But if that person stood in front of the board and showed you yes, they very well could do it without the steps, would you have accepted that or called him a liar and a cheat? because i got the latter and damned near got kicked out as despite being held together by stitches me and the math teacher nearly came to blows. And please remember this was a "football school' so we aren't talking calc or trig here, we are talking bog simple 3 and 4 number division and multiplication.
But we are NOT talking about vector calc, that at least would have been interesting, no the douchebag teacher had a living shitfit because i wouldn't sit there and do the stupid 'carry the one' crap with large division and multiplication and even had the gall to accuse me of cheating because i could do it in my head faster than he could doing his little step crap!
The ONLY thing that kept me from dropping out right there, because i had told him to take back his accusation or we were gonna have to step outside, was that my home tutor was in the class next door and called the principal and walked in between us. She turned to me and said "Hand me your calc watch" and then she put two long multiplication questions on the board and said "Alright Mr Black, you get one and he gets the other...GO!" and of course i blew through it in less than 20 seconds while he was still on his first line. so did he apologize? Nope it was then "Search him, he must have a hidden calc!". By that time the principal had seen enough and said "Ms Edwards do you think he'd be better off back in home tutoring?" and signed off for me to just go back home instead of trying to do half days which with the combo of the pain from the stitches and my total boredom was for the best anyway. And as I said when they finally forced me to go to HS instead of going to class i ran my own class teaching football players so it wasn't like school was gonna teach me anything, not in a "football school".
the simple fact is this: they have NO idea what to do with extra bright kids if there isn't some sort of magnet program which there isn't in my area. the lowest IQ in my family is 130 by my late sis and the only reason she scored that low was she had been out at a party the night before and was wore out from dancing. Her two boys scored 152 and 148 and frankly we had to home school them because they were bored to tears. Public schools are only really good for those in the center of the bell curve, those on the ends are just frustrated. Honestly i wouldn't be surprised if a lot of those with high grades that are constantly in trouble simply aren't frustrated like i was, as I'd do anything to get out of class so i could get back to my programming or Asimov.
And yet again the pirate version is the BETTER version. Why can't they take a hint from Gabe at Valve, or is he too busy swimming in his giant money pool going "Woo Hoo, I'm like Scrooge McDuck" to take their calls? Make it simple, make it easy, make it cheap. My Steam games don't care if I'm online or off, thanks to the sales my average steam game cost less than $10, and its as simple as 'push button, get game". Seriously how do you fuck that up? Oh wait a tick...origin? Oh, the shitty knockoff that does everything wrong..oops, my bad. Carry on.
Sadly voting with your wallet only goes so far in these cases thanks to "PPT math" which is where they go to congress with a PPT and say "If you see here our sales were projected to be X because we got R on the consoles and we only got S which means it MUST be those ebil pirates argh! We need more draconian laws" and they get it. But at least you personally can make sure they don't get a damned dime of your money, just as i only buy games from steam and GOG.
Oh please! To use a/. car analogy this would be like saying cars need to be banned because some LOL got killed driving her 58 Ford with non safety glass. the plants SHOULD have been shut down more than 15 years ago, but instead the government took bribes and kept them running WELL past their limits and you act like that proves anything? The only thing it proves is shitty governments are shitty. Build the latest designs, place thorium reactors next to them to use any waste and voila! A nice safe and clean power source that I would have no problem having a house next to.
So you keep that NIMBY attitude, I'm sure the coal guys will love your ass, me I'll enjoy living in a state where the power is cheap enough many of the apts come with it as part of the rent.
So for those of us who don't speak lawyerese, how good/bad are the odds this patent will stick? I remember SGI was one of the first in the biz doing GPU heavy work so if anybody has patents that would put a serious crimp on mobile my gut tells me it'd be them, but as I said i don't speak lawyerese, especially not at 6AM, so if someone could give odds that would be nice.
I'm waiting to see someone explain WHY, for the love of Pete why? with ALL the trouble Mozilla has had lately, declining share, practically zero adoption in the mobile space, the well documented problems with memory leaks, extensions getting killed by version jumps, extensions making the leaks worse, why are they wasting resources making a fricking browser based MMO?
