you can tell your kids to avoid these houses, but what good does that really do? Has anybody ever shown that knowing where the sex offenders in town were led to children (we're worried about protecting the children, right?) who were less likely to be the victims of crime (or sex crimes, if you want to be more specific?)
And the whole banning them from the Internet thing, even worse...
And you should always do what you're told, even if it sounds like, or is, not the best option? Baaaa, I will obey, baaaa. Well, that IS what high school is meant to be like. We don't let people think for themselves until at least college.
What will Microsoft provide? We will provide to you the software and necessary licensing to accomplish the data collection. Specifically Microsoft will provide you with: * All software, including documentation, required to gather data regarding your home computer use.
I guess technically, `the software and necessary licensing' could mean the OS too, but I really don't see anything that says you get Vista for free. It sounds like they will just let you download their monitoring program free -- I can't find anything that says you actually get Vista or Office or whatever. If I read this right, the benefit to you is that you get to tell them what you think about your Microsoft software and what you do with it, and well, that's it. If you get free (beyond their monitoring application) Microsoft software, I can't find where they say this.
It also says this --
Download and install the software on your Windows Vista or Windows XP computer if you are joining the automated feedback program.
... and somehow, I don't think this means `download Vista or XP'... it means download their software to your computer that already has Vista or XP.
What seems more likely would be some sort of technological singularity happening sometime after we start making intelligent machines. Of course, this might turn into this `Skynet' that you're referring to -- but if it does, I don't think there will be much of a chance of humankind prevailing if the machines decide that we should be gotten rid of.
The FOSS system is great - probably the one thing that someone ten years ago would not have predicted.
Of course they would not have predicted it 10 years ago -- because it had already existed for quite some time.
Free/Open source software is a lot older than ten years old. Even Linux, perhaps one of the most commonly mentioned examples, is sixteen years old, and GNU was around long before that, and free/open source software was certainly around before that, even if people didn't usually call it such. RMS's GNU history page talks about him quitting MIT to writing GNU software in 1984, for example, and he certainly mentions that there was lots of free and open source software before that.
Unless you're referring to some specific FOSS system? Or perhaps referring to how it has really taken off? Sure, Linux (and FreeBSD, OpenBSD, etc.) have become much more popular in the last ten years, but it was just a continuation of a trend that was already in motion (scary -- I've been using Linux for 15 years now, since 0.95something!) And even today, while Linux and friends are popular in servers, they're relatively still rare on the desktop. (I say, as I type this on a Linux box.)
Yes, you were ripped off. You should complain, loudly, and get your money back. Or should have, whenever this happened. A picture of the screen saying `this is a demo!' and the package that does not say it's a demo should be more than enough to convince any retailer (even places like Wal-Mart with `no software return' policies to refund your money.)
However, that does not change the fact that Deus Ex rocked and Deus Ex 2 sucked.
Also, note that $20 for an old game is not *cheap*. $5 would be cheap, and $10 seems to be the normal cost for their bargain-bin games like that. I know the packaging you're referring to -- the size of a CD case, with minimal if any documentation included. The full game packaging is larger.
I agree that the F-35 looks way cool, but `stop dead at will and hover in mid-air'... I doubt it's quite that easy, and it's only the F-35B, and they gave up a lot of other things for the ability to land vertically. They say it's STOL rather than VTOL -- perhaps it doesn't have quite enough thrust to gain altitude from the ground?
Right, it wasn't so important to hack every single vending machine you saw, but you probably found a lot more value in hacking every single turret, bot, camera, and health station. Especially the cameras, because bad guys would come by and the turret would send 'bots after 'em, and the bad guy would attack the bots and not the camera, so it would just keep sending bots until the guy was dead. Especially useful for Big Daddies when you had the security bullseye plasmid. Having the splicers try to heal at your 0wned health station was satisfying too:)
But as for the hacking minigame itself, meh. It wasn't really fun, it was a means to an end. Fortunately, it wasn't very hard.
Take it home, read the SSA, return the still-sealed box for a full refund? Sure, that works. But do you think that's actually reasonable? When you buy a car, you agree to a smaller contract than this -- and thats even if you include financing!
Agreeing to 5000 words of legaleze just to play a game? And again, I saw nothing in this legaleze that said that the game was tied to a specific territory or region and they could shut it off if you left it.
You mean the agreement that you can't read until you're actually installing the product because it's not printed on the box?
Yes, I think that's the exact agreement he's referring to.
Though my (American) Orange Box says `Please see http://www.steampowered.com/agreement to view the SSA prior to purchase'. (SSA = Steam Subscriber Agreement). Excuse me while I go home and look this URL up, then come back to the store to buy it if the EULA meets with my agreement...
