The Scouring of the Shire would have added at least another half hour to the length of the film and make people wonder how much longer this thing was going to go on.
Too late. I was already thinking "jesus, this is taking forever" to myself in the theatre- and I've read the trilogy several times over.
It may have had something to do with the fact that it, like Harry Potter 3 (to pull up an example), had really shitty transitions between scenes, specifically within the last half-hour or so of the movie. So the screen would go black, I would think "oh, is it over?" but nope...Not over. I'm sure this is what pissed off other people watching the end of the movie as well.
I'll go to see the Guide even if reviewers give it a bad review for the simple fact that I tend to like movies that other people hate, even if it completely misses the point it was going for. Most movies, even the really horrible ones, have some redeeming point to make them watchable. Hell, I even sat through the Spice Girls movie some years back without resenting the hell out of it; what does that tell you?
if the modes were combined it will likely by somewhat like synthanasia is my guess, i cannot think of any other way for it to work, after all, all the colours are already taken up!
How do you know? I mean, if you're not able to see a colour outside of your visible spectrum there's no reason other colours can't still exist, you just can't see them and therefore have no conception of what they could possibly look like. Gives me a bit of a headache thinking about it, honestly. I'm reminded of descriptions of LSD trips in which the person swore they saw colours outside of the normal spectrum that they had never seen before and couldn't describe. Too bad colours are one of those things you need to see (that old ditty about describing red to a blind man holds true here).
I would _love_ to see what infrared or ultraviolet looks like. Man, what an experience...Now I just have to wait a few years/decades for the price to go down so I can get my very own implant.
I submitted a rather large Staples rebate via the EasyRebate online system some time ago on behalf of my mother. She has yet to see a check or any acknowledgement that they would be sending one. I no longer shop at Staples, and neither does she.
Realistically, HIV almost _always_ needs some kind of direct way of getting into the bloodstream to cause infection. The myth about HIV being a "homosexual disease" has some basis in fact because of this; the nature of anal sex makes it more likely that abrasions and bleeding will occur which facilitates the transfer of HIV. Naturally, this is possible with heterosexual anal/vaginal sex as well, but the association with male homosexual sex should be obvious.
HIV cannot be transferred via tears, snot, or saliva to my knowledge (IANAD). And either way you'd need an open wound of some kind to make transferring it even remotely statistically likely.:) Tooth enamel certainly offers no risk, so short of drilling past the enamel and into the pulp to the point of bleeding (and miniscule amounts of aerosolized blood...well, do I even have to say it?) it's not possible.
The punchcard thing is a bit more plausible, though...All sorts of nasty things collect on old stuff like that. A case of a guy getting a necrotic wound from scratching himself on an old bedpost while moving comes to mind. You'd have to be really unlucky, but you could theoretically get the same thing from a papercut.
At the very least, it's more than possible you could get an infection that would require prescription-strength topical antibiotics. Nothing life-threatening (as long as it's not staph and it doesn't turn necrotic) but still something to worry about whenever you get a wound from something likely to be swimming with bacteria and viruses (dusty old punchcards, again, being a good source of both).
I have no idea if that could even hapen but it sounds liek it could. Kind of like getting aids from drinking after someone with it.
I hope this is misplaced and you're just being facetious, but you don't "get AIDS" from anyone; you develop AIDS after contracting HIV.
And you can't contract HIV simply by drinking after someone (even if they bleed a little on the cup)...You can't even get it by kissing them, barring the both of you having a decently sized open bleeding wound in the mouth, at which point I'd hope both of you wouldn't feel up to kissing much of anyone anyway.
Laws or no, it's still morally or ethically questionable conduct depending on your given set of morals or ethics. Though if you don't consider ripping off someone else's brainchild morally or ethically questionable, do the rest of us a favour and don't bitch if/when it happens to you.
If I'm joe-sixpack I don't give a damn about CSS 2.0 compliance.