Hey Moz, you wanna fart around? that's cool, but don't be surprised if you wake up one day and find your share of the browser market dried up. How about instead of wasting money on MMOs, yet another thing we do not need, how about you use that money to do some focus groups or even just ASK your users what they want, and then you actually LISTEN to them, how about that?
I used to hand out Firefox in my free software pack with every new build, but it seems that Mozilla has got that bug that infected the Ubuntu and GNOME guys, the "Fuck what the users think or want we're doing our own thang" bug and its REALLY fucking irritating. So now I hand out Comodo Dragon and Pale Moon, which BTW if you haven't tried it its very good and they LISTEN to the users and have kept the old UI while killing some of the dumb shit FF devs did under the hood like the 256 connections bit. C'mon FF devs, you USED to have focus. remember when you first got us to switch to FF from the suite? Remember how you aid your goal was to be the "fastest most nimble standards compliant browser", remember that? Well at least on the machines passing through my door as well as my own machines you don't seem very fast OR nimble, in fact i get an extra 40 minutes of battery life by NOT using Firefox.
So c'mon Moz, I know you can do better. Quit aping Chrome, quit fucking off with stupid distractions and get focused on being the BEST browser there is. Fix it so FF can update without UAC prompts, fix the memory and CPU hogging, get back to your core strengths and watch your users come back. because i bet there are a lot of them like me using one of the Chromium based that try each new release in the HOPES you'll come back, and would be happy to return to the fold if you did.
But how smooth is the KB/mouse when it comes to space battles? Is it one of those games where the layout feels intuitive, or is it one of those where you need a cheat sheet printed just to keep up with all the buttons? I have both Freelancer and Freespace II and honestly I almost never play Freespace II while I fire up Freelancer at least a couple of times a year because the controls in Freelancer are so much easier to pick up. With Freespace II I always felt like I was playing with a hand tied behind my back if I didn't have a flightstick. That is why I have the MW 4 they gave out free but won't fire it up, as I know it is a game that without a stick while it is POSSIBLE to play, it sure isn't easy or fun.
so bottom line, in the space battles did you feel at ease with the KB/mouse combo or did it feel like you were fighting it?
I guess thoughtcrime is a word you guys have never heard of huh? Or the phrase "freedom of speech"? tell me, when the Mullahs are screaming "Death to the infidels!" in the mosques, do you drag them away? or is it a double standard like here in the USA? When you have blacks throwing words like "Cracka, white devil" around, do they get carted off? i bet they don't.
Its nice to see one sided liberal bullshit isn't limited to the USA.
Yeah that blew my mind as well, EA are usually the greediest of the greedy, right of there with Sony and Activision.
I do have some questions though: Has anyone played it? How well does it control with a keyboard and mouse? is it easy to use or are you screwed without a flightstick? How is the performance? Does it handles widescreen well? sadly i don't have time to answer those questions myself as i got a shitload of games on the Steam Xmas sale and still haven't gotten around to all of them as all the DLC i got for Just Cause II is just too damned fun. i don't know what guy thought mounting a tank gun on a Tuk Tuk was a good idea buts its fun as hell, up on the sidewalk BOOM BOOM BOOM.
But if this game is as easy to control as say Freelancer was with a keyboard and mouse I'd love to give it a shot, its been awhile since i went all X-Wing in space, probably not since Freelancer as a matter of fact.
Sorry about that, we here in the USA may not have health care but one thing we have too much of is tech. Hell i dump late model P4s all day long on Craigslist simply because i don't have any use for them and hate seeing good running machines end up in the dumpster and our CLs are filled to the brim with CRTs. Its a damned shame the shipping would be so insane as i bet I could find 20-24 inch CRTs all day long for less than $100, probably less than $60. Its the same as how I can find dual core desktops all day for a little of nothing because everyone is in the laptop/tablet craze right now and so nobody cares about desktops but gamers who don't want anything less than quads.
But would that "instant bazillionaire" take a job cleaning puke at the Chuck E Cheese? ya see this is in a way the same argument I've been having with some of the FOSS community on why the GPL doesn't work on the desktop, its the "busted shitter" problem. You can get humans to do creative things for free, to write songs, create art, make some cool piece of software, but NOBODY wants or is willing to do the nasty jobs for free, cleaning the neighbors busted shitters or in the case of FOSS all the regression testing QA, document writing, fixing the current driver model, all those long, boring, dull, tedious and thankless jobs simply wouldn't get done. I mean if everyone has everything they want how would you get someone to spend all day cleaning plasma pipes? you wouldn't and THAT is the problem.
