Personally, I'm a fan of pencil/punchcard/mechanical ballots. It's what I've used all my life and they tend to be nice and simple. However, electronic voting does have some advantages.
Physical - As seen in that hanging chad thing, punchcards require a small amount (very small) of oomph to properly punch the card, oomph older voters (or handicapped ones) might lack. Similarly, pencils take manual dexterity and the mechanical machines often required a bit of a heft, at least for the level that locked down the switches at the end. Computers are theoretically less taxing and have input methods for the handicapped.
Instant Results - Honestly, I suspect this is at the heart of things. No one has to count votes by hand. Results can be automatically beamed to newscasts. In short, it fulfills that American Dream of having What-you-want-When-you-want-it. I personally think that this instant reporting of results is a bad thing, as it encourages voter apathy (why should it matter what people in Florida put down? It's your vote.)
It's "Progressive" - IMNSHO, probably the second biggest reason. By trotting out electronic voting machines, legislators are showing that they're "hip" with the times. They get an image of being innovators, trail-blazers. Bloody morons...
Meh, anyhow, there are some advantages. I'd argue only the first one is valid. At that, they could provide some alternate input method for those people physically challenged by something requiring manual dexterity.
First off many FPS games have been around as long as or longer than MMORPGs, so that arguement right there doesn't hold up.
I suspect that what he means is the short-term experience with the session you're playing. While I've been playing games of Eradicator for over 5 years, it hasn't been the same session that I've been playing. In comparison, in an MMORPG, you may have been building your character for years. *shrug*
A Day in the Desert also eliminated some of the levelling. You had a multitude of different directions you could go with your skills and some of the "grinding," repeating a task over and over again, could be automated to be run while you were gone. (I think... I only played for a short while before life intervened, so most of this is based upon my brother's experience, him having spent much time on the original and its sequel.)
Too many people do that just to get a job here. Obviously I am unaware of your particular situation but it doesn't sound much better.
We have a government obsessed with moral values yet we allow this sort of behavior just so people can get jobs that born/raised Americans need.
I suspect you're misreading him. It's entirely likely he married for love or such reasons. His "If I can do it" is likely reminding the complainers that there are jobs available if they search. If he can find them...
Meh, or I could be the one misreading him, but I doubt jumping to conclusions will help anyone.
I'm blanking on the name of the book, but there's an anecdote that the fellow who created the Jiff-Lube symbol related wherein he presented the symbol, to him cleverly incorporating the J and L of the name along with an arrow that could be put on such signs that the arrow actually pointed in the direction of the facility. In the presentation, one of CEOs wrinkled their brow and said, "It's looks like a penis to me." The advertisement designed, thinking fast, shot back, "I don't know about you sir, but my pee-pee doesn't bend like that." Everyone laughed and the phallic significance of the logo never came up again.
I really wish I could remember the name of that book... fascinating stuff.
Supposedly, this similar to how a lot of "dumb laws" get signed in. Someone wants to derail a piece of legislation, so they attach something ridiculous like requiring two trains approaching each other on the same track to both stop and wait for the other to pass. Texas law IIRC.
BS. If you don't like the product, don't buy it. Sounds like you no longer like the TiVo product. Don't buy it.
*sigh* Even outside of the arguments all over this discussion about people who have bought the units or have lifetime subscriptions, there's also the fact that a lot of people like this service. They believe that this is a short-term profit solution, possibly created by someone who plans to leave for another job before things crash, having reaped profits. Because they care, they complain.
You're talking about the conversion process developed by the Nazi's to get oil from coal?
As I understand, it's been refined today, but we're still dealing with non-renewable sources plus the energy necessary to make the conversion. (It was only feasible for the Nazi's because they had a lot of coal, but were shut off from oil)
And from my point of view, the browser war translates to "IE vs. standards compliance"
In all fairness, though things are better now, both IE and Netscape broke a lot of W3C rules to add the latest features for their browsers. <BLINK> tags anyone?
A virus that goes from time slot to time slot, sucking up our patience for companies that sell feminine products, forever searching for the correct demographic.
Is this really so difficult? I would think that the demographics would be fairly simply, Females 14-45. If you wanted to be really conservative, you target them from 12 to 55 (puberty keeps occuring earlier and menopause doesn't happen in some women until fairly late in life).
