Apple has shipped unfinished product over and over. OSX 10.0 was by no means production ready. With 10.4, they finally have a polished, very reliable OS - after several years of interim releases that focused on improving sluggish performance, getting rid of crashes, improving driver support, and basically just getting the OS fully up to "finished" standards. How many people are still using the 10.0 release of OSX? Very few, if any, because major changes to the core of the OS have taken place and 10.2 is usually the minimum version required to run major applications like Creative Suite. From Adobe's website, Creative Suite requires the following: Mac OS X v.10.2.8 through v.10.4 (10.3.4 through 10.4 recommended; G5 requires v.10.3 or later).
MS is definitely adopting Apple's mindset of "get it out the door and release a better version a year or so later".
A Mac? You are in for a whole new world of frustration. Buy the fastest one you possibly can. OSX requires at least 1 GB of RAM and a very fast harddrive to run major design applications reasonably well. I couldn't imagine gaming on the Mac. I'm platform agnostic and I can tell you Windows 2000 on a single processor Athlon XP 3000 is a much more pleasant (as in snappy and responsive) experience than OSX Tiger on a Dual (powerpc) processor G5. Window/screen redraws and web browsing on Windows 2000 is faster than OSX. File navigation on OSX is about the same as Windows, and even then it's pretty slow. Do not buy into the hype. Both platforms have their performance issues. Incidentally, very few applications are able to run natively on the Intel processors right now. That means major slowdowns for at least 6 months to a year while everything transitions to x86 compatibility.
It could be argued that in a true open market DVDs should be priced as high as people are willing to pay (Star Wars box sets, for example), and lowered if people are unmotivated to buy. The same thing for music. This explains iTunes success, as people are more willing to pay $1.00 for a song than $17.00 for a CD with that song. The problem with piracy is that people care less about living by a moral code than "having lots of stuff" and they don't even want to pay a reasonable price for something they want. $15-20 for a DVD you love is hardly unreasonable in the U.S..
One of the problems with the science - religion debate is simply that the Bible is the only source the theologians have when explaining their universe to the scientist. Believers always find themselves explaining something away or taking a new discovery and trying to "fit" it to the Bible. Centuries ago a literal interpretation of the Bible was the standard - but today the only way to believe the Bible is to either deny science or reject the literal interpretation. Today creation scientists are actually saying that the speed of light has changed over time and that one year hasn't equaled one year in the past. The more scientists discover, the more believers have to make these great leaps of logic to explain the Bible.
The bottom line is this - do you think that someone can get up and start walking around after being dead and rotting for three days? (That would be Jesus, for you non-Bible-believing types). If so, you believe something that is physically impossible and goes against every single thing we've learned about the universe through science. Religion is always a leap of logic - a belief in things that are unknown or unknowable or impossible. I don't see the big deal. Some people believe it, some don't. At this point in life I could care less either way. Even if people could know the absolute truth about the universe they are always just going to ignore the facts and believe what they are comfortable with.
I am level OT VII in my church, by the way. Kidding.
Hey, get that guys post! i want to create a movie based upon it! car chases! beautiful women! huge fireball explosions! sophomoric humor! It'll be great!
A worse side effect of the PageRank system is that eventually all of the top search results will be from the biggest companies that everyone already knows about, by nature of the fact that they have the most linkage. If you are running a small site on a specialized topic, you'll still have to figure out a way to outrank Amazon, Overstock, various manufacturers, and the top forums (which have thousands of database entries that are essentially massive keyword vaults). It's impossible to outrank them without keyword stuffing, even if your site is more on-topic. You could have the most relevant site on earth on a certain topic, and Amazon will still beat you in the rank.
RSS can be handy for stock watchers. You can subscribe to an RSS feed for each company you track by entering their symbol on Yahoo Finance, and clicking the RSS button. An application like RSSReader (which is free) will pull all of the headlines together. It saves a ton of time when you want to read each stock's daily news.