Reading through that, I see nothing that lets them cut you off just because you bought your game from the `wrong' country. But then again, it is 5165 words (titled `Welcome to Steam' no less!) so maybe I missed something. The average reader's speed is 200-250 words per minute. Assuming 250 wpm, that's 21 minutes just reading their Steam agreement -- and this is complicated reading that people generally aren't familiar with, so they probably have to slow down (and maybe look some legal terms up) if they really want to understand it.
I guess the EULA would have to be on the web -- there's not enough room for the EULA, even if we use the entire outside of the box and every piece of paper inside. (Granted, there's only one piece of paper inside...)
Of course, if you download your game from the Internet and use a Steam crack, they can't turn it off...
It seems to me that Valve is trying to punish their paying customers because they didn't pay *enough*. And that sounds like a mistake on their part. If they want everybody to pay the same price, don't sell the game for less in other countries...
You mean like the US? There was no law violated here (by the customers -- Valve might be another matter) that I'm aware of, just some arbitrary policy that Valve probably buried deep in some EULA or something.
In any event, this sounds like a lawsuit waiting to happen. And the bad publicity is likely to cost Valve/Steam far more than any additional revenue they make from selling the game twice. Valve wants us to believe that we should like Steam, but abusing it like this is not going to help there.
The reason why B5 was such a breath of fresh air...
The reason I mentioned B5 is that the ships seemed to have to obey the laws of physics. Especially the Star Furys seemed real-world. Granted, hyperspace and such doesn't fit so well, but the rest seemed far more realistic.
But yeah, I loved B5. (And Star Trek, for that matter, but B5 was better.)
and we get Newtonian-physics-accurate battle scenes in normal space. Considering that their impulse drives can get them to significant percentages of c, and warp drive is much faster -- and people don't get splattered across the bridge every time they make a course change, I'd say probably not.
ATA 133 (I will assume this, due to the "aging hd mentioned) is only 17MB/sec for comparison's sake. No, ATA 133 is theoretically 133 MB/s. It's bytes, not bits.
And I used to regularly get sustained 25-30 MB/s from single drives (40 GB or so) on ATA 33 interfaces. Going to ATA 66, 100 or 133 may increase the speed when hitting the on-drive cache, but the drives themselves usually can't go that fast. How fast are the fastest IDE drives nowadays for sustained, sequential transfers -- 50 MB/s or so?
I buy most of them used for a pittance That is currently legal, but give the RIAA (and MPAA, book publishers, etc.) time -- they'll be working on closing this `loophole' in the law soon enough. Well, they've already made some noises about it, but so far they have not really succeeded, except via DRM.
They're defending Sen. Craig, not exactly a card-carrying member. I don't think the ACLU only defends people who carry membership cards.
In any event, while Senator Craig seems to be quite the hypocrite, I'd say the ACLU's support of him is appropriate and in tune with their stated mission. And all they've done so far that I'm aware of is send a letter, which doesn't cost much.
The ACLU probably would have been interested in this case if they were contacted (I don't know if they were or not), but they have to pick their battles -- they tend to go for ones that have far-reaching implications, and I don't know if this one qualifies.
In any event, I find it to be a good thing that the ACLU will assist even those whom have already been tried and found guilty by the court of public opinion, and it's one of several reasons why I send them money too.
Censorship is not possible on the Internet, period. Censorship of certain things is not easy on the Internet, but it's not impossible. If there is something that has a severe penalty for having, and few people want anyways, and even having it has a really strong stigma against it, it's effectively censored even for those who do want it. Case in point? Child pornography. Yes, there's some on the Internet, but it's very effectively censored. And the few cases where it can be found on the Internet, it's generally either 1) very carefully hidden and protected, 2) very obvious, because it was posted to `frame' somebody else (and therefore removed quickly), or 3) only marginally child porn, if it all. A picture of your six month old daughter taking a bath is not child porn, but people have beenarrested for things like that before.
But of course, none of this helps Mediadefender. But don't go pretending that Internet censorship is impossible, period.
Guy may mean:
* Informal term or address, often for a man or boy originated shortly after the execution of Guy Fawkes; the plural form "guys" is often used without regard to gender
`Vision correctable to 20/20' might just mean 20/20 vision with glasses.
Which would indeed be a first. A lot of things like this have traditionally required 20/20 vision -- no glasses, no contacts, and no surgery on your eyes to correct vision permitted.
I'm guessing that you're not likely to get to fly the Shuttle or anything like that (they probably DO want `Top Gun' types, or at least commercial jet pilots), but if you ever do go into space (and most astronauts don't) then you'd probably doing experiments and the like. And for that, it's OK to need glasses. It's probably OK to need glasses if you're flying the Shuttle or a fighter too, but there's always the chance they'd fall off and that could lead to a very expensive mistake...