I have taken for granted that advertsiing will always exist. And, for that matter, ways of blocking ads will proliferate just as quickly whether it's TiVo for your television, AdBlock for web-browsing, or KazaaLite for P2P. There are those who argue that the methods for blocking ads just create an arms race where advertisers respond by ramping up their attempts to get our attention, but I say that that they'd ramp these things up due to competition with or without our attempts to escape the ads.
Speaking of which, Phillip K. Dick had it about right when it came to intrusive advertising, his stories involving forced-experience billboards that took control of your synapses or the robot which camped in your house breaking things and then fixing them to show its utility and would not leave until you bought it.
Actually, given how slow Windows Explorer tends to be parsing directories, yes it may be much faster. I still remember a friend of mine deleting a large directory of temporary items. After 10 minutes of waiting for windows to finish displaying the whole directory, he dropped down to MS-DOS and deleted them all with one command and about 5 seconds of runtime.
There are definitely speed advantages to command lines.
Honestly, it was one of those impulse things. I periodically link random things in an effort to keep hyperlinks relevant. Eh, my sister can handle herself, I figure.
Well, for one, it really was kind of a fad. As more of an expanded answer, Duncan damn near bankrupted themselves by selling too many units back when they had the wooden yo-yos (As orders mounted, getting the good wood was more and more costly) allowing for the cheap plastic crap to compete. After a while, people started equating yo-yos with the plast ones. But yeah, yo-yos used to be one of the standard gifts at elementary school parties for me. My mother had found a large amount of Duncan yo-yos at bulk pricing, so they became standard gifts for us. That and, for a long time, those little sun-catcher things where you have a metal frame and some crystals, then cook it in your microwave.
^_^ Indeed! My grandfather made me a set when I was a child and they're still in use by my younger siblings. Nice varnished hardwood, gorgeous looking things. Only thing is, I'd warn any parent getting blocks for their kids that kids figure out that blocks make excellent projectiles early on and some of them have amazing arms on them as well as unerring accuracy...
Actually, I'm one to advocate bike helmets for the same reason I advocate seat belts. There's often some fairly high speeds involved and there's a lot of concrete around these days for kids to ram their heads into. I have a cousin who fell into a concrete embankment while bicycling, hit it head first. The impact was enough to total the helmet, but he came away with just a few scratches. As a 24-year-old, I wear a helmet when biking. I've got too much invested in this head.
On the other hand, I'm a believer that kneepads and elbowpads for skating/skateboarding isn't necessary until you get to the really acrobatic stuff. Yes, they'll get some nasty scrapes from time to time, but for the most part, it heals without a scar and it gives the kid a reminder not to fall next time.
And lastly, let your kids roughhouse. Tussling as a child taught me a lot about how to fall and how to react to an attack. We occasionally wound up with the odd bruise or scrape, but it healed and bad feelings seldom festered between me and my brothers. ^_^ Then again, from an early age, we were sparring with boffer weapons. Lastly, I'm a firm believer in letting your kids wander about the neighborhood without supervision, but then again, I grew up in a fairly suburban area with next to no crime and a lot of friendly neighbors.
Construx. Those beams would shatter into multiple shards of plastic that would embedd themselves in your foot. And then there were thr connectors, which were essentially miniature plastic caltrops.
They're plastic these days.:( We still have one of the old metal sets at home, compete with electric motor with two gear ratios. There was just something inherently solid about creating your mechanisms with metal beams and bolts. Heck, after we accidentally broke a bed by jumping on it, my oldest brother Michael fixed it with one of those corner pieces from the Erector Set and it took months for my parents to realize the bed had ever been broken.
Sadly, I suspect that the metal sets would no longer be considered safe for kids anymore. *shrug* Which makes sense from a pure safety perspective, as I know we banged ourselves up repeatedly making weapons out of the pieces in addition to scrapes from burrs on the pieces and a few cases of hair or skin getting caught in the open workings of the motor. *wry grin* And then there was that incident where I got thrown across the patio by an electric shock. But in retrospect, yanking the cord out of the outlet when on a rain-soacked patio was not the brightest of moves for all that I had good intentions. (My little sister, Eileen, was reaching for the plug. Her being a toddler, I knew she wouldn't remove it safely, so I did so. Ouch...)
I still have a few sets languishing in closets in my parents' house. *wry grin* Those pieces that didn't wind up getting embedded in feet during the night, that is. They were a very interesting set if you were interested in construction frames and support, but I found the orthogonal limits, well, limitting... Combined with the relatively flimsy nature of the longer spars, structures often wound up collapsing under their own weight. Still, their ringes, rotating connectors, glow-in-the-dark wheels, and paneling were nice touches.
