I'm no web developer but one issue that we had: you can't redirect based on the URL.
Example: On our webserver we were serving multiple pages off of the same server, and depending on the URL entered the server would serve up different pages. IE, both www.boatsite.com and www.hikingsite.com resolved to the same server IP address, but the server would present a boating or hiking site, respectively, depending on which URL was entered.
HTTPS broke that because we weren't able to read the URL until later in the process when it was decrypted.
Like I said, it may have been an IIS limitation or just a knowledge issue of our webmaster (which isn't me - I was just tangentially involved in this issue), but this did present a bit of a headache.
I can agree, but I honestly think most people also don't really care about this issue much.
Most of the people I know that even watched broadcast television were happy with their SD televisions before the switch. The whole switch-over in the US for many was just a headache. Those that do have new TV's, the main thing that they seem to like is the "clear" picture, which is provided by the change to digital transmissions - not HD.
Even myself, if I'm watching an SD signal that was meant for a 4:3 set then it's annoying. I get either a stretched picture or worse - letterboxing meant for 4:3 which REALLY compresses things. However, a 480p picture that is formatted for a 16:9 display honestly doesn't look bad to me at all. I've got a 46" 1080p set in the living room (and a 32" 720p in the bedroom). A lot of my television I'm getting off iTunes now, and the vast majority of what I buy I'm buying the SD version of. Between the two, the jump from 480p just isn't worth an extra $1 per episode.
Take the following example. A really hot female undercover police officer walking down the street on the Vegas strip, stops random guys that look drunk and offers them sexual favors if they cover her bar tab.
That one probably wouldn't be illegal either way. It's not a direct exchange of money - it's essentially exchanging a gift for sex. That really isn't illegal (hell the entire Valentine's Day holiday is more or less BUILT on that idea).
Prostitution laws are one of those oddities where the action is legal is just about every single way except a direct handover of cash. Two friends who are just bored can do it - no problem. Women do it for drinks at the bar no problem. Every Valentine's Day it gets traded for chocolates, flowers, and teddy bears. Got a nice boat? Park it at the marina and just hangout on a Saturday and you can scoop up all the free tail you want just for taking them out on the water. If you hand over an actual dollar though it apparently kills all the puppies in all directions for 100 miles, and must therefore be illegal.
An important difference is that the girl in the story is 13. In your example she's 14, which is legal in a few states (I don't know of any state that goes lower than 14 though). All a cultural thing. Depending on the country you're in it could be much lower. I believe it's 12 many parts of Mexico for example.
You don't get harmed by (normal) porn you nut, not even kids.
Kinda, kinda not. It really depends. I don't think there's any inherent harm in a boy seeing a boob, but realistically I think it does do some damage in that at that young with the hormones raging, you are looking at possible social damage. IE, kid starts looking at lots of porn instead of going out and trying to look at real boobies the old fashioned way.
Once upon a time it was common knowledge amongst young boys that those boobies they wanted to see so badly were to be found on roughly 50% of their peers - they just needed to develop a certain skill and tact to achieve that goal. Today the porn shortcut has lead to a decline in much of those skills.
MIDI doesn't interest me that much. Also, from my understanding they're using the Squire line of Fender Stratocasters (not Telecasters). I've seen those for as little as $99 on sale new. Normal non-sale price at Guitar Center is $119. I have a used one that I picked up for $60 from a pawn shop. Technically not TOO bad of an instrument. They work, and are "real" guitars as opposed to something like the First Act stuff they sell in department stores which are more or less toys, but as I said - you can get a whole lot more guitar for $300.
Indeed - also, the $300 Rock Band guitar isn't nearly as nice as what you can get for $300 in the regular electic market. That's approaching the price of being able to get something actually pretty nice and functional. I didn't pay much more than that for my best guitar (a 2004 Gibson Melody Maker - back when they still came with the dogear P90 pickup).
On a related note, here is some not researched, anecdotal opinion: the best bands often site as influential bands that weren't nearly as successful. True genre busting, cutting edge musicians bring together ideas from a variety of places. Learning every Nirvana song will not make you the next Nirvana. I'd go so far as to say cannot make you the next Nirvana.