Sadly the ONLY way I see out of the busted shitter dilemma in the ST universe would be to take a page from Star Wars and look into earth's history and create a slave class who were FORCED to clean the busted shitters. that is what the droids really were after all, a slave race forced to do the menial tasks that the other races didn't want to do. In a way we are seeing this problem play out IRL sadly with the ghettos and the third and fourth generation welfare queens. I recently read a very sad article by an inner city schoolteacher that when asking students "what do you want to be when you grow up?" several girls basically said 'i'm gonna have a couple of kids and get paid" and the others in class saw that as a valid "lifestyle" choice. Whether we choose to accept it or not a human can be a VERY lazy and pleasure driven creature and the problem with the ST universe is that given basically unlimited everything you'd have an insane number that would simply sit on their asses, get fat, and watch HoloTV. After all EVERYONE wants to be Picard, but how many would want to be Barclay? Or the guy who spends his day installing the sonic showers?
Re:Unfortunately that doesn't work all the time
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Open Source Payday
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· Score: 1
While I like your idea mine was based on killing the "you're hurting the poor!" arguments I've often seen thrown about, like how they'll always point out some third world country using FOSS in schools or giving it to kids and say 'You'll destroy that you monster!".
So I based my idea on a license that has been around for ages in the Windows world, the "Free for non commercial use" license. this lets individuals and charities, those that are making NO profits on the software, the right to use it. in my modified form you lose NO freedoms, you simply have one freedom modified and that is the right to distribute which says if you distribute then you MUST pay for a license that MUST be offered. This way RMS and his militants can't scream about his four freedoms as they are ALL still there, you have the code, you can modify, you can share your changes, and you can distribute but you can't just take their hard works while giving them nothing in return.
Ultimately as things become ever more complex and integrated i believe you will see the GPL model dying out, simply because good programmers don't have the spare time to futz with software they can't make a cent off of. if the numbers in an article/. posted a few months back is true we are already seeing this, with more going to proprietary or BSD (where they can lock it to hardware and not share changes) than going GPL. If you saw the numbers they posted then you saw that with the introduction of GPL V3 the numbers dived and haven't ever recovered.
IMHO we don't need to throw out the baby with the bathwater as the IDEA of FOSS is sound, its the implementation. if you have read the writings of RMS you can tell as he gets older he truly believes there can be some sort of communist utopia, even going so far as to praise Chavez and Castro on visits to those countries while ignoring the busted shitter dilemma was so bad in the USSR that they would have to assign soldiers to "potato duty" to get the busted shitters fixed and even then there simply wasn't enough people to do it. Everyone wants to be the artist, everyone wants to be the star, NOBODY wants to be the guy that cleans the puke at the Chuck E Cheese, its simply human nature. But guess what happens if you don't pay someone to clean up that puke? it just sits there and stinks up the joint, ruining the whole place in the process. there has to be a way for someone to get paid to clean up the messes, to fix the drivers, do QA, write all the docs, all that boring thankless work that nobody wants to do HAS to get done. I would argue the current model is actually giving a HUGE advantage to companies like MSFT and Apple because by hiding the code THEY can pay someone to do those jobs, whereas FOSS can't so they don't get done. Sad really as the idea could do a lot of good, but nobody wants to deal with software that isn't even 80% done which is what the post I was responding to found out.
I think the whole kayfabe bullshit actually makes wrestlers lives WORSE as people just go 'oh its just fake" and then ignore the truly horrible abuse these guys take in the ring. Yeah sure its fake but in reality its like being a stuntman in that things can and DO go wrong. The hospital my mom worked at treated many a big name wrestler and the amount of "Jesus Christ look at him!" injuries these guys got was just nuts. Compound fractures, guys that had had their bells rung so many times their brains behaved like a 70 year olds when they were 28, just truly rough horrible injuries. my mom said even treating the boxers wasn't as bad as what she'd see on the wrestlers yet they are treated like 'Oh its just all fake' so those injuries don't count.
