did they seriously make it WIPD today?... BS alliance...
is it april fools day again? whats going on?
on a tangent... how do you create a World Whatever Day? is there some sort of adjudicating body that approves these days, or is it entirely ad hoc? Cause if it is... I declare tomorrow World Fling Feces at Bill Gates and Pirate the Living Shit out of Microsoft Day. Not a catchy Acronym, but i think with everybody's cooperation, we can make WFFBGPLSM Day a roaring success.
Officer Bar-Brady, I'd like to reinstate my previous declaration of Shenanigans...
but seriously I really do declare shenanigans on the Bush Administration. You really gotta love those guys, I mean, firing people for giving money to Kerry and acting as if, DUH!! you should totally be firing people for giving money to Kerry is total genius.
Has anyone actually checked to see if anything illegal is happening? I mean its totally skeezy and SHOULD be illegal, but I'm not entirely sure that it actually IS. lame as that is.
Meh, seems to have become synonymous with mac...like Mac OS X 10.x = Windows-whatever... maybe when they make the next paradigmatic jump, like the jump between OS 9 and 10.0 we'll get a XI but you know that XI doesnt look as cool, so we'll probably get some kind of the OS formerly know as X or somehting... bah, conjecture, I like the exhausting the big cats theme... force windows to stick with ungulates... I cant wait for Windows Water Buffalo
You are, in fact, offering an opinion regarding the rights and wrongs of the supply management strategy of netflix, as you are accusing them of "arbitrary execution and deployment of unpublished discriminatory categorisations for different customers, and the idiosyncratic way these regulations are enforced." It is neither underhand nor unfair, as it promises that the people who dont rent many movies get the one movie they do want when they want it.
You seem to have some kind of complex going on in your last paragraph... I was in no way accusing you personally of renting movies to rip them to disk, that was simply something that many other people who were high-volume renters had mentioned. It was tossed in as a hypothetical afterthought and if you had enough grasp of the english language to understand the meaning of the word "if" then you would have realized that. Also, the word "you" can be used both in the specific sense, as in refering to you, meehawl, or in the general sense, synonymous with "one" to mean, in the case in question, "particularly if ONE is ripping them all to disc...."
and, of course, you dont need any further delay factor between the keyboard and your brain, so I will bid you have a good evening
I dunno, kinda irritating that having a 2 year-old mac makes you go get a new cord just to be able to use a device from the same company that built your comp... It just seems needlessly alienating. So what if more pc people are buying ipods now and they tend to not have firewire... WE bought THEIR computers, we deserve their loyalty in exchange for our loyalty. I mean, maybe not in such melodramitic terms, but we've scratched their backs, and now they're saying that we need to buy a different brush attachment before they'll... let us continue to scratch their backs...
deliberate or inadvertent, its still wrong. you've got this bizarre idea that one somehow DESERVES to be able to rent more movies faster than one's fellow customer. roshi found this quote from hackingnetflix or whatever that site was:
"In determining priority for shipping and inventory allocation, we give priority to those members who receive the fewest DVDs through our service. As a result, those members who receive the most movies may experience next-day shipping and receive movies lower in their Queue more often than our other members. By prioritizing in this way, we help assure a balanced experience for all our members. Those that rent a lot of movies get a great value and those with lighter viewing habits are able to count on our service to meet their limited needs"
Doesnt sound very haphazard to me. Doesnt sound very discriminatory to me. Sounds to me like they dont want to screw more limited users over on their movie choices because people who are ripping a dvd collectioin for 20 bucks a month want another new dvd every day. it is in no way arbitrary, nor is it bad ethics, and it is particularly not bad business. No matter how much you want to grumble, paying the cost of one dvd a month to rent maybe, what?...6? MINIMUM? and particularly if you're ripping them all to your own private collection, that is a steal...
Speaking of bad ethics, if you cant deal with Netflix's standard system, by all means just continue whining to the CSR's and get squeaky-wheel treatment.
Bah your choice of adverb is fundamentally incorrect. They discriminiate between high volume and low volume customers, allowing those who facilitate the high volume customers to use so much postage to get the movie they want when they want it. This is entirely fair. If I only got 3 or 4 movies from netflix, i'd be pretty pissed off is my saturday evening was dead because some jackass who was getting a new movie every 3 days ripping it to disc and then returning it had the movie I wanted to watch. Or to put it another way, if I have one movie on my list and you have 7, I'm not going to cry for you if I get my only choice and you get your, 3rd, or 4th choice, only to get your 1st choice a week later. Its a system involving a shared library. Those who want to overtax it shouldnt bitch about "their" movies being delayed to satisfy the requests of those other customers who are disproportionately bearing the brunt of operating costs while receiving overall less utility from the system as a whole.
