I think you may be confusing the public defendant statute. There are some situations where you can't get a public defender for very simple crimes, but everywhere that I know of will grant a jury trial for ANYTHING if you request it. Matter of fact, last time I was called in for jury duty it was for a trial in which a motorist failed to signal when turning and she requested a jury trial for a traffic violation with a fine of less than $200.
Yet you think that lying in an attempt to catch drunk drivers would throw any stink on a politician? I think they would be happy to get "blamed" for it and would run with that under their campaign slogan.
I work in government with a number of elected officials. Trust me, none of them would want to be even remotely connected to something like that.
They don't, but the local sheriff or another person that they answer to usually DO have to campaign. It's not always direct, but in almost all government entities there's an elected official not too many hops up the ladder.
Any politician caught up in such a thing would have a terrible campaign next time around however as people suggest that they intentionally LIED to the population to force them into a certain area. Even outside of the obvious deceitfulness there, it also could have implications for negatively affecting the traffic.
Probably not illegal, but such a thing could quickly turn into a PR nightmare.
No, the side who lost is now referring to it as the "War of Northern Aggression" or some such nonsense to try to romanticize their fight for slavery.
I think that's more of a TV thing. I grew up in the south (South Carolina - hell we started the war) and still live here. In my 30 years I have not once in my life heard that war referred to as the "War of Northern Aggression" except on television and the Internet. To any other person - even the "south will rise again!" lunatics you occasionally meet, it's just "the civil war".
Depending on how you look at it, the Revolutionary War WAS a civil war, as at that time we were part of Britain and were fighting with the main British forces. It's just that the "civil war" tag is usually only applied when the side wanting to break away loses the fight.:)
Tangent here, but I wonder if there is some improvement in modern times as to parents naming their kids incredibly common names. Just personally, if my last name was "Smith" and I had a kid "Joe", "John", "Sue", "Sally", etc would all be off the table immediately. It would have to be Plaxico Smith or something like that.
I have the same thing happen with snail mail - mostly bill collectors. Apparently they just LOVE trying to guess at addresses and track people down. There is another person with my first and last name (different middle) born in the same state as me on the same day (I found all this out while sorting out similar problems I was having with his crap showing up on my driving record).
At least every 3 weeks I get a new collection notice from some company trying to get money from him. I call them up and they always act as if I'm trying to cheat them or something. One collection agency actually tried to convince me it would be better to just pay the guys bill anyways. Thing is, since he's SSN is different none of them ever make it to my credit report, so if they don't take my word for it I don't care too much.
Did have an interesting traffic stop once though. I didn't know why it was taking so long until the cop came back asking whether or not I had any narcotics charges on my record. After that processed for a second and realizing he wasn't just messing with me we got it cleared up. He was close to calling for backup as my "evil twin" (as I've come to refer to him:)) was supposed to be incarcerated at that time.
I do, but my bookshelf cost $24.95 (it's one of those screw-together cheapos that they sell in department stores - but it works fine). Used ones at thrift stores cost even less.
Realistically though, such things are ultimately an optional cost. I don't HAVE to purchase a book shelf in order to read books. If I want to I can just stack them in an a corner and they still "work" just as well. The investment in an e-Reader is a REQUIRED investment.
As to the out of print books, that's fine, and I have read a few of those (but on my computer, not a dedicated device), but out of copyright free works are outside of the scope of the discussion when talking about the market economy of e-books, as they essentially operate outside of that economy. Those same works still cost $4-5 dollars in paper form where the words themselves are free to reprint with no cost. The vast majority of that price is in printing and distribution costs since there are no royalties to pay. Why is it that a book that DOES have such royalties only has a $2-3 premium over out or print works yet in e-book form they have a $10 premium?
I know, I know. Economics. The price is set at what the market will pay. That's fine. I just happen to disagree with the market on this issue, and I'm not willing to pay the going rate.
