Because if they let you keep it on your computer, you can share it from your computer. You can also edit out commercials and otherwise modify it.
The production studios don't want that. They want to have complete control over when, where, and how you watch everything. They don't believe in "fair use;" they want every penny they can scrape away from you for even thinking about their show. That's why technologies such as filesharing are so scary--it takes the control away from the studios and gives it to the consumers (albeit mostly illegally, thanks to big-time corporate avarice leading to the systematic undermining of consumers' legal rights).
I wish that someone would come up with the idea of "open source television," where programming is produced for free consumption and distribution, and financed by donations or additional fee-based services. You know, art for art's sake and all? Universities should do something like that.
First of all, I think this thing is ugly as sin. It's not sleek and stylish, it looks like something you'd find in a manufacturing plant making pieces of some sort of industrial equipment. Okay, that's just my personal taste, maybe you think it's beautiful.
That being said, it definitely has non-aesthetic drawbacks as well. From one of the reviews on Newegg's site:
Overall I'm satisfied, though I'll post my minor complaints here because that's what this is for, right? (1) No reset button. (2) The power light "bleeds" into the hard drive light. (3) Case doesn't do much to deaden sound. While not an issue for me, don't buy this case if you are looking to build a quiet computer. (4) Though the location and installation of the hard drives is unique, it would make connecting a full load of SCSI drives difficult. This can probably mostly be overcome with a round cable. (5) The power LED connector is a three pin while my MB, and all I've used to now, require a 2 pin connector. I had to remove the individual pins from the connector to plug into the board. (6) Not too familiar with Firewire connections, but the front panel firewire array connector does not fit on my MB. You would have to extract the individual pins like I did with the power connector. (7) I'm suspicious that airflow through the case is as good as it appears it should be. CPUs run about 4-5 degrees C warmer with the sides mounted in place.
He may be satisifed, but I'm definitely steering away from it. That's just too many weirdities.
Yes, yes, you're a very smart person with too much free time on their hands.
His mouse figuratively caught fire, and you are literally a pedant and a jerk.
It was a fair comment. When I read the original post, I imagined (and still do) the guy playing some game when some hardware glitch caused the mouse to catch on fire. I doubt that if such an even really happened, it was directly because of his intense gameplaying session, but it still makes an interesting story and I'm actually a little bit curious if the guy really meant literally. I once had a Bay Networks switch literally catch on fire for no discernable reason. It's not that far a stretch for me to think that a mouse literally catching on fire would be odd, but well within the realm of the possible.
I guess the question that's burning in my mind (pun only slightly intended) is: How the hell do you know that the original poster meant figuratively and not literally? I don't see anything that indicates that he was being metaphorical. At least the replier asked the question instead of just making the assumption.
And how is this guy being a pedant and/or a jerk? By asking for clarification in a jovial and unassuming kind of way? Pedantic would be pointing out that you switched pronouns in mid-sentence (...you're a very smart person with too much free time on their hands.). Thank goodness I would never stoop to such low levels. Though I don't find his comment particularly modworthy for funny, I also don't see it as particularly asinine, either, and I don't see him trying to convey the impression that he's smart or the original poster is stupid. From what I'm reading, that seems to be an MO limited to you. (Oh, and me, but I admit that I can sometimes be a real ass to people being real asses...)
And you, with your unwarranted belittling reply (which is officially longer than the one you are complaining about), are telling him that he has too much free time on his hands? Give me a break.
I don't care if you mod this offtopic post down, but for the love of god, please don't mod it up!
Re:This is the end, my friends, the only end
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Podcasting
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· Score: 1
I didn't recall the Bible being a book about printing press technology.
First of all, I'm a Paragon City hero as well. I've pre-ordered CoV and can't wait for the official release of Issue 5.:-)
Second, you're 100% right. I don't mind ads in games if it fits with real-world experience. If I see a Coke machine in a game set in modern times, I don't think twice about it. In fact, it adds an immersive element to the game since in real life I see Coke machines all over. In City of Heroes, there are snack machines in building break rooms. I wouldn't mind seeing Resee's or M&M's or Lays Potato Chips (or better yet, several real brands of junk food) stocked in them. I really like your idea of placing era-appropriate ads. An old-timey Coke sign in a game set in the '40's would be awesome, or a spiffed-up futuristic looking logo in a game set in the future would probably be pretty cool.
However, if the ads don't fit in with real-world experience or are pushed relentlessly on the viewer, they detract from a game and make it less fun to play. As a rule of thumb, for example, if I notice a product placement in a television show or movie, it's likely that they've already screwed up because ideal placements should just naturally fit in. If you want to see placements from hell taken to a humorous extreme, check out Return of the Killer Tomatoes. In some movies and shows, I really feel like they're pushing product placements to this extreme.
Fortunately, games haven't gone there yet, and if we're lucky, placements will remain very subtle. I'd rather have nothing at all than obvious ads, but knowing how greedy and pushy advertisers are, we'll probably just eventually end up with the latter.
One thing's for sure, though. The day we start having full commercials in games that we pay for, I'm giving up gaming and taking up this new thing I heard about called reading...