I'm totally gonna throw a "I'm not from Texas" party. Strange, i was going to have one anyways... then they go and make it necessary.
And I really dont feel like shutting the fuck up, because i have this really idiot thing I do called thinking, that leads to this other idiot thing i do where I speak out against stupidity that adversely affects the innocent. simply because i have no representation in the texas legislature in no way means that I do not have a vested interest in that body NOT enacting lunacy as law.
I too have an uncle, i mean mixed feelings about this...
On the one hand, i like the idea of the internet being literally open to anyone with the hardware. But then again, I'm a big communist and i hate freedom.
On the other hand, i'm not sure i like the idea of the government being my isp, having a record of all the things I do online, without having to work for it, either through getting warrants on me, invoking some kind of patriot act BS, (cause as I said, given that i favor equal access to information, I clearly hate freedom) or hacking my shit directly. It just seems like the slope into 1984 will be steeper and slipperier if the govt is everybody's isp.
But at the same time, it seems kind of like an inevitable progression once a few cities get it going.
I have this little nagging feeling that texan libraries kinda suck already. not to stereotype or anything, but I have a lot of cousins from texas, and while it could just be the shallow part of my family gene pool, they're not the most well read of my relatives.
I'm not sure if stopping blizzard titles would be appropriate. I only have experience with one other bliz title, Diablo II, but CD keys and accts don't work like that with DII, at least. I'm playing online with second hand discs/keys and everything works fine. With DII, the key is only used to make sure that one copy of the game is logged on to bnet at a time, since each user may have multiple accts.
that was longwinded, but basically, perhaps only WoW should be blocked from ebay, as it is the broken product.
The advance in technology being announced here is Intel's solution to the Two Photon Absorption problem. This allowed the team of scientists referenced in the story you cite to take the pulsing silicon laser they announced then, and make it a continuous wave laser, which is being announced now.
But I should have linked the previous story as well... my bad.
No
THe whole point of the CD key is to make sure that you have a valid game disc, and that only one copy of that game disc can be used on the servers at one time.
With Diablo, you can create as many accounts as you want, but if you try to log on with the same CD key on two different comps at the same time, one will get denied, because the CD key is already in use. They could do the exact same thing with WoW, but they didnt.
The tieing of CD key to Acct in the fashion as described for WoW was a CHOICE by Bliz to make it difficult to NOT pay THEM for the physical game and also to give them the ability to limit server use if they encounter overload problems by pulling the game from the sherlf, as they have done.
Ah, the requisite NextGen nazi. Dont get me wrong, NextGen rocks, but to lump DS9 with Enterprise is just wrong. Enterprise totally sucked, and thats why it got axed. DS9 is rad and allowed for a real overarching plotline to develop, as opposed to the NextGen thing of the "X-Character Episodes." Like the "Data Episodes" where the silly humans are doing something that puzzles data and he endeavors to understand, or the "Barclay Episodes."
That's not to say that DS9 is better, I happen to like NG better overall, simply because the best of the "X-Character episodes" are just soo good.
But needless to say, Berman has shown himself unworthy of the reigns and should, in turn, be shown the door.
"To each his own, but I think having humanity be a multi-planet species is a very worthwhile goal, arguably the most important goal we have for the immediate future."
Sorry, was drinking strong ales while posting, didnt mean to be harsh. I mainly meant that stretching to have a manned mission mars is different from seriously going about colonizing the planet. One's a sylmbolic moment, and one's a serious scientific advance. I merely question which W proposes.
Well, obviously CO2 is a given, i was referring to the other impurities, especially sulfur contamination in eastern bituminous coal that has become more of a problem with the near extinction of cleaner anthracite coal.
yes, they do replace the tailings in the mines... but that still leaves unconsolidated debris open to water infiltration and exfiltration that was not open before. I've seen pretty quality pictures of springs coming out of supposedly safe re-packed coal mines in the adirondacks. bright red and orange deposits of cadmium should not line stream beds.
