It's called an FM radio. I have one in my car, and it downloads music to my brain whenever I drive. Unfortunately, my brain seems to have a problem with the "delete" function. I can't delete that copy of "Hollaback Girl" I downloaded a few months back. Not only that, my mental media player is stuck on repeat right at that part with trombone slide. Someone please help!
Orbjects: noun. contraction of ORBiting oBJECTS (with the repeated B collapsed to a single character). Any object in a solar system that orbits. Focus of such orbit must be another object or center of gravity derived from two or more objects.
Further classification: Little Orbjects: Wee orbjects that require only a passing flock of waterfowl to achieve escape velocity. Can only contain volcanos, sheep, roses, and possibly a child, tippler, king, or accountant. Big Orbjects: Orbjects that would require an actual propulsion system including significant amount of reaction mass to achieve escape velocity. Huge Orbjects: Orbjects whose mass is so great that a human being could not survive its gravitational pull. Or better stated, orbjects that you might have sex with, but wouldn't introduce to your friends.
video game players are violent. You can get medieval on someone's ass playing the Telletubbies game if you try hard enough. What about all the times I crashed 747's into the World Trade Center in Microsoft FS2000? To be fair, I was trying to fly between them, but the frame rate on my Pentium ONE (with the floating point bug, thank you very much) was so crappy I often over-controlled and wiped out on one of them.
The converse is also true. I play World of Warcraft, an intensely PVP game but have never fought another player (mostly because they're all noobs and I'm too nice to pwn them severely). I could easily play an hour of GTA without killing a single NPC. It's not the point of the game, but I could do it if I wanted to.
Still, I'm thankful that the vast rightwing conspiracy is taking time off from the war on drugs, fighting against pr0n, opposing gay marriage, defending the rights of blastocycts, installing surveillance cameras, wire-tapping my home, and working feverishly to perfect SOME kind of mind-control device to protect me (a 47 year old man) from violent video games. Thanks, dudes!
Actually, Hummers can't carry much in a useful fashion. Here's why: 1. They're friggen expensive. Unless I'm a gazillionaire, nobody's going to put sharp scratchy dirty or otherwise damaging items in my status symbol. Of course, if I were a gazillionaire, I'd buy a new Hummer every time I needed to haul around something and throw the Hummer away when I was done with it. 2. The tailgate is like 19 feet tall. Seriously, I feel like one of those guys in Land of the Giants every time I stand next to one. I keep looking for a saftey pin & spool of thread rapelling rig. Any load you want to haul around has to be lifted to almost chest height to get it into the Hummer. I once had a friend ask me to bring around my minivan to help him haul his TV because he couldn't get it into his Hummer (a little of reason #1 came into play too, as the TV was sharp, scratchy and dirty). And it was gold. GOLD, people! I can now razz him at any moment I choose about how he needs to trade in his tiny little Hummer for a Man's Ride (aka, a beat-up 2002 Chevy Venture). 3. You can't really see the Garfield-ass suction-cupped to the back window of a Hummer. They're too high up. In practical terms, this means there's no viable reason for owning one.
Make all elections double-blind experiments and let the two major parties each run 1/3 of the country, leaving 1/3 as a "control" which would have no government at all. All elected officials would have their names concealed, their voices altered, wear hoods and height-evenging shoes, and the control region would have be appear to be governed by the animatronic Abe Lincoln in the closest Disney theme park.
At the end of the term, the winning candidate names and the regions they governed would be revealed by a research assistant named Smitty, who would receive AP Science course credit for running the whole experiment. The region with the best economy at the end of the term wins the right to appoint the next Smitty. If Abe Lincoln wins, the next Smitty is chosen by the banjo-player in the Country-Bear Jamboree./makes as much sense as what we do today//more...
Unfortunately, with them being in a p*ssing contest with Agora, I think the excellence will degrade. For those not from the Great(ly backwards and mostly illiterate) State of Pennsylvania, PAVCS is PennsylvaniA Virtual Charter School. They use an excellent (see poster's description above) curriculum developed by a company called K12. Until recently, K12 had significant control over the operation of PAVCS, but not long ago they lost some of that. To muddy the waters, K12 now has Agora, its own virtual charter school. Competition being at the heart of capitalism, we now have choice, and the big dog in this market is Agora. I think PAVCS will suffer unless the two can come to some mutually beneficial agreement.