***Apple has taken a very active role in developing the processor for PowerPC chips and chip sets; this is what makes the Power Mac G5 very fast at some tasks.***
Apple doesn't "develop" the processor at all, they just write code that takes advantage of the new features in the new processor (like Altivec). Then they hype the crap out of it as if they created the processor. They had so many problems when Motorola was supplying the CPU that it was pretty obvious that Motorola had Apple over a barrel and there was nothing Apple could do except wait for Motorola to (very slowly) improve their chips. IBM has fallen behind development in the past and these chip shortages will never be a problem with Intel. Also there have been issues in the past with IBM chips not running well at spec speed, for example when they switched to a copper process instead of aluminum there were some speed issues that people didn't expect. IBM isn't a 100% perfect CPU supplier, in other words.
Intel isn't going to remove anything from their processors. What are they going to do, start pulling out transistors? I find it ironic that Mac users that have mocked Intel for years will now find themselves using an Intel and feeling superior for doing so, because after all, it's a Mac.
I think the whole point of the Intel move is precisely because Apple doesn't want to develop hardware like they've done in the past (onboard SCSI, proprietary connections like ADB), so they'll just let the biggest player handle the work and Apple will fit the OS to the fastest available hardware.
It's fun to guess how much the executive resignation after only x months will cost the company. Place your bets - was it a million, two million, ten million? Or did he hit the superball and pull in 100 million?
In this case (from the AP):
"...If it's determined that Maffei resigned for "good cause," he will be entitled to a $3.2 million severance payment, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission."
1991 is more like it. The "IBM" processor available in 1981 was the 8088 and the fastest speed was 8 MHz.
The 386/486 were available around 1991 and personally I wouldn't consider them 'vintage'. You need at least a tape drive or other obsolete I/O device to fall into that category.
"In an unrelated case, Ronald Redding, 37, of Linthicum Heights, Md., was charged Tuesday with giving his copy of "Million Dollar Baby" to a friend. Redding faces a misdemeanor charge of willfully infringing a copyright by distributing the film."
Kill this guy, he's a waste of DNA. Give a friend a DVD... go straight to jail, do not pass go. Federal PMITA prison for this dude. Or death, he deserves it. Good use of the courts, too, we can't have people loaning copies of movies to friends, the entire system will come undone for sure if this starts to happen. I love charge stacking. They wanted to get this guy for pirating ROTS, and nailed him for something completely different. Unwarranted search and seizure forever. Only bad part is that there's no mention of resisting arrest and conspiracy. Prosecution needs to get on the ball.
"The Prebate cartridge package sets forth the following license agreement on the outside of the package:
RETURN EMPTY CARTRIDGE TO LEXMARK
FOR REMANUFACTURING AND
RECYCLING
Please read before opening. Opening of this package or using the patented cartridge inside confirms your acceptance of the following license agreement. The patented cartridge is sold at a special price subject to a restriction that it may be used only once. Following this initial use, you agree to return the empty cartridge only to Lexmark for remanufacturing and recycling. If you don't accept these terms, return the
unopened package to your point of purchase. A regular price cartridge without these terms is available. Consumers can opt to buy Lexmark cartridges without the Prebate post-sale restriction, but at the higher price..."
There is a special agreement between Lexmark and the consumer to purchase at a lower price, and in order to get that price, you need to send the cartridge back to Lexmark. Also, Lexmark was sued by ACRA, the Arizona Cartridge Remanufacturers Association, who thought this was unfair.
Personally I think it's a perfectly valid agreement and if I could save $30 on a $100 toner cartridge, I'd do it. Basically, Lexmark is reducing the price of their cartridges to match the sleazeball toner remanufacturers. Have you ever gotten a call from a pushing inkjet/toner salesman? Those guys are some of the worst conmen alive.