No, but you do give a damn about the fact that your favourite "Best Viewed in IE" web pages aren't rendering "correctly" in Firefox/Opera/whatever. As has been rehashed many times, users do not care that it is IE with the problem, especially if they're switching from IE to a browser like Firefox; they view it as a "why does Firefox mess up this page? It looks fine in IE!" (particularly if they're designing their own crappy pages that are tailored to IE, even unknowingly) and this is enough to get them to forsake other browsers entirely. They will not see IE as being the problem. They will not see poor, noncompliant CSS coding and a lack of skill on the part of the web designer as the problem. Other browsers are perceived as being the problem and as being "broken". If anything is preventing other browsers from really sweeping in and taking the market, it is this.
<conspiracy theory> Now, I got to thinking about this ages ago and began wondering if this is in fact intentional on the part of Microsoft. After all, if IE is the browser that the majority uses to the point that designers are "forced" to make pages tailored for IE (causing them to render incorrectly in other browsers), it's not hard to believe that they would intentionally keep it this way to play on the incorrect perceptions of ignorant users that other browsers are the problem and are "broken" rather than the other way around. Something to think about. </conspiracy theory>
Speaking from experience, I can say with great certainty that menstruation and the woes that come with it are far more bearable and indeed enjoyable than suffering a room full of MENSA members drifting about like so much spooge in a toilet bowl.
Not that I don't agree with the rest of your post, this just stood out to me:
I've known some incredibly intelligent people who'd probably flunk these tests - folks that can play music so amazingly well and reproduce exact notes after hearing them just once.
Depending on what part of the world they hail from, this ability is not at all unusual. Identifying a note like that is called perfect pitch and it's extremely prominent among people that were raised learning tonal languages like Chinese and has a stronger presence among people who grew up playing musical instruments. Reproducing a note when you have perfect pitch is cake if you have rudimentary knowledge of the instrument.
This should go without saying, but not all "web designers" are incompetent hacks. Some of us actually look at web design as an artform. The challenge of getting a web page not only working but looking downright good in every browser you throw it at is quite exhilirating. This is not just for designing personal sites but sites for businesses as well.
It's unfortunate that there are people that believe that using things like ActiveX is not only "nifty" but absoloutely necessary for every website you could think about designing. Arguing with these people gives me headaches. I just chock it up to horrendous teaching and block it out now.
I would imagine it is much more profitable, at least in the short run, to do things like this. Same would be true for Everquest if it's possible to steal items in this manner, but I am unfamiliar with how exactly the item system in that game works (was always a Diablo fan, not a EQ fan).
The prices some of these things fetch is insane even to the most hardcore of gamers..But I guess if you've got that much money to blow anything starts looking good. Hell, you should see some of the prices the shit on the text-based MUD DragonRealms fetches. Upwards of thousands of dollars for characters, rare items, and currency. And it's easy to shell out anywhere from $30-$500 a month directly to the company that runs the game itself, nevermind the underground networks of illegal buying and selling of characters/items/money. But I digress...
Everything you said basically sums up why I'm planning to get my ass out of the United States as soon as I can. I'm thinking Norway or Germany. I really don't know yet.
I'm deathly afraid that I or someone close to me will suffer because of the incredible ignorance and complacancy of others. I'm afraid because even though all of this is happening before the collective eyes of the public all the only thing anyone seems to want to do about it is say, "Wow, that's awful. Someone should really do something about that. Oh, what's for dinner?"
I'm giving myself five years in this country. I figure that'll be enough time to amass enough wealth to get myself settled down somewhere else. At least then I can watch safely from the sidelines where I won't be hit by any figurative shrapnel when the shit really starts to fly.
Oh, god. First it was "fetus," but then people saw pictures of actual fetuses and realized that they're just very young babies. Then it became the even more jargony "embryo," but now that's starting to give way to the massively jargony "zygote." All to avoid saying the word "baby."
And "baby" is an emotionally loaded word used by people that want to make others feel bad for getting abortions or donating embryos to science. Let's be honest here.
