Don't forget that quality has also dropped noticeably.
Prove it. I call bullshit. The 'poor quality' argument is a favorite of the "HEY EVERYONE, I DON'T OWN A TV, LET ME TELL YOU WHY" crowd.
I enjoy: The Sopranos, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Sex and the City, The Simpsons, The Daily Show, The West Wing, Arrested Development, Survivor (the only reality show I watch or have any interest in), Law & Order: Criminal Intent, Dennis Miller's new show on CNBC, ESPN SportsCenter, HDTV live sports, and now HBO has rolled out their next good show, Deadwood.
There is PLENTY of quality programming on TV.
Just because there is also plenty of unadulterated SHIT out there doesn't mean the quality of all programming is down. You say the quality has "dropped noticeably." Prove it. I don't see it. I also don't read my horoscope or believe causation when there is only correlation.
Well, I hate to break it to you, but what's stopping TW/Charter/Cox/etc. from charging you $3/channel (or pick your favorite insane amount) on the a la carte plan?
Market forces? TV is a luxury, and they have competitors via satellite TV and the internet.
And what about the niche channel you like (TechTV maybe?) that the general populace couldn't care less about? Will you be happy when they go under because only a select few people want to pay for it?
If there is no market for it, why is it on the air? Why should people who don't like it subsidize it? I may lose a channel or two that I care to watch, but that is capitalism baby!
imagine every few songs your streaming mp3 player would play an automtically generated GB song with "pleasant" sounding music when your net's okay, and "discordant" music when something weird's up
There's a joke in here somewhere about the slashdot effect and Stravinsky but I'm not quite sure what it is.
I'm not saying I support the government meddling in the affairs of businesses (for they are not subtle and quick to raise prices), HOWEVER...
They would have to raise their prices quite a bit for most people's bills to go up and not down. Considering I watch about 10 channels of the hundreds I receive.
I'll give you a guess who they'd like to fund if they aren't already. I mean, if you were bin Laden, would you vote for someone trying to:
Kill you? Erase your organization from the earth? Reward assassins $50 million for your death or capture? Rain fire down upon your comrades? Yell at you?
The BBB is nothing but a protection racket for businesses that traditionally garner lots of complaints... The BBB is esentially useless after the fact if you've been screwed
I have used the BBB several times. Every single time I have been satisfied with the results. I find that if you lay out your case very reasonably, the company will fold and resolve the matter to close the case. If I am not able to resolve the matter with their customer service department, I submit a complaint against them trough www.bbb.org. To me this is a fairly simple way of giving the company a wake up call.
Here are a few of my latest BBB uses:
1. Most recently, I received a $110 refund from Banfield Pet Hospital (a.k.a. VetSmart, often located in PetSmart stores). Long story short, I had received terrible service from their stupid wellness plan over the past year. I felt I should be reimbursed the money I paid each month due to this horrible service and the fact that Banfield had made it so hard to cancel. Within 10 days of filing the BBB complaint, I had a check from Banfield for 9 months of payments (a compromise I guess)... very satisfied.
2. The time before that, I was having trouble with ShareBuilder. I had setup my Roth IRA with them, but had not really started investing in it yet. I had 100 shares of BEOS left over from the "good old days," and about $15 in cash. ShareBuilder announced they would now start charging IRA accounts $25 a year, and if the cash was not available, they would liquidate funds to cover it. Oh, and by the way, to transfer your account away from them, they'd charge you $50, likewise liquidating funds to cover if necessary. I wanted to keep the BEOSZ stock, and I felt like I was pinned in by them, so I complained. I was stonewalled by email. It was impossible to talk to anyone via phone. I filed a complaint with the BBB, and next thing you know I am getting phone calls from someone in customer service. End result: account transferred to ameritrade for free.
3. A few years ago I stupidly bought a magazine subscription from a door-to-door saleswoman. Honestly, I wouldn't have done it, but this girl was very hot and it was hard to tell her no. (Hey, at least I'm honest.) So she gets $20 out of me, mostly in the form of a check. A few hours later, I do some research on the company, Palmetto Marketing, Inc. No surprise, it's essentially a scam, and they rarely deliver on the magazine subscriptions, according to the word on the net. I send a letter to the BBB about how they handled the sale (dropping hot girls in the neighborhood with a fake sob-story), how they rarely deliver, what can I do, etc. A couple weeks later my magazine subscription started. Could be a coincidence, who knows...