Why can't Linux people understand this: Windows users utilize software written only for Windows. My copies of Adobe Creative Suite, Maya, Dreamweaver, MS Office, Microsoft Money and other utilites cost me almost $4000. That's $4000 that pays my bills and makes me money. Will the Windows binaries run on OSX? No, so I'm not switching. Will they run on Linux natively? No, so I'm not switching.
When software developers sell multi-platform licenses for each title, then we can switch. Until then, it's Windows or whatever OS you are locked into due to the expense of moving to another platform, which would require buying a full version instead of an upgrade. Why spend that kind of money to switch when the software/hardware combo you are using now will work just fine?
I wouldn't ignore older ways of file management just because they are "old". There are a lot of people out there would like Windows Explorer to have dual pane file nav, like several popular DOS treeview apps.
The feature in System7 (refined in OS8 and OS9) is the triangle icon next to the folder that lets you expand the contents of the folder and collapse it. I'm not sure how the gnome implementation will work, but it works well on OS9. The usefulness of this comes when you need to create new folders, rename folders, rename files and do a lot of manual work to organize a file/folder structure exactly the way you want it. I think Mac OS9 is the best OS for this. Window scroll speed, rename delays, and ease of cursor insertion into the filename are all critical elements for a pleasant experience with this type of organizing, and so far the only OS that does it perfectly is OS9.
In addition, in OS9 you have access to a folder tree view in the Open/Save dialogs, which lets you easily navigate through a folder structure to put a file where you want it. OSX uses this exact way of doing it, so to say that the older OS is somehow irrelevant, well, OSX's GUI builds on everything that came before. It's really just a prettier version of OS9, OS8 and System7, as much as OSX fanatics don't want to admit it.
They could have easily compared the new Gnome feature to the same exact thing in OSX, which is still implemented as a carry over from OS9.
By that logic why don't we just abolish different times altogether. From now on, the time is precisely 12:03. AM or PM, take your pick. Much more convenient, no watches neeeded, all deadlines condensed to "is it due before or after 12:03?" While we're at it lets get rid of Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Sunday and just deal with the big three - M, F and Sat. There are also too many temperatures to deal with. Can't we just have maybe 5 or 6?
One of the things I noticed last week was that Windows Update... had been updated. It's now a new stylized webpage and it works a little differently - in that, it doesn't. My Windows 2000 Pro machine refuses to install anything that's been downloaded with the "new" Windows update. They refer you to the help section if installation fails, and after trying all of the help suggestions I just gave up, nothing worked.
No telling how long we have until Microsoft disables it and forces everyone over to a new system that doesn't work. I've always liked, or at least tolerated Windows and I've never understood why everyone here *hates* Microsoft. Now I get it. Hopefully someone will find the above url useful if they have problems.
Hmm, had no idea about the timeframe there. The first PowerPC chips were excellent in their day... I remember our school getting the first batch of PPC processors in the form of "Power Macintosh 7500's" and the performance gain was enormous over the LC's that they replaced. No one complained about the PPC chips after we saw the huge leap in productivity.
Keep in mind the date of that market share drop coincides with Windows 95's release. Windows 95 is really what killed Mac, because the main reason for using the Mac was a far superior user experience over DOS and early versions of Windows. With 95 out there, the user experience was "good enough" and offered a lot of things an average user would have bought a Mac for. So the creatives kept moving on with Macs, mainly due to having $3000 invested in software and fonts that wouldn't work on the PC, and most new users just went with '95.
Back in 1995 you could buy a couple of different Macs at OfficeMax. When Steve took over again the Mac's disappeared from common retailers like OfficeMax, which also helped to kill off buying. There was also so much talk of Apple dying that no one wanted to make a huge investment in something that was going to be dead in a year.
So basically what I'm saying is that during that time period there was a lot happening besides an architecture change to kill Mac popularity. Going from 68000 to PPC was great if you needed the performance and were committed to the Mac platform.
I think that means you can't sue a government official and be awarded civil damages.
