If some people dislike it, that's their problem, not mine, and I don't like changing my behaviour and my personality to suit people's opinions about what is considered socially acceptable or good.
A well run company with fair usage policies and overall good deals that happens to offer DSL can most certainly compete with a company like Verizon that happens to use fiber. Which, incidentally, is why they're eager to make that scenario impossible by... cutting the copper.
I doubt very much that many people steal/borrow/accidentally connect/fornicate with someone's wireless connection from inside the owner's house. Put another way:
These people with these unsecured access points, their networks are intruding into my home. So is it trespassing? Vandalism? Illegal dumping? Public disturbance? Since we're making (bad) analogies. If someone put their things into my house without my leave to do so, unsecured or not, then would I be a thief to take those things? This isn't so clear cut in any case (IMHO), but especially considering an unsecured AP.
The supply is NOT infinite. Repeat with me, the supply is NOT infinite. It may be an artificially limited supply, but it is limited all the same. If a supply is truly infinite, then no one would be selling it. Air is a pretty good example of this. Not so much clean air, but there is, usually, at any given time, in most places where people can be found, enough air for someone to stay alive. In places where there isn't, someone is selling it. They can get away with it because the supply isn't infinite (or close enough to it) in that instance. Supply isn't just some abstract notion of whether something is possible, it has to be done, and that has to be taken into account as well.
I don't really have much of an opinion on this model tbh, but I just had to point this out.
Overall, Vista does have a lot of new changes. However, there is not too much there holding a customer back from upgrading. Many of the new features in Vista can be turned off and disabled if they can't be tested or get in the way, leaving you with a very XP-like user experience. Vista supports almost all of the group policies that XP does when it comes to being managed through AD. There are several new ways of deploying Vista images as well, with free Microsoft tools, but, there is nothing stopping you from using your existing tools either (Ghost, etc).
So wait... There's nothing holding you back from upgrading because the things that don't work yet can be turned off? I can't really argue with the rest of what you said (well i can, but I have to go), but damn, I don't know if I'd want you advising me on what to spend money on if you're ok with buying something rife with features that don't work, because hey, you don't need those features anyway. This is a classic case of fixing something that isn't broken.
I don't mean to sound like a dick, and I'm not one to say he's too young to be playing that game at age 6...
But players like that, be they 6 or 36 or 86, are a huge pain in the ass to deal with.
How efficient can this really be though? Has anyone paid so much as lip service to the energy costs associated with trucking this stuff around, plowing, harvesting, processing it? These are not trivial expenditures. It's great that we can turn sugar into energy. But how much energy does it take to turn some dirt, air and water into sugar?
It would be wiser to put the swap partition on the conventional disks. And for the love of god, buy some RAM. (or quit wasting all that disk space) 2-3GB of swap is silly, and if you actually find yourself using that much swap, you really need more RAM.
Blizzard didn't give any stores a thank you, but they should. Blizzard's download service is godawful... it's nothing more than a crappy bittorrent service, plagued with problems. It's always been FAR easier to download patches from services like filefront or if you're lucky, your guild website, and buying TBC in the stores was a no-brainer... I had a friend who paid for his BC upgrade online and then had to wait for something like 30 hours for the installer image to download. I walked down to Best Buy (I still feel dirty, but I literally walked [in the rain no less] and they were geographically closest) and bought the thing and had it installed and running in something like 2 hours from the moment I left my apartment.
Blizzard is either totally unmotivated to, or incapable of (either technically or because vivendi has them by the short hairs) providing a direct download service for anything related to WoW, be it free content patches (ok, I can see that being BT based.. fair enough, it's free) or expansions you have to pay for. And if I'm paying for something, I want it NOW, or as close to now as possible. Charging the same price online as in stores for 2 or so GB of software is fine, but only if I can actually download it over a fat pipe (700k-1Mb/s minimum). Selling it via download is fine, but it has to be fast. Yes I understand it'll still take a couple hours, which is ok. 24 hours+, and sometimes up into several DAYS to download something I just paid for (and really want to play, because we're all crack addicts) is NOT ok. As it stands, Blizzard does NOT have a viable alternative to buying their games in a store. If they'd suck up the bandwidth cost and provide a real service, they'd still make gobs of money, but they don't, and I'm betting it's vivendi's doing. Really though, I don't actually care why. Blizzard's downloads (paid or otherwise) are a joke though, and have nothing on the simple expedience of going to the box store.
Valve already has an online option for purchasing their stuff, it's called Steam. It's also the devil, but that's even more OT than complaining about Blizzard's crappy download service.
I understand that M$ has forced the Vista install on vendors, but I don't understand why they can't make the rollback to XP an option for those of us that want/need it. ...they aren't allowed?