I've used the BBB several other times in the past, almost always with good results.
Strangely, the one time I did not have good results was when I complained to the BBB about Apple. We'd bought an Apple iMac when they first came out, and I felt the OS (MacOS 9) was a piece of shit, and wanted a refund. That is when I learned Apple's ABSOLUTELY NO REFUNDS policy. Bad Apple. Anyway, no help from the BBB, Apple told them the policy was very clear up-front (it was), and that was my lone BBB experience that did not end well for me...
Your idea of "freedom" is just another in a long list of morals that people have held dear over the centuries, like loyalty, justice, compassions, etc.
I think you are confused about what the word "morals" means.
Morals are judgements of certain things, whether they be deemed "good" or "bad." Freedom is not a moral issue. Every person is born free and some are imprisoned, to various extents, based on who they were borne to, and where.
Thus laws that stipulate that you can steal a man's life or property are protecting his freedom, and have nothing to do with whether it is "right" or "wrong" in a moral sense, the beliefs of religious folks notwithstanding.
Even had the ten commandments never been written down, or any other religious code similar to them, I can assure you that Thomas Jefferson and his compatriates would still insist that a man is born with inate freedoms.
Should it be a federal crime? No. That is a decision that should be left to each state and not the federal government.
Personally, I wouldn't live in a stat where it was legal to kill any domestic animal, even if you owned them. Obviously it would not be legal to kill someone else's pet in any circumstance since that is akin to stealing their property. However, whether or not it is a civil or criminal matter is up for debate.
Every law legislates morality in some form or another. Killing a man, stealing what he earned, etc are all wrong because we believe them to be morally reprehensible and thus created laws to punish those who do it.
Morals do not enter into it. It is all about FREEDOM. You can't kill a man or steal his possessions because your right to swing your fist ends at another man's nose. It is about ensuring that everyone has this freedom, not on moral grounds, but on basic, common sense. If you are allowed to kill someone, they are allowed to kill you. Same goes for stealing.
The government's role is to secure your person and your property, not to legislate morality.
The register article says $2000+ per year, the spamhaus faq just says they will cost $2000+. So is it a one-time fee (sounds good), or an annual fee?
I am guessing it is a one-time fee, and the renewal will be less. Spamhaus states the up front cost is high as the first roadblock for spammers -- why pay $2000 for the domain when you are going to get shutdown almost immediately after using it to send spam? It also is going to cost them more than normal to run this sTLD. So a large one-time fee makes sense.
Depends on who's asking and who's answering. A useless question, it's here.
Our tax dollars were spent mandating its deployment
That does suck.
our money will be wasted purchasing the receivers (which are going to have to be in all TVs)
Now you lost me.
First, you don't have to buy a TV. It is a luxury.
Second, you can keep your current TV as long as the receiver you have will output a lesser signal for you. Many do.
Third, HDTV technology has become more and more affordable, and will continue to do so just like DVD did, and just like every other technology like this has done. That it has been mandated to the broadcasters that pay the government for the right to exclusively use 'our' airwaves is one reason the cost will go down on the equipment. Shit, I get my HDTV receiver for an extra $6 a month to my cable operator, and that includes almost a dozen HD channels. (TW central florida.)
what does it do for us? Nothing.
So don't buy it. I, however, love my HDTV.
We worry about the effects of lack of exercise, overeating, diabetes, etc, yet we mandate better TV signals and are double paying for it.
Again, I don't get your point. I find it amazing that your post was rated +5 Insightful. I'd go for -1 Confused if I had points.
The real reason AOL wanted to dump Mozilla entirely on its own. Yhey've likely been discussing this deal with Microsoft for a while. Microsoft's first order of business was probably "well, you'll have to get rid of Mozilla."
If HL2 really will require Steam, then don't purchase the game. Don't increase their sales figures, don't let them think this is a profitable way to force DRM down our throats. Behave like customers, not simpering consumers, and take your business elsewhere.
Can someone point me to an official quote from the company that explains that if you don't have a network connection, you can't play HL2? Because other than them requiring me to connect to their computers to play this game, I don't really see the big deal about having to install their content delivery platform to play HL2. I am going to want to do that anyway to get the updates. As long as I can play HL2 even when my net connection is fucked, what does it matter?
Can you provide evidence of what features they lack?