It would be like a parent trying to sue the President for their kid being killed in the Iraq War. If an official were to be held personally responsible for the actions of government there would be no end to the lawsuits and the system would collapse.
Back then, on Limbaugh, Boortz, and other conservative shows, people were screaming about the Democrats doing this - taking away our freedom, yada, yada. Now the bill is here and it will get passed - by Republicans. And the conservative talk shows... ho hum, no big deal, gotta fight terror, ya know.
Never voting Republican or Democrat ever again. The only things both parties care about is increasing their own power (i.e. the next election), control over citizens, and their taxation leverage.
For those wondering why this matters, we already have a "universal" ID - a State Driver's License and a Social Security Number. We don't need another ID from the Feds. We already have to show ID for everything including getting on an airplane and being admitted to a hospital. Having a Federal ID is simply another way to tag us as U.S. Property. Name any tangible benefit of this program to an individual citizen. It's completely for Federal benefit at our expense.
After that I still haven't got round to buying half life 2
I suggest trying HL2. It's the best FPS I've ever played. The story and atmosphere just pull you right in. The demo is available, too, and Ravenholm is one of the best levels in the game, but the entire game is just great. The game itself flows really well from level to level. They did a lot of work in thinking out the pacing. I was having fun playing the game, but a lot of times I just sat back and appreciated how well certain game elements were thought out, and how well crafted the game was. It's really in a league by itself, in my opinion.
Ultimately, all FPS's are just "shoot baddies in hallways", so that's always limiting. But Half-Life 2 pushes the story to the limit. It's not perfect (the boat ride became tiresome), but it's very, very good. The nice thing is you get Counterstrike:Source along with HL2, which is also very good and a lot of fun, with a TON of online players and servers. I was playing it so much I had to uninstall it to get my work done.
If you need an HTML/CSS/XML primer
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Apple has shipped product over and over.
Apple has shipped unfinished product over and over. OSX 10.0 was by no means production ready. With 10.4, they finally have a polished, very reliable OS - after several years of interim releases that focused on improving sluggish performance, getting rid of crashes, improving driver support, and basically just getting the OS fully up to "finished" standards. How many people are still using the 10.0 release of OSX? Very few, if any, because major changes to the core of the OS have taken place and 10.2 is usually the minimum version required to run major applications like Creative Suite. From Adobe's website, Creative Suite requires the following: Mac OS X v.10.2.8 through v.10.4 (10.3.4 through 10.4 recommended; G5 requires v.10.3 or later).
MS is definitely adopting Apple's mindset of "get it out the door and release a better version a year or so later".
A Mac? You are in for a whole new world of frustration. Buy the fastest one you possibly can. OSX requires at least 1 GB of RAM and a very fast harddrive to run major design applications reasonably well. I couldn't imagine gaming on the Mac. I'm platform agnostic and I can tell you Windows 2000 on a single processor Athlon XP 3000 is a much more pleasant (as in snappy and responsive) experience than OSX Tiger on a Dual (powerpc) processor G5. Window/screen redraws and web browsing on Windows 2000 is faster than OSX. File navigation on OSX is about the same as Windows, and even then it's pretty slow. Do not buy into the hype. Both platforms have their performance issues. Incidentally, very few applications are able to run natively on the Intel processors right now. That means major slowdowns for at least 6 months to a year while everything transitions to x86 compatibility.
It could be argued that in a true open market DVDs should be priced as high as people are willing to pay (Star Wars box sets, for example), and lowered if people are unmotivated to buy. The same thing for music. This explains iTunes success, as people are more willing to pay $1.00 for a song than $17.00 for a CD with that song. The problem with piracy is that people care less about living by a moral code than "having lots of stuff" and they don't even want to pay a reasonable price for something they want. $15-20 for a DVD you love is hardly unreasonable in the U.S..
On a similar topic, Lacie released a portable hard drive with built in encryption (Triple DES) and a fingerprint reader.
