IANAL, but it would appear that Thompson is arguing the case on the grounds that the game constitutes a public nuisance. If he's arguing on those grounds then the court has no choice but to decide on those grounds. Many people posting in this article have repeatedly pointed out that it is a violation of first-amendment rights to ban this game. If that is so, then it is not the Florida judge's duty to decide what is or is not a violation of the constitution. That falls to the US Supreme Court. The reason that it hasn't been thrown completely out as prior restraint is because the Florida legislature has penned a law specifically allowing prior restraint if the publishing of the art constitutes a public nuisance. Note that my knowledge of said law is exclusively based on gleanings from other posters.
To sum it up, it is irrelevant whether or not this is a violation of first-amendment rights because the jurisdiction in question cannot decide what is constitutional and what is not. This is also not a clear cut case of prior restraint because of a piece of Florida legislation. If Rockstar wants to set a freedom of speech precedent should this case be lost, they will have to follow an appeal all the way to the US Supreme Court. For a lower court to rule based on the constitution would imply that said court was somehow on-par with the Supreme Court.
Yeah, it's a real BITCH to get information out of Creative. I've been to their website countless times to try to find information about my SoundBlaster card. When I go find a tutorial, it's for a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT CARD. Note that said tutorial was linked from the card I own. So they're giving me non-applicable technical support. The card ships with no manual, there's no help file I can use either on Creative's website or on the CD with the card. There's no way to get information about their card anywhere. I swear to god I will never buy another Creative product as long as I live. It's worse than ATI's drivers were a few years ago. I mean, how high do you have to be to think it's okay to link to a tutorial that uses a completely different card as a reference? I found out on a third-party forum that the card I own didn't even ship with the particular feature I was trying to enable. Why they couldn't have stated this on their website, I'll never know.
I don't think the prediction of a paperless society is wrong. I just think the timeframe was wrong. Analysts have a tendancy to severely overestimate the effect a new piece of technology will have on something. As a result, instead of the 15 years needed for something to start taking hold, they'll say "It'll be widespread within 3 years." I do see a paperless society becoming more mainstream, especially with the significant reduction in price of LCDs and especially of pressure-sensing LCDs. There's a guy who sits behind me in Physics class who takes all his notes on a tablet PC. This is just the first step. When eBooks start being widely available, and significantly less expensive than regular textbooks, that will be another step. When we develop screen readers that behave like paper and not like a lightbulb, then a truly paperless society becomes possible.
It's important to note that even if something becomes possible, it doesn't mean that such a thing will immediately become prevalent. It took 50 or more years for electricity to go from a novelty to a commodity. Think about the amount of time between Gutenberg's invention of the movable type printing press and the commoditization of the written word. People have to get used to the way society changes as a result of technology. There will always be some element of a society distrustful or resentful of the changes brought about by technology, but as those elements slowly pass on there will be less resistance.
In the case of the datacenter, I can accept this man's prediction, but I doubt that they will all disappear within the next 10 or even 20 years. Rather, when networks become truly wireless and when computing technology becomes completely integral in our daily lives, we will have little need for data centers, except in major corporations and in areas where the security of the data in question would be compromised by the transmission.
I'd like to point out that computers haven't even become commodity products. When they become so inexpensive that the vast majority of people need no financial assitance to buy one, then they will be a commodity.
Wait, where do you get 15,000 packages from? Are you counting the actual packages in the OS, or each OS itself? If you're considering each individual package in Linux a "package" then you have to consider each program in Windows a "package." This means that Solitare counts as a single package, Minesweeper counts as a single package, Notepad counts as a single package, etc. It's really not a fair comparison otherwise.
I use 21-26 character passwords that I construct out of sentences for important stuff. Then I attach a meaningful string of numbers to the end of it to make it a stronger password. The length of the sentences makes it pretty difficult to use a dictionary and the rules of the language to narrow down what I'm typing, especially if I reference things that people who don't know me wouldn't understand. In my case, proper nouns make my password stronger. I use the sentences as mnemonics so I can reconstruct the password if I memorize the sentence. I think I'd be pretty safe from shoulder-surfing even when I'm entering a PIN because I can key things in pretty damn fast. Yes, even at shopping centers where they require you to use a pen to press buttons. Those are horribly insecure, by the way. I can enter a 9-digit number in about 3 seconds using a stylus and a touch screen.