Sorry, debates don't work that way. You stated "They all beat MS-SQL consistantly." Now try to back that claim up. In what way do they beat MS consistently?
Its the closest thing America has to a neibhorhood pub [other than the neighborhood pub] where you can get out of the house and just hang without being a consumer [while consuming their coffee].
Yeah, that sounds like a good idea. Shift the tax burden too the poor and the entrepeneurs in the middle class so that the rich can entrech their right to deny the american dream to even more people.
How on Earth is a flat tax "shifting the burden?" Let's say the flat tax is 10%. If you are poor and make $20,000 a year, you would pay a measly $2000 a year. If you are successful and make $1 million a year, you pay $100,000 in taxes. You make 50x as much money and pay 50x as much in taxes.
How can you sit there and say the burden is somehow on the poor with a flat tax? The more you make, the more you pay.
The way it is now, the poor pay nothing and get the benefits of welfare and social programs. The very very very rich get out of paying their full due using tax loopholes. The middle class, upper middle class, and lower-end rich folks pay more, more, and more than the poor, with the tax brackets increasing the more you make (and the benefits received decreasing the more you make).
BTW, you need to get it out of your head that the rich are "evil." You said, "the rich can entrech [sic] their right to deny the american dream to even more people" is complete bullshit. How do you think most of these people got rich? The American Dream. They worked hard or they took risks, and it paid off.
How would they "deny the american dream" to people, anyway? As far as I know, the American Dream is not to live off the government, which is what is happening now with many of the lazy among us.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't forget that quality has also dropped noticeably.
Prove it. I call bullshit. The 'poor quality' argument is a favorite of the "HEY EVERYONE, I DON'T OWN A TV, LET ME TELL YOU WHY" crowd.
I enjoy: The Sopranos, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Sex and the City, The Simpsons, The Daily Show, The West Wing, Arrested Development, Survivor (the only reality show I watch or have any interest in), Law & Order: Criminal Intent, Dennis Miller's new show on CNBC, ESPN SportsCenter, HDTV live sports, and now HBO has rolled out their next good show, Deadwood.
There is PLENTY of quality programming on TV.
Just because there is also plenty of unadulterated SHIT out there doesn't mean the quality of all programming is down. You say the quality has "dropped noticeably." Prove it. I don't see it. I also don't read my horoscope or believe causation when there is only correlation.
Well, I hate to break it to you, but what's stopping TW/Charter/Cox/etc. from charging you $3/channel (or pick your favorite insane amount) on the a la carte plan?
Market forces? TV is a luxury, and they have competitors via satellite TV and the internet.
And what about the niche channel you like (TechTV maybe?) that the general populace couldn't care less about? Will you be happy when they go under because only a select few people want to pay for it?
If there is no market for it, why is it on the air? Why should people who don't like it subsidize it? I may lose a channel or two that I care to watch, but that is capitalism baby!
imagine every few songs your streaming mp3 player would play an automtically generated GB song with "pleasant" sounding music when your net's okay, and "discordant" music when something weird's up
There's a joke in here somewhere about the slashdot effect and Stravinsky but I'm not quite sure what it is.
I'm not saying I support the government meddling in the affairs of businesses (for they are not subtle and quick to raise prices), HOWEVER...
They would have to raise their prices quite a bit for most people's bills to go up and not down. Considering I watch about 10 channels of the hundreds I receive.
If you want real freedom, vote Libertarian.
But with freedom comes responsibility. This land of children living off the nanny state cannot handle that, I am sad to say.
I'll give you a guess who they'd like to fund if they aren't already. I mean, if you were bin Laden, would you vote for someone trying to:
Kill you?
Erase your organization from the earth?
Reward assassins $50 million for your death or capture?
Rain fire down upon your comrades?
Yell at you?
(OK, so I ran out of ideas at the end.)
I'm shocked! People that run businesses are donating to republicans, and old people are backing the dems.
HOLY SHIT!
The BBB is nothing but a protection racket for businesses that traditionally garner lots of complaints ... The BBB is esentially useless after the fact if you've been screwed
I have used the BBB several times. Every single time I have been satisfied with the results. I find that if you lay out your case very reasonably, the company will fold and resolve the matter to close the case. If I am not able to resolve the matter with their customer service department, I submit a complaint against them trough www.bbb.org. To me this is a fairly simple way of giving the company a wake up call.