We also had Capsella and Erector Sets (both the old metal one that came with an electric motor and the later lame plastic set). Now the one I always lusted after was Robotix, a set of which a friend down the street owned. Solid pastic pieces that connected with hex-connecters and all sets came with motors and generally an associated remote control. Building vehicles to battle each other was fun, as was the time we built a working arm.
I believe the same thing was "proved" for CDs several years back too. Best I remember, the case got thrown out for private individuals selling amongst each other, but that retail stores had to get some kind of a vendor license.
It isn't any different than MS limiting your ability to transfer an OEM Windows license from one machine to another. Sure, you "own" the license, but that doesn't always mean you can do what you want.:(
They key difference here is that you actually are purchasing a video game rather than a license AFAIK. Things like Windows and 3D Studio are not able to be resold because they explicitly state that you are only purchasing a non-transferrable license for use. I've yet to see such an assertation on a video-game box.
We've got one of these vendors in the mall. When asked what the 76000 referred to, he said it referred to the total number of levels in all the games. Admittedly, he may have been talking out of his ass...
I will admit that I'm tempted to grab one of these things were it not for that I have no idea how hardy/fragile they are, let alone the legalities. Well, and of course I'll probably get it online where it's cheaper.
Well, at one point, I would have pointed you to iName (now Mail.com) who provided a free forwarding service such that you could keep the same address and change where it forwards to, but they've switched to a pay model too. Admittedly, it's only about $10 per year, which is still worth it for me, but others might balk.
If you only need to authenticate with the email, you may want to consider getting one of the free web-based accounts. The only catch is that those addresses often accumulate so much spam that you can't use them for actual correspondence and they often have to be swept once a week or so to keep them from overflowing with spam.
Slashdot Mirror
For those not getting the joke, "chaud" is French for hot and Quebec has always been proud of being bilingual.
Meh, anyhow, there are some advantages. I'd argue only the first one is valid. At that, they could provide some alternate input method for those people physically challenged by something requiring manual dexterity.
First off many FPS games have been around as long as or longer than MMORPGs, so that arguement right there doesn't hold up.
I suspect that what he means is the short-term experience with the session you're playing. While I've been playing games of Eradicator for over 5 years, it hasn't been the same session that I've been playing. In comparison, in an MMORPG, you may have been building your character for years. *shrug*
A Day in the Desert also eliminated some of the levelling. You had a multitude of different directions you could go with your skills and some of the "grinding," repeating a task over and over again, could be automated to be run while you were gone. (I think... I only played for a short while before life intervened, so most of this is based upon my brother's experience, him having spent much time on the original and its sequel.)
We have a government obsessed with moral values yet we allow this sort of behavior just so people can get jobs that born/raised Americans need.
I suspect you're misreading him. It's entirely likely he married for love or such reasons. His "If I can do it" is likely reminding the complainers that there are jobs available if they search. If he can find them...
Meh, or I could be the one misreading him, but I doubt jumping to conclusions will help anyone.
I really wish I could remember the name of that book... fascinating stuff.
Supposedly, this similar to how a lot of "dumb laws" get signed in. Someone wants to derail a piece of legislation, so they attach something ridiculous like requiring two trains approaching each other on the same track to both stop and wait for the other to pass. Texas law IIRC.
BS. If you don't like the product, don't buy it. Sounds like you no longer like the TiVo product. Don't buy it.
*sigh* Even outside of the arguments all over this discussion about people who have bought the units or have lifetime subscriptions, there's also the fact that a lot of people like this service. They believe that this is a short-term profit solution, possibly created by someone who plans to leave for another job before things crash, having reaped profits. Because they care, they complain.
As I understand, it's been refined today, but we're still dealing with non-renewable sources plus the energy necessary to make the conversion. (It was only feasible for the Nazi's because they had a lot of coal, but were shut off from oil)
And from my point of view, the browser war translates to "IE vs. standards compliance"
In all fairness, though things are better now, both IE and Netscape broke a lot of W3C rules to add the latest features for their browsers. <BLINK> tags anyone?
Is this really so difficult? I would think that the demographics would be fairly simply, Females 14-45. If you wanted to be really conservative, you target them from 12 to 55 (puberty keeps occuring earlier and menopause doesn't happen in some women until fairly late in life).