They're all still better than what we're using now, and it totally dicounts the possibility of thinking of other sources of clean energy to use as well.
Performing electrolysis with wind, solar and hydro power can produce hydrogen fuel that is 100% pollution-free and 100% renewable.
Plus, even if you don't use eco-friendly fuel sources, it still helps because if you concentrate energy production using "dirty" fuels in one place (e.g. a power plant), then you can clean and dispose of the dirty components of the emissions in one place before releasing much cleaner air and water back into the ecosystem.
I wish the summary had included this quote as well:
Craig Mathias, founder of the Farpoint Group, a wireless consulting firm in Ashland, Mass., said Wi-Fi signals can interfere with each other, but not with other wireless devices.
"It's hard to imagine how this is a security threat," Mathias said. "They clearly don't want the competition."
I find this type of behavior disgusting, too. It's yet another case of one business trying to interfere with another business's services any way they can to make a few more pennies, and the real loser in the battle ends up being the consumer.
If the FCC is stupid enough to side with Logan on this, Continental Airlines should hang big signs all over its lounges and gates saying something to the effect of, "Logan International Airport is keeping us from offering wireless Internet service for free because they would rather make you pay them $7.95 a day. Please write to Craig P. Coy, CEO at One Harborside Drive, Suite 200 S, East Boston, MA 02128-2909, and let them know how you feel about that."
But then, I can be rather mean like that when people are being stupid.
I don't get... how 9/11 [a]ffected anyone. Maybe I'm odd but I found it laughable at best. Lots of people running through the streets screaming like the sky is falling, so could you possiblely explain it to me too?
Ah, crap, I got sucked in. Must be a slow Friday night at work...
There's several explanations why 9/11 affected everyone so strongly here in America.
First, there's the fact that around 3,000 people all died. That's a hellova lot of people. They weren't soldiers, they weren't in a war zone, they were just average, ordinary people doing their normal daily routine when literally out of the blue, BAM! Dead. 3,000.
Second, Americans don't have the worldwide reputation of being arrogant pricks for nothing. *I'M* and American, and I'm painfully aware that most people here think that this country is invincible. 9/11 demonstrated in spectacular fashion that terrorist attacks were no longer a matter of Middle Eastern towelheads killing each other. (A common American stereotype for illustrative purposes, not my perception personally.)
Third, releated to our perceived invincibility, is the fact that we've never had to deal with this kind of thing before. The last time we were attacked like this was in 1941, and most of the people who were around them are dead now. We don't have an IRA or an ETA. Other than odd wackos here and there, we're not used to mass numbers of people being killed in terrorist attacks. In that sense, we as a country suddenly had to pay the emotional price of being lucky and yes, a bit spoiled.
3,000 people dying isn't laughable, whether those people are American, English, Iraqui, or Martian. Okay, I admit, if someone had stopped to pick up a penny in the middle of the chaos, that would have been kind of funny. As it was, I don't find any humor in people fleeing in fear for their lives from buildings crashing down on top of them. If you watch the tapes, you'll realize that the sky was falling.
I have a pretty thick skin, and I did move on shortly after the attacks. It was easy for me because I didn't know anyone who died in the attacks. I don't particularly enjoy when we have periodic shows and such wallowing in the grief and anguish of that day, and I disagree with the notion that we're somehow a stronger country because of the attacks. Frankly, I find a lot of our actions—the lying, the needless killing, the systematic taking away of our freedoms—since the attacks reprehensible. But I do remember the attacks. There's no denying that to this day, they still do affect me in some ways. And if you don't understand why, I feel sorry for you.
It may not be quite what you're looking for, but this may be helpful. Amazon.com has a buried section (why, I don't know, and I can't even remember how I found it) called Libros en español that is nothing but Spanish language books.
I'm not necessarily pitching Amazon.com. Even if you don't want to buy off of Amazon.com because of patent issues, it may give you a good list of titles to look for somewhere else.
Another possiblity is to look specifically at Spanish or Mexican online stores. For example, I was looking for a Spanish language book and couldn't find it in America anywhere. I ended up buying it from Spain at Casa del Libro. Yeah, it cost more to have it shipped here and I had to pay in Euro (not a problem if you charge it on a credit card), but it was just what the doctor ordered. Bookstores in other countries will tend to focus more on authors from that country and authors who write in that country's native language.
I don't see the problem. There have been years when almost every author was American, and there have been years when almost every author wasn't. Statistically speaking, this isn't that unusual. Maybe it was just a really good year of British writing. I say congratulations to the British, don't sweat it, and maybe we'll do better next year.
I dunno, I've gotten semi-used to seeing it now, enough that I don't really think about it or slow down when I read it. Who knows? If everybody keeps using it, maybe it will someday become a legitimate plural for "box" and Brian Regan can feel all warm and gooey inside for adding a word to the English language!
everybody seems to use it without even knowing where it comes from
Isn't this true about almost every word that everybody uses?