Ummm... insightful? i would have said uninformed... but....
coal burning generators are pretty clean lately, mainly due to the fairly progressive regulations on CO2 and C2O2 output. The problem with Coal remains, toxicity of mine tailings, and this problem is much greater with nuclar power due to the increased concentrations of reactive heavy metals in uranium tailings. So, no, nuclear is not squeaky clean compared to coal, it shares the same rather shameful hidden environmental detriments
I assume you are reffering to the older, high-rpm, turbine farms such as the ones in southern cali. The newer turbines, such as the Horseheaven Hills Wind Farm near Walla Walla, Wa, turn at a sufficiently low rpm that they make almost no noise at all. In fact, having spent a good deal of time studying them, i'd have to say that the entire wind farm was eerily silent. But I wasnt sleeping underneath one, of course...
"No matter what "green" energy we use, there will be pollution. Check out the byproducts created in the manufacture of solar cells. Yes, nuclear does require some mining, and it requires proper disposal of nuclear waste. Yet, in the end, nuclear is amazingly efficient at eliminating greenhouse gases on a level with other green technologies."
To say that nuclear does require some mining is a gross understatement.
Fissionable Uranium is one of the minority isotopes, and must be concentrated by gas-diffusion or other methods before it can be useful... Therefore mass quantities of uranium ore are necessary to provide the relatively small amound of final product. Also, Uranium mining tailings are some of the most concentrated low-level radioactive tailings we make. They are heavily contaminated with other reactive heavy metals and must be treated with almost the same level of caution as spent nuclear fuel rods.
While i agree wholeheartedly with the rest of your analysis, in that no energy production system is a panacea, everything will have unlookedfor side affects, you seem to drop your appropriately holistic view of power generation when it comes to the real negatives of nuclear power.
"It can be... done before going to Mars, for comparable price..."
"Oh really. And you know this... how? Guesswork?"
well, at the very least, we can and should be making the energy needs of our civilization ahead of another patriotic nationalistic drive to place a superfluous human being alongside the useful scientific instruments on another celestial body...
I mean, do we really need to have a person there for any other reason than to have another, as The Onion put it, "Holy Fucking Shit, Man Walks on Fucking Moon" moment?
Slashdot Mirror
why do you sit around with a small wallet photo in each eye all the time? thats weird.
did I miss something?
... BS alliance...
did they seriously make it WIPD today?
is it april fools day again? whats going on?
on a tangent... how do you create a World Whatever Day? is there some sort of adjudicating body that approves these days, or is it entirely ad hoc?
Cause if it is... I declare tomorrow World Fling Feces at Bill Gates and Pirate the Living Shit out of Microsoft Day. Not a catchy Acronym, but i think with everybody's cooperation, we can make WFFBGPLSM Day a roaring success.
Officer Bar-Brady, I'd like to reinstate my previous declaration of Shenanigans...
but seriously I really do declare shenanigans on the Bush Administration. You really gotta love those guys, I mean, firing people for giving money to Kerry and acting as if, DUH!! you should totally be firing people for giving money to Kerry is total genius.
Has anyone actually checked to see if anything illegal is happening? I mean its totally skeezy and SHOULD be illegal, but I'm not entirely sure that it actually IS. lame as that is.
Meh, seems to have become synonymous with mac...like Mac OS X 10.x = Windows-whatever... maybe when they make the next paradigmatic jump, like the jump between OS 9 and 10.0 we'll get a XI but you know that XI doesnt look as cool, so we'll probably get some kind of the OS formerly know as X or somehting...
bah, conjecture, I like the exhausting the big cats theme... force windows to stick with ungulates... I cant wait for Windows Water Buffalo
You are, in fact, offering an opinion regarding the rights and wrongs of the supply management strategy of netflix, as you are accusing them of "arbitrary execution and deployment of unpublished discriminatory categorisations for different customers, and the idiosyncratic way these regulations are enforced."
It is neither underhand nor unfair, as it promises that the people who dont rent many movies get the one movie they do want when they want it.
You seem to have some kind of complex going on in your last paragraph... I was in no way accusing you personally of renting movies to rip them to disk, that was simply something that many other people who were high-volume renters had mentioned. It was tossed in as a hypothetical afterthought and if you had enough grasp of the english language to understand the meaning of the word "if" then you would have realized that. Also, the word "you" can be used both in the specific sense, as in refering to you, meehawl, or in the general sense, synonymous with "one" to mean, in the case in question, "particularly if ONE is ripping them all to disc...."
and, of course, you dont need any further delay factor between the keyboard and your brain, so I will bid you have a good evening
I dunno, kinda irritating that having a 2 year-old mac makes you go get a new cord just to be able to use a device from the same company that built your comp... It just seems needlessly alienating. So what if more pc people are buying ipods now and they tend to not have firewire...