It probably won't protect data from the govt (assume they can read anything), but it's a good idea if you travel and need the capacity.
http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=106One of the problems with the science - religion debate is simply that the Bible is the only source the theologians have when explaining their universe to the scientist. Believers always find themselves explaining something away or taking a new discovery and trying to "fit" it to the Bible. Centuries ago a literal interpretation of the Bible was the standard - but today the only way to believe the Bible is to either deny science or reject the literal interpretation. Today creation scientists are actually saying that the speed of light has changed over time and that one year hasn't equaled one year in the past. The more scientists discover, the more believers have to make these great leaps of logic to explain the Bible.
The bottom line is this - do you think that someone can get up and start walking around after being dead and rotting for three days? (That would be Jesus, for you non-Bible-believing types). If so, you believe something that is physically impossible and goes against every single thing we've learned about the universe through science. Religion is always a leap of logic - a belief in things that are unknown or unknowable or impossible. I don't see the big deal. Some people believe it, some don't. At this point in life I could care less either way. Even if people could know the absolute truth about the universe they are always just going to ignore the facts and believe what they are comfortable with.
I am level OT VII in my church, by the way. Kidding.
TO: Michael.Bay@dreamworks.com
FW: New idea
Hey, get that guys post! i want to create a movie based upon it! car chases! beautiful women! huge fireball explosions! sophomoric humor! It'll be great!
A worse side effect of the PageRank system is that eventually all of the top search results will be from the biggest companies that everyone already knows about, by nature of the fact that they have the most linkage. If you are running a small site on a specialized topic, you'll still have to figure out a way to outrank Amazon, Overstock, various manufacturers, and the top forums (which have thousands of database entries that are essentially massive keyword vaults). It's impossible to outrank them without keyword stuffing, even if your site is more on-topic. You could have the most relevant site on earth on a certain topic, and Amazon will still beat you in the rank.
You are comparing a $150 card to a $600 top-of-the-line consumer card. The 7800 kills everything else, it is the king of the hill.
For those wanting to download 3dmark - the torrent works great.
RSS can be handy for stock watchers. You can subscribe to an RSS feed for each company you track by entering their symbol on Yahoo Finance, and clicking the RSS button. An application like RSSReader (which is free) will pull all of the headlines together. It saves a ton of time when you want to read each stock's daily news.
Cool idea. Maybe he was inspired by this: http://parisfacial.ytmnd.com/ (warning: automatically plays sound)
***Apple has taken a very active role in developing the processor for PowerPC chips and chip sets; this is what makes the Power Mac G5 very fast at some tasks.***
Apple doesn't "develop" the processor at all, they just write code that takes advantage of the new features in the new processor (like Altivec). Then they hype the crap out of it as if they created the processor. They had so many problems when Motorola was supplying the CPU that it was pretty obvious that Motorola had Apple over a barrel and there was nothing Apple could do except wait for Motorola to (very slowly) improve their chips. IBM has fallen behind development in the past and these chip shortages will never be a problem with Intel. Also there have been issues in the past with IBM chips not running well at spec speed, for example when they switched to a copper process instead of aluminum there were some speed issues that people didn't expect. IBM isn't a 100% perfect CPU supplier, in other words.
Intel isn't going to remove anything from their processors. What are they going to do, start pulling out transistors? I find it ironic that Mac users that have mocked Intel for years will now find themselves using an Intel and feeling superior for doing so, because after all, it's a Mac.
I think the whole point of the Intel move is precisely because Apple doesn't want to develop hardware like they've done in the past (onboard SCSI, proprietary connections like ADB), so they'll just let the biggest player handle the work and Apple will fit the OS to the fastest available hardware.
It's fun to guess how much the executive resignation after only x months will cost the company. Place your bets - was it a million, two million, ten million? Or did he hit the superball and pull in 100 million?
In this case (from the AP):
"...If it's determined that Maffei resigned for "good cause," he will be entitled to a $3.2 million severance payment, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission."