I'm sure he's thought about it a little more than that. He's talking about Amazon the eBook retailer here, not Amazon the hardware vendor (yes, I know it's the same company, but different facets of it). When focusing on aspects of a business you can't always generalize to that degree.
Well, I don't have time to RTFA, but if the summary is correct, Stallman says eBooks "don't respect our freedoms", and his solution is take taxes and distribute them to authors whose books the individual taxpayer may or may not wish to read. Because that really respects our freedoms. What a tool.
Not to mention that one of his biggest complaints is the assertion that identification should not be possible (with the underlying assertion being that the government shouldn't know what you're reading).
How in the hell are you going to make a workable system for determining author popularity without identifying readers and what they're reading? If it's anonymous and not tied back to a real person the smart authors would just scam the system to inflate their "popularity" through anonymous voting.
Additionally, I suppose one could accept the restrictive terms of ebooks if the price was substantially lower than their dead tree counterparts, but this does not seem to be the case.
This is it in a nutshell for me. I can buy most major books in mass-market paperback form for $7-8 after they've been out a short while, and printing cost is a huge portion of that price.
If their profit margin is $3-4 on a paper copy, there's no way I'm going to spend $10 on a digital copy that will likely not be around nearly as long (AND requires a $100+ investment in hardware just to use them). I'm personally willing to spend $2 to $3 on an ebook. Anything more and I'm not going to bother. I tend to only read a half-dozen book or so per year anyways, so it's not as if "having my entire library with me at all times" is some big thing anyways.
I never got around to trying Skies of Arcadia. By the time I was finishing up Grandia II I was in my second year and had a PS2 shortly afterwards at which point due to the backwards compatibility I started playing through a lot of the PSX back-catalog (I never owned an original PSX so buying a PS2 opened all those games to me).
I have to agree, and that's the reason some consider it smart not to attend college unless it's an in state school. There are a few around here that can get you a BS for $5K a year in tuition. If you are in your last year or two, even less if you take only the one or two needed classes (~$300-$400 per class.)
That's where I think the discrepancy lies. It's hard to broadly paint college as a "waste of money" when the costs vary so much for attending. In-state public universities are typically 1/5th or less the cost of a private college. In-state public technically colleges (where you can often do the first 2 years of a degree if you want) tend to be even less.
Like everything, you should bargain shop. When I graduated college I barely broke $20k in student loan debt (which is now 14 months from being paid off). That's about the cost of a mediocre car. Considering that my living and houses expenses for that time were included in that (ie, those were expenses I'd have had to pay anyways that I got to delay), it's not a bad bargain at all. Whether or not I'm any "better" at what I do because of the degree - I'll leave that up to debate. I'll say that it helped develop a lot of non-specific skills tremendously though (such as public speaking and general social skills), and at the end of the day it opens up a lot of job opportunities that simply require a degree.
Not really, since the games WERE DRM'd. It just so happens that it was a very, very weak and easily circumvented DRM'd.
Also, as a Dreamcast owner who DIDN'T pirate games, I can honestly say that the library was a bit thin. I liked Soul Caliber, Grandia 2, and RE: Code Veronica. Other than that - it just didn't hold my attention. No fault of the hardware there though.
I'll admit that the ONLY reason I ended up getting a Dreamcast was because it debuted right after I left home for college. I had left my N64 at home when I left (because it technically belonged to both me and my younger siblings so I let them have it), and I was bored with only my computer to play games on, so I bought the first new console that came out.
From decades of experience, I can tell you that ANYTHING that is related to that level of being optional will not catch on. Virtually anything that's not considered "standard equipment" (for ALL the players) will be avoided by the developers, as few want to target the smaller market segment.
Dreamcast's failure is unlikely to have had anything to do with the controller, PARTICULARLY since the LCD screen was an addon device that most games didn't even use and all 3rd party memory cards (and possibly some first part - my memory is fuzzy there) completely omitted.