Are we talking Emo rats? Wow. I thought the disease only existed in humans, but if it exists in nature as well, we've got a serious problem on our hands.
Yeah. I'm sure that the panels have gotten less expensive than 15 or 20-thousand for a 1 or 2 kWh system too. I wasn't really talking about central or decentral production. The problem with renewable energy without the grid upgrades I mentioned is that there's no way to move power from areas of surplus to areas of need. If we didn't upgrade our grid, even with decentralised production there would still be times of power shortage because of a lack of power in one area. We could alleviate this by building a lot of non-renewable power plants, like we have been doing, or we could ship power across the currently non-existant grid to other parts of the US. Read Smil's book. One of the things he mentions is the nonexistance of any substantial grid connections between the different localities in the country. Say, for instance, that it was sunny across the entire eastern seaboard such that they were generating a huge surplus of energy. Now, say that it's dead in the northwest. How are you going to get the surplus from the east to the northwest without any grid? This is the issue that I'm attempting to point out.
No, threatening the president occupies a different level of legal proceedings than normal assault. Threats against a civil servant's life for performing their duties fall under special laws, at least in my jurisdiction, because a threat against, say, a judge, may prevent that judge from carrying out the service for which he has been charged. Assault on a police officer is another example because your assault may prevent said officer from carrying out his duty and as a society we rely on him to protect us from the criminal element. Not so for a baker or a store clerk.
The problem with Wind and Solar in the US is that, in order for us to build enough to completely replace all our fossil-fuel baseline, we will need grid interconnects across the US large enough to ship all the power across the country several times. It's not unfeasible, but it will cost as much as building a ton of nuclear reactors, which are also really expensive. I'd say that if money weren't an issue I'd go with Wind and Solar though. But since the southwest is our biggest source of solar and the midwest is our biggest source of wind, we'll have to ship power through our nonexistant grid interconnects. There's a book by Vaclav Smil called _Energy at The Crossroads: Global Perspectives and Uncertainties_ published by the MIT Press in 2003 that has a huge in-depth discussion and analysis of energy problems, if you're interested.
I believe it's actually a felony to threaten the president. You can say anything you want about his actions, but the second you say that he should be beaten or killed you can be arrested. Just because those people have not been punished doesn't make it any less of a crime in our system. It's also a specific crime to assault a civil servant, as we have to make a distinction between the man and his job.
I live in one of those smaller towns. The cost for heating my apartment in the winter is about $40 every two months. I'm not really expecting to have to use my heater and my computer, so it'll probably stay roughly the same for me. And yeah, most of my electricity comes from hydroelectric power.
No, I have every right to keep you off my property if I don't want you there. You are violating my right to do with my property as I please. Your right to access ends when you step off the sidewalk and onto my lawn. You are not allowed to throw trash onto my lawn, as you are vandalizing my property. You should respect my right to private property because otherwise I will throw you to the curb and take your wallet, your clothes, and whatever else you have. After all, you're violating my freedom by protecting those objects. Why should I respect your right to have that wallet? What do I have to gain from that?
They did this to Xenosaga I. It was called Xenosaga: The Movie, and consisted of nothing but the cutscenes. It was also remarkably comprehensible. Apparently if you cut all the gameplay completely out of the game, arrange the cutscenes in some semblance of a chronology, and encode that, it's about the same as going through the game for the cutscenes, without all the damn running around and getting into random battles. I think it was closer to 5 or 10 hours long though. This was nice, as this was a game where I actually groaned whenever I'd get into a fight.
I like Burger King. The meat is ginormous! I'm gonna walk the mile or so to get me a value meal and a copy of the sneaking game even though I don't own an Xbox. Even if you hate the food, it's a steal for such an awesome piece of memoribilia.
Totally ditching my mod points for this, but I thought I'd chime in and say that the proctologist gives you a pill that will cause you not to remember a few hours after taking the pill, then goes to work. So yes, even though you will be horribly violated, you will not remember a damn thing. Also, they no long violate you with a metal bar as was the norm several years ago. Now they do it with a thin flexible tube and a micro camera.
And you're right about the bias toward men in health studies. Up until the latter half of the last century there were hardly any studies done on women. In the 19th century medical science thought women were less intelligent than men because they had smaller brains, even. If anything, I think we need to devote our attention equally across the board.