1991 is more like it. The "IBM" processor available in 1981 was the 8088 and the fastest speed was 8 MHz.
The 386/486 were available around 1991 and personally I wouldn't consider them 'vintage'. You need at least a tape drive or other obsolete I/O device to fall into that category.
From the article:
"In an unrelated case, Ronald Redding, 37, of Linthicum Heights, Md., was charged Tuesday with giving his copy of "Million Dollar Baby" to a friend. Redding faces a misdemeanor charge of willfully infringing a copyright by distributing the film."
Kill this guy, he's a waste of DNA. Give a friend a DVD... go straight to jail, do not pass go. Federal PMITA prison for this dude. Or death, he deserves it. Good use of the courts, too, we can't have people loaning copies of movies to friends, the entire system will come undone for sure if this starts to happen. I love charge stacking. They wanted to get this guy for pirating ROTS, and nailed him for something completely different. Unwarranted search and seizure forever. Only bad part is that there's no mention of resisting arrest and conspiracy. Prosecution needs to get on the ball.
From the ruling:
There is a special agreement between Lexmark and the consumer to purchase at a lower price, and in order to get that price, you need to send the cartridge back to Lexmark. Also, Lexmark was sued by ACRA, the Arizona Cartridge Remanufacturers Association, who thought this was unfair.
Personally I think it's a perfectly valid agreement and if I could save $30 on a $100 toner cartridge, I'd do it. Basically, Lexmark is reducing the price of their cartridges to match the sleazeball toner remanufacturers. Have you ever gotten a call from a pushing inkjet/toner salesman? Those guys are some of the worst conmen alive.
Why can't Linux people understand this: Windows users utilize software written only for Windows. My copies of Adobe Creative Suite, Maya, Dreamweaver, MS Office, Microsoft Money and other utilites cost me almost $4000. That's $4000 that pays my bills and makes me money. Will the Windows binaries run on OSX? No, so I'm not switching. Will they run on Linux natively? No, so I'm not switching.
When software developers sell multi-platform licenses for each title, then we can switch. Until then, it's Windows or whatever OS you are locked into due to the expense of moving to another platform, which would require buying a full version instead of an upgrade. Why spend that kind of money to switch when the software/hardware combo you are using now will work just fine?
I wouldn't ignore older ways of file management just because they are "old". There are a lot of people out there would like Windows Explorer to have dual pane file nav, like several popular DOS treeview apps.
The feature in System7 (refined in OS8 and OS9) is the triangle icon next to the folder that lets you expand the contents of the folder and collapse it. I'm not sure how the gnome implementation will work, but it works well on OS9. The usefulness of this comes when you need to create new folders, rename folders, rename files and do a lot of manual work to organize a file/folder structure exactly the way you want it. I think Mac OS9 is the best OS for this. Window scroll speed, rename delays, and ease of cursor insertion into the filename are all critical elements for a pleasant experience with this type of organizing, and so far the only OS that does it perfectly is OS9.
In addition, in OS9 you have access to a folder tree view in the Open/Save dialogs, which lets you easily navigate through a folder structure to put a file where you want it. OSX uses this exact way of doing it, so to say that the older OS is somehow irrelevant, well, OSX's GUI builds on everything that came before. It's really just a prettier version of OS9, OS8 and System7, as much as OSX fanatics don't want to admit it.
They could have easily compared the new Gnome feature to the same exact thing in OSX, which is still implemented as a carry over from OS9.
By that logic why don't we just abolish different times altogether. From now on, the time is precisely 12:03. AM or PM, take your pick. Much more convenient, no watches neeeded, all deadlines condensed to "is it due before or after 12:03?" While we're at it lets get rid of Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Sunday and just deal with the big three - M, F and Sat. There are also too many temperatures to deal with. Can't we just have maybe 5 or 6?