Overall, I'd say that Dreamcast's failure was more so a combination of people opting to wait for Sony's console (given the track record between the two in the previous generation), as well as the fact that Dreamcast games could be pirated merely by downloading the image and burning it with a regular CD burner.
You have to understand the mentality (that term used generously) of a lot of the idiots here. To many, they don't really know what Communism means. At all. They really have no clue except that it's identified with Russia and China. It's just become a generic adjective meaning "bad" to them.
One guy was arguing a while back (can't even remember the person, or what he was proposed anymore) that some particular political figure was supported anarchy and communism. Doesn't matter that though both might be viewed as negative, they are pretty much complete opposites of each other. He was just stringing together a list of words that were "bad".
The 8th amendment protects against cruel and unusual, not unjust, punishments.
Have to remember that they weren't too far off of a time when if a ruler didn't like you you very well could be locked in a brazen bull and roasted to death. Simple incarceration isn't considered cruel or unusual and the constitution doesn't really deal with sentence lengths.
People have hit 200+WPM, but realistically most people that I'm familiar with who think they're pecking at 30+WPM simply are overestimating their speed, or found a test composed completely of words less than 4 characters long to take and see a number and pump up their self esteem some. To realistically do more than 30WPM you need to be averaging no more than 2 seconds per word typed. With touch typing that's nothing. I've never seen peckers do that with anything more complicated than "The cat goes to the box." type stuff.
I would if it didn't involve a cell-phone. My cell phone battery dies far too frequently to rely on it. Honestly, if Google let me buy one of the key-fob authenticators like Blizzard sells I'd attach one of those, as the battery lasts plenty long enough.
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I think you may be confusing the public defendant statute. There are some situations where you can't get a public defender for very simple crimes, but everywhere that I know of will grant a jury trial for ANYTHING if you request it. Matter of fact, last time I was called in for jury duty it was for a trial in which a motorist failed to signal when turning and she requested a jury trial for a traffic violation with a fine of less than $200.
Yet you think that lying in an attempt to catch drunk drivers would throw any stink on a politician? I think they would be happy to get "blamed" for it and would run with that under their campaign slogan.
I work in government with a number of elected officials. Trust me, none of them would want to be even remotely connected to something like that.
They don't, but the local sheriff or another person that they answer to usually DO have to campaign. It's not always direct, but in almost all government entities there's an elected official not too many hops up the ladder.
Of course not. They didn't say Apple responded to a legal requirement. They voluntarily responded to a REQUEST.
Any politician caught up in such a thing would have a terrible campaign next time around however as people suggest that they intentionally LIED to the population to force them into a certain area. Even outside of the obvious deceitfulness there, it also could have implications for negatively affecting the traffic.
Probably not illegal, but such a thing could quickly turn into a PR nightmare.
No, the side who lost is now referring to it as the "War of Northern Aggression" or some such nonsense to try to romanticize their fight for slavery.
I think that's more of a TV thing. I grew up in the south (South Carolina - hell we started the war) and still live here. In my 30 years I have not once in my life heard that war referred to as the "War of Northern Aggression" except on television and the Internet. To any other person - even the "south will rise again!" lunatics you occasionally meet, it's just "the civil war".
Depending on how you look at it, the Revolutionary War WAS a civil war, as at that time we were part of Britain and were fighting with the main British forces. It's just that the "civil war" tag is usually only applied when the side wanting to break away loses the fight. :)
Tangent here, but I wonder if there is some improvement in modern times as to parents naming their kids incredibly common names. Just personally, if my last name was "Smith" and I had a kid "Joe", "John", "Sue", "Sally", etc would all be off the table immediately. It would have to be Plaxico Smith or something like that.
I have the same thing happen with snail mail - mostly bill collectors. Apparently they just LOVE trying to guess at addresses and track people down. There is another person with my first and last name (different middle) born in the same state as me on the same day (I found all this out while sorting out similar problems I was having with his crap showing up on my driving record).