I'm not trying to be a grammar pacifist or anything, but language does change over time, and it's not at all unusual for small groups to share an internal jargon. No one complains on Fark that "asshat" isn't a real word, it's just something that popped up and stuck.
I don't really like or hate "boxen," but if you want to get rid of it, you might as well try to get rid of stuff like "pwned," the "All your bases" joke, and even more mainstream things like "hacker," "bug," and emoticons. Personally, I'd rather get rid of the pronunciation of Linux as LIE-nucks once and for all.
I guess we've all got our pet peeves. A lady I work with writes e-mail as e'mail, and it bugs me so much that if that catches on, I think I'll just give up and kill myself. (For the record, e-mail is not a contraction, it is a hyphenated word, vaguely acronymical at best.)
your using "boxen" instead of "boxes" makes you look either like (1) you blindly follow a meme to computer-educated folks, and (2) an ill-educated person to everybody else?
How do you know he's not a Unix clustering professional?
At any rate, thanks for the etymology of the word. I didn't know that, and now it is kind of funny and makes sense.
"The really frustrating thing is the reason given for shutting down this funding—some misguided notion that an embryo is somehow morally equivalent to a human being."
Can you prove otherwise, without using a lot of "maybe's" and "ifs"?
Sure, no problem. A lot of people like to think that an embryo is morally a person, but in our practical day-to-day lives, no one really treats it as such. Ponder this:
No one celebrates their conception day, but most people do celebrate their birthday.
Embryos don't get Social Security numbers, babies do.
Having a miscarriage is a serious emotional blow, but losing an infant is much more devastating. I don't think I've ever heard of anyone having a funeral for a miscarried child. (I know, you probably do, but it's very odd.)
If a pregnant woman's life is in danger due to pregnancy complications, most of the time, she will have an abortion and most people feel that she's morally justified in doing so. But if a house catches on fire and a mother has to make a choice between herself and her baby, most of the time, she'll save the baby. If she does otherwise, fewer people feel like she's justified.
Most people, conservatives included, believe that Roe v. Wade should stand, which allows a woman to have an abortion. Even the far right-wingers I know thinks that abortion is justified in the case of rape and/or incest. If an embryo (or fetus) is a moral person, then abortion would be murder even if the embryo is the product of rape and/or incest, and thus women who are victims of rape should be forced to carry the child to term. It's rather universally agreed, however, that killing a baby after birth is outright murder.
These are just a few ways off the top of my head in which even conservatives do not treat an embryo or fetus as the moral equivalent of a human being. I'm sure if I put some more thought into it, I could come up with plenty more.
We're talking human beings.
No, we're not. That's my point.
Hmmm, yes a "clump of cells" as long as it wasn't the "clump of cells" that turned out to be you. Strange how the "human" dividing line moves so.
But the clump of cells wasn't me, therefore it's irrelevant. I keep seeing people confuse something's potential with it's reality. Just because something has the potential to be something else doesn't give it the status or rights of that thing it may someday become. As someone else pointed out, if my mom had had an abortion, it wouldn't make a lick of difference to me because I simply would have never existed. This is far, far different from my present life being ended by someone sneaking in and killing me in the middle of the night, because at this point, my existence isn't potential, it's reality.
Using your logic, one could just as easily say that if Osama bin Laden's mother had had an abortion, the world would arguably be a much happier and safer place, and because of this, women should have more abortions. It's a non sequitur and I reject such arguments. Let's make important decisions like this based on what what the reality of the situation is, not what it may or may not be someday or what it could or could not have been if something had been different.
Or framed in a different way, it's very possible in the near future that we'll be able to clone human beings from the intact DNA contained in any of the millions of cells in our bodies. At that point, should we start saving every sloughed off cell because the potential exists for it to be a person? Additionally, we probably have the technology now to freeze our extra cells to save them for the purpose of becoming new human beings when such technology does exist. Should we never let any of them go to waste now? Of course not, everyone knows that's silly. The same holds true for the clump of cells that is an embryo. Just because it has the potential to be a human being someday doesn't give it any special or sacred status today.
Monstrously irresponsible snake-oil statements like that made by John Whatshisname (yeah, he was even "my" senator, shows how much he did for NC) that if John Kerry was elected President quadraplegics woudl stand up out of their wheelchairs and walk again are...shall we say...far less than responsible.
The exact quote from John Edwards is, "If we do the work that we can do in this country, the work that we will do when John Kerry is president, people like Christopher Reeve are going to get up out of that wheelchair and walk again."
I don't find anything particularly monstrously irresponsible about this quote. He doesn't imply that people will get up out of their wheelchairs a week or two after Kerry would have been elected. I think most people, like me, are smart enough to realize that curing spinal cord injury is a while coming.
However, personally, I'm convinced that if we put our collective ingenuity in medical research towards finding a cure for spinal cord injuries, we will get real and tangible results, as this article demonstrates. It's not a cure, but it sure is progress.
The election of John Kerry would not have necessarily accomplished this goal during his presidency, and I don't think that Edwards's quote was implying that it would. After all, John F. Kennedy said in 1961, "I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth." Even if he had not been assassinated in 1963 and re-elected in 1964, his goal still wouldn't have happened while he was in office.