That's great and all, but many people have no intention nor desire to be the "next Nirvana". I don't want to play in a band. I don't want to play gigs. When I play around on my guitar it's typically just to pass time or goofing off with friends (none of which play anything and most of whom would be drunk anytime the guitar comes out).
For many people, the instrument isn't a career choice, or even a major focus of life - it's just a hobby.
You're spending an aweful lot of time trying to explain ways to acheive this task without the game. The problem is your whole position seems to stem from some inherent notion that a game is bad, and should thus be avoided.
That position is not going to be shared by most here (and at it's base is rather illogical). Rather than worry about all the ways I could avoid playing a game and learning guitar, if I you know, actually LIKE games (as I'm sure many here do), then it's not a bad idea to just use the game.
Somehow I doubt that our last little revolution would have succeeded without them. Egypt's recent revolution also would have been unlikely to suceed without the looming threat of other nations stepping in with guns.
Realistically, when it comes down to it if one party is entrenched enough, asking nicely doesn't always get the job done. Always good as a first try, but without the threat of anything more coming of it it also becomes your last resort.
The firearms prohibition on felons is US federal law. No "typically" about it. If you are convicted of a felony in the US you lose the right to own firearms unless it is expunged.
That said, as always is the case with laws, there are loopholes. Muzzleloading weapons (regardless of date of manufacture) and any "antique" guns (anything made prior to 1898, but not replicas thereof) are not considered firearms under federal law. Doesn't matter that they have triggers and barrels and when you pull the trigger it goes bang and a piece of lead flies out the end at deadly velocity - it's not legally a firearm.:)
Of course, then you get into the territory of state law, and SOME states do further define those items as firearms and issue their own prohibitions against felons owning them. Some states even prohibit felons from owning any "deadly weapon" which even encompasses archery.
What do we do? America is a Republic, not a Democracy. The only thing we can do to try to "fix" the problem is reelect more people who end up falling to the same bribes as those who we previously wanted out. At any given time out of a population of well over 300 million people, there are really only 1000 or so people that truly have the power to change the system. That number is small enough to simply be bought out. Put new people in and they'll buy them out. Wanna change the system? Can't. The people that can do it are the same people who would lose from it doing so.
Short of an armed revolution, things are not going to change. Ever. Thing is, they've got the bread and circuses act down pact. Most of the masses are relatively content. Their reality shows come on every night and the food is relatively cheap. They have no interest in losing what they have. We're going to have to wait for our ruling class to really run the country absolutely into the ground, shutting off supply of cheap trinkets to the population, before things really change.
You might as well ask for a citation for the sky being blue. Prostitution is a job - not a job that is particularly enjoyable, but still a job that people do for the same reason anyone else does a job: the financial return is worth the tradeoff. It's still voluntary. As a matter of fact most prostitutes/escorts who move past our Bible-belt induced morality conflicts actually end up making pretty good money for relatively low time-input. There's not many other industries where you can make $200 per hour or more (in some cases a LOT more) for what is essentially manual labor.
Like it or not, the cost of labor HAS dropped through the floor. In a global economy, supply and demand has made human labor worth a fraction of what it used to be. Unions are an artificial attempt to prop up wages that the market will not support. You either drop the union demands or the corporation purchases their labor from your competitors down the street ("down the street" in this case is likely China, India, or the Phillipines).
Like it or not, when you're a factory worker your work is just a commodity that you're selling, and right now, it's a buyers market. EVENTUALLY it will balance out more - our population density is lower and we have a lot of resources, so the average standard of living will typically be higher, but in a global economy any grossly imbalanced standard of living situations will tend to shift around until they equalize.
Exactly. Amazon figured this out with music but I don't know why everywhere isn't figuring out that DRM doesn't work.
Take any DRM'd TV episode, song, game - whatever. You, the paying customer, have this huge list of things you can't do with it. Can't play it on a different computer. Can't play it on Linux. Can't stream it to your media center in the living room. Hard drive crashed? Sorry - even though you backed up the file there is some stupid keyring system that you didn't backup and it can't be recreated. All this bulslhit stacked on to "stop piracy".
Now, with *all of that headache* in place, go to The Pirate Bay. Type in the name of said item. Bam. Completely unhindered versions of it available with two clicks.