WE bought THEIR computers, we deserve their loyalty in exchange for our loyalty.
I mean, maybe not in such melodramitic terms, but we've scratched their backs, and now they're saying that we need to buy a different brush attachment before they'll... let us continue to scratch their backs...
deliberate or inadvertent, its still wrong. you've got this bizarre idea that one somehow DESERVES to be able to rent more movies faster than one's fellow customer.
roshi found this quote from hackingnetflix or whatever that site was:
"In determining priority for shipping and inventory allocation, we give priority to those members who receive the fewest DVDs through our service. As a result, those members who receive the most movies may experience next-day shipping and receive movies lower in their Queue more often than our other members. By prioritizing in this way, we help assure a balanced experience for all our members. Those that rent a lot of movies get a great value and those with lighter viewing habits are able to count on our service to meet their limited needs"
Doesnt sound very haphazard to me. Doesnt sound very discriminatory to me. Sounds to me like they dont want to screw more limited users over on their movie choices because people who are ripping a dvd collectioin for 20 bucks a month want another new dvd every day. it is in no way arbitrary, nor is it bad ethics, and it is particularly not bad business. No matter how much you want to grumble, paying the cost of one dvd a month to rent maybe, what?...6? MINIMUM? and particularly if you're ripping them all to your own private collection, that is a steal...
Speaking of bad ethics, if you cant deal with Netflix's standard system, by all means just continue whining to the CSR's and get squeaky-wheel treatment.
Bah
your choice of adverb is fundamentally incorrect. They discriminiate between high volume and low volume customers, allowing those who facilitate the high volume customers to use so much postage to get the movie they want when they want it.
This is entirely fair. If I only got 3 or 4 movies from netflix, i'd be pretty pissed off is my saturday evening was dead because some jackass who was getting a new movie every 3 days ripping it to disc and then returning it had the movie I wanted to watch.
Or to put it another way, if I have one movie on my list and you have 7, I'm not going to cry for you if I get my only choice and you get your, 3rd, or 4th choice, only to get your 1st choice a week later.
Its a system involving a shared library. Those who want to overtax it shouldnt bitch about "their" movies being delayed to satisfy the requests of those other customers who are disproportionately bearing the brunt of operating costs while receiving overall less utility from the system as a whole.
Hey, at least they had the dough to cover a backup of the fundraising site.
I mean, you gotta spend money to make money, you know?
I'm totally gonna throw a "I'm not from Texas" party. Strange, i was going to have one anyways... then they go and make it necessary.
And I really dont feel like shutting the fuck up, because i have this really idiot thing I do called thinking, that leads to this other idiot thing i do where I speak out against stupidity that adversely affects the innocent.
simply because i have no representation in the texas legislature in no way means that I do not have a vested interest in that body NOT enacting lunacy as law.
I too have an uncle, i mean mixed feelings about this... On the one hand, i like the idea of the internet being literally open to anyone with the hardware. But then again, I'm a big communist and i hate freedom. On the other hand, i'm not sure i like the idea of the government being my isp, having a record of all the things I do online, without having to work for it, either through getting warrants on me, invoking some kind of patriot act BS, (cause as I said, given that i favor equal access to information, I clearly hate freedom) or hacking my shit directly. It just seems like the slope into 1984 will be steeper and slipperier if the govt is everybody's isp. But at the same time, it seems kind of like an inevitable progression once a few cities get it going.
I have this little nagging feeling that texan libraries kinda suck already. not to stereotype or anything, but I have a lot of cousins from texas, and while it could just be the shallow part of my family gene pool, they're not the most well read of my relatives.
whatever, I just want my Adrian Barbo-Bot
and that monkey better keep his hands off my 'stache
I'm not sure if stopping blizzard titles would be appropriate. I only have experience with one other bliz title, Diablo II, but CD keys and accts don't work like that with DII, at least. I'm playing online with second hand discs/keys and everything works fine. With DII, the key is only used to make sure that one copy of the game is logged on to bnet at a time, since each user may have multiple accts.
that was longwinded, but basically, perhaps only WoW should be blocked from ebay, as it is the broken product.
The advance in technology being announced here is Intel's solution to the Two Photon Absorption problem. This allowed the team of scientists referenced in the story you cite to take the pulsing silicon laser they announced then, and make it a continuous wave laser, which is being announced now.