Medically, the words "zygote", "embryo", and "fetus" refer to very specific things and stages of development. Sorry, but until it's born, a "baby" even at full-term is for all intents and purposes a "fetus". For all the accusations of feigned ignorance you fling around you sure do a lot of it yourself. Or perhaps you really didn't know the difference and I'm actually teaching you something. Oh joyous day...
Boy would I just love to corner the CEO of the company distributing this stuff and catch them with this in an interview. It's just the kind of manipulative "think of the children!" crap that could be easily sold to the evening news for Joe and Jane Average to get outraged over.
Right, except the post you were responding to was specifically referring to using Napster to download copyrighted music. Nowhere did I see it said or even implied that p2p is inherently bad. So your post was a kneejerk reaction to a perceived slight at best.
And guess what, I still see it as theft. Not the same kind of theft as someone taking my wallet or my car perhaps, but it is theft nonetheless. Maybe your common average Joe would have a problem assigning multiple layers of meaning to the same word, and I would welcome someone coming up with synonyms for intellectual property and the theft of intellectual property that make sense (and don't undermind the real meaning), but I expected a bit more here. Or...well, this is Slashdot. Perhaps I shouldn't have.
As far as I'm concerned, if someone copies and uses something I created (a painting or drawing for example) without permission or regard for my rights as its creator, even if it doesn't technically "cost" me anything monetarily, it is still theft. This has happened to me before, and I'll be damned if I didn't feel like I'd been stolen from. It seems that people only understand the concept of "intellectual property" once they've actually dealt in it and understood what the theft of IP can do to a person, not just monetarily but creatively.
That said, no, intellectual property is not property, it is intellectual property. That is why it is called intellectual property and not just plain property. Now, while this term has been heavily abused by certain organizations and used to guilt people into buying overpriced crap on a sliver of silicone, it's still a valid term that refers to a perfectly valid state of being. If someone really thinks intellectual property is a load of FUD because it can't possibly be "property" in even an abstract sense, that strikes me as the equivilent of saying the Mona Lisa is only worth the canvas it's on and the paint that was used to make it. If anything is really the equivilent of shitting on the actual artists' rights it's that kind of thinking.
All that said, yes, I do download copyrighted music without paying for it and I do occasionally share music with friends. However, I'm not justifying my actions; what I do is theft, barring special circumstances (like PD works or stuff released with the musicians' blessings, like with much of NIN's stuff). I don't try to deny it and I don't try to justify it by saying "well intellectual property isn't _really_ property so I'm not _really_ stealing anything!"
Now, you (general you) may be unable to live with your actions without going on massive tirades to justify it and convince others what you're doing is not really stealing, but some/most of us don't really buy it. It's a piss-poor way of justifying your actions. I'm getting tired talk about how theft of IP doesn't "really" hurt anyone and talking about how the concept of IP only exists to crush the little guy etc etc ad nauseum. Bullshit. Try going through the process of creating something only to have someone rip you off and see how you feel about it.
So, just curious...which one of us is spewing FUD, now?
It's less the "I'm a kid so _I_ should be careful who I talk to online and offline," and more the "I'm a kid and I know _better_ than an adult who actually has experience doing the thing I'm berating them for because popular media said so," stuff that irritates.
And honestly...I've been meeting people I met online since I was 14. Even if you're a youngun all you need are the proper precautions (public places are always a must as well as parental supervision). The ability to find people your age that you actually get along with strikes me as a Good Thing, especially for young geeks...Such people were sorely lacking when I was that age. I know I would have been happier if I had the ability to go out and have a good time with a few like-minded people.
And the sad part is this irrational fear does not always get dispelled with age. Far from it...It's only reinforced by stories of virtual bogeymen. Yes, I've had grown adults berate me for posting my phone number publicly. Apparently there are online stalkers lurking around every corner just waiting for a silly unsuspecting young woman like me to make a mistake like that. Well...Few dozen times and counting. I'm still waiting on that whole rape-and-homicide thing to happen, but it occurs to me that I probably shouldn't hold my breath.