No crap but I bet he is bored to tears in class every damned day! I absolutely HATED public school because it was strictly lowest common denominator, I even had a teacher accuse me of cheating simply because I was better at basic math than he was without having to go through all those stupid steps. the best thing that ever happened to me was a damned dog getting into the spokes of my motorbike at 60MPH because it got me home tutors through the junior HS years because the tutor took one look at the books I was reading like the wonderful "Best sci/fi and horror writers of the year" series and instead of the stupid crap they were teaching in school Ms Edwards had me discussing the pros and cons of grandfather paradoxes and skipped the whole stupid "show your work" crap which just slowed me down.
Sadly some administrator decided 'its not good for him to be isolated like that" and forced me to go to HS. What happened? the first day i got sent to detention because some jarheaded teacher said "Anybody not will to run 10 laps just get out of my class' so myself followed by half the class promptly left, and the football coach took one look at the books I was reading in his detention and for the next 4 years i was given all As even though I never actually attended any classes, how did I do that? simple the coach took me to each class and said "He is in your class, mark him as present and give him an A on all work as he'll be on "special assignment"" which turned out to be running my own class for 4 years teaching jocks how to pass the minimums required to play ball. Turns out over the years I've met several from neighboring "football schools' that had the same "special assignment" as me and all were very bright students that the schools basically didn't know what to do with. I figure I learned more teaching those jocks than the dumbed down classes they taught anyway.
So while this kid will probably have a kick ass career I do NOT envy him ATM, his life is probably equal parts boredom and frustration if he is in the public school system. I ended up giving my two boys home schooling after seeing that public schools had gotten even worse than when I was there, there was bigotry, indifference, and even religious whackos, and we are talking about the teachers. Frankly I wouldn't wish the US public school system on my worst enemy as if you are not lucky enough to be in one of the few upper class ritzy neighborhoods frankly the schools just suck. Good luck kid, just keep your head down and remember that college is just around the corner where the smart CAN get ahead.
While I haven't seen him personally I will give a big bravo to the whole "open magic" movement we have been seeing as of late. look we ALL know its a trick, alright? this ain't the 1600s. Does knowing its a trick ruin it? FUCK NO because it the ARTIST and how they sell it that makes it kick ass. I mean we all knew Heath Ledger wasn't crazy but it was the way he sold the character that has people debating to this day how much was madness and how much was a Zanatos Gambit.
So I'm all for getting rid of the "ohhhh..it's MAGIC!" bullshit like we saw for years so we can get rid of the kayfabe and just concentrate on these folks being damned good entertainers.
The problem is our entire system is designed to let the rich "run out the clock" as it were, letting them drag shit out for years and years because they know that while they can afford to have their own legal team on retainer the people they are crushing simply can't. I got to see this first hand when a friend of mine that was running a little ISP got crushed thanks to a big teleco making sure nobody would sell him backbone access and told him "Yeah just try to sue us". His lawyer said "Oh there is zero doubt you'll win, its as open and shut as it can be, but I hope you have about a mil five and a decade to spare as they will bury you in bullshit motions and appeals until they break you".
That is why I have said for years we need to take the advantage of money OUT of the system, by forcing both sides to pay into a pool from which BOTH sides lawyers are paid. in this way if a rich corp or individual tried to crush the other under "dream team" lawyers they would be forced to put an equal amount at the disposal of the opposing side, thus negating their advantage. I believe this would work for criminal as well, where prosecutors can pile on experts while the defendant runs out of cash.
Proving that FOSSies can't even stay on topic, gee, what a surprise. I'd be happy to post endless statistics to show that frankly nobody gives a shit about your "4 freedumbs" but that would mean taking you away from your rampant circle jerking to bash scripts and I'd hate to bother, since most of you can barely copypasta.
So please go back to posting pointless blather about an OS nobody uses and we'll all go back to completely ignoring it, as we have for the past 20 years.
Not to mention this is NOT "Tron" this is just a variation on slither. These don't even look like light cycles they are just dots. Lame. And since when do we not count all the overhead of the browser? I'm sure you could get a 5Kb checkers game by using all the existing code in ubuntu or Win 7 but we wouldn't say that it was really a 5Kb checkers game would we?