And just what constitutes 'relevant professional experience.'? Well, just look at what most astronauts over the years did before becoming astronauts. I seem to recall a lot of military pilots doing it, for example.
Though my guess is that they're less looking for `Top Gun' types of guys and more for the brainy scientist guys -- but guys who are physically fit too. And so relevant professional experience would probably mean doing brainy scientist sorts of things. I imagine the military still has a lot of people like this...
Though in general, if you want a job, apply -- even if you don't fit all their qualifications exactly. I doubt this is any different -- though I imagine that they won't be hiring many people who merely have bachelors degrees. I'd expect them to pick PhDs instead. Especially if I'm right about the sort of people they want.
Most people with IT degrees aren't very "social" and rarely run for office, if ever. Most people working in IT don't have IT degrees. They either don't have a degree, or have a degree in something else. For example, my degrees are in physics and astronomy.
Give it a few years, we'll get more geeks in office.
"Open source" is a term of art with a very specific meaning That's one definition. Here is another. `Of or relating to source code that is available to the public'.
People redefining words to fit their agenda (for good or bad) is nothing new. And like it or not, the English language is ambiguous, and one word or phrase may mean different things to different people. And just because they use a definition that doesn't jive with the one you prefer, that doesn't mean they're `wrong'.
Anyone in the software field, or any related field, who thinks that "open source simply means the source is available" is dangerously ignorant. Anyone who speaks English but honestly thinks that words or phrases can only have one meaning is either 1) in denial or 2) doesn't really speak English.
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I'm a parent, and I'm guessing that under your worldview, I want to be `soft on sex offenders'. But I don't see it that way -- instead, I want the punishment to fit the crime. If you're 17 and have sex with your 15 year old girlfriend, you should be grounded for a week, perhaps have your cell phone taken away. Peeing on the side of a building? $50 fine. Rape a 3 year old girl to within an inch of her life? Life in prison, perhaps even the death penalty.
`Sex offender registration' is a huge crock. All it really does is let us take some people, found guilty of certain offenses, and make them pariahs for life. I imagine the original premise was to protect society from these dangerous predators, but in many cases they're not predators at all! And why only sex crimes? I'd be FAR more concerned if the guy next door killed his neighbor in a fight 10 years ago than if he got caught diddling the 16 year old girl next door when he was 19 -- but guess which one has to register?
I might be better able to support registration as either further punishment or to protect society if it applied to all crimes of a certain level, not just `sex crimes'. But even then I can't really support it -- when you've paid your debt to society, that should be the end of it. And if you're too dangerous to be let out, then you shouldn't be let out -- the sex offender registry should not be a `last ditch' sort of thing.
And what good does the sex offender registry do? Sure, it gives people a list of names of people to harass, to run out of town, to lynch, to kill. And you can tell your kids to avoid these houses, but what good does that really do? Has anybody ever shown that knowing where the sex offenders in town were led to children (we're worried about protecting the children, right?) who were less likely to be the victims of crime (or sex crimes, if you want to be more specific?)
And the whole banning them from the Internet thing, even worse ...
... and somehow, I don't think this means `download Vista or XP'It also says this --
What seems more likely would be some sort of technological singularity happening sometime after we start making intelligent machines. Of course, this might turn into this `Skynet' that you're referring to -- but if it does, I don't think there will be much of a chance of humankind prevailing if the machines decide that we should be gotten rid of.
Free/Open source software is a lot older than ten years old. Even Linux, perhaps one of the most commonly mentioned examples, is sixteen years old, and GNU was around long before that, and free/open source software was certainly around before that, even if people didn't usually call it such. RMS's GNU history page talks about him quitting MIT to writing GNU software in 1984, for example, and he certainly mentions that there was lots of free and open source software before that.
Unless you're referring to some specific FOSS system? Or perhaps referring to how it has really taken off? Sure, Linux (and FreeBSD, OpenBSD, etc.) have become much more popular in the last ten years, but it was just a continuation of a trend that was already in motion (scary -- I've been using Linux for 15 years now, since 0.95something!) And even today, while Linux and friends are popular in servers, they're relatively still rare on the desktop. (I say, as I type this on a Linux box.)
However, that does not change the fact that Deus Ex rocked and Deus Ex 2 sucked.
Also, note that $20 for an old game is not *cheap*. $5 would be cheap, and $10 seems to be the normal cost for their bargain-bin games like that. I know the packaging you're referring to -- the size of a CD case, with minimal if any documentation included. The full game packaging is larger.
Not quite Macross ... but getting closer.
But as for the hacking minigame itself, meh. It wasn't really fun, it was a means to an end. Fortunately, it wasn't very hard.