-two kids in PAVCS
--love the program
---make dashies, not slashies!
Another "problem" (from the school boards' point of view) is that the kids who are in these programs tend to be those who would have been the top students in public schools. Not only do the schools lose funding from having to subsidize the online charters, they lose top test scores.
In many school districts, teacher and principal bonuses are tied to performance, which is measured by the difference in before and after scores on standardized tests. Potentially, every smart kid that's pulled out represents a loss of earnings to teachers and administrative staff. This is especially true if the top test takers are pulled AFTER the first "before" tests are taken and BEFORE the "after" tests are taken.
So why are they resisting? Because virtual charter schools cost them money. They cost the district money because of subsidizing, and they cost the teachers and principals money because of lost bonuses. Of course, they never consider the easy solution: Make the schools safe and teach the students well. If they had done that in the first place, there wouldn't be any need for the virtual charter schools.
Captain: Engage the NIRF* (*Negative Index of Refraction Fractalizer) Executive Officer: NIRF engaged, Sir Captain (ducking): WTF* is that? (*What The F**K) (**uc) Flight Officer: Flight deck to Bridge - I think we just got buzzed- by a Japanese Zero! Captain: Let's go out and win WWII!
Seriously, did the guy think he'd get away with this? What total and utter plagiarism! Styx did the whole "notes appearing at random points and sliding at random rates toward a crescendo chord" thing ages ago. And better, if you ask me.
It's not so much that he copied them almost directly that bugs the crap out of me every time I go to the movie theatres. The fact that he claims that it's original and "had never been done before."
Total crap.
JT and Spock go to White Castle IV in the Delta Quadrant
Starfleet Police Academy MMDCCCXIII
Extraterrestrial House
Phillips Insists You Watch This Long Commercial From Our Sponsors Without Skipping To The Part Where You Get To See The Title Of This Movie Don't Touch That Remote It Won't Work Anyway Stay Seated Do Not Go Get A Soda Or Unit Will Pause Playback Until Your Uniq Embedded RFID-Chip and Infrared Signatures Are Detected By Sensors Trek - The DCMA Mandatory Voyage
Walking down the Path of Evil to the Ultimate Precipice of Slippery Slopeyness:
I've had this idea for a long time. Instead of making you watch a commercial or making commercials louder to make them harder to ignore, you get the choice to watch the advertisements or not. But before you can proceed to the rest of the content, you have to have some interaction with the set to make sure the advertisement made an "impression."
Examples:
- Click the advertiser's logo (logo moves so no auto-clicky)
- 4x4 game of "concentration" to match logo, product, company name, etc.
- Multiple-choice questions about the advert
- Click on character "talking heads" from the advert to make them reiterate parts of the message
- Characters act out a bit, then you get to choose "should Clara (a) Use Brand Z to bake her cake or (b) use SuperMix Cake Mix- with Real Cake Bits(sm)!" then react appropriately to your choice.
The possibilities are endless. Make it entertaining enough (and short enough), and the "user" (aka the "used") won't mind much at all.
1. Dude (or dude-ette)! What a cool idea. If I had any flippin idea of how to do the metamod thingy, I'd give a +2 vote for being so insightfullnesslyish. If I had to give your idea a name, I'd use "boutique theatres" (complete with the anglosnobish spelling). You could theme-ify them based on the movie being shown. Chateau d'expensif wine and pate' de fois bleah for the incomprehensible foreign films. Hot tub and a mess o'wings for NASCAR-themed films. Band-camp props and beenie-weenie for American Pie movies. The possibilities are endless.
2. Do theater owners read Slashdot? I hope so- maybe they'll see this poster's idea and run with it. Or better yet, maybe they'll just shut down business when they realize people really hate the movie-going experience.
3. Personally, I go to only a few movies a year. Same reasons as everyone else: it's too expensive, there are various annoyances, etc.. I do like it from one point of view, though: it's an event. Watching a movie in my own home is just something to do for that particular period of time. I enjoy the movie on my 61" DLP and 300-watt 7:1 surround sound system as much as enjoy it at a theater, but there's no sense of "hey! I'm leaving the dubble-wide to go do something."
4. Currently, movie theaters have to sign agreements to not sell DVDs/videos. If the studios let them do that, they'd complain a lot less. Sell people a DVD of the movie for going to the movie theater and buying a $15 snak-pak. I'd go just to get the DVD and take it home to watch it. The theater would make their profit and not have to clean up after me. I'd be happy watching the movie at home w/o ads and previews. It's a win-win!