As a testament to how stupid it is, when I switched my music player from an iPod Touch to my Android phone, I still had some Apple DRM'd songs left over in my iTunes library. With an afternoon and a trip to a torrent site I was able to replace all my DRM'd files with freshly "pirated" (but working) copies of the songs I'd already paid for . . .
Disregarding the improved UI (almost all people seem to work much quicker with a capacitive touch screen versus a stylus), neither of those devices had a GPS, nor (most importantly) a functional internet connection that is available 99% of the time you are away from home.
Seriously, the "always there" internet connection on these devices pretty much the main driving factor in their popularity - you can't compare them to devices of old that lack that important part. It's like trying to compare automobiles to carriages and dismissing it as "nothing different".
Now the solution would be to require those companies to open their lines, but "those companies" would fight such a law tooth and claw (or more accurately: lobbyist, campaign contribution, and lawsuit).
Not only that, but there is a HUGE segment of people who fight against any such things. Due to interests I hang out on a lot of forums that tend to be fairly heavily right wing oriented, and you can't imagine the trouble I had explaining something like Net Neutrality to these people. Their view was basically that government laws about what companies could do were bad. Period. The specifics were irrelevant. Most admitted that they didn't really grasp the situation, but that wasn't important, because a government law about what a company do automatically meant it was Bad (TM).
It sucks but America today is politically polarized into two directions, neither of which works for me. To me I think corporate personhood is a sham. Corporations have more money and more power than most people, even the super rich, yet they haven't the cohesive mind of a person. They are driven only by profit motive. That's fine, but unchecked it can cause damage to society.
With that in mind, I have no issue with government regulation on companies, but I think that INDIVIDUALS should be free to live their lives unhindered by government. The problem is money tends to talk, and that doesn't lend itself to the uber-rich entity without a concious getting anything short of what it wants.
To a degree, yes. The internet for many people shifted the location of their information from libraries into the home. When I was a kid and I wanted to check a random fact or lookup a recipe or find out just what was the last year of production for the Chevy Corvair, I could find that information out - but I had to go to the library. It was inconvenient, and it was slow. The internet brought that information a step closer. Now, you could access that information at home.
Mobile devices do the same thing taking it yet a step further. Now your data access is no longer restricted by your location - it's with you at all times.
Yeah, if by "convergence" you mean 100 fart apps and other pointless diversions.
The old tired excuse that the cell phones are filled with "fart" apps is really getting less and less viable. My phone is now my primary method of GPS navigation. It also has a fairly good guitar tuning app on it. My music, podcasts, email, etc are all right there. With the SSH client I can login to my home PC and do certain tasks anywhere I need. I can identify any song I happen to hear in the background.
And most importantly, I can just open a web browser. That's something that you obviously have some use for as you had to use it to post that message.
There were ALWAYS people like you. Ranting that computers were useless "toys" when they first came about. Probably ranting that color TV (or even TV in favor of radio) would never catch on. Quit waving your cane around and understand that technology marches on, no matter how much you wish to dig your feet into the sand.
You're looking at a large city like Houston though. In many areas of the country - even if you're living in an urban setting, you're not necessarily in a large city. In those areas, you are incredibly likely to only have only one option for wired broadband. In rural areas this is even more true - if you have access to broadband at all.
In my case I live in a very rural setting (don't even live in a town - I live in an unincorporated area that is now about 14 miles from any town - when I was a kid in the same area it was 20 miles, but civilization inches a bit closer over time), and I have only a single option for wired broadband. I does happen to be one of those smaller companies though. My local phone/telecom company resells Spirit Telecom bandwidth. Speeds are slow and prices high (I pay $50/month for 3Mbps), but there are no caps which I suppose is a good thing. If they ever decide to put them on though - it's basically a situation of I either accept it or move somewhere else. There are no other options.
The reality though is that those engines still don't spring up out of the ground. They have to be written in the first place, and those programmers have to choose D3D or OpenGL. There is cause to care which operates better.
Besides - existing engines aren't always the best choice. If no one ever reinvented the wheel they'd probably still be made of wood.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm no web developer but one issue that we had: you can't redirect based on the URL.