This is absoloutely true and I get tired of pointing this out to people that act like every single person online is a psychopath that wants nothing more than to skin them alive and wear their internal organs. There are still people who react with horror when I mention that all of my contact information (real name, address, phone number) is avaliable to pretty much anyone that wants it. They ask me if I'm afraid of being raped, murdered, and left somewhere to rot in this smug matter-of-fact voice. Some of these people are half my age and have none of the experience meeting the people I've met online in real life, yet they're talking to me like I'm the uninformed idiot. Gaah!
And of course it's entirely incomprehensible for any "normal" person to grasp that the geekly aquaintences I have online are no more strange or dangerous (or are indeed far less so) than your average drunken jerk at a local bar. Bleh.
When they tout themselves as a source of reliable information, yes, I expect them to have a grasp of english better than that of your average middle schooler.
The foreigners comment is also based on false premises. Many..no, make that all of the foreigners I know speak better english than most of the native speakers I know. I imagine it has something to do with how they're taught the language in the first place.
And it's pretty easy to spot the difference between someone who's just stupid/lazy and someone who is inept at the language they're speaking. So don't give me that crap.
The fact that the person who wrote this can't even spell simple words and use proper grammar is enough to motivate me not to take anything they have to say seriously.
And I disagree. My box is what most people would most definitely call "old". I've had it for nearly a decade to be exact and it has nearly all of the original hardware (replaced the sound card years ago and added 2 sticks of RAM, bringing it up to 256mb...that's it). Right now I'm using SuSE 9.0 Personal with KDE and it runs perfectly.
So what was that you were saying about Windows 95 extracting more functionality out of old hardware? I can guarantee you that if I tried running Windows 95 on this thing it would suck so badly I'd chuck it out a window rather than trying to deal with Windows:P
> This guy mentioned P3s with 256 mb of ram. That would barely run KDE in my opinion.
Hate to break it to you, but your opinion is wrong. I am doing exactly that RIGHT NOW with absoloutely no slowdown and no delays.
Funny thing is I only upgraded to 256 recently. I was running KDE with no slowdown for nearly a year with a mere 128mb. I only upgraded because someone gave me some old sticks of RAM they didn't need anymore.
I do hate to shatter your worldview of people with "old and inferior" hardware (yeah, hearing people call my computer "old and inferior" doesn't hurt or annoy at all) but we get by just as well running the same things as you folks without twice the RAM and without a processor that cost you as much as our entire box would fetch in a hock shop.
Slashdot Mirror
Let the vacuous cries of "big brother" from the teeming /. masses begin!
Too late. I was already thinking "jesus, this is taking forever" to myself in the theatre- and I've read the trilogy several times over.
It may have had something to do with the fact that it, like Harry Potter 3 (to pull up an example), had really shitty transitions between scenes, specifically within the last half-hour or so of the movie. So the screen would go black, I would think "oh, is it over?" but nope...Not over. I'm sure this is what pissed off other people watching the end of the movie as well.
I'll go to see the Guide even if reviewers give it a bad review for the simple fact that I tend to like movies that other people hate, even if it completely misses the point it was going for. Most movies, even the really horrible ones, have some redeeming point to make them watchable. Hell, I even sat through the Spice Girls movie some years back without resenting the hell out of it; what does that tell you?
How do you know? I mean, if you're not able to see a colour outside of your visible spectrum there's no reason other colours can't still exist, you just can't see them and therefore have no conception of what they could possibly look like. Gives me a bit of a headache thinking about it, honestly. I'm reminded of descriptions of LSD trips in which the person swore they saw colours outside of the normal spectrum that they had never seen before and couldn't describe. Too bad colours are one of those things you need to see (that old ditty about describing red to a blind man holds true here).
I would _love_ to see what infrared or ultraviolet looks like. Man, what an experience...Now I just have to wait a few years/decades for the price to go down so I can get my very own implant.