I think he means after they're dead. Maybe he should have added "that's not in the water after it dies" or "in a really really dry place."
I agree, though. Just after it dies the reproductive tract is probably still sort of wet, from sitting in the water all the time. Or at least part of the time. I had a hermit crab once. Actually, my kid had a hermit crab. But I bought it. In fact, I bought it several times. Every time one would die, I'd go buy another one and tell him that his crab had "changed shells."
Which in retrospect was an excellent chance to find out whether or not a dead crab's reproductive tract is really dry. But alas, opportunity, like a dead hermit crab, and curiously enough unlike the postman never knocks twice. Although the postman doesn't actually knock. He rings. Twice, actually. Unless you don't have a doorbell, in which case I suppose he might knock. And by knock, you have to consider that when knocking on a door you really knock more than once per "knocking event." Take "Shave-and-a-haircut...two-bits." That's seven knocks, but you're really only asking for entry once, right? So if the door didn't have a doorbell, per se, and the postman did shave-and-a-etc twice, that would be fourteen distinct knocks or seven opportunities if you count it that way. Either way, it's more knocks than you can shake a dead crab at, as I always say.
Is a network connection mandatory? Because I'm not going to drill a flipping hole in the floor, snake a effin cable up the heating vents, cut a slot in the wall for a workbox, get a face plate with RJ-11 connector, go back to Home Depot, get a face plate with RJ-45 connector, go back to Home Depot, get a crimping tool, go back to Home Depot, get some cat5e cable that's bloody PLENUM rated, crimp fifteen or sixteen jacks on the bloody PLENUM-rated cat5e cable, go back to Home Depot, buy a contractor-pack of 50 friggin RJ-45 connectors and a copy of "Wire Your Home for Teh IntarNets!" snake the first cable out of the wall, break a hole in the wall with a sledge-hammer, find where the first cable is stuck on a 110VAC line, go down to the basement, reset the breaker for the circuit for the room with the 110VAC line, re-run the network with bloody PLENUM-rated cat5e cable, go back to Home Depot, buy a 8'x4' piece of drywall to repair a 1'x1' hole, go back to Home Depot this time with a god-damn friggin bloody flippin list, buy some drywall tape, clips, spackle, sandpaper, a drywall knife, a spatula and a copy of "Home Repairs with Norm Abrams," patch, tape, spackle, and sand the wall, drive halfway back to DAG-NABBIT fripping Home Depot, go back home and get a piece of the old drywall, drive BACK to Home Depot (get the FARK out of my way you bleeping idiot!!! Where'd you get your beeping driver's license, moron?!!), buy a gallon of paint matched to the same color to fix the 1'x1' bare spot, drive home, look for a paint brush, say screw it and use an old sponge and call it "spot faux finishing," try eight different ways to hook up the new X360 to the intarnets, my TV, my cardiac monitor, the on-star system in my car (drive back to Home Depot yourself, you bloody farking machine!), then call my kids downstairs to play a game of Monopoly.
Seriously. Have you ever asked a six year old where his shoes are? Give them all your nuclear waste, tell them NOT TO LOSE IT, then forget about it for the next 10,000 years. Some future archeologist will find it under an unopened package of Yugi-Oh! cards he just HAD to have, assuming the future archeologist is a mom, searching for a pair of shoes, for another six-year-old who lost his for the billionth time.
Bought a display model from a local retailer, brought it home, popped in a Norton Anti-Virus CD and went to town. Eight hours later, it was still fubarred. Even the emergency repair partition was screwed up. (I have no way of knowing if that was virus-related, though.) Eventually, I just called the manufacturer and had them send out a set of Windows-XP media.
Lesson learned: never buy the display model if it's hooked up to an in-store network!
The AT&T employee volunteer organization called the "Pioneers" does a lot of community service work. One time, they participated experiment designed to help troubled children get therapy. They took apart a cordless phone handset, modified it so that the intercom feature was always on, and put the speaker and mic into a teddy bear. A therapist would then use the base station to speak to the child through the bear. This was quite a while ago (late 80's/early 90's), well before things like furbies and tickle-me elmo - at the time, it was quite high-tech. The idea was that some of these kids had a hard time talking to adults, but they might open up to a teddy bear.