But that STILL doesn't explain rare stuff like what Kirk had. He had Romulan ale, he had 300+ year old glasses, these things are RARE with a capital R, so how did he get them? Was he REALLY lucky? There has to be, even with replicators, a way to decide who gets the rare things because even with a replicator an original thing is gonna be more treasured than a copy, its just human nature. And as you pointed out how do you deal with other races? Janeway pointed out on Voyager there are STRICT rules about giving replicator tech to other races because of the obvious life changing implications, but there are still gonna be times when you need to deal with other races as not everything can be replicated, such as starship fuel.
I personally think Rodenberry just never sat down and thought things through and left a couple of glaring plot holes nobody said anything about. Because lets think about it, you have replicators AND holodecks...why the fuck would you ever work? How do you get people to do the shitty jobs, like the guy that crawls in the tubes running the wiring? Why would you do the shitty jobs when you can push a button and have a feast and walk into this room and instantly be God? I can't remember which Sci-Fi writer wrote this but I agree that they didn't think Star Trek through, as any race with holodecks and replicators would probably be wiped out. aliens would land to find mummified corpses in holodecks as why deal with reality when you can have perfection? Why would you care when a simple button press gives you anything you desire? I just don't see how if one logically thought the process through it would work.
How EXACTLY is it offtopic to explain that a certain zealtry bunch is completely ignoring the topic? Fine lets use a/. car analogy shall we? The TFA is about a new car GPS system and someone posts "I replaced the one in my Focus with this unit and it runs great" and so another poster asks "What makes this unit better than the one in your Focus" and suddenly a bunch of zealots pop in with "It works great in my Honda ricer herp derp".
Now how EXACTLY is a question about the Ford Focus in ANY way shape or form require multiple comments about Honda ricers? Answer IT ISN'T but sadly FOSSies are like Moonies and can't STFU, even when the subject doesn't have a God damned thing to do with their crap. you got more time than money and want to waste it dumpster diving and forum hunting for fixes? that's cool, its your time to waste but do NOT waste everyopne else's time chiming in on subjects that have fuck all to do with your busted OS, kay. Nobody cares, your OS is lower than JavaME and will NEVER even crack the 10% mark EVAR. So let the grownups that actually have money talk occasionally, okay sparky? Go compile something as we are really sick about your harping on about your "freedoms" especially when you are running Windows at work and probably dual boot just to get shit done.
Re:Unfortunately that doesn't work all the time
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Open Source Payday
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· Score: 3, Interesting
The problem with FOSS is what I call the "Busted shitter dilemma" which you ran into when you couldn't find a replacement for Vegas. As you pointed out taking one of the existing FOSS editors and bringing it to to Vegas level? Really really REALLY not fun, instead it'll be long, slow, headache inducing thankless work. Since as you have pointed out it is VERY difficult to make money with FOSS except in some very niche circumstances that work simply doesn't get done.
I bet the FOSS editing software you looked at had lousy or incomplete docs, obvious features missing, and one or more nasty bugs that had been well documented but not fixed. That isn't because all FOSS software is shit, its because of human nature. We humans love to create new things but HATE long boring tedious jobs. Ask for someone to write you a song or paint you a portrait for free? you'll probably find several willing to do so. Ask them to come fix your busted shitter? Watch as you have ZERO willing to do this, its just the way it is.
That is why I have been saying for years we need a NEW license, one that will allow companies like Canonical the ability to get paid for fixing busted shitters. Wouldn't it be nice if Canonical didn't have to flail around trying to find some way to make money, like slapping together Unity and trying to sell it to TV and phone OEMs that will never bite? Wouldn't it be nice if instead they could pay developers to ONLY make things better? Better docs, QA, regression testing, insuring that all software fit the UI conventions, in short making a truly world class OS? Wouldn't that be nice? Because like it or not for every creative job you have in FOSS you have 100 that are about as pleasant as being the guy that cleans up the puke at the Chuck E Cheese. So instead we need a new license i call the "Hard Work" license, because I think we would all agree if you bust your ass you should get to be paid for your labor. here is the new license:
1.-You are allowed to have the code, 2.-You are free to modify that code for personal use in any way you desire, 3.-If you distribute that code YOU MUST PAY for a license, which must be offered.