Good thing rape and murder are quite illegal regardless of how old the rapist/murderer are. I don't know what world you live in where rape and murder aren't adequately addressed in the letter of the law, but perhaps they should redirect a little effort away from prosecuting things that don't really hurt anyone to handling those things that do. If anyone is guilty of harm here, it's the people responsible for dragging those two poor kids through all this shit. But hey, protecting these two kids by ostracizing them with the sex offender label for the rest of their lives might well be a part of your world. Lotta different worlds out there.
This "punishment", it wasn't about whacky marketing. It has NOTHING to do with marketing at all, any flavor of it. It has to do with some guys who happen to be in the marketing business, plying their trade under the assumption that people weren't stupid and scared enough to freak out and completely overreact to lite-bright. Boston didn't make the cut, and they're pissed about making total fools of themselves in front of the media. (that they called in the first place)
I'm as much for real restrictions on invasive forms of marketing as most people, I hate it. I mean really, that shit didn't hurt anyone. If anyone did any harm it was the city of boston for well, terrorizing people. Though really, I'm hoping this starts to happen more often, so the rest of the world will see how stupid it is to run from shadows.
The same reasons people buy $120,000 cars and $4,000 mountain bikes, or drop $2,500 on antique model trains.
Which are usually one of these two:
1) The activity they enjoy (driving, mountain biking, playing wow, managing eentsy little train centered communities whilst wearing a conductor's hat and talking to themselves) tend to be more enjoyable with better equipment (which tends to be expensive). I would rather walk than try and navigate a huffy down some of the singletrack I threaded yesterday, it's simple nowhere near as fun compared to my gt.
b) Penis. Pretty much self explanatory, but some people just have to beat the Jones'.
There are lots of other reasons, obsessive collection or an excess of funds and free time, but you get the point I hope.
No one seems to freak out though when people mention those other things. For instance, a $120k porsche is fine, but a video game equivalent is scoffed at, even though they achieve EXACTLY THE SAME END GOAL, which is increased (perceived? does it matter?) enjoyment for the purchaser. Some people just like to slay dragons and shit, but since there's only a few ways to emulate the experience, they do it via the avenues they have. Big shiny toys are big shiny toys sir (miss?), and they tend to be more fun than you know, Kias and Huffies and yes, MMO characters with wimpy swords and crappy gear. It's all just sports equipment. It's all the same. Really.
Sweet pink jesus batman! It IS something else. It's not piracy, it's copyright infringement. I'm guessing there were no boats involved, no? Guys with peglegs and bad teeth? Ah. Not piracy, copyright infringement. You know, if more judges chuckled and called lawyers silly when they made this mistake, it would be a good sign.
Slashdot Mirror
The fewer smart people you have circulating throughout society, the easier it is make society as a whole believe whatever you want them to.
(I say this jokingly, but not totally)
Yeah! Fsck those guys!
A well run company with fair usage policies and overall good deals that happens to offer DSL can most certainly compete with a company like Verizon that happens to use fiber. Which, incidentally, is why they're eager to make that scenario impossible by... cutting the copper.
Why would either need an excuse?
I doubt very much that many people steal/borrow/accidentally connect/fornicate with someone's wireless connection from inside the owner's house. Put another way:
These people with these unsecured access points, their networks are intruding into my home. So is it trespassing? Vandalism? Illegal dumping? Public disturbance? Since we're making (bad) analogies. If someone put their things into my house without my leave to do so, unsecured or not, then would I be a thief to take those things? This isn't so clear cut in any case (IMHO), but especially considering an unsecured AP.
The thing is, now they CAN.
The supply is NOT infinite. Repeat with me, the supply is NOT infinite. It may be an artificially limited supply, but it is limited all the same. If a supply is truly infinite, then no one would be selling it. Air is a pretty good example of this. Not so much clean air, but there is, usually, at any given time, in most places where people can be found, enough air for someone to stay alive. In places where there isn't, someone is selling it. They can get away with it because the supply isn't infinite (or close enough to it) in that instance. Supply isn't just some abstract notion of whether something is possible, it has to be done, and that has to be taken into account as well.
I don't really have much of an opinion on this model tbh, but I just had to point this out.
Of course we can!
So wait... There's nothing holding you back from upgrading because the things that don't work yet can be turned off? I can't really argue with the rest of what you said (well i can, but I have to go), but damn, I don't know if I'd want you advising me on what to spend money on if you're ok with buying something rife with features that don't work, because hey, you don't need those features anyway. This is a classic case of fixing something that isn't broken.
I don't mean to sound like a dick, and I'm not one to say he's too young to be playing that game at age 6... But players like that, be they 6 or 36 or 86, are a huge pain in the ass to deal with.
How efficient can this really be though? Has anyone paid so much as lip service to the energy costs associated with trucking this stuff around, plowing, harvesting, processing it? These are not trivial expenditures. It's great that we can turn sugar into energy. But how much energy does it take to turn some dirt, air and water into sugar?
It would be wiser to put the swap partition on the conventional disks. And for the love of god, buy some RAM. (or quit wasting all that disk space) 2-3GB of swap is silly, and if you actually find yourself using that much swap, you really need more RAM.