Personally, I didn't think this was such a good idea. You're taking kids whose grasp on reality is tenuous at best- and now their teddy bear can have real conversations with them? I wonder how many of those kids are adults today, cringing in corners because Teddy Ruxpin keeps telling them to kill, kill, kill!
Couldn't your company sue HP for fraud? Essentially, HP is lying- their statement that the cartridge has expired is obviously false because there is still usable ink in the resevoir. Maybe they could argue that ink degrades in quality over time. But so what? Shouldn't the user of the printer be allowed to determine when the cartridge can't print? An expiry date is at best an estimate based on experimental observation and knowledge of the ink's chemical properties. External variables surely affect the useful life of a cartridge.
A customer-focused company (not one that is focused on screwing the customer, mind you) would handle ink-quality degradation in the driver. If you popped in a "new" cartridge that came from expired stock, you would get a message stating "The cartridge has exceeded its designed storage time. Print quality might suffer. HP recommends you replace this cartridge. [OK]" If your cartridge was installed before the storage-expiry but has exceeded its designed in-printer lifespan then a similar warning IS appropriate. After all, a customer-focused company is concerned that its customers get the best performance out of its products. In fact, I would be upset if they DIDN'T warn me of either situation.
I don't feel that HP is right in refusing me the choice to ignore the warning and proceed. What if I just have one more page to print, my thesis is due tomorrow, and it's 12:01AM- oops! No degree! Even if my motivation is to milk every drop of ink out of MY cartridge, that should be my right.
Making a false statement about the state of the cartridge if fraud. Preventing me from using my own ink cartridge is theft.
/Just sayin.
Investigating this might not be that difficult...
on
Martian Sea Discovered
·
· Score: 2, Funny
... All we would need to do is have a probe drop a moderately sized man-made metorite or two onto the plate to expose the material underneath the "perhaps [only] a few centimetres thick" layer of volcanic ash.
/Anyone know if the Brits are planning building Beagle 3?
Saturated? Hmmmph! I'm still stuck playing EQ2 because I can't buy a copy of Wow. I had one literally taken out of my hands by a mom at Target the other day with nothing more than a "if you're not going to buy that, my son wants it for his birthday." I seriously considered summoning a L23 Security Wight. The only thing that stopped me was the fact that I knew they're not accepting new subscribers until they get their hardware issues ironed out. Happy birthday, Junior!
Yeah, I did consider that argument. I think the game developers would (and do) argue that if you offer something for sale, no matter how you obtained it, the thing itself is what's for sale not the time/effort required to get it. And in the case of plat and items, the thing is already owned by the developers as part of their IP.
The way I see it, my idea does away with most of the problems surrounding pharming. To include (in no particular order):
It leads to game-economy problems. Enough bots pharming plat leads to a devaluation of the in-game currency, making it difficult to regulate.
Providing in-game services for RL money should not have that effect, other than in the very-minor case of "groups for hire" where the patron gets all the drops, loot, exp of the group's effort.
It leads to bad behavior. I've read of (but never seen) pharmers training high-level mobs onto chars coming into their pharming areas, and other abuses. Again, in-game services are merely playing the game as intended and in accordance with the EULA, so theoretically bad behavior is not an issue.
It's a legal liability for the developer. If they allow in-game items and currency to be treated like RL property of the players, they open themselves to litigation every they change the game. No such issue with selling in-game services, since there's no exchange of items or currency.
Bots. Everybody hates 'em, myself included. It's pretty hard to design a service-providing bot. Furthermore, part of the fun of MMORPG is the player interchange. Chat's half of why I play. Bots aren't exactly good conversationalists. Except for maybe Hal-9000, and we all know how that turned out.
It isn't fair. Players with RL cash are able to advance faster, afford cooler stuff, get prestige items, etc. without the effort required of purists (or folks like me with limited RL resources). I agree, and that's why I'm against paying for in-game items and currency with RL cash. Selling services is more fair because the service is still in the real game and requires the buyer's participation. The buyer still has to expend the in-game effort of grouping with the for-hire group, going adventuring, etc..
I can think of one potential problem with my idea, though: It could (and probably would) lead to abusive in-game hawking of services. Anyone who's ever been to a beach in the Bahamas will know what I'm talking about. You can't sit five minutes without someone coming up to you offering to give you a massage, braid your hair, take you parasailing, rent you a jetski, and other less legal propositions as well. If some company takes my idea and runs with it, be prepared to be annoyed by thousands of third-world citizens sending you messages like "great exp group waiting for YOU!" and "Tour Zek in perfect safety!" Feel free to hate me, should this occur. I'll certainly be hating myself.