Something that bothers me about the feminist movement is that it circulates some pretty heavily women-centric views. An earlier poster mentioned that there was a large social movement to focus on how girls were treated in education more than boys, and as a result there are far more women graduating high school and going to college. My view of this situation is that there are some things in which we tend to overcorrect, and other things which need more correction. The gender bias in health care needs more correction, but the gender bias in education seems to swing in the other direction, with a few exceptions like the need for more girls to become science/engineering majors.
In general there's a lot more support for girls and women than there is for men in education. Maybe I'm missing out on a few opportunities, but I've noticed also that women tend to be considered a minority for the purposes of funding, completely ignoring the fact that women and men tend to be about equal parts of the population. I've seen plenty of girls scholarships, but I've not seen one mens scholarship, so it seems to me that there is a significant bias there.
I see a most poignant example of this in one of our former presidents, when he said "I am not a crook." When these machines aren't at the forefront of public scrutiny, they must certainly be at the rear, and whatever is at the rear smells worst.
I have to say, also, that I like Star Trek but that I cringe every time they give a technical explanation because I know exactly how much of it is bullshit. The ability of a group of english majors to explain modern science is usually pretty laughable, so I actually prefer them to not tell me what's going on. That way I don't have to cover my ears when they suggest that the warp drive is generating an inverse tachyon field which is interfering with the dilithium matrix.
Well, after studying 10 weeks of E&M, I'd have to say that even some of us younger guys could build a power source. It's not hard. The major difficulty is finding something efficient, and in a disaster something that works is more important than efficiency.
As an aside, I have a battery big enough to power my portable MP3 player for several months if the power ever died.
I really hate playing Smash Brothers. So for me, there were NO must-own games, though F-Zero GX was close. I have a feeling I'm going to be waiting several years for something I actually want to play to come out on the Wii. Something in the jRPG set that I can completely lose myself in for several days at a time.
Slashdot Mirror
Did you say 3 watts? Could we put that in a notebook PC?
IANAL, but it would appear that Thompson is arguing the case on the grounds that the game constitutes a public nuisance. If he's arguing on those grounds then the court has no choice but to decide on those grounds. Many people posting in this article have repeatedly pointed out that it is a violation of first-amendment rights to ban this game. If that is so, then it is not the Florida judge's duty to decide what is or is not a violation of the constitution. That falls to the US Supreme Court. The reason that it hasn't been thrown completely out as prior restraint is because the Florida legislature has penned a law specifically allowing prior restraint if the publishing of the art constitutes a public nuisance. Note that my knowledge of said law is exclusively based on gleanings from other posters.
To sum it up, it is irrelevant whether or not this is a violation of first-amendment rights because the jurisdiction in question cannot decide what is constitutional and what is not. This is also not a clear cut case of prior restraint because of a piece of Florida legislation. If Rockstar wants to set a freedom of speech precedent should this case be lost, they will have to follow an appeal all the way to the US Supreme Court. For a lower court to rule based on the constitution would imply that said court was somehow on-par with the Supreme Court.
Yeah, it's a real BITCH to get information out of Creative. I've been to their website countless times to try to find information about my SoundBlaster card. When I go find a tutorial, it's for a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT CARD. Note that said tutorial was linked from the card I own. So they're giving me non-applicable technical support. The card ships with no manual, there's no help file I can use either on Creative's website or on the CD with the card. There's no way to get information about their card anywhere. I swear to god I will never buy another Creative product as long as I live. It's worse than ATI's drivers were a few years ago. I mean, how high do you have to be to think it's okay to link to a tutorial that uses a completely different card as a reference? I found out on a third-party forum that the card I own didn't even ship with the particular feature I was trying to enable. Why they couldn't have stated this on their website, I'll never know.
I don't think the prediction of a paperless society is wrong. I just think the timeframe was wrong. Analysts have a tendancy to severely overestimate the effect a new piece of technology will have on something. As a result, instead of the 15 years needed for something to start taking hold, they'll say "It'll be widespread within 3 years." I do see a paperless society becoming more mainstream, especially with the significant reduction in price of LCDs and especially of pressure-sensing LCDs. There's a guy who sits behind me in Physics class who takes all his notes on a tablet PC. This is just the first step. When eBooks start being widely available, and significantly less expensive than regular textbooks, that will be another step. When we develop screen readers that behave like paper and not like a lightbulb, then a truly paperless society becomes possible.