I submitted a rather large Staples rebate via the EasyRebate online system some time ago on behalf of my mother. She has yet to see a check or any acknowledgement that they would be sending one. I no longer shop at Staples, and neither does she.
Same scam, different veil.
Realistically, HIV almost _always_ needs some kind of direct way of getting into the bloodstream to cause infection. The myth about HIV being a "homosexual disease" has some basis in fact because of this; the nature of anal sex makes it more likely that abrasions and bleeding will occur which facilitates the transfer of HIV. Naturally, this is possible with heterosexual anal/vaginal sex as well, but the association with male homosexual sex should be obvious.
:) Tooth enamel certainly offers no risk, so short of drilling past the enamel and into the pulp to the point of bleeding (and miniscule amounts of aerosolized blood...well, do I even have to say it?) it's not possible.
HIV cannot be transferred via tears, snot, or saliva to my knowledge (IANAD). And either way you'd need an open wound of some kind to make transferring it even remotely statistically likely.
Point taken, then. It is a touchy subject for me.
The punchcard thing is a bit more plausible, though...All sorts of nasty things collect on old stuff like that. A case of a guy getting a necrotic wound from scratching himself on an old bedpost while moving comes to mind. You'd have to be really unlucky, but you could theoretically get the same thing from a papercut.
At the very least, it's more than possible you could get an infection that would require prescription-strength topical antibiotics. Nothing life-threatening (as long as it's not staph and it doesn't turn necrotic) but still something to worry about whenever you get a wound from something likely to be swimming with bacteria and viruses (dusty old punchcards, again, being a good source of both).
I hope this is misplaced and you're just being facetious, but you don't "get AIDS" from anyone; you develop AIDS after contracting HIV.
And you can't contract HIV simply by drinking after someone (even if they bleed a little on the cup)...You can't even get it by kissing them, barring the both of you having a decently sized open bleeding wound in the mouth, at which point I'd hope both of you wouldn't feel up to kissing much of anyone anyway.
Laws or no, it's still morally or ethically questionable conduct depending on your given set of morals or ethics. Though if you don't consider ripping off someone else's brainchild morally or ethically questionable, do the rest of us a favour and don't bitch if/when it happens to you.
<conspiracy theory> Now, I got to thinking about this ages ago and began wondering if this is in fact intentional on the part of Microsoft. After all, if IE is the browser that the majority uses to the point that designers are "forced" to make pages tailored for IE (causing them to render incorrectly in other browsers), it's not hard to believe that they would intentionally keep it this way to play on the incorrect perceptions of ignorant users that other browsers are the problem and are "broken" rather than the other way around. Something to think about. </conspiracy theory>
Not that I don't agree with the rest of your post, this just stood out to me:
I've known some incredibly intelligent people who'd probably flunk these tests - folks that can play music so amazingly well and reproduce exact notes after hearing them just once.
Depending on what part of the world they hail from, this ability is not at all unusual. Identifying a note like that is called perfect pitch and it's extremely prominent among people that were raised learning tonal languages like Chinese and has a stronger presence among people who grew up playing musical instruments. Reproducing a note when you have perfect pitch is cake if you have rudimentary knowledge of the instrument.
Alright, I've digressed enough for one thread...
This should go without saying, but not all "web designers" are incompetent hacks. Some of us actually look at web design as an artform. The challenge of getting a web page not only working but looking downright good in every browser you throw it at is quite exhilirating. This is not just for designing personal sites but sites for businesses as well.
It's unfortunate that there are people that believe that using things like ActiveX is not only "nifty" but absoloutely necessary for every website you could think about designing. Arguing with these people gives me headaches. I just chock it up to horrendous teaching and block it out now.
Are you trying to say that women are point-and-click?
Who knew we were so (l)user-friendly.
I would imagine it is much more profitable, at least in the short run, to do things like this. Same would be true for Everquest if it's possible to steal items in this manner, but I am unfamiliar with how exactly the item system in that game works (was always a Diablo fan, not a EQ fan).