One of the things I noticed last week was that Windows Update... had been updated. It's now a new stylized webpage and it works a little differently - in that, it doesn't. My Windows 2000 Pro machine refuses to install anything that's been downloaded with the "new" Windows update. They refer you to the help section if installation fails, and after trying all of the help suggestions I just gave up, nothing worked.
d efault.asp
The only thing that does work (for me anyway)is the old URL: http://v4.windowsupdate.microsoft.com/catalog/en/
No telling how long we have until Microsoft disables it and forces everyone over to a new system that doesn't work. I've always liked, or at least tolerated Windows and I've never understood why everyone here *hates* Microsoft. Now I get it. Hopefully someone will find the above url useful if they have problems.
Remember, breveity is the essence of wit.
NOT.
Hmm, had no idea about the timeframe there. The first PowerPC chips were excellent in their day... I remember our school getting the first batch of PPC processors in the form of "Power Macintosh 7500's" and the performance gain was enormous over the LC's that they replaced. No one complained about the PPC chips after we saw the huge leap in productivity.
Keep in mind the date of that market share drop coincides with Windows 95's release. Windows 95 is really what killed Mac, because the main reason for using the Mac was a far superior user experience over DOS and early versions of Windows. With 95 out there, the user experience was "good enough" and offered a lot of things an average user would have bought a Mac for. So the creatives kept moving on with Macs, mainly due to having $3000 invested in software and fonts that wouldn't work on the PC, and most new users just went with '95.
Back in 1995 you could buy a couple of different Macs at OfficeMax. When Steve took over again the Mac's disappeared from common retailers like OfficeMax, which also helped to kill off buying. There was also so much talk of Apple dying that no one wanted to make a huge investment in something that was going to be dead in a year.
So basically what I'm saying is that during that time period there was a lot happening besides an architecture change to kill Mac popularity. Going from 68000 to PPC was great if you needed the performance and were committed to the Mac platform.
I think that means you can't sue a government official and be awarded civil damages.
It would be like a parent trying to sue the President for their kid being killed in the Iraq War. If an official were to be held personally responsible for the actions of government there would be no end to the lawsuits and the system would collapse.
This issue is very old, here is an article about the same thing from 1998:
o 14no17_id.htm
http://www.thenewamerican.com/tna/1998/vo14no17/v
Back then, on Limbaugh, Boortz, and other conservative shows, people were screaming about the Democrats doing this - taking away our freedom, yada, yada. Now the bill is here and it will get passed - by Republicans. And the conservative talk shows... ho hum, no big deal, gotta fight terror, ya know.
Never voting Republican or Democrat ever again. The only things both parties care about is increasing their own power (i.e. the next election), control over citizens, and their taxation leverage.
For those wondering why this matters, we already have a "universal" ID - a State Driver's License and a Social Security Number. We don't need another ID from the Feds. We already have to show ID for everything including getting on an airplane and being admitted to a hospital. Having a Federal ID is simply another way to tag us as U.S. Property. Name any tangible benefit of this program to an individual citizen. It's completely for Federal benefit at our expense.
After that I still haven't got round to buying half life 2
I suggest trying HL2. It's the best FPS I've ever played. The story and atmosphere just pull you right in. The demo is available, too, and Ravenholm is one of the best levels in the game, but the entire game is just great. The game itself flows really well from level to level. They did a lot of work in thinking out the pacing. I was having fun playing the game, but a lot of times I just sat back and appreciated how well certain game elements were thought out, and how well crafted the game was. It's really in a league by itself, in my opinion.
Ultimately, all FPS's are just "shoot baddies in hallways", so that's always limiting. But Half-Life 2 pushes the story to the limit. It's not perfect (the boat ride became tiresome), but it's very, very good. The nice thing is you get Counterstrike:Source along with HL2, which is also very good and a lot of fun, with a TON of online players and servers. I was playing it so much I had to uninstall it to get my work done.
Visit:
http://www.w3schools.com/
Good stuff, easy to navigate, covers the basics, free.