If it was a server glitch, HD crash, incompetent admins, normal IT problem then sure I could easily understand. Giving 88 white house people separate email accounts, non.gov domain names, and going through the RNC computers instead of the normal white house computers is just too fishy. Read the summary of findings found by oversight committees and you won't help but see it wasn't an IT fault it was a deliberate skirting of the laws. This is as bad as Cheney making the claim that the office of the VP isn't part of the executive branch so he doesn't need to give records to the national archives.
After the Bush executive branch 'lost' millions of emails in violation of the Presidential Records Act, and will probably never have a bit of legal trouble of their actions, why does legality matter?
Obama wants to bring change to the country then demand that laws get upheld and bring those to task who disregarded the Records Act millions of times. Don't want to tarnish a past President then at least disbar the white house counsel which may have known about it under Gonzales. Otherwise don't try to grandstand that you're following the law since it doesn't have any teeth whatsoever to be followed. Kinda like those other Dumb laws that were never taken off the books.
I wouldn't go so far as to say indie gaming is dead. Torque has ports to the Xbox, wii and iPhone. Sure it takes a whole lot more to get agreements with the content providers instead of just buying a development kit from GG but it is doable.
The days of a small group making a game without any real money involved are probably not so bright. We can hope that the iPhone and Android give us a new batch of indie developers with interesting ideas.
Complain to some regional VP in Toyota, you'll get results. Years ago my less than a year old prius had AC problems due to some circuit board. The part was stuck on a boat due to some dock strike. I complained that the dealer loaner didn't have AC - at that time i was doing some sales calls and mid july heatwave and a suit wasn't a comfortable mix. Toyota paid for an Enterprise rental with AC for over a month until they got the board fixed. They more than went out of their way to cover my annoyance.
Google already owns part of Meraki networks, the wifi auto-mesh people. Their gear is actually decent and priced nicely. Not much to replace the typical home systems but it's a start.
I like the story of gamma rays first being detected because we were looking for evidence of the Soviets using Nukes on the Moon. DoD projects that help develop tech for NASA projects could be a good thing.
As long as they don't start developing plans for bringing liberty to the hydrocarbon rich populace of Titan.
I'm located in lower Michigan, my family has an HVAC shop. At retail a typical, top ranked by consumer reports, furnace is less than 2000. Of course if you toss on an air conditioner A coil and an outdoor condenser you'll easily far more than double just the cost of the equipment. Installation can also add on a significant cost - duct work can take a bit of time. There are many ways to add on even more cost to systems - go for a high pressure furnace (needing very small duct work) or go for very high efficiency outdoor condensers - like anything there are a lot of choices. But if you had a 5 year old furnace, no AC, that needed replacing with the equivalent model - like replacing a new zune - it'd be next to no installation.
I agree with your point though, there are many choices from the cheap to the not so cheap. If my $20 mp3 player bites the dust I won't even bother trying to figure out why. But with the zune costing up to $250, even 5 years later I'd be far more concerned about it not working. It's the buying something at a price, and from a company, that you expect to mean quality and turns out not to be, that gets me.
Why are consumer electronics any different than any other product? Let's talk about items costing less than a laptop, so less than 2000.
Would you accept if your 5 year old ___ broke , was unfixable, and needed a new replacement?
Home Furnace
Central Air
Oven
Refrigerator
Bike
You get the picture. Why are electronic manufactures exempt from shoddy products that don't have some sort of reasonable lifespan? Not wear and tear or dropping a product, just the product becoming unusable due to the product having some bug/feature to break it outright like the Zune.
As to a microwave, a 5 year old whirlpool oven broke on me and they no longer had replacement circuit boards. Whirlpool expects their products to have at least a 10 year lifespan. They pro-rated my equipment and sold a new unit, installed, for 33% of the cost. Now that's an acceptable solution for shoddy workmanship.
OH boy, the 'but the US is huge' argument that comes up every time broadband in the US is discussed. I'd buy that if our metro areas were chocked full of fiber speeds and just the rural areas were slow. The fact is that even in our largest metro areas the US broadband is horrid.
A recent study shows that even our smalled state, Rhode Island, with population density of over 1000 per square mile, has an average speed of only 6.7 Mbps. If you can't make that dense of an area high speed there is something seriously wrong with our system. Namely the Telco lobby arm is so strong that their gov't sanctioned monopoly remains and speeds don't improve.