At least every 3 weeks I get a new collection notice from some company trying to get money from him. I call them up and they always act as if I'm trying to cheat them or something. One collection agency actually tried to convince me it would be better to just pay the guys bill anyways. Thing is, since he's SSN is different none of them ever make it to my credit report, so if they don't take my word for it I don't care too much.
Did have an interesting traffic stop once though. I didn't know why it was taking so long until the cop came back asking whether or not I had any narcotics charges on my record. After that processed for a second and realizing he wasn't just messing with me we got it cleared up. He was close to calling for backup as my "evil twin" (as I've come to refer to him :)) was supposed to be incarcerated at that time.
I do, but my bookshelf cost $24.95 (it's one of those screw-together cheapos that they sell in department stores - but it works fine). Used ones at thrift stores cost even less.
Realistically though, such things are ultimately an optional cost. I don't HAVE to purchase a book shelf in order to read books. If I want to I can just stack them in an a corner and they still "work" just as well. The investment in an e-Reader is a REQUIRED investment.
As to the out of print books, that's fine, and I have read a few of those (but on my computer, not a dedicated device), but out of copyright free works are outside of the scope of the discussion when talking about the market economy of e-books, as they essentially operate outside of that economy. Those same works still cost $4-5 dollars in paper form where the words themselves are free to reprint with no cost. The vast majority of that price is in printing and distribution costs since there are no royalties to pay. Why is it that a book that DOES have such royalties only has a $2-3 premium over out or print works yet in e-book form they have a $10 premium?
I know, I know. Economics. The price is set at what the market will pay. That's fine. I just happen to disagree with the market on this issue, and I'm not willing to pay the going rate.
I'm sure he's thought about it a little more than that. He's talking about Amazon the eBook retailer here, not Amazon the hardware vendor (yes, I know it's the same company, but different facets of it). When focusing on aspects of a business you can't always generalize to that degree.
Well, I don't have time to RTFA, but if the summary is correct, Stallman says eBooks "don't respect our freedoms", and his solution is take taxes and distribute them to authors whose books the individual taxpayer may or may not wish to read. Because that really respects our freedoms. What a tool.
Not to mention that one of his biggest complaints is the assertion that identification should not be possible (with the underlying assertion being that the government shouldn't know what you're reading).
How in the hell are you going to make a workable system for determining author popularity without identifying readers and what they're reading? If it's anonymous and not tied back to a real person the smart authors would just scam the system to inflate their "popularity" through anonymous voting.
Probably the Harry Reid interview:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7mRSI8yWwg
Additionally, I suppose one could accept the restrictive terms of ebooks if the price was substantially lower than their dead tree counterparts, but this does not seem to be the case.
This is it in a nutshell for me. I can buy most major books in mass-market paperback form for $7-8 after they've been out a short while, and printing cost is a huge portion of that price.
If their profit margin is $3-4 on a paper copy, there's no way I'm going to spend $10 on a digital copy that will likely not be around nearly as long (AND requires a $100+ investment in hardware just to use them). I'm personally willing to spend $2 to $3 on an ebook. Anything more and I'm not going to bother. I tend to only read a half-dozen book or so per year anyways, so it's not as if "having my entire library with me at all times" is some big thing anyways.
I never got around to trying Skies of Arcadia. By the time I was finishing up Grandia II I was in my second year and had a PS2 shortly afterwards at which point due to the backwards compatibility I started playing through a lot of the PSX back-catalog (I never owned an original PSX so buying a PS2 opened all those games to me).
I have to agree, and that's the reason some consider it smart not to attend college unless it's an in state school. There are a few around here that can get you a BS for $5K a year in tuition. If you are in your last year or two, even less if you take only the one or two needed classes (~$300-$400 per class.)
That's where I think the discrepancy lies. It's hard to broadly paint college as a "waste of money" when the costs vary so much for attending. In-state public universities are typically 1/5th or less the cost of a private college. In-state public technically colleges (where you can often do the first 2 years of a degree if you want) tend to be even less.