Here are a few of my latest BBB uses:
1. Most recently, I received a $110 refund from Banfield Pet Hospital (a.k.a. VetSmart, often located in PetSmart stores). Long story short, I had received terrible service from their stupid wellness plan over the past year. I felt I should be reimbursed the money I paid each month due to this horrible service and the fact that Banfield had made it so hard to cancel. Within 10 days of filing the BBB complaint, I had a check from Banfield for 9 months of payments (a compromise I guess)... very satisfied.
2. The time before that, I was having trouble with ShareBuilder. I had setup my Roth IRA with them, but had not really started investing in it yet. I had 100 shares of BEOS left over from the "good old days," and about $15 in cash. ShareBuilder announced they would now start charging IRA accounts $25 a year, and if the cash was not available, they would liquidate funds to cover it. Oh, and by the way, to transfer your account away from them, they'd charge you $50, likewise liquidating funds to cover if necessary. I wanted to keep the BEOSZ stock, and I felt like I was pinned in by them, so I complained. I was stonewalled by email. It was impossible to talk to anyone via phone. I filed a complaint with the BBB, and next thing you know I am getting phone calls from someone in customer service. End result: account transferred to ameritrade for free.
3. A few years ago I stupidly bought a magazine subscription from a door-to-door saleswoman. Honestly, I wouldn't have done it, but this girl was very hot and it was hard to tell her no. (Hey, at least I'm honest.) So she gets $20 out of me, mostly in the form of a check. A few hours later, I do some research on the company, Palmetto Marketing, Inc. No surprise, it's essentially a scam, and they rarely deliver on the magazine subscriptions, according to the word on the net. I send a letter to the BBB about how they handled the sale (dropping hot girls in the neighborhood with a fake sob-story), how they rarely deliver, what can I do, etc. A couple weeks later my magazine subscription started. Could be a coincidence, who knows...
I've used the BBB several other times in the past, almost always with good results.
Strangely, the one time I did not have good results was when I complained to the BBB about Apple. We'd bought an Apple iMac when they first came out, and I felt the OS (MacOS 9) was a piece of shit, and wanted a refund. That is when I learned Apple's ABSOLUTELY NO REFUNDS policy. Bad Apple. Anyway, no help from the BBB, Apple told them the policy was very clear up-front (it was), and that was my lone BBB experience that did not end well for me...
Your idea of "freedom" is just another in a long list of morals that people have held dear over the centuries, like loyalty, justice, compassions, etc.
I think you are confused about what the word "morals" means.
Morals are judgements of certain things, whether they be deemed "good" or "bad." Freedom is not a moral issue. Every person is born free and some are imprisoned, to various extents, based on who they were borne to, and where.
Thus laws that stipulate that you can steal a man's life or property are protecting his freedom, and have nothing to do with whether it is "right" or "wrong" in a moral sense, the beliefs of religious folks notwithstanding.
Even had the ten commandments never been written down, or any other religious code similar to them, I can assure you that Thomas Jefferson and his compatriates would still insist that a man is born with inate freedoms.
Should it be a federal crime? No. That is a decision that should be left to each state and not the federal government.
Personally, I wouldn't live in a stat where it was legal to kill any domestic animal, even if you owned them. Obviously it would not be legal to kill someone else's pet in any circumstance since that is akin to stealing their property. However, whether or not it is a civil or criminal matter is up for debate.
Every law legislates morality in some form or another. Killing a man, stealing what he earned, etc are all wrong because we believe them to be morally reprehensible and thus created laws to punish those who do it.
Morals do not enter into it. It is all about FREEDOM. You can't kill a man or steal his possessions because your right to swing your fist ends at another man's nose. It is about ensuring that everyone has this freedom, not on moral grounds, but on basic, common sense. If you are allowed to kill someone, they are allowed to kill you. Same goes for stealing.
The government's role is to secure your person and your property, not to legislate morality.
Don't forget the thousands of civilians who died in Iraq.
Which thousands? The hundreds of thousands under Saddam, or the thousands while we were removing him?
The register article says $2000+ per year, the spamhaus faq just says they will cost $2000+. So is it a one-time fee (sounds good), or an annual fee?
I am guessing it is a one-time fee, and the renewal will be less. Spamhaus states the up front cost is high as the first roadblock for spammers -- why pay $2000 for the domain when you are going to get shutdown almost immediately after using it to send spam? It also is going to cost them more than normal to run this sTLD. So a large one-time fee makes sense.