Slashdot Mirror
It's called an FM radio. I have one in my car, and it downloads music to my brain whenever I drive. Unfortunately, my brain seems to have a problem with the "delete" function. I can't delete that copy of "Hollaback Girl" I downloaded a few months back. Not only that, my mental media player is stuck on repeat right at that part with trombone slide. Someone please help!
Join AFA-AFA! Americans For An Acronym-Free America!
Orbjects: noun. contraction of ORBiting oBJECTS (with the repeated B collapsed to a single character). Any object in a solar system that orbits. Focus of such orbit must be another object or center of gravity derived from two or more objects.
Further classification:
Little Orbjects: Wee orbjects that require only a passing flock of waterfowl to achieve escape velocity. Can only contain volcanos, sheep, roses, and possibly a child, tippler, king, or accountant.
Big Orbjects: Orbjects that would require an actual propulsion system including significant amount of reaction mass to achieve escape velocity.
Huge Orbjects: Orbjects whose mass is so great that a human being could not survive its gravitational pull. Or better stated, orbjects that you might have sex with, but wouldn't introduce to your friends.
video game players are violent. You can get medieval on someone's ass playing the Telletubbies game if you try hard enough. What about all the times I crashed 747's into the World Trade Center in Microsoft FS2000? To be fair, I was trying to fly between them, but the frame rate on my Pentium ONE (with the floating point bug, thank you very much) was so crappy I often over-controlled and wiped out on one of them.
The converse is also true. I play World of Warcraft, an intensely PVP game but have never fought another player (mostly because they're all noobs and I'm too nice to pwn them severely). I could easily play an hour of GTA without killing a single NPC. It's not the point of the game, but I could do it if I wanted to.
Still, I'm thankful that the vast rightwing conspiracy is taking time off from the war on drugs, fighting against pr0n, opposing gay marriage, defending the rights of blastocycts, installing surveillance cameras, wire-tapping my home, and working feverishly to perfect SOME kind of mind-control device to protect me (a 47 year old man) from violent video games. Thanks, dudes!
Can I pay the extra 35 cents per baryon for an all-light matter universe?
Actually, Hummers can't carry much in a useful fashion. Here's why:
1. They're friggen expensive. Unless I'm a gazillionaire, nobody's going to put sharp scratchy dirty or otherwise damaging items in my status symbol. Of course, if I were a gazillionaire, I'd buy a new Hummer every time I needed to haul around something and throw the Hummer away when I was done with it.
2. The tailgate is like 19 feet tall. Seriously, I feel like one of those guys in Land of the Giants every time I stand next to one. I keep looking for a saftey pin & spool of thread rapelling rig. Any load you want to haul around has to be lifted to almost chest height to get it into the Hummer. I once had a friend ask me to bring around my minivan to help him haul his TV because he couldn't get it into his Hummer (a little of reason #1 came into play too, as the TV was sharp, scratchy and dirty). And it was gold. GOLD, people! I can now razz him at any moment I choose about how he needs to trade in his tiny little Hummer for a Man's Ride (aka, a beat-up 2002 Chevy Venture).
3. You can't really see the Garfield-ass suction-cupped to the back window of a Hummer. They're too high up. In practical terms, this means there's no viable reason for owning one.
I say we should use the scientific method!
/makes as much sense as what we do today //more...
Make all elections double-blind experiments and let the two major parties each run 1/3 of the country, leaving 1/3 as a "control" which would have no government at all. All elected officials would have their names concealed, their voices altered, wear hoods and height-evenging shoes, and the control region would have be appear to be governed by the animatronic Abe Lincoln in the closest Disney theme park.
At the end of the term, the winning candidate names and the regions they governed would be revealed by a research assistant named Smitty, who would receive AP Science course credit for running the whole experiment. The region with the best economy at the end of the term wins the right to appoint the next Smitty. If Abe Lincoln wins, the next Smitty is chosen by the banjo-player in the Country-Bear Jamboree.