The prices some of these things fetch is insane even to the most hardcore of gamers..But I guess if you've got that much money to blow anything starts looking good. Hell, you should see some of the prices the shit on the text-based MUD DragonRealms fetches. Upwards of thousands of dollars for characters, rare items, and currency. And it's easy to shell out anywhere from $30-$500 a month directly to the company that runs the game itself, nevermind the underground networks of illegal buying and selling of characters/items/money. But I digress...
Everything you said basically sums up why I'm planning to get my ass out of the United States as soon as I can. I'm thinking Norway or Germany. I really don't know yet.
I'm deathly afraid that I or someone close to me will suffer because of the incredible ignorance and complacancy of others. I'm afraid because even though all of this is happening before the collective eyes of the public all the only thing anyone seems to want to do about it is say, "Wow, that's awful. Someone should really do something about that. Oh, what's for dinner?"
I'm giving myself five years in this country. I figure that'll be enough time to amass enough wealth to get myself settled down somewhere else. At least then I can watch safely from the sidelines where I won't be hit by any figurative shrapnel when the shit really starts to fly.
Oh, god. First it was "fetus," but then people saw pictures of actual fetuses and realized that they're just very young babies. Then it became the even more jargony "embryo," but now that's starting to give way to the massively jargony "zygote." All to avoid saying the word "baby."
And "baby" is an emotionally loaded word used by people that want to make others feel bad for getting abortions or donating embryos to science. Let's be honest here.
Medically, the words "zygote", "embryo", and "fetus" refer to very specific things and stages of development. Sorry, but until it's born, a "baby" even at full-term is for all intents and purposes a "fetus". For all the accusations of feigned ignorance you fling around you sure do a lot of it yourself. Or perhaps you really didn't know the difference and I'm actually teaching you something. Oh joyous day...
Boy would I just love to corner the CEO of the company distributing this stuff and catch them with this in an interview. It's just the kind of manipulative "think of the children!" crap that could be easily sold to the evening news for Joe and Jane Average to get outraged over.
Right, except the post you were responding to was specifically referring to using Napster to download copyrighted music. Nowhere did I see it said or even implied that p2p is inherently bad. So your post was a kneejerk reaction to a perceived slight at best.
And guess what, I still see it as theft. Not the same kind of theft as someone taking my wallet or my car perhaps, but it is theft nonetheless. Maybe your common average Joe would have a problem assigning multiple layers of meaning to the same word, and I would welcome someone coming up with synonyms for intellectual property and the theft of intellectual property that make sense (and don't undermind the real meaning), but I expected a bit more here. Or...well, this is Slashdot. Perhaps I shouldn't have.
As far as I'm concerned, if someone copies and uses something I created (a painting or drawing for example) without permission or regard for my rights as its creator, even if it doesn't technically "cost" me anything monetarily, it is still theft. This has happened to me before, and I'll be damned if I didn't feel like I'd been stolen from. It seems that people only understand the concept of "intellectual property" once they've actually dealt in it and understood what the theft of IP can do to a person, not just monetarily but creatively.
That said, no, intellectual property is not property, it is intellectual property. That is why it is called intellectual property and not just plain property. Now, while this term has been heavily abused by certain organizations and used to guilt people into buying overpriced crap on a sliver of silicone, it's still a valid term that refers to a perfectly valid state of being. If someone really thinks intellectual property is a load of FUD because it can't possibly be "property" in even an abstract sense, that strikes me as the equivilent of saying the Mona Lisa is only worth the canvas it's on and the paint that was used to make it. If anything is really the equivilent of shitting on the actual artists' rights it's that kind of thinking.
All that said, yes, I do download copyrighted music without paying for it and I do occasionally share music with friends. However, I'm not justifying my actions; what I do is theft, barring special circumstances (like PD works or stuff released with the musicians' blessings, like with much of NIN's stuff). I don't try to deny it and I don't try to justify it by saying "well intellectual property isn't _really_ property so I'm not _really_ stealing anything!"