Agreeing to 5000 words of legaleze just to play a game? And again, I saw nothing in this legaleze that said that the game was tied to a specific territory or region and they could shut it off if you left it.
This is screaming for a class action lawsuit.
Though my (American) Orange Box says `Please see http://www.steampowered.com/agreement to view the SSA prior to purchase'. (SSA = Steam Subscriber Agreement). Excuse me while I go home and look this URL up, then come back to the store to buy it if the EULA meets with my agreement
Reading through that, I see nothing that lets them cut you off just because you bought your game from the `wrong' country. But then again, it is 5165 words (titled `Welcome to Steam' no less!) so maybe I missed something. The average reader's speed is 200-250 words per minute. Assuming 250 wpm, that's 21 minutes just reading their Steam agreement -- and this is complicated reading that people generally aren't familiar with, so they probably have to slow down (and maybe look some legal terms up) if they really want to understand it.
I guess the EULA would have to be on the web -- there's not enough room for the EULA, even if we use the entire outside of the box and every piece of paper inside. (Granted, there's only one piece of paper inside ...)
Of course, if you download your game from the Internet and use a Steam crack, they can't turn it off ...
It seems to me that Valve is trying to punish their paying customers because they didn't pay *enough*. And that sounds like a mistake on their part. If they want everybody to pay the same price, don't sell the game for less in other countries ...
In any event, this sounds like a lawsuit waiting to happen. And the bad publicity is likely to cost Valve/Steam far more than any additional revenue they make from selling the game twice. Valve wants us to believe that we should like Steam, but abusing it like this is not going to help there.
I'm almost camera shy!
It's only a lie if you know it not to be true.
In this case, it sounds like an honest mistake.
But yeah, I loved B5. (And Star Trek, for that matter, but B5 was better.)
Babylon 5 is over there
And I used to regularly get sustained 25-30 MB/s from single drives (40 GB or so) on ATA 33 interfaces. Going to ATA 66, 100 or 133 may increase the speed when hitting the on-drive cache, but the drives themselves usually can't go that fast. How fast are the fastest IDE drives nowadays for sustained, sequential transfers -- 50 MB/s or so?
In any event, while Senator Craig seems to be quite the hypocrite, I'd say the ACLU's support of him is appropriate and in tune with their stated mission. And all they've done so far that I'm aware of is send a letter, which doesn't cost much.
The ACLU probably would have been interested in this case if they were contacted (I don't know if they were or not), but they have to pick their battles -- they tend to go for ones that have far-reaching implications, and I don't know if this one qualifies.
In any event, I find it to be a good thing that the ACLU will assist even those whom have already been tried and found guilty by the court of public opinion, and it's one of several reasons why I send them money too.
But of course, none of this helps Mediadefender. But don't go pretending that Internet censorship is impossible, period.
Not as rare as you might think. Lots of well educated people participate in strenuous sports of some sort.
Or are you referring to the `not a guy' part ... there's a few of those out there too.
BTW--I live in Florida and work in aerospace, so if you do go to work as an astronaut, look me up! The jobs appear to be in HoustonWhich would indeed be a first. A lot of things like this have traditionally required 20/20 vision -- no glasses, no contacts, and no surgery on your eyes to correct vision permitted.
I'm guessing that you're not likely to get to fly the Shuttle or anything like that (they probably DO want `Top Gun' types, or at least commercial jet pilots), but if you ever do go into space (and most astronauts don't) then you'd probably doing experiments and the like. And for that, it's OK to need glasses. It's probably OK to need glasses if you're flying the Shuttle or a fighter too, but there's always the chance they'd fall off and that could lead to a very expensive mistake ...
Though my guess is that they're less looking for `Top Gun' types of guys and more for the brainy scientist guys -- but guys who are physically fit too. And so relevant professional experience would probably mean doing brainy scientist sorts of things. I imagine the military still has a lot of people like this ...
Though in general, if you want a job, apply -- even if you don't fit all their qualifications exactly. I doubt this is any different -- though I imagine that they won't be hiring many people who merely have bachelors degrees. I'd expect them to pick PhDs instead. Especially if I'm right about the sort of people they want.
Give it a few years, we'll get more geeks in office.
Anyone in the software field, or any related field, who thinks that "open source simply means the source is available" is dangerously ignorant. Anyone who speaks English but honestly thinks that words or phrases can only have one meaning is either 1) in denial or 2) doesn't really speak English.People redefining words to fit their agenda (for good or bad) is nothing new. And like it or not, the English language is ambiguous, and one word or phrase may mean different things to different people. And just because they use a definition that doesn't jive with the one you prefer, that doesn't mean they're `wrong'.