Unfortunately, with them being in a p*ssing contest with Agora, I think the excellence will degrade. For those not from the Great(ly backwards and mostly illiterate) State of Pennsylvania, PAVCS is PennsylvaniA Virtual Charter School. They use an excellent (see poster's description above) curriculum developed by a company called K12. Until recently, K12 had significant control over the operation of PAVCS, but not long ago they lost some of that. To muddy the waters, K12 now has Agora, its own virtual charter school. Competition being at the heart of capitalism, we now have choice, and the big dog in this market is Agora. I think PAVCS will suffer unless the two can come to some mutually beneficial agreement.
-two kids in PAVCS
--love the program
---make dashies, not slashies!
Another "problem" (from the school boards' point of view) is that the kids who are in these programs tend to be those who would have been the top students in public schools. Not only do the schools lose funding from having to subsidize the online charters, they lose top test scores.
In many school districts, teacher and principal bonuses are tied to performance, which is measured by the difference in before and after scores on standardized tests. Potentially, every smart kid that's pulled out represents a loss of earnings to teachers and administrative staff. This is especially true if the top test takers are pulled AFTER the first "before" tests are taken and BEFORE the "after" tests are taken.
So why are they resisting? Because virtual charter schools cost them money. They cost the district money because of subsidizing, and they cost the teachers and principals money because of lost bonuses. Of course, they never consider the easy solution: Make the schools safe and teach the students well. If they had done that in the first place, there wouldn't be any need for the virtual charter schools.
Captain: Engage the NIRF* (*Negative Index of Refraction Fractalizer)
Executive Officer: NIRF engaged, Sir
Captain (ducking): WTF* is that? (*What The F**K) (**uc)
Flight Officer: Flight deck to Bridge - I think we just got buzzed- by a Japanese Zero!
Captain: Let's go out and win WWII!
Seriously, did the guy think he'd get away with this? What total and utter plagiarism! Styx did the whole "notes appearing at random points and sliding at random rates toward a crescendo chord" thing ages ago. And better, if you ask me. It's not so much that he copied them almost directly that bugs the crap out of me every time I go to the movie theatres. The fact that he claims that it's original and "had never been done before." Total crap.
All this means is that the speed of light has changed.
Walking down the Path of Evil to the Ultimate Precipice of Slippery Slopeyness:
I've had this idea for a long time. Instead of making you watch a commercial or making commercials louder to make them harder to ignore, you get the choice to watch the advertisements or not. But before you can proceed to the rest of the content, you have to have some interaction with the set to make sure the advertisement made an "impression."
Examples:
- Click the advertiser's logo (logo moves so no auto-clicky)
- 4x4 game of "concentration" to match logo, product, company name, etc.
- Multiple-choice questions about the advert
- Click on character "talking heads" from the advert to make them reiterate parts of the message
- Characters act out a bit, then you get to choose "should Clara (a) Use Brand Z to bake her cake or (b) use SuperMix Cake Mix- with Real Cake Bits(sm)!" then react appropriately to your choice.
The possibilities are endless. Make it entertaining enough (and short enough), and the "user" (aka the "used") won't mind much at all.
Three things:
1. Dude (or dude-ette)! What a cool idea. If I had any flippin idea of how to do the metamod thingy, I'd give a +2 vote for being so insightfullnesslyish. If I had to give your idea a name, I'd use "boutique theatres" (complete with the anglosnobish spelling). You could theme-ify them based on the movie being shown. Chateau d'expensif wine and pate' de fois bleah for the incomprehensible foreign films. Hot tub and a mess o'wings for NASCAR-themed films. Band-camp props and beenie-weenie for American Pie movies. The possibilities are endless.
2. Do theater owners read Slashdot? I hope so- maybe they'll see this poster's idea and run with it. Or better yet, maybe they'll just shut down business when they realize people really hate the movie-going experience.
3. Personally, I go to only a few movies a year. Same reasons as everyone else: it's too expensive, there are various annoyances, etc.. I do like it from one point of view, though: it's an event. Watching a movie in my own home is just something to do for that particular period of time. I enjoy the movie on my 61" DLP and 300-watt 7:1 surround sound system as much as enjoy it at a theater, but there's no sense of "hey! I'm leaving the dubble-wide to go do something."
4. Currently, movie theaters have to sign agreements to not sell DVDs/videos. If the studios let them do that, they'd complain a lot less. Sell people a DVD of the movie for going to the movie theater and buying a $15 snak-pak. I'd go just to get the DVD and take it home to watch it. The theater would make their profit and not have to clean up after me. I'd be happy watching the movie at home w/o ads and previews. It's a win-win!