It's important to note that even if something becomes possible, it doesn't mean that such a thing will immediately become prevalent. It took 50 or more years for electricity to go from a novelty to a commodity. Think about the amount of time between Gutenberg's invention of the movable type printing press and the commoditization of the written word. People have to get used to the way society changes as a result of technology. There will always be some element of a society distrustful or resentful of the changes brought about by technology, but as those elements slowly pass on there will be less resistance.
In the case of the datacenter, I can accept this man's prediction, but I doubt that they will all disappear within the next 10 or even 20 years. Rather, when networks become truly wireless and when computing technology becomes completely integral in our daily lives, we will have little need for data centers, except in major corporations and in areas where the security of the data in question would be compromised by the transmission.
I'd like to point out that computers haven't even become commodity products. When they become so inexpensive that the vast majority of people need no financial assitance to buy one, then they will be a commodity.
Wait, where do you get 15,000 packages from? Are you counting the actual packages in the OS, or each OS itself? If you're considering each individual package in Linux a "package" then you have to consider each program in Windows a "package." This means that Solitare counts as a single package, Minesweeper counts as a single package, Notepad counts as a single package, etc. It's really not a fair comparison otherwise.
I use 21-26 character passwords that I construct out of sentences for important stuff. Then I attach a meaningful string of numbers to the end of it to make it a stronger password. The length of the sentences makes it pretty difficult to use a dictionary and the rules of the language to narrow down what I'm typing, especially if I reference things that people who don't know me wouldn't understand. In my case, proper nouns make my password stronger. I use the sentences as mnemonics so I can reconstruct the password if I memorize the sentence. I think I'd be pretty safe from shoulder-surfing even when I'm entering a PIN because I can key things in pretty damn fast. Yes, even at shopping centers where they require you to use a pen to press buttons. Those are horribly insecure, by the way. I can enter a 9-digit number in about 3 seconds using a stylus and a touch screen.
Are we talking Emo rats? Wow. I thought the disease only existed in humans, but if it exists in nature as well, we've got a serious problem on our hands.
Yeah. I'm sure that the panels have gotten less expensive than 15 or 20-thousand for a 1 or 2 kWh system too. I wasn't really talking about central or decentral production. The problem with renewable energy without the grid upgrades I mentioned is that there's no way to move power from areas of surplus to areas of need. If we didn't upgrade our grid, even with decentralised production there would still be times of power shortage because of a lack of power in one area. We could alleviate this by building a lot of non-renewable power plants, like we have been doing, or we could ship power across the currently non-existant grid to other parts of the US. Read Smil's book. One of the things he mentions is the nonexistance of any substantial grid connections between the different localities in the country. Say, for instance, that it was sunny across the entire eastern seaboard such that they were generating a huge surplus of energy. Now, say that it's dead in the northwest. How are you going to get the surplus from the east to the northwest without any grid? This is the issue that I'm attempting to point out.
No, threatening the president occupies a different level of legal proceedings than normal assault. Threats against a civil servant's life for performing their duties fall under special laws, at least in my jurisdiction, because a threat against, say, a judge, may prevent that judge from carrying out the service for which he has been charged. Assault on a police officer is another example because your assault may prevent said officer from carrying out his duty and as a society we rely on him to protect us from the criminal element. Not so for a baker or a store clerk.
Are you a traffic cop by any chance? Sorry about that. I was just looking for the Enterprise.
The problem with Wind and Solar in the US is that, in order for us to build enough to completely replace all our fossil-fuel baseline, we will need grid interconnects across the US large enough to ship all the power across the country several times. It's not unfeasible, but it will cost as much as building a ton of nuclear reactors, which are also really expensive. I'd say that if money weren't an issue I'd go with Wind and Solar though. But since the southwest is our biggest source of solar and the midwest is our biggest source of wind, we'll have to ship power through our nonexistant grid interconnects. There's a book by Vaclav Smil called _Energy at The Crossroads: Global Perspectives and Uncertainties_ published by the MIT Press in 2003 that has a huge in-depth discussion and analysis of energy problems, if you're interested.
I believe it's actually a felony to threaten the president. You can say anything you want about his actions, but the second you say that he should be beaten or killed you can be arrested. Just because those people have not been punished doesn't make it any less of a crime in our system. It's also a specific crime to assault a civil servant, as we have to make a distinction between the man and his job.