Like everything, you should bargain shop. When I graduated college I barely broke $20k in student loan debt (which is now 14 months from being paid off). That's about the cost of a mediocre car. Considering that my living and houses expenses for that time were included in that (ie, those were expenses I'd have had to pay anyways that I got to delay), it's not a bad bargain at all. Whether or not I'm any "better" at what I do because of the degree - I'll leave that up to debate. I'll say that it helped develop a lot of non-specific skills tremendously though (such as public speaking and general social skills), and at the end of the day it opens up a lot of job opportunities that simply require a degree.
Not really, since the games WERE DRM'd. It just so happens that it was a very, very weak and easily circumvented DRM'd.
Also, as a Dreamcast owner who DIDN'T pirate games, I can honestly say that the library was a bit thin. I liked Soul Caliber, Grandia 2, and RE: Code Veronica. Other than that - it just didn't hold my attention. No fault of the hardware there though.
I'll admit that the ONLY reason I ended up getting a Dreamcast was because it debuted right after I left home for college. I had left my N64 at home when I left (because it technically belonged to both me and my younger siblings so I let them have it), and I was bored with only my computer to play games on, so I bought the first new console that came out.
Virtual Boy
PowerGlove
PowerPad
SuperScope
Super Gameboy
SNES Mouse
Satellaview
N64 Transferpack
Nintendo 64DD
N64 VRU
Gameboy Printer
There are a ton of Nintendo Accessories that flopped because they were off the wall and not supported by many games.
From decades of experience, I can tell you that ANYTHING that is related to that level of being optional will not catch on. Virtually anything that's not considered "standard equipment" (for ALL the players) will be avoided by the developers, as few want to target the smaller market segment.
Dreamcast's failure is unlikely to have had anything to do with the controller, PARTICULARLY since the LCD screen was an addon device that most games didn't even use and all 3rd party memory cards (and possibly some first part - my memory is fuzzy there) completely omitted.
Overall, I'd say that Dreamcast's failure was more so a combination of people opting to wait for Sony's console (given the track record between the two in the previous generation), as well as the fact that Dreamcast games could be pirated merely by downloading the image and burning it with a regular CD burner.
Are you seriously that fucking stupid, or do you choose to suck dick?
I'm reminded of that scene in Star Trek 4:
Spock: They like you very much, but they are not the hell "your" whales.
Dr. Gillian Taylor: I suppose they told you that.
Spock: The *hell* they did.
You have to understand the mentality (that term used generously) of a lot of the idiots here. To many, they don't really know what Communism means. At all. They really have no clue except that it's identified with Russia and China. It's just become a generic adjective meaning "bad" to them.
One guy was arguing a while back (can't even remember the person, or what he was proposed anymore) that some particular political figure was supported anarchy and communism. Doesn't matter that though both might be viewed as negative, they are pretty much complete opposites of each other. He was just stringing together a list of words that were "bad".
The 8th amendment protects against cruel and unusual, not unjust, punishments.
Have to remember that they weren't too far off of a time when if a ruler didn't like you you very well could be locked in a brazen bull and roasted to death. Simple incarceration isn't considered cruel or unusual and the constitution doesn't really deal with sentence lengths.
People have hit 200+WPM, but realistically most people that I'm familiar with who think they're pecking at 30+WPM simply are overestimating their speed, or found a test composed completely of words less than 4 characters long to take and see a number and pump up their self esteem some. To realistically do more than 30WPM you need to be averaging no more than 2 seconds per word typed. With touch typing that's nothing. I've never seen peckers do that with anything more complicated than "The cat goes to the box." type stuff.
I would if it didn't involve a cell-phone. My cell phone battery dies far too frequently to rely on it. Honestly, if Google let me buy one of the key-fob authenticators like Blizzard sells I'd attach one of those, as the battery lasts plenty long enough.