I think he means after they're dead. Maybe he should have added "that's not in the water after it dies" or "in a really really dry place." I agree, though. Just after it dies the reproductive tract is probably still sort of wet, from sitting in the water all the time. Or at least part of the time. I had a hermit crab once. Actually, my kid had a hermit crab. But I bought it. In fact, I bought it several times. Every time one would die, I'd go buy another one and tell him that his crab had "changed shells." Which in retrospect was an excellent chance to find out whether or not a dead crab's reproductive tract is really dry. But alas, opportunity, like a dead hermit crab, and curiously enough unlike the postman never knocks twice. Although the postman doesn't actually knock. He rings. Twice, actually. Unless you don't have a doorbell, in which case I suppose he might knock. And by knock, you have to consider that when knocking on a door you really knock more than once per "knocking event." Take "Shave-and-a-haircut...two-bits." That's seven knocks, but you're really only asking for entry once, right? So if the door didn't have a doorbell, per se, and the postman did shave-and-a-etc twice, that would be fourteen distinct knocks or seven opportunities if you count it that way. Either way, it's more knocks than you can shake a dead crab at, as I always say.
/just not gonna do it.
Seriously. Have you ever asked a six year old where his shoes are? Give them all your nuclear waste, tell them NOT TO LOSE IT, then forget about it for the next 10,000 years. Some future archeologist will find it under an unopened package of Yugi-Oh! cards he just HAD to have, assuming the future archeologist is a mom, searching for a pair of shoes, for another six-year-old who lost his for the billionth time.
Riiiight. Oh, and did you get that memo on the TPS header reports?
Bought a display model from a local retailer, brought it home, popped in a Norton Anti-Virus CD and went to town. Eight hours later, it was still fubarred. Even the emergency repair partition was screwed up. (I have no way of knowing if that was virus-related, though.) Eventually, I just called the manufacturer and had them send out a set of Windows-XP media.
Lesson learned: never buy the display model if it's hooked up to an in-store network!
Personally, I didn't think this was such a good idea. You're taking kids whose grasp on reality is tenuous at best- and now their teddy bear can have real conversations with them? I wonder how many of those kids are adults today, cringing in corners because Teddy Ruxpin keeps telling them to kill, kill, kill!
A customer-focused company (not one that is focused on screwing the customer, mind you) would handle ink-quality degradation in the driver. If you popped in a "new" cartridge that came from expired stock, you would get a message stating "The cartridge has exceeded its designed storage time. Print quality might suffer. HP recommends you replace this cartridge. [OK]" If your cartridge was installed before the storage-expiry but has exceeded its designed in-printer lifespan then a similar warning IS appropriate. After all, a customer-focused company is concerned that its customers get the best performance out of its products. In fact, I would be upset if they DIDN'T warn me of either situation.
I don't feel that HP is right in refusing me the choice to ignore the warning and proceed. What if I just have one more page to print, my thesis is due tomorrow, and it's 12:01AM- oops! No degree! Even if my motivation is to milk every drop of ink out of MY cartridge, that should be my right. Making a false statement about the state of the cartridge if fraud. Preventing me from using my own ink cartridge is theft.
/Just sayin.
Saturated? Hmmmph! I'm still stuck playing EQ2 because I can't buy a copy of Wow. I had one literally taken out of my hands by a mom at Target the other day with nothing more than a "if you're not going to buy that, my son wants it for his birthday." I seriously considered summoning a L23 Security Wight. The only thing that stopped me was the fact that I knew they're not accepting new subscribers until they get their hardware issues ironed out. Happy birthday, Junior!
The way I see it, my idea does away with most of the problems surrounding pharming. To include (in no particular order):
I can think of one potential problem with my idea, though: It could (and probably would) lead to abusive in-game hawking of services. Anyone who's ever been to a beach in the Bahamas will know what I'm talking about. You can't sit five minutes without someone coming up to you offering to give you a massage, braid your hair, take you parasailing, rent you a jetski, and other less legal propositions as well. If some company takes my idea and runs with it, be prepared to be annoyed by thousands of third-world citizens sending you messages like "great exp group waiting for YOU!" and "Tour Zek in perfect safety!" Feel free to hate me, should this occur. I'll certainly be hating myself.