Example: On our webserver we were serving multiple pages off of the same server, and depending on the URL entered the server would serve up different pages. IE, both www.boatsite.com and www.hikingsite.com resolved to the same server IP address, but the server would present a boating or hiking site, respectively, depending on which URL was entered.
HTTPS broke that because we weren't able to read the URL until later in the process when it was decrypted.
Like I said, it may have been an IIS limitation or just a knowledge issue of our webmaster (which isn't me - I was just tangentially involved in this issue), but this did present a bit of a headache.
I can agree, but I honestly think most people also don't really care about this issue much.
Most of the people I know that even watched broadcast television were happy with their SD televisions before the switch. The whole switch-over in the US for many was just a headache. Those that do have new TV's, the main thing that they seem to like is the "clear" picture, which is provided by the change to digital transmissions - not HD.
Even myself, if I'm watching an SD signal that was meant for a 4:3 set then it's annoying. I get either a stretched picture or worse - letterboxing meant for 4:3 which REALLY compresses things. However, a 480p picture that is formatted for a 16:9 display honestly doesn't look bad to me at all. I've got a 46" 1080p set in the living room (and a 32" 720p in the bedroom). A lot of my television I'm getting off iTunes now, and the vast majority of what I buy I'm buying the SD version of. Between the two, the jump from 480p just isn't worth an extra $1 per episode.
http://xkcd.com/605/
There's a danger in just assuming that trends continue without verification.
Take the following example. A really hot female undercover police officer walking down the street on the Vegas strip, stops random guys that look drunk and offers them sexual favors if they cover her bar tab.
That one probably wouldn't be illegal either way. It's not a direct exchange of money - it's essentially exchanging a gift for sex. That really isn't illegal (hell the entire Valentine's Day holiday is more or less BUILT on that idea).
Prostitution laws are one of those oddities where the action is legal is just about every single way except a direct handover of cash. Two friends who are just bored can do it - no problem. Women do it for drinks at the bar no problem. Every Valentine's Day it gets traded for chocolates, flowers, and teddy bears. Got a nice boat? Park it at the marina and just hangout on a Saturday and you can scoop up all the free tail you want just for taking them out on the water. If you hand over an actual dollar though it apparently kills all the puppies in all directions for 100 miles, and must therefore be illegal.
An important difference is that the girl in the story is 13. In your example she's 14, which is legal in a few states (I don't know of any state that goes lower than 14 though). All a cultural thing. Depending on the country you're in it could be much lower. I believe it's 12 many parts of Mexico for example.
You don't get harmed by (normal) porn you nut, not even kids.
Kinda, kinda not. It really depends. I don't think there's any inherent harm in a boy seeing a boob, but realistically I think it does do some damage in that at that young with the hormones raging, you are looking at possible social damage. IE, kid starts looking at lots of porn instead of going out and trying to look at real boobies the old fashioned way.
Once upon a time it was common knowledge amongst young boys that those boobies they wanted to see so badly were to be found on roughly 50% of their peers - they just needed to develop a certain skill and tact to achieve that goal. Today the porn shortcut has lead to a decline in much of those skills.
MIDI doesn't interest me that much. Also, from my understanding they're using the Squire line of Fender Stratocasters (not Telecasters). I've seen those for as little as $99 on sale new. Normal non-sale price at Guitar Center is $119. I have a used one that I picked up for $60 from a pawn shop. Technically not TOO bad of an instrument. They work, and are "real" guitars as opposed to something like the First Act stuff they sell in department stores which are more or less toys, but as I said - you can get a whole lot more guitar for $300.
Indeed - also, the $300 Rock Band guitar isn't nearly as nice as what you can get for $300 in the regular electic market. That's approaching the price of being able to get something actually pretty nice and functional. I didn't pay much more than that for my best guitar (a 2004 Gibson Melody Maker - back when they still came with the dogear P90 pickup).
On a related note, here is some not researched, anecdotal opinion: the best bands often site as influential bands that weren't nearly as successful. True genre busting, cutting edge musicians bring together ideas from a variety of places. Learning every Nirvana song will not make you the next Nirvana. I'd go so far as to say cannot make you the next Nirvana.
That's great and all, but many people have no intention nor desire to be the "next Nirvana". I don't want to play in a band. I don't want to play gigs. When I play around on my guitar it's typically just to pass time or goofing off with friends (none of which play anything and most of whom would be drunk anytime the guitar comes out).