See how simple that is? You still get ALL your freedoms, even the freedom to distribute (since the other company can't just refuse to sell you a license) but those that actually fix the busted shitters can be paid for their doing the thankless jobs nobody will do for free. Imagine how truly incredible the FOSS landscape would be in less than 5 years...Vegas? There would be software MUCH better since the devs would get feedback direct from the users and wouldn't have to depend on selling new features. Operating systems? Apple and MSFT are stunned when the latest releases come out and ALL the complaints have been wiped out, all drivers are solid and stable, upgrades never break, all the docs are well written and helpful, the entire ecosystem thanks to having the users and devs tied tightly together and the devs having a monetary incentive to listen to their users causes a complete change, no more itch scratching and "will not fix" blowing off the users since those that strive for a "it all just works perfectly" mantra get rewarded for their hard work.
Its really simple folks, the GPL works in SOME places but not ALL places and I would argue not even in most places does the GPL license work. It works in both servers and embedded because large corporations make money on those servers and embedded devices and thus see it as an investment, this model simply doesn't work on the desktop or on software that will primarily be used on a desktop. What you end up with is what we have now, where companies that try to treat FOSS as more than a hobby blow millions before finally folding for lack of a way to recoup costs. The landscape is littered with the dead, gOS, Xandros, Linspire, Novell, Mandriva any day now and within 3 years Canonical. If you want the desktop software to get beyond some guy's hobby and the desktops to have more polish than "Bob's distro" then you simply have to
Excuse #267 "ZOMG M$!!!" and you know what? RMS may turn into a superhero and fly by lighting his own farts. If you want to dislike the UI, or some feature, that's cool but when you are so desperate to hate something you have to come up with something they MIGHT do in the far flung future it makes you sound more than a little batshit.
Oh and BTW your Linux? ILLEGAL, just nobody has busted your collective asses for it yet. Most of those codecs like X264? ILLEGAL in any country that signed Berne, all that? Is patented. So unless you live in a country that hasn't signed Berne you might as well be running a pirated version of Windows because you are on the same legal ground. Like it or not ALL the major formats ARE PATENTED and unless you have bought the right to use the codecs (I believe there is a grand total of one company that sells Linux codecs and they don't cover all the major formats) then legally you can't. Both MSFT and Apple paid for the rights to use those formats, your distro? Did not. You can scream about copyrights and patents but until the law is changed it IS the law.
So standing on a soapbox proclaiming MSFT may burn the customer in the future while you violate patents right this very minute is more than a little pot meet kettle. Oh and mark my words, tried to warn ya but nobody would listen, now that Flash is all but gone now that you don't have Adobe paying for the right to play H.264 on Linux when H.265 gets released you WILL pay your license fees, MPEG-LA will see to that. Mark my words the next version of H.26x WILL have DRM support which means if you try to reverse engineer protected path you WILL be on the hook for DMCA, and probably some extra charges like facilitating copyright infringement.
But considering MSFT has had support for DRM in Windows since WinXP and you don't hear anybody complaining, everything "just works" and if anything thanks to WMC Windows is easier than ever to copy content your doom and gloom prediction doesn't seem to have much of a leg to stand on. Frankly after pulseaudio, the trashing of the DEs, the mess that is the Linux driver model? MSFT could charge triple what they currently do and DRM the shit out of it and it'd be cheap at twice the price. I would go back to running OS/2 Warp on a Pentium 1 before I'd ever touch Linux again.
Uhhhh...did you and the other Linux guys not even bother to read before responding? The question was " What advantages do you see (((over Windows Media Center in Windows 7)))" which means talking about Linux makes ZERO sense in regards to the question! Its not like any of the major distros actually come with Media Center software with a 10 foot interface so you pretty much HAVE to go DIY but with Win 7 that isn't the case.
So while I'm glad you got it to run,the question has ZERO to do with Linux and has no bearing on the thread and doesn't really address in any way shape or form what myself and the other poster was discussing and thus is completely pointless, sorry. Glad it works for you, wouldn't take Linux on a bet, really only want to hear comparisons between WMC and XBMC, kthnx.