I live in one of those smaller towns. The cost for heating my apartment in the winter is about $40 every two months. I'm not really expecting to have to use my heater and my computer, so it'll probably stay roughly the same for me. And yeah, most of my electricity comes from hydroelectric power.
No, I have every right to keep you off my property if I don't want you there. You are violating my right to do with my property as I please. Your right to access ends when you step off the sidewalk and onto my lawn. You are not allowed to throw trash onto my lawn, as you are vandalizing my property. You should respect my right to private property because otherwise I will throw you to the curb and take your wallet, your clothes, and whatever else you have. After all, you're violating my freedom by protecting those objects. Why should I respect your right to have that wallet? What do I have to gain from that?
They did this to Xenosaga I. It was called Xenosaga: The Movie, and consisted of nothing but the cutscenes. It was also remarkably comprehensible. Apparently if you cut all the gameplay completely out of the game, arrange the cutscenes in some semblance of a chronology, and encode that, it's about the same as going through the game for the cutscenes, without all the damn running around and getting into random battles. I think it was closer to 5 or 10 hours long though. This was nice, as this was a game where I actually groaned whenever I'd get into a fight.
I like Burger King. The meat is ginormous! I'm gonna walk the mile or so to get me a value meal and a copy of the sneaking game even though I don't own an Xbox. Even if you hate the food, it's a steal for such an awesome piece of memoribilia.
Totally ditching my mod points for this, but I thought I'd chime in and say that the proctologist gives you a pill that will cause you not to remember a few hours after taking the pill, then goes to work. So yes, even though you will be horribly violated, you will not remember a damn thing. Also, they no long violate you with a metal bar as was the norm several years ago. Now they do it with a thin flexible tube and a micro camera.
And you're right about the bias toward men in health studies. Up until the latter half of the last century there were hardly any studies done on women. In the 19th century medical science thought women were less intelligent than men because they had smaller brains, even. If anything, I think we need to devote our attention equally across the board.
Something that bothers me about the feminist movement is that it circulates some pretty heavily women-centric views. An earlier poster mentioned that there was a large social movement to focus on how girls were treated in education more than boys, and as a result there are far more women graduating high school and going to college. My view of this situation is that there are some things in which we tend to overcorrect, and other things which need more correction. The gender bias in health care needs more correction, but the gender bias in education seems to swing in the other direction, with a few exceptions like the need for more girls to become science/engineering majors.
In general there's a lot more support for girls and women than there is for men in education. Maybe I'm missing out on a few opportunities, but I've noticed also that women tend to be considered a minority for the purposes of funding, completely ignoring the fact that women and men tend to be about equal parts of the population. I've seen plenty of girls scholarships, but I've not seen one mens scholarship, so it seems to me that there is a significant bias there.
End speculation based on specious evidence.
I see a most poignant example of this in one of our former presidents, when he said "I am not a crook." When these machines aren't at the forefront of public scrutiny, they must certainly be at the rear, and whatever is at the rear smells worst.
WoW still pisses a lot of its customers off. They're just locked in in that their friends play so they can't really stop.
I have to say, also, that I like Star Trek but that I cringe every time they give a technical explanation because I know exactly how much of it is bullshit. The ability of a group of english majors to explain modern science is usually pretty laughable, so I actually prefer them to not tell me what's going on. That way I don't have to cover my ears when they suggest that the warp drive is generating an inverse tachyon field which is interfering with the dilithium matrix.
That reminds me of an Eddie Izzard routine. So, Cake or death?
I've got a solution for that. Simply buy the DVD, then rip it and encode it. Presto, you've got your digital download and a hard copy all in one.
My Rio Chiba is expandable with SD cards, and it has an FM radio tuner in it. Granted the tuner kinda sucks, but I didn't buy it for that anyway.
Well, after studying 10 weeks of E&M, I'd have to say that even some of us younger guys could build a power source. It's not hard. The major difficulty is finding something efficient, and in a disaster something that works is more important than efficiency.
As an aside, I have a battery big enough to power my portable MP3 player for several months if the power ever died.
I really hate playing Smash Brothers. So for me, there were NO must-own games, though F-Zero GX was close. I have a feeling I'm going to be waiting several years for something I actually want to play to come out on the Wii. Something in the jRPG set that I can completely lose myself in for several days at a time.