It is certain that the election of George W. Bush has hindered the goal of finding a cure to spinal cord injury. He has shut down a major source of funding in an area of research that, as we can see from this article, is directly relevant to finding a cure.
The really frustrating thing is the reason given for shutting down this funding—some misguided notion that an embryo is somehow morally equivalent to a human being. I find it interesting that most of these fundamentalists have no problem at all with killing highly complex organisms such as rats, monkeys, rabbits, and so on in the name of scientific research, but a clump of nondescript cells with no capacity for thought, feeling, or any sensation at all; a clump of nondescript cells with no past, present, or future; a clump of nondescript cells very similar to the kind that we wash off in the shower every day without even thinking; is somehow sacred.
What if these same fundamentalists had insisted that researching advanced rocket propulsion techniques in the '60's was too similar to building a Tower of Babel, attempting to reach to heaven? Would John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson have cowered to this weird religious-based belief and let the Russians unilaterally own space today?
I hope not, just as I hope that in the next election, we manage to get some leadership who is willing to stand up for science that can make our lives better instead of trying to push America further and further into a new dark age of technology because of religious fundamentalism.
That's what I had in mind, something that other users can see and use to decide whether or not they want to play with other people.
Before I decide to waste time with some anonymous person, it would be helpful if I saw something like this:
Of this person's co-players (teammates and opponents) in the past, 14% have taken the time to rate them.
74%: griefer
22%: incompetent
4%: capable
This person is on 31 other players' ignore lists.
I'd probably avoid that person. The temporary suspension of someone's account doesn't help me as a player decide whether or not I want that person as an opponent or as a teammate. The account cancellation does, but that's only used as an extreme last resort, and only after the person has already caused a lot of damage. The beauty of the system is that it would be automatic; no game admins would have to get involved except under really weird circumstances.
Using a system like this, players will generally behave not because they're afraid of being banned, but because they're afraid of being ostracized and publically displayed as an asshole.
It's kind of like an idea I'd like to see implemented for drivers, something I call the "Stupid System." By law, everyone's car has to have a stupid meter installed in the window, which is a receiver. Everyone who wants one is also given a stupid transmitter. When you're driving, if someone does something really stupid, like cutting across three lanes in front of you because they weren't paying attention and were about to miss their exit, then you can use your stupid transmitter to tag their car. After they receive a certain number of stupid tags from different people based on the population in their area, they get a traffic ticket. After a higher threshhold, they lose their license. The number of stupid tags a person has at any given time is displayed on the stupid meter, so that other drivers will know what they're dealing with.
Not trying to look a gift horse in the mouth...
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Friday Means Free Games
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· Score: 2, Interesting
This is a great idea, but the Liberated Games list is a bit skimpy. I noticed that a bunch of the games were shareware demos, such as Wolfenstein 3D and such, but I remember downloading hundreds of fun shareware games from BBS'es. Anyone remember William Soleau's games? God, I played Oilcap until my fingers bled...
Also noticably absent are the amazing collection of open source software games, of which my favorite at this time would probably be Freeciv.
"Notwithstanding the disputed area, the Canadian foreign affairs ministry is allowing its cafeteria to sell Danish pastries as a goodwill gesture toward the Danish government and people," said ministry spokesman Reynald Doiron.
It seems that there is hope that this senseless war can be avoided. I don't like the thought of so many brave Canadian and Danish soldiers being tragically lost in the frozen wasteland of the Arctic. And the last thing that ANYONE wants to deal with is the Hansian insurgency.
Perhaps the Danes could respond by offering pizza with Canadian bacon in their cafeteria...
Philosophically, I agree with you, but I can see their point, too. Using GCC to compile and install non-Linspire sanctioned applications gives non-novice but non-advanced users the ability to majorly screw up their system. These users would then proceed to unduly tax the company's tech support people and, even worse, gripe about how unstable Linspire is to all of their friends and Internet forums.
If you don't want to pay for GPL software, you don't have to. But remember the beauty of GPL software—Linspire can sell it to people who will pay for it if they want to, and the promise of stability and ease-of-use makes me lean towards thinking that it's justified.
The system's 48-inch primary mirror concentrates light into a secondary mirror, which strips away the infrared and ultraviolet components, and directs the visible light into the receiver.
As for the solar panels, I would think that they'd be a lot more expensive. (Disclaimer: I haven't actually checked.) The systems I've seen require large banks of batteries to store power, and there are a lot of expensive system components.
One nice thing about solar lighting is that there's really not much else other than a mirror and a bunch of fiber optic cables. It's a pretty simple system made of relatively cheap parts.
Also, one of the selling points of the company's Web site is that the lighting is all natural, not artificial, which is supposedly preferable for happy attitudes and such.
Of course, not having any lights at night or on cloudy days would totally suck. The article mentions that the system can be integrated with supplimental artifical lighting. Perhaps a combination of solar panels and solar lighting would be the best system if one wants cheap, eco-friendly lighting that is also mostly natural for happy attitudes.