Blizzard didn't give any stores a thank you, but they should. Blizzard's download service is godawful... it's nothing more than a crappy bittorrent service, plagued with problems. It's always been FAR easier to download patches from services like filefront or if you're lucky, your guild website, and buying TBC in the stores was a no-brainer... I had a friend who paid for his BC upgrade online and then had to wait for something like 30 hours for the installer image to download. I walked down to Best Buy (I still feel dirty, but I literally walked [in the rain no less] and they were geographically closest) and bought the thing and had it installed and running in something like 2 hours from the moment I left my apartment. Blizzard is either totally unmotivated to, or incapable of (either technically or because vivendi has them by the short hairs) providing a direct download service for anything related to WoW, be it free content patches (ok, I can see that being BT based.. fair enough, it's free) or expansions you have to pay for. And if I'm paying for something, I want it NOW, or as close to now as possible. Charging the same price online as in stores for 2 or so GB of software is fine, but only if I can actually download it over a fat pipe (700k-1Mb/s minimum). Selling it via download is fine, but it has to be fast. Yes I understand it'll still take a couple hours, which is ok. 24 hours+, and sometimes up into several DAYS to download something I just paid for (and really want to play, because we're all crack addicts) is NOT ok. As it stands, Blizzard does NOT have a viable alternative to buying their games in a store. If they'd suck up the bandwidth cost and provide a real service, they'd still make gobs of money, but they don't, and I'm betting it's vivendi's doing. Really though, I don't actually care why. Blizzard's downloads (paid or otherwise) are a joke though, and have nothing on the simple expedience of going to the box store. Valve already has an online option for purchasing their stuff, it's called Steam. It's also the devil, but that's even more OT than complaining about Blizzard's crappy download service.
In a dump truck.
She'll stop doing it.
Actually, it's more that you were screwed out of $180 and $20 worth of software, but that's just quibbling.
Good thing rape and murder are quite illegal regardless of how old the rapist/murderer are. I don't know what world you live in where rape and murder aren't adequately addressed in the letter of the law, but perhaps they should redirect a little effort away from prosecuting things that don't really hurt anyone to handling those things that do. If anyone is guilty of harm here, it's the people responsible for dragging those two poor kids through all this shit. But hey, protecting these two kids by ostracizing them with the sex offender label for the rest of their lives might well be a part of your world. Lotta different worlds out there.
I hope I never wander into yours though.
Ok. So, let's just be clear here.
This "punishment", it wasn't about whacky marketing. It has NOTHING to do with marketing at all, any flavor of it. It has to do with some guys who happen to be in the marketing business, plying their trade under the assumption that people weren't stupid and scared enough to freak out and completely overreact to lite-bright. Boston didn't make the cut, and they're pissed about making total fools of themselves in front of the media. (that they called in the first place)
I'm as much for real restrictions on invasive forms of marketing as most people, I hate it. I mean really, that shit didn't hurt anyone. If anyone did any harm it was the city of boston for well, terrorizing people. Though really, I'm hoping this starts to happen more often, so the rest of the world will see how stupid it is to run from shadows.
The same reasons people buy $120,000 cars and $4,000 mountain bikes, or drop $2,500 on antique model trains. Which are usually one of these two:
1) The activity they enjoy (driving, mountain biking, playing wow, managing eentsy little train centered communities whilst wearing a conductor's hat and talking to themselves) tend to be more enjoyable with better equipment (which tends to be expensive). I would rather walk than try and navigate a huffy down some of the singletrack I threaded yesterday, it's simple nowhere near as fun compared to my gt.
b) Penis. Pretty much self explanatory, but some people just have to beat the Jones'.
There are lots of other reasons, obsessive collection or an excess of funds and free time, but you get the point I hope.
No one seems to freak out though when people mention those other things. For instance, a $120k porsche is fine, but a video game equivalent is scoffed at, even though they achieve EXACTLY THE SAME END GOAL, which is increased (perceived? does it matter?) enjoyment for the purchaser. Some people just like to slay dragons and shit, but since there's only a few ways to emulate the experience, they do it via the avenues they have. Big shiny toys are big shiny toys sir (miss?), and they tend to be more fun than you know, Kias and Huffies and yes, MMO characters with wimpy swords and crappy gear. It's all just sports equipment. It's all the same. Really.
Here Timbatwe, Google sent you a computer! Let's plug it in to the... oh.
Sweet pink jesus batman! It IS something else. It's not piracy, it's copyright infringement. I'm guessing there were no boats involved, no? Guys with peglegs and bad teeth? Ah. Not piracy, copyright infringement. You know, if more judges chuckled and called lawyers silly when they made this mistake, it would be a good sign.
That is all, no other nitpicks. :)
But it's got a hyphen! The hyphen, man, the hyphen!
Turns out, 640k isn't enough.
It's going to be a great month for anyone with an extra copy and an ebay account.
No no no. It's the "Twincline plane. Now slanted on both sides!"