Now, you (general you) may be unable to live with your actions without going on massive tirades to justify it and convince others what you're doing is not really stealing, but some/most of us don't really buy it. It's a piss-poor way of justifying your actions. I'm getting tired talk about how theft of IP doesn't "really" hurt anyone and talking about how the concept of IP only exists to crush the little guy etc etc ad nauseum. Bullshit. Try going through the process of creating something only to have someone rip you off and see how you feel about it.
So, just curious...which one of us is spewing FUD, now?
It's less the "I'm a kid so _I_ should be careful who I talk to online and offline," and more the "I'm a kid and I know _better_ than an adult who actually has experience doing the thing I'm berating them for because popular media said so," stuff that irritates.
And honestly...I've been meeting people I met online since I was 14. Even if you're a youngun all you need are the proper precautions (public places are always a must as well as parental supervision). The ability to find people your age that you actually get along with strikes me as a Good Thing, especially for young geeks...Such people were sorely lacking when I was that age. I know I would have been happier if I had the ability to go out and have a good time with a few like-minded people.
And the sad part is this irrational fear does not always get dispelled with age. Far from it...It's only reinforced by stories of virtual bogeymen. Yes, I've had grown adults berate me for posting my phone number publicly. Apparently there are online stalkers lurking around every corner just waiting for a silly unsuspecting young woman like me to make a mistake like that. Well...Few dozen times and counting. I'm still waiting on that whole rape-and-homicide thing to happen, but it occurs to me that I probably shouldn't hold my breath.
This is absoloutely true and I get tired of pointing this out to people that act like every single person online is a psychopath that wants nothing more than to skin them alive and wear their internal organs. There are still people who react with horror when I mention that all of my contact information (real name, address, phone number) is avaliable to pretty much anyone that wants it. They ask me if I'm afraid of being raped, murdered, and left somewhere to rot in this smug matter-of-fact voice. Some of these people are half my age and have none of the experience meeting the people I've met online in real life, yet they're talking to me like I'm the uninformed idiot. Gaah!
And of course it's entirely incomprehensible for any "normal" person to grasp that the geekly aquaintences I have online are no more strange or dangerous (or are indeed far less so) than your average drunken jerk at a local bar. Bleh.
When they tout themselves as a source of reliable information, yes, I expect them to have a grasp of english better than that of your average middle schooler.
The foreigners comment is also based on false premises. Many..no, make that all of the foreigners I know speak better english than most of the native speakers I know. I imagine it has something to do with how they're taught the language in the first place.
And it's pretty easy to spot the difference between someone who's just stupid/lazy and someone who is inept at the language they're speaking. So don't give me that crap.
The fact that the person who wrote this can't even spell simple words and use proper grammar is enough to motivate me not to take anything they have to say seriously.
Ridiculousness avails.
And I disagree. My box is what most people would most definitely call "old". I've had it for nearly a decade to be exact and it has nearly all of the original hardware (replaced the sound card years ago and added 2 sticks of RAM, bringing it up to 256mb...that's it). Right now I'm using SuSE 9.0 Personal with KDE and it runs perfectly.
:P
So what was that you were saying about Windows 95 extracting more functionality out of old hardware? I can guarantee you that if I tried running Windows 95 on this thing it would suck so badly I'd chuck it out a window rather than trying to deal with Windows
> This guy mentioned P3s with 256 mb of ram. That would barely run KDE in my opinion.
Hate to break it to you, but your opinion is wrong. I am doing exactly that RIGHT NOW with absoloutely no slowdown and no delays.
Funny thing is I only upgraded to 256 recently. I was running KDE with no slowdown for nearly a year with a mere 128mb. I only upgraded because someone gave me some old sticks of RAM they didn't need anymore.
I do hate to shatter your worldview of people with "old and inferior" hardware (yeah, hearing people call my computer "old and inferior" doesn't hurt or annoy at all) but we get by just as well running the same things as you folks without twice the RAM and without a processor that cost you as much as our entire box would fetch in a hock shop.