The "dark side" of the moon is the far side by definition, not by semantics. According to the Wikipedia:
"The far side is sometimes called the "dark side". In this case "dark" means "unknown and hidden" and not "lacking light"; in fact the far side receives (on average) as much sunlight as the near side, but at opposite times."
I once got in a VERY heated argument with a guy at college (a civil engineering major, for the record) over what the "dark side" of the moon was. He kept saying that it was the side that always faces away from the sun, and I kept trying to explain that there is no side that always faces away from the sun, that the moon's periods of rotation on its axis and revolution around the Earth were the same, and that I'm 100% sure of this and have known it since I was eight years old. I tried to tell him that this accounts for the fact that when you look at the moon, it is always in the same orientation whether it's waxing, full, or waning.
I absolutely hate it when I get in an argument about something when I'm 100% sure about something and can't convince someone else for whatever stupid reason. Oh well, I guess it's better than being 100% wrong about something that someone who is 100% right about can't convince me, but I wouldn't know.:-)
Someone could set up a bounty to get an insider to leak the key. It might be difficult—you would have to have the source anonymous enough for Sony not to trace, but traceable enough to verify and deliver payment. Perhaps going through some unregulated third party in a country where such transactions are not tracked? The details would probably take a while to iron out, but not as long as brute forcing the key, methinks.
Of course, I'm not actually condoning that because it would be illegal and unethical...
Does anyone else here get the feeling that the only reason Microsoft is suing Google is because they know they can't win the search war? I'm guessing that the idea is that if you can't beat your enemy at how they fight best, beat them with litigation. Not that Microsoft would ever stoop to doing something low like that...
Let Mr. Lee go, Steve and Bill, no good can come of this for Microsoft OR Google.
Slashdot Mirror
Because if they let you keep it on your computer, you can share it from your computer. You can also edit out commercials and otherwise modify it.
The production studios don't want that. They want to have complete control over when, where, and how you watch everything. They don't believe in "fair use;" they want every penny they can scrape away from you for even thinking about their show. That's why technologies such as filesharing are so scary--it takes the control away from the studios and gives it to the consumers (albeit mostly illegally, thanks to big-time corporate avarice leading to the systematic undermining of consumers' legal rights).
I wish that someone would come up with the idea of "open source television," where programming is produced for free consumption and distribution, and financed by donations or additional fee-based services. You know, art for art's sake and all? Universities should do something like that.
First of all, I think this thing is ugly as sin. It's not sleek and stylish, it looks like something you'd find in a manufacturing plant making pieces of some sort of industrial equipment. Okay, that's just my personal taste, maybe you think it's beautiful.
That being said, it definitely has non-aesthetic drawbacks as well. From one of the reviews on Newegg's site:
He may be satisifed, but I'm definitely steering away from it. That's just too many weirdities.
It was a fair comment. When I read the original post, I imagined (and still do) the guy playing some game when some hardware glitch caused the mouse to catch on fire. I doubt that if such an even really happened, it was directly because of his intense gameplaying session, but it still makes an interesting story and I'm actually a little bit curious if the guy really meant literally. I once had a Bay Networks switch literally catch on fire for no discernable reason. It's not that far a stretch for me to think that a mouse literally catching on fire would be odd, but well within the realm of the possible.
I guess the question that's burning in my mind (pun only slightly intended) is: How the hell do you know that the original poster meant figuratively and not literally? I don't see anything that indicates that he was being metaphorical. At least the replier asked the question instead of just making the assumption.
And how is this guy being a pedant and/or a jerk? By asking for clarification in a jovial and unassuming kind of way? Pedantic would be pointing out that you switched pronouns in mid-sentence (...you're a very smart person with too much free time on their hands.). Thank goodness I would never stoop to such low levels. Though I don't find his comment particularly modworthy for funny, I also don't see it as particularly asinine, either, and I don't see him trying to convey the impression that he's smart or the original poster is stupid. From what I'm reading, that seems to be an MO limited to you. (Oh, and me, but I admit that I can sometimes be a real ass to people being real asses...)
And you, with your unwarranted belittling reply (which is officially longer than the one you are complaining about), are telling him that he has too much free time on his hands? Give me a break.
I don't care if you mod this offtopic post down, but for the love of god, please don't mod it up!
You obviously missed that verse in Habbakuk.
First of all, I'm a Paragon City hero as well. I've pre-ordered CoV and can't wait for the official release of Issue 5. :-)
Second, you're 100% right. I don't mind ads in games if it fits with real-world experience. If I see a Coke machine in a game set in modern times, I don't think twice about it. In fact, it adds an immersive element to the game since in real life I see Coke machines all over. In City of Heroes, there are snack machines in building break rooms. I wouldn't mind seeing Resee's or M&M's or Lays Potato Chips (or better yet, several real brands of junk food) stocked in them. I really like your idea of placing era-appropriate ads. An old-timey Coke sign in a game set in the '40's would be awesome, or a spiffed-up futuristic looking logo in a game set in the future would probably be pretty cool.