I'm going to guess that most/. readers like the sound of computer fans for background noise. I talk over those all the time, ignore them as ubiquitous white noise. Also why bother ever turning them off, they're always busy downloading something or another.
One of the better ways to reduce the 'getting stuck' that I've seen was in the Simpsons Grant Theft style game Hit and Run. If you failed a mission around 10 or so times it offered to just let you continue on, or you could keep on trying.
I have played enough games that have 1 utterly painful level to appreciate a way to continue on without hours worth of repetition.
Having read the patent summary it would appear that multiplayer games like DOOM back in '93 would count as prior art. It's graphical, your space marine is your avatar, and the server handles movement. Or better yet I recall playing multiplayer Crossfire back in '93 also.
What I'd like to see the Obama administration do is demand that the 200 billion already given to the telco's for 'universal broadband' be actually put into place. Force them to go forward with the plans they had originally stated before taking those billions of tax credits, fees, etc that they never delivered upon. If the monopolies are unwilling to play than force them to pay back their 200 billion to another entity that will do what was promised for that money.
Otherwise the universal broadband is just feeding more money to the telco monopolies. Going with a Universal Broadband sounds great but I only see it as a telco bailout, those big companies are just like all the other election donors with their hands out. Do a campaign finance search for every member of congress dealing with Telco in any fashion. They've loaded the deck to make sure they get their way.
The CC companies took it upon themselves to make up their own rules. They are pretty stringent. CISP requires a yearly audit.
When I last looked in depth at this there was a per card theft fine of 10,000. Obviously the huge credit card thefts from some of the big merchants have never paid anywhere near that per card. But as a small business it was a deciding factor on changing our rebilling process.
Slashdot Mirror
Armed with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich!
Smart move, the peanut butter will make a biological weapon out of your waste data.
This sounds more like the browser based Kingdom of Loathing. 100K+ regular players for a donation supported game is impressive.
If it was a server glitch, HD crash, incompetent admins, normal IT problem then sure I could easily understand. Giving 88 white house people separate email accounts, non .gov domain names, and going through the RNC computers instead of the normal white house computers is just too fishy. Read the summary of findings found by oversight committees and you won't help but see it wasn't an IT fault it was a deliberate skirting of the laws. This is as bad as Cheney making the claim that the office of the VP isn't part of the executive branch so he doesn't need to give records to the national archives.
Ah I see you've had an ISP contract with giganews too!
After the Bush executive branch 'lost' millions of emails in violation of the Presidential Records Act, and will probably never have a bit of legal trouble of their actions, why does legality matter?
Obama wants to bring change to the country then demand that laws get upheld and bring those to task who disregarded the Records Act millions of times. Don't want to tarnish a past President then at least disbar the white house counsel which may have known about it under Gonzales. Otherwise don't try to grandstand that you're following the law since it doesn't have any teeth whatsoever to be followed. Kinda like those other Dumb laws that were never taken off the books.
I saw that Bond movie.
I wouldn't go so far as to say indie gaming is dead. Torque has ports to the Xbox, wii and iPhone. Sure it takes a whole lot more to get agreements with the content providers instead of just buying a development kit from GG but it is doable.
The days of a small group making a game without any real money involved are probably not so bright. We can hope that the iPhone and Android give us a new batch of indie developers with interesting ideas.
Of course they're timeless - Well at least Paul. Even if he dies they'll just find a replacement to keep him around.
Complain to some regional VP in Toyota, you'll get results. Years ago my less than a year old prius had AC problems due to some circuit board. The part was stuck on a boat due to some dock strike. I complained that the dealer loaner didn't have AC - at that time i was doing some sales calls and mid july heatwave and a suit wasn't a comfortable mix. Toyota paid for an Enterprise rental with AC for over a month until they got the board fixed. They more than went out of their way to cover my annoyance.
Google already owns part of Meraki networks, the wifi auto-mesh people. Their gear is actually decent and priced nicely. Not much to replace the typical home systems but it's a start.
I'll glady work for only $1 for the whole year if I also get a free private jet, stock options and other goodies.
Interesting idea, hit the ISPs so they lose Internet connectivity. A few complaints against the major backbones and the country goes dark.
I take it you haven't read, or seen hogfather? The tooth fairy could lead to the end of existance!