Ya know I never figured out how that was supposed to work. Using credits or some plastic chips? i could see that. But if NOBODY has anything that takes the place of currency then how do you decide who gets something rare? I mean you watch the movies and Kirk had some seriously old collector's items, so how did he get it? they have a lotto or something and he was REALLY lucky? Hell even in DS-9 Nog was able to use barter with the Federation crewmen so they had to actually own things otherwise they wouldn't have anything to trade.
Question: What advantages do you see over Windows media center in Windows 7? Not having run XBMC since leaving XP in 09 I am curious as to what advantages you find over what is built into Win 7, is it better on resources? does it give you more Internet TV options? How is its hardware acceleration? Because while i can see the advantages clearly for something like the pi, where you are talking about a device that takes less power than your average cable box I just don't see offhand what advantages one could get from XBMC running on top of win 7.
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But if that person stood in front of the board and showed you yes, they very well could do it without the steps, would you have accepted that or called him a liar and a cheat? because i got the latter and damned near got kicked out as despite being held together by stitches me and the math teacher nearly came to blows. And please remember this was a "football school' so we aren't talking calc or trig here, we are talking bog simple 3 and 4 number division and multiplication.
But we are NOT talking about vector calc, that at least would have been interesting, no the douchebag teacher had a living shitfit because i wouldn't sit there and do the stupid 'carry the one' crap with large division and multiplication and even had the gall to accuse me of cheating because i could do it in my head faster than he could doing his little step crap!
The ONLY thing that kept me from dropping out right there, because i had told him to take back his accusation or we were gonna have to step outside, was that my home tutor was in the class next door and called the principal and walked in between us. She turned to me and said "Hand me your calc watch" and then she put two long multiplication questions on the board and said "Alright Mr Black, you get one and he gets the other...GO!" and of course i blew through it in less than 20 seconds while he was still on his first line. so did he apologize? Nope it was then "Search him, he must have a hidden calc!". By that time the principal had seen enough and said "Ms Edwards do you think he'd be better off back in home tutoring?" and signed off for me to just go back home instead of trying to do half days which with the combo of the pain from the stitches and my total boredom was for the best anyway. And as I said when they finally forced me to go to HS instead of going to class i ran my own class teaching football players so it wasn't like school was gonna teach me anything, not in a "football school".
the simple fact is this: they have NO idea what to do with extra bright kids if there isn't some sort of magnet program which there isn't in my area. the lowest IQ in my family is 130 by my late sis and the only reason she scored that low was she had been out at a party the night before and was wore out from dancing. Her two boys scored 152 and 148 and frankly we had to home school them because they were bored to tears. Public schools are only really good for those in the center of the bell curve, those on the ends are just frustrated. Honestly i wouldn't be surprised if a lot of those with high grades that are constantly in trouble simply aren't frustrated like i was, as I'd do anything to get out of class so i could get back to my programming or Asimov.
And yet again the pirate version is the BETTER version. Why can't they take a hint from Gabe at Valve, or is he too busy swimming in his giant money pool going "Woo Hoo, I'm like Scrooge McDuck" to take their calls? Make it simple, make it easy, make it cheap. My Steam games don't care if I'm online or off, thanks to the sales my average steam game cost less than $10, and its as simple as 'push button, get game". Seriously how do you fuck that up? Oh wait a tick...origin? Oh, the shitty knockoff that does everything wrong..oops, my bad. Carry on.
Sadly voting with your wallet only goes so far in these cases thanks to "PPT math" which is where they go to congress with a PPT and say "If you see here our sales were projected to be X because we got R on the consoles and we only got S which means it MUST be those ebil pirates argh! We need more draconian laws" and they get it. But at least you personally can make sure they don't get a damned dime of your money, just as i only buy games from steam and GOG.
Oh please! To use a /. car analogy this would be like saying cars need to be banned because some LOL got killed driving her 58 Ford with non safety glass. the plants SHOULD have been shut down more than 15 years ago, but instead the government took bribes and kept them running WELL past their limits and you act like that proves anything? The only thing it proves is shitty governments are shitty. Build the latest designs, place thorium reactors next to them to use any waste and voila! A nice safe and clean power source that I would have no problem having a house