For many people, the instrument isn't a career choice, or even a major focus of life - it's just a hobby.
You're spending an aweful lot of time trying to explain ways to acheive this task without the game. The problem is your whole position seems to stem from some inherent notion that a game is bad, and should thus be avoided.
That position is not going to be shared by most here (and at it's base is rather illogical). Rather than worry about all the ways I could avoid playing a game and learning guitar, if I you know, actually LIKE games (as I'm sure many here do), then it's not a bad idea to just use the game.
Somehow I doubt that our last little revolution would have succeeded without them. Egypt's recent revolution also would have been unlikely to suceed without the looming threat of other nations stepping in with guns.
Realistically, when it comes down to it if one party is entrenched enough, asking nicely doesn't always get the job done. Always good as a first try, but without the threat of anything more coming of it it also becomes your last resort.
The firearms prohibition on felons is US federal law. No "typically" about it. If you are convicted of a felony in the US you lose the right to own firearms unless it is expunged.
That said, as always is the case with laws, there are loopholes. Muzzleloading weapons (regardless of date of manufacture) and any "antique" guns (anything made prior to 1898, but not replicas thereof) are not considered firearms under federal law. Doesn't matter that they have triggers and barrels and when you pull the trigger it goes bang and a piece of lead flies out the end at deadly velocity - it's not legally a firearm. :)
Of course, then you get into the territory of state law, and SOME states do further define those items as firearms and issue their own prohibitions against felons owning them. Some states even prohibit felons from owning any "deadly weapon" which even encompasses archery.
What do we do? America is a Republic, not a Democracy. The only thing we can do to try to "fix" the problem is reelect more people who end up falling to the same bribes as those who we previously wanted out. At any given time out of a population of well over 300 million people, there are really only 1000 or so people that truly have the power to change the system. That number is small enough to simply be bought out. Put new people in and they'll buy them out. Wanna change the system? Can't. The people that can do it are the same people who would lose from it doing so.
Short of an armed revolution, things are not going to change. Ever. Thing is, they've got the bread and circuses act down pact. Most of the masses are relatively content. Their reality shows come on every night and the food is relatively cheap. They have no interest in losing what they have. We're going to have to wait for our ruling class to really run the country absolutely into the ground, shutting off supply of cheap trinkets to the population, before things really change.
You might as well ask for a citation for the sky being blue. Prostitution is a job - not a job that is particularly enjoyable, but still a job that people do for the same reason anyone else does a job: the financial return is worth the tradeoff. It's still voluntary. As a matter of fact most prostitutes/escorts who move past our Bible-belt induced morality conflicts actually end up making pretty good money for relatively low time-input. There's not many other industries where you can make $200 per hour or more (in some cases a LOT more) for what is essentially manual labor.
Like it or not, the cost of labor HAS dropped through the floor. In a global economy, supply and demand has made human labor worth a fraction of what it used to be. Unions are an artificial attempt to prop up wages that the market will not support. You either drop the union demands or the corporation purchases their labor from your competitors down the street ("down the street" in this case is likely China, India, or the Phillipines).
Like it or not, when you're a factory worker your work is just a commodity that you're selling, and right now, it's a buyers market. EVENTUALLY it will balance out more - our population density is lower and we have a lot of resources, so the average standard of living will typically be higher, but in a global economy any grossly imbalanced standard of living situations will tend to shift around until they equalize.
Exactly. Amazon figured this out with music but I don't know why everywhere isn't figuring out that DRM doesn't work.
Take any DRM'd TV episode, song, game - whatever. You, the paying customer, have this huge list of things you can't do with it. Can't play it on a different computer. Can't play it on Linux. Can't stream it to your media center in the living room. Hard drive crashed? Sorry - even though you backed up the file there is some stupid keyring system that you didn't backup and it can't be recreated. All this bulslhit stacked on to "stop piracy".
Now, with *all of that headache* in place, go to The Pirate Bay. Type in the name of said item. Bam. Completely unhindered versions of it available with two clicks.