However, if the ads don't fit in with real-world experience or are pushed relentlessly on the viewer, they detract from a game and make it less fun to play. As a rule of thumb, for example, if I notice a product placement in a television show or movie, it's likely that they've already screwed up because ideal placements should just naturally fit in. If you want to see placements from hell taken to a humorous extreme, check out Return of the Killer Tomatoes . In some movies and shows, I really feel like they're pushing product placements to this extreme.
Fortunately, games haven't gone there yet, and if we're lucky, placements will remain very subtle. I'd rather have nothing at all than obvious ads, but knowing how greedy and pushy advertisers are, we'll probably just eventually end up with the latter.
One thing's for sure, though. The day we start having full commercials in games that we pay for, I'm giving up gaming and taking up this new thing I heard about called reading...
They're all still better than what we're using now, and it totally dicounts the possibility of thinking of other sources of clean energy to use as well.
Amazing, that water stuff is, isn't it?
Actually, the company's Web site addresses this:
Plus, even if you don't use eco-friendly fuel sources, it still helps because if you concentrate energy production using "dirty" fuels in one place (e.g. a power plant), then you can clean and dispose of the dirty components of the emissions in one place before releasing much cleaner air and water back into the ecosystem.
Why? Because of the immense amount of greenhouses released into the atmosphere by everyone's fireplaces?
"Code Orange Smog Alert: Please limit driving and fireplace-using..."
I will not living room-pool.
I wish the summary had included this quote as well:
I find this type of behavior disgusting, too. It's yet another case of one business trying to interfere with another business's services any way they can to make a few more pennies, and the real loser in the battle ends up being the consumer.
If the FCC is stupid enough to side with Logan on this, Continental Airlines should hang big signs all over its lounges and gates saying something to the effect of, "Logan International Airport is keeping us from offering wireless Internet service for free because they would rather make you pay them $7.95 a day. Please write to Craig P. Coy, CEO at One Harborside Drive, Suite 200 S, East Boston, MA 02128-2909, and let them know how you feel about that."
But then, I can be rather mean like that when people are being stupid.
Ah, crap, I got sucked in. Must be a slow Friday night at work...
There's several explanations why 9/11 affected everyone so strongly here in America.
First, there's the fact that around 3,000 people all died. That's a hellova lot of people. They weren't soldiers, they weren't in a war zone, they were just average, ordinary people doing their normal daily routine when literally out of the blue, BAM! Dead. 3,000.
Second, Americans don't have the worldwide reputation of being arrogant pricks for nothing. *I'M* and American, and I'm painfully aware that most people here think that this country is invincible. 9/11 demonstrated in spectacular fashion that terrorist attacks were no longer a matter of Middle Eastern towelheads killing each other. (A common American stereotype for illustrative purposes, not my perception personally.)
Third, releated to our perceived invincibility, is the fact that we've never had to deal with this kind of thing before. The last time we were attacked like this was in 1941, and most of the people who were around them are dead now. We don't have an IRA or an ETA. Other than odd wackos here and there, we're not used to mass numbers of people being killed in terrorist attacks. In that sense, we as a country suddenly had to pay the emotional price of being lucky and yes, a bit spoiled.
3,000 people dying isn't laughable, whether those people are American, English, Iraqui, or Martian. Okay, I admit, if someone had stopped to pick up a penny in the middle of the chaos, that would have been kind of funny. As it was, I don't find any humor in people fleeing in fear for their lives from buildings crashing down on top of them. If you watch the tapes, you'll realize that the sky was falling.
I have a pretty thick skin, and I did move on shortly after the attacks. It was easy for me because I didn't know anyone who died in the attacks. I don't particularly enjoy when we have periodic shows and such wallowing in the grief and anguish of that day, and I disagree with the notion that we're somehow a stronger country because of the attacks. Frankly, I find a lot of our actions—the lying, the needless killing, the systematic taking away of our freedoms—since the attacks reprehensible. But I do remember the attacks. There's no denying that to this day, they still do affect me in some ways. And if you don't understand why, I feel sorry for you.
It may not be quite what you're looking for, but this may be helpful. Amazon.com has a buried section (why, I don't know, and I can't even remember how I found it) called Libros en español that is nothing but Spanish language books.
There's a section under it called Ciencia ficción y fantasía
I'm not necessarily pitching Amazon.com. Even if you don't want to buy off of Amazon.com because of patent issues, it may give you a good list of titles to look for somewhere else.
Another possiblity is to look specifically at Spanish or Mexican online stores. For example, I was looking for a Spanish language book and couldn't find it in America anywhere. I ended up buying it from Spain at Casa del Libro. Yeah, it cost more to have it shipped here and I had to pay in Euro (not a problem if you charge it on a credit card), but it was just what the doctor ordered. Bookstores in other countries will tend to focus more on authors from that country and authors who write in that country's native language.
It's called the Nebula Awards.
I don't see the problem. There have been years when almost every author was American, and there have been years when almost every author wasn't. Statistically speaking, this isn't that unusual. Maybe it was just a really good year of British writing. I say congratulations to the British, don't sweat it, and maybe we'll do better next year.