But I should have linked the previous story as well... my bad.
No THe whole point of the CD key is to make sure that you have a valid game disc, and that only one copy of that game disc can be used on the servers at one time. With Diablo, you can create as many accounts as you want, but if you try to log on with the same CD key on two different comps at the same time, one will get denied, because the CD key is already in use. They could do the exact same thing with WoW, but they didnt. The tieing of CD key to Acct in the fashion as described for WoW was a CHOICE by Bliz to make it difficult to NOT pay THEM for the physical game and also to give them the ability to limit server use if they encounter overload problems by pulling the game from the sherlf, as they have done.
Ah, the requisite NextGen nazi.
Dont get me wrong, NextGen rocks, but to lump DS9 with Enterprise is just wrong. Enterprise totally sucked, and thats why it got axed. DS9 is rad and allowed for a real overarching plotline to develop, as opposed to the NextGen thing of the "X-Character Episodes." Like the "Data Episodes" where the silly humans are doing something that puzzles data and he endeavors to understand, or the "Barclay Episodes."
That's not to say that DS9 is better, I happen to like NG better overall, simply because the best of the "X-Character episodes" are just soo good.
But needless to say, Berman has shown himself unworthy of the reigns and should, in turn, be shown the door.
Weird. That sucks How fast do the blades turn? kind a rough estimate, I think the ones near Walla Walla only did like maybe 30 rpm
"To each his own, but I think having humanity be a multi-planet species is a very worthwhile goal, arguably the most important goal we have for the immediate future." Sorry, was drinking strong ales while posting, didnt mean to be harsh. I mainly meant that stretching to have a manned mission mars is different from seriously going about colonizing the planet. One's a sylmbolic moment, and one's a serious scientific advance. I merely question which W proposes.
Well, obviously CO2 is a given, i was referring to the other impurities, especially sulfur contamination in eastern bituminous coal that has become more of a problem with the near extinction of cleaner anthracite coal.
yes, they do replace the tailings in the mines... but that still leaves unconsolidated debris open to water infiltration and exfiltration that was not open before. I've seen pretty quality pictures of springs coming out of supposedly safe re-packed coal mines in the adirondacks. bright red and orange deposits of cadmium should not line stream beds.
Ummm... insightful? i would have said uninformed... but.... coal burning generators are pretty clean lately, mainly due to the fairly progressive regulations on CO2 and C2O2 output. The problem with Coal remains, toxicity of mine tailings, and this problem is much greater with nuclar power due to the increased concentrations of reactive heavy metals in uranium tailings. So, no, nuclear is not squeaky clean compared to coal, it shares the same rather shameful hidden environmental detriments
I assume you are reffering to the older, high-rpm, turbine farms such as the ones in southern cali. The newer turbines, such as the Horseheaven Hills Wind Farm near Walla Walla, Wa, turn at a sufficiently low rpm that they make almost no noise at all.
In fact, having spent a good deal of time studying them, i'd have to say that the entire wind farm was eerily silent. But I wasnt sleeping underneath one, of course...
"No matter what "green" energy we use, there will be pollution. Check out the byproducts created in the manufacture of solar cells. Yes, nuclear does require some mining, and it requires proper disposal of nuclear waste. Yet, in the end, nuclear is amazingly efficient at eliminating greenhouse gases on a level with other green technologies."
To say that nuclear does require some mining is a gross understatement.
Fissionable Uranium is one of the minority isotopes, and must be concentrated by gas-diffusion or other methods before it can be useful... Therefore mass quantities of uranium ore are necessary to provide the relatively small amound of final product.
Also, Uranium mining tailings are some of the most concentrated low-level radioactive tailings we make. They are heavily contaminated with other reactive heavy metals and must be treated with almost the same level of caution as spent nuclear fuel rods.
While i agree wholeheartedly with the rest of your analysis, in that no energy production system is a panacea, everything will have unlookedfor side affects, you seem to drop your appropriately holistic view of power generation when it comes to the real negatives of nuclear power.
"It can be ... done before going to Mars, for comparable price ..."
... how? Guesswork?"
"Oh really. And you know this
well, at the very least, we can and should be making the energy needs of our civilization ahead of another patriotic nationalistic drive to place a superfluous human being alongside the useful scientific instruments on another celestial body...
I mean, do we really need to have a person there for any other reason than to have another, as The Onion put it, "Holy Fucking Shit, Man Walks on Fucking Moon" moment?