As a testament to how stupid it is, when I switched my music player from an iPod Touch to my Android phone, I still had some Apple DRM'd songs left over in my iTunes library. With an afternoon and a trip to a torrent site I was able to replace all my DRM'd files with freshly "pirated" (but working) copies of the songs I'd already paid for . . .
Notice that the poster already stated that the % increases stated were for dollar amounts, NOT units. There is no conversion math necessary.
Disregarding the improved UI (almost all people seem to work much quicker with a capacitive touch screen versus a stylus), neither of those devices had a GPS, nor (most importantly) a functional internet connection that is available 99% of the time you are away from home.
Seriously, the "always there" internet connection on these devices pretty much the main driving factor in their popularity - you can't compare them to devices of old that lack that important part. It's like trying to compare automobiles to carriages and dismissing it as "nothing different".
Now the solution would be to require those companies to open their lines, but "those companies" would fight such a law tooth and claw (or more accurately: lobbyist, campaign contribution, and lawsuit).
Not only that, but there is a HUGE segment of people who fight against any such things. Due to interests I hang out on a lot of forums that tend to be fairly heavily right wing oriented, and you can't imagine the trouble I had explaining something like Net Neutrality to these people. Their view was basically that government laws about what companies could do were bad. Period. The specifics were irrelevant. Most admitted that they didn't really grasp the situation, but that wasn't important, because a government law about what a company do automatically meant it was Bad (TM).
It sucks but America today is politically polarized into two directions, neither of which works for me. To me I think corporate personhood is a sham. Corporations have more money and more power than most people, even the super rich, yet they haven't the cohesive mind of a person. They are driven only by profit motive. That's fine, but unchecked it can cause damage to society.
With that in mind, I have no issue with government regulation on companies, but I think that INDIVIDUALS should be free to live their lives unhindered by government. The problem is money tends to talk, and that doesn't lend itself to the uber-rich entity without a concious getting anything short of what it wants.
That makes it sound like we might have the problem straightened out in 30-40 years. Life is too short to accept slow and steady for most problems.
To a degree, yes. The internet for many people shifted the location of their information from libraries into the home. When I was a kid and I wanted to check a random fact or lookup a recipe or find out just what was the last year of production for the Chevy Corvair, I could find that information out - but I had to go to the library. It was inconvenient, and it was slow. The internet brought that information a step closer. Now, you could access that information at home.
Mobile devices do the same thing taking it yet a step further. Now your data access is no longer restricted by your location - it's with you at all times.
Yeah, if by "convergence" you mean 100 fart apps and other pointless diversions.
The old tired excuse that the cell phones are filled with "fart" apps is really getting less and less viable. My phone is now my primary method of GPS navigation. It also has a fairly good guitar tuning app on it. My music, podcasts, email, etc are all right there. With the SSH client I can login to my home PC and do certain tasks anywhere I need. I can identify any song I happen to hear in the background.
And most importantly, I can just open a web browser. That's something that you obviously have some use for as you had to use it to post that message.
There were ALWAYS people like you. Ranting that computers were useless "toys" when they first came about. Probably ranting that color TV (or even TV in favor of radio) would never catch on. Quit waving your cane around and understand that technology marches on, no matter how much you wish to dig your feet into the sand.
Why not start patenting words next.
Ironically, they already own the trademark NeXT.
You're looking at a large city like Houston though. In many areas of the country - even if you're living in an urban setting, you're not necessarily in a large city. In those areas, you are incredibly likely to only have only one option for wired broadband. In rural areas this is even more true - if you have access to broadband at all.
In my case I live in a very rural setting (don't even live in a town - I live in an unincorporated area that is now about 14 miles from any town - when I was a kid in the same area it was 20 miles, but civilization inches a bit closer over time), and I have only a single option for wired broadband. I does happen to be one of those smaller companies though. My local phone/telecom company resells Spirit Telecom bandwidth. Speeds are slow and prices high (I pay $50/month for 3Mbps), but there are no caps which I suppose is a good thing. If they ever decide to put them on though - it's basically a situation of I either accept it or move somewhere else. There are no other options.
The reality though is that those engines still don't spring up out of the ground. They have to be written in the first place, and those programmers have to choose D3D or OpenGL. There is cause to care which operates better.
Besides - existing engines aren't always the best choice. If no one ever reinvented the wheel they'd probably still be made of wood.