Was HDTV really even necessary?
Depends on who's asking and who's answering. A useless question, it's here.
Our tax dollars were spent mandating its deployment
That does suck.
our money will be wasted purchasing the receivers (which are going to have to be in all TVs)
Now you lost me.
First, you don't have to buy a TV. It is a luxury.
Second, you can keep your current TV as long as the receiver you have will output a lesser signal for you. Many do.
Third, HDTV technology has become more and more affordable, and will continue to do so just like DVD did, and just like every other technology like this has done. That it has been mandated to the broadcasters that pay the government for the right to exclusively use 'our' airwaves is one reason the cost will go down on the equipment. Shit, I get my HDTV receiver for an extra $6 a month to my cable operator, and that includes almost a dozen HD channels. (TW central florida.)
what does it do for us? Nothing.
So don't buy it. I, however, love my HDTV.
We worry about the effects of lack of exercise, overeating, diabetes, etc, yet we mandate better TV signals and are double paying for it.
Again, I don't get your point. I find it amazing that your post was rated +5 Insightful. I'd go for -1 Confused if I had points.
And to think I could have been spending that wasted time creating lego churches instead.
I'm sorry, please re-phrase your questions in the form of questions.
Of course then they'd need to sell a shitload of games just to recoup that investment.
P.S. If he DOESN'T pay retail, he's spending even more money, since they are LOSING MONEY on each sale at retail.
The real reason AOL wanted to dump Mozilla entirely on its own. Yhey've likely been discussing this deal with Microsoft for a while. Microsoft's first order of business was probably "well, you'll have to get rid of Mozilla."
Just thinking out loud.
Spielberg often does really lousy movies
Yes, lousy movies like:
Schindler's List
The Color Purple
Saving Private Ryan
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
E.T. - The Extra-Terrestrial
Indiana Jones Trilogy
JAWS
I could go on...
Can't I ask Mike Internet about Godwin Law?
You NAZIs!
If HL2 really will require Steam, then don't purchase the game. Don't increase their sales figures, don't let them think this is a profitable way to force DRM down our throats. Behave like customers, not simpering consumers, and take your business elsewhere.
Can someone point me to an official quote from the company that explains that if you don't have a network connection, you can't play HL2? Because other than them requiring me to connect to their computers to play this game, I don't really see the big deal about having to install their content delivery platform to play HL2. I am going to want to do that anyway to get the updates. As long as I can play HL2 even when my net connection is fucked, what does it matter?
Can you provide evidence of what features they lack?
Sorry, debates don't work that way. You stated "They all beat MS-SQL consistantly." Now try to back that claim up. In what way do they beat MS consistently?
The other three eat MS-SQL for breakfast.
Uh huh... Prove it.
Its the closest thing America has to a neibhorhood pub [other than the neighborhood pub] where you can get out of the house and just hang without being a consumer [while consuming their coffee].
I would not like to loose out on a lossless original. If I don't have a lossless hard copy then I'll end up loosing files
Don't you mean a looseless hard copy?
... and it is a stupid and unfound reasoning
So try to disprove the logic.
Yeah, that sounds like a good idea. Shift the tax burden too the poor and the entrepeneurs in the middle class so that the rich can entrech their right to deny the american dream to even more people.
How on Earth is a flat tax "shifting the burden?" Let's say the flat tax is 10%. If you are poor and make $20,000 a year, you would pay a measly $2000 a year. If you are successful and make $1 million a year, you pay $100,000 in taxes. You make 50x as much money and pay 50x as much in taxes.
How can you sit there and say the burden is somehow on the poor with a flat tax? The more you make, the more you pay.
The way it is now, the poor pay nothing and get the benefits of welfare and social programs. The very very very rich get out of paying their full due using tax loopholes. The middle class, upper middle class, and lower-end rich folks pay more, more, and more than the poor, with the tax brackets increasing the more you make (and the benefits received decreasing the more you make).
BTW, you need to get it out of your head that the rich are "evil." You said, "the rich can entrech [sic] their right to deny the american dream to even more people" is complete bullshit. How do you think most of these people got rich? The American Dream. They worked hard or they took risks, and it paid off.
How would they "deny the american dream" to people, anyway? As far as I know, the American Dream is not to live off the government, which is what is happening now with many of the lazy among us.