Maybe it was just a copy of Windows ultimate boot CD. On a serious note, I wonder how much MS pays to get even little flashes like that in a show?
But at least Gibson's works are labeled under Fiction.
I like the story of gamma rays first being detected because we were looking for evidence of the Soviets using Nukes on the Moon. DoD projects that help develop tech for NASA projects could be a good thing.
As long as they don't start developing plans for bringing liberty to the hydrocarbon rich populace of Titan.
I'm located in lower Michigan, my family has an HVAC shop. At retail a typical, top ranked by consumer reports, furnace is less than 2000. Of course if you toss on an air conditioner A coil and an outdoor condenser you'll easily far more than double just the cost of the equipment. Installation can also add on a significant cost - duct work can take a bit of time. There are many ways to add on even more cost to systems - go for a high pressure furnace (needing very small duct work) or go for very high efficiency outdoor condensers - like anything there are a lot of choices. But if you had a 5 year old furnace, no AC, that needed replacing with the equivalent model - like replacing a new zune - it'd be next to no installation.
I agree with your point though, there are many choices from the cheap to the not so cheap. If my $20 mp3 player bites the dust I won't even bother trying to figure out why. But with the zune costing up to $250, even 5 years later I'd be far more concerned about it not working. It's the buying something at a price, and from a company, that you expect to mean quality and turns out not to be, that gets me.
Why are consumer electronics any different than any other product? Let's talk about items costing less than a laptop, so less than 2000.
Would you accept if your 5 year old ___ broke , was unfixable, and needed a new replacement?
You get the picture. Why are electronic manufactures exempt from shoddy products that don't have some sort of reasonable lifespan? Not wear and tear or dropping a product, just the product becoming unusable due to the product having some bug/feature to break it outright like the Zune.
As to a microwave, a 5 year old whirlpool oven broke on me and they no longer had replacement circuit boards. Whirlpool expects their products to have at least a 10 year lifespan. They pro-rated my equipment and sold a new unit, installed, for 33% of the cost. Now that's an acceptable solution for shoddy workmanship.
OH boy, the 'but the US is huge' argument that comes up every time broadband in the US is discussed. I'd buy that if our metro areas were chocked full of fiber speeds and just the rural areas were slow. The fact is that even in our largest metro areas the US broadband is horrid.
A recent study shows that even our smalled state, Rhode Island, with population density of over 1000 per square mile, has an average speed of only 6.7 Mbps. If you can't make that dense of an area high speed there is something seriously wrong with our system. Namely the Telco lobby arm is so strong that their gov't sanctioned monopoly remains and speeds don't improve.
I'm going to guess that most /. readers like the sound of computer fans for background noise. I talk over those all the time, ignore them as ubiquitous white noise. Also why bother ever turning them off, they're always busy downloading something or another.
One of the better ways to reduce the 'getting stuck' that I've seen was in the Simpsons Grant Theft style game Hit and Run. If you failed a mission around 10 or so times it offered to just let you continue on, or you could keep on trying.
I have played enough games that have 1 utterly painful level to appreciate a way to continue on without hours worth of repetition.
Having read the patent summary it would appear that multiplayer games like DOOM back in '93 would count as prior art. It's graphical, your space marine is your avatar, and the server handles movement. Or better yet I recall playing multiplayer Crossfire back in '93 also.
Do we trust Business 2.0's predictions when they kinda missed seeing their own demise in the future?
What I'd like to see the Obama administration do is demand that the 200 billion already given to the telco's for 'universal broadband' be actually put into place. Force them to go forward with the plans they had originally stated before taking those billions of tax credits, fees, etc that they never delivered upon. If the monopolies are unwilling to play than force them to pay back their 200 billion to another entity that will do what was promised for that money.
Otherwise the universal broadband is just feeding more money to the telco monopolies. Going with a Universal Broadband sounds great but I only see it as a telco bailout, those big companies are just like all the other election donors with their hands out. Do a campaign finance search for every member of congress dealing with Telco in any fashion. They've loaded the deck to make sure they get their way.
The CC companies took it upon themselves to make up their own rules. They are pretty stringent. CISP requires a yearly audit.
When I last looked in depth at this there was a per card theft fine of 10,000. Obviously the huge credit card thefts from some of the big merchants have never paid anywhere near that per card. But as a small business it was a deciding factor on changing our rebilling process.