I have taken for granted that advertsiing will always exist. And, for that matter, ways of blocking ads will proliferate just as quickly whether it's TiVo for your television, AdBlock for web-browsing, or KazaaLite for P2P. There are those who argue that the methods for blocking ads just create an arms race where advertisers respond by ramping up their attempts to get our attention, but I say that that they'd ramp these things up due to competition with or without our attempts to escape the ads.
Speaking of which, Phillip K. Dick had it about right when it came to intrusive advertising, his stories involving forced-experience billboards that took control of your synapses or the robot which camped in your house breaking things and then fixing them to show its utility and would not leave until you bought it.
There are definitely speed advantages to command lines.
Honestly, it was one of those impulse things. I periodically link random things in an effort to keep hyperlinks relevant. Eh, my sister can handle herself, I figure.
^_^ That program was a massive source of entertainment to me as a child.
Well, for one, it really was kind of a fad. As more of an expanded answer, Duncan damn near bankrupted themselves by selling too many units back when they had the wooden yo-yos (As orders mounted, getting the good wood was more and more costly) allowing for the cheap plastic crap to compete. After a while, people started equating yo-yos with the plast ones. But yeah, yo-yos used to be one of the standard gifts at elementary school parties for me. My mother had found a large amount of Duncan yo-yos at bulk pricing, so they became standard gifts for us. That and, for a long time, those little sun-catcher things where you have a metal frame and some crystals, then cook it in your microwave.
^_^ Indeed! My grandfather made me a set when I was a child and they're still in use by my younger siblings. Nice varnished hardwood, gorgeous looking things. Only thing is, I'd warn any parent getting blocks for their kids that kids figure out that blocks make excellent projectiles early on and some of them have amazing arms on them as well as unerring accuracy...
On the other hand, I'm a believer that kneepads and elbowpads for skating/skateboarding isn't necessary until you get to the really acrobatic stuff. Yes, they'll get some nasty scrapes from time to time, but for the most part, it heals without a scar and it gives the kid a reminder not to fall next time.
And lastly, let your kids roughhouse. Tussling as a child taught me a lot about how to fall and how to react to an attack. We occasionally wound up with the odd bruise or scrape, but it healed and bad feelings seldom festered between me and my brothers. ^_^ Then again, from an early age, we were sparring with boffer weapons. Lastly, I'm a firm believer in letting your kids wander about the neighborhood without supervision, but then again, I grew up in a fairly suburban area with next to no crime and a lot of friendly neighbors.
Construx. Those beams would shatter into multiple shards of plastic that would embedd themselves in your foot. And then there were thr connectors, which were essentially miniature plastic caltrops.
For some reason, applying vaseline to my toys to "improve the 'feel'" sounds vaguely wrong, let alone my kids' toys...
According to this page, Fisher Price no longer makes them.
Sadly, I suspect that the metal sets would no longer be considered safe for kids anymore. *shrug* Which makes sense from a pure safety perspective, as I know we banged ourselves up repeatedly making weapons out of the pieces in addition to scrapes from burrs on the pieces and a few cases of hair or skin getting caught in the open workings of the motor. *wry grin* And then there was that incident where I got thrown across the patio by an electric shock. But in retrospect, yanking the cord out of the outlet when on a rain-soacked patio was not the brightest of moves for all that I had good intentions. (My little sister, Eileen, was reaching for the plug. Her being a toddler, I knew she wouldn't remove it safely, so I did so. Ouch...)
We also had Capsella and Erector Sets (both the old metal one that came with an electric motor and the later lame plastic set). Now the one I always lusted after was Robotix, a set of which a friend down the street owned. Solid pastic pieces that connected with hex-connecters and all sets came with motors and generally an associated remote control. Building vehicles to battle each other was fun, as was the time we built a working arm.
It isn't any different than MS limiting your ability to transfer an OEM Windows license from one machine to another. Sure, you "own" the license, but that doesn't always mean you can do what you want. :(
They key difference here is that you actually are purchasing a video game rather than a license AFAIK. Things like Windows and 3D Studio are not able to be resold because they explicitly state that you are only purchasing a non-transferrable license for use. I've yet to see such an assertation on a video-game box.
I will admit that I'm tempted to grab one of these things were it not for that I have no idea how hardy/fragile they are, let alone the legalities. Well, and of course I'll probably get it online where it's cheaper.
If you only need to authenticate with the email, you may want to consider getting one of the free web-based accounts. The only catch is that those addresses often accumulate so much spam that you can't use them for actual correspondence and they often have to be swept once a week or so to keep them from overflowing with spam.