I dunno, I've gotten semi-used to seeing it now, enough that I don't really think about it or slow down when I read it. Who knows? If everybody keeps using it, maybe it will someday become a legitimate plural for "box" and Brian Regan can feel all warm and gooey inside for adding a word to the English language!
Isn't this true about almost every word that everybody uses?
I'm not trying to be a grammar pacifist or anything, but language does change over time, and it's not at all unusual for small groups to share an internal jargon. No one complains on Fark that "asshat" isn't a real word, it's just something that popped up and stuck.
I don't really like or hate "boxen," but if you want to get rid of it, you might as well try to get rid of stuff like "pwned," the "All your bases" joke, and even more mainstream things like "hacker," "bug," and emoticons. Personally, I'd rather get rid of the pronunciation of Linux as LIE-nucks once and for all.
I guess we've all got our pet peeves. A lady I work with writes e-mail as e'mail, and it bugs me so much that if that catches on, I think I'll just give up and kill myself. (For the record, e-mail is not a contraction, it is a hyphenated word, vaguely acronymical at best.)
How do you know he's not a Unix clustering professional?
At any rate, thanks for the etymology of the word. I didn't know that, and now it is kind of funny and makes sense.
Sure, no problem. A lot of people like to think that an embryo is morally a person, but in our practical day-to-day lives, no one really treats it as such. Ponder this:
These are just a few ways off the top of my head in which even conservatives do not treat an embryo or fetus as the moral equivalent of a human being. I'm sure if I put some more thought into it, I could come up with plenty more.
No, we're not. That's my point.
But the clump of cells wasn't me, therefore it's irrelevant. I keep seeing people confuse something's potential with it's reality. Just because something has the potential to be something else doesn't give it the status or rights of that thing it may someday become. As someone else pointed out, if my mom had had an abortion, it wouldn't make a lick of difference to me because I simply would have never existed. This is far, far different from my present life being ended by someone sneaking in and killing me in the middle of the night, because at this point, my existence isn't potential, it's reality.
Using your logic, one could just as easily say that if Osama bin Laden's mother had had an abortion, the world would arguably be a much happier and safer place, and because of this, women should have more abortions. It's a non sequitur and I reject such arguments. Let's make important decisions like this based on what what the reality of the situation is, not what it may or may not be someday or what it could or could not have been if something had been different.
Or framed in a different way, it's very possible in the near future that we'll be able to clone human beings from the intact DNA contained in any of the millions of cells in our bodies. At that point, should we start saving every sloughed off cell because the potential exists for it to be a person? Additionally, we probably have the technology now to freeze our extra cells to save them for the purpose of becoming new human beings when such technology does exist. Should we never let any of them go to waste now? Of course not, everyone knows that's silly. The same holds true for the clump of cells that is an embryo. Just because it has the potential to be a human being someday doesn't give it any special or sacred status today.
Because I have karma to burn...
The exact quote from John Edwards is, "If we do the work that we can do in this country, the work that we will do when John Kerry is president, people like Christopher Reeve are going to get up out of that wheelchair and walk again."
I don't find anything particularly monstrously irresponsible about this quote. He doesn't imply that people will get up out of their wheelchairs a week or two after Kerry would have been elected. I think most people, like me, are smart enough to realize that curing spinal cord injury is a while coming.
However, personally, I'm convinced that if we put our collective ingenuity in medical research towards finding a cure for spinal cord injuries, we will get real and tangible results, as this article demonstrates. It's not a cure, but it sure is progress.
The election of John Kerry would not have necessarily accomplished this goal during his presidency, and I don't think that Edwards's quote was implying that it would. After all, John F. Kennedy said in 1961, "I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth." Even if he had not been assassinated in 1963 and re-elected in 1964, his goal still wouldn't have happened while he was in office.
It is certain that the election of George W. Bush has hindered the goal of finding a cure to spinal cord injury. He has shut down a major source of funding in an area of research that, as we can see from this article, is directly relevant to finding a cure.
The really frustrating thing is the reason given for shutting down this funding—some misguided notion that an embryo is somehow morally equivalent to a human being. I find it interesting that most of these fundamentalists have no problem at all with killing highly complex organisms such as rats, monkeys, rabbits, and so on in the name of scientific research, but a clump of nondescript cells with no capacity for thought, feeling, or any sensation at all; a clump of nondescript cells with no past, present, or future; a clump of nondescript cells very similar to the kind that we wash off in the shower every day without even thinking; is somehow sacred.
What if these same fundamentalists had insisted that researching advanced rocket propulsion techniques in the '60's was too similar to building a Tower of Babel, attempting to reach to heaven? Would John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson have cowered to this weird religious-based belief and let the Russians unilaterally own space today?
I hope not, just as I hope that in the next election, we manage to get some leadership who is willing to stand up for science that can make our lives better instead of trying to push America further and further into a new dark age of technology because of religious fundamentalism.
That's what I had in mind, something that other users can see and use to decide whether or not they want to play with other people.
Before I decide to waste time with some anonymous person, it would be helpful if I saw something like this:
I'd probably avoid that person. The temporary suspension of someone's account doesn't help me as a player decide whether or not I want that person as an opponent or as a teammate. The account cancellation does, but that's only used as an extreme last resort, and only after the person has already caused a lot of damage. The beauty of the system is that it would be automatic; no game admins would have to get involved except under really weird circumstances.
Using a system like this, players will generally behave not because they're afraid of being banned, but because they're afraid of being ostracized and publically displayed as an asshole.
It's kind of like an idea I'd like to see implemented for drivers, something I call the "Stupid System." By law, everyone's car has to have a stupid meter installed in the window, which is a receiver. Everyone who wants one is also given a stupid transmitter. When you're driving, if someone does something really stupid, like cutting across three lanes in front of you because they weren't paying attention and were about to miss their exit, then you can use your stupid transmitter to tag their car. After they receive a certain number of stupid tags from different people based on the population in their area, they get a traffic ticket. After a higher threshhold, they lose their license. The number of stupid tags a person has at any given time is displayed on the stupid meter, so that other drivers will know what they're dealing with.
This is a great idea, but the Liberated Games list is a bit skimpy. I noticed that a bunch of the games were shareware demos, such as Wolfenstein 3D and such, but I remember downloading hundreds of fun shareware games from BBS'es. Anyone remember William Soleau's games? God, I played Oilcap until my fingers bled...
Also noticably absent are the amazing collection of open source software games, of which my favorite at this time would probably be Freeciv.
Disclaimer: I'm not a member of Xbox Live...
Perhaps it would be worthwhile to implement some sort of ratings system. You get to rate your opponent on his or her conduct and sportsmanship.
Accrue enough "demerits" from different members, and you get tagged as a habitual asshole.
It seems that there is hope that this senseless war can be avoided. I don't like the thought of so many brave Canadian and Danish soldiers being tragically lost in the frozen wasteland of the Arctic. And the last thing that ANYONE wants to deal with is the Hansian insurgency.
Perhaps the Danes could respond by offering pizza with Canadian bacon in their cafeteria...
Philosophically, I agree with you, but I can see their point, too. Using GCC to compile and install non-Linspire sanctioned applications gives non-novice but non-advanced users the ability to majorly screw up their system. These users would then proceed to unduly tax the company's tech support people and, even worse, gripe about how unstable Linspire is to all of their friends and Internet forums.
If you don't want to pay for GPL software, you don't have to. But remember the beauty of GPL software—Linspire can sell it to people who will pay for it if they want to, and the promise of stability and ease-of-use makes me lean towards thinking that it's justified.
The article specifically says that it does:
As for the solar panels, I would think that they'd be a lot more expensive. (Disclaimer: I haven't actually checked.) The systems I've seen require large banks of batteries to store power, and there are a lot of expensive system components.
One nice thing about solar lighting is that there's really not much else other than a mirror and a bunch of fiber optic cables. It's a pretty simple system made of relatively cheap parts.
Also, one of the selling points of the company's Web site is that the lighting is all natural, not artificial, which is supposedly preferable for happy attitudes and such.
Of course, not having any lights at night or on cloudy days would totally suck. The article mentions that the system can be integrated with supplimental artifical lighting. Perhaps a combination of solar panels and solar lighting would be the best system if one wants cheap, eco-friendly lighting that is also mostly natural for happy attitudes.
The "dark side" of the moon is the far side by definition, not by semantics. According to the Wikipedia:
I once got in a VERY heated argument with a guy at college (a civil engineering major, for the record) over what the "dark side" of the moon was. He kept saying that it was the side that always faces away from the sun, and I kept trying to explain that there is no side that always faces away from the sun, that the moon's periods of rotation on its axis and revolution around the Earth were the same, and that I'm 100% sure of this and have known it since I was eight years old. I tried to tell him that this accounts for the fact that when you look at the moon, it is always in the same orientation whether it's waxing, full, or waning.
I absolutely hate it when I get in an argument about something when I'm 100% sure about something and can't convince someone else for whatever stupid reason. Oh well, I guess it's better than being 100% wrong about something that someone who is 100% right about can't convince me, but I wouldn't know. :-)
Someone could set up a bounty to get an insider to leak the key. It might be difficult—you would have to have the source anonymous enough for Sony not to trace, but traceable enough to verify and deliver payment. Perhaps going through some unregulated third party in a country where such transactions are not tracked? The details would probably take a while to iron out, but not as long as brute forcing the key, methinks.
Of course, I'm not actually condoning that because it would be illegal and unethical...
Does anyone else here get the feeling that the only reason Microsoft is suing Google is because they know they can't win the search war? I'm guessing that the idea is that if you can't beat your enemy at how they fight best, beat them with litigation. Not that Microsoft would ever stoop to doing something low like that...
Let Mr. Lee go, Steve and Bill, no good can come of this for Microsoft OR Google.
Here's one of many. You can catch it tomorrow (Saturday) night at 11:40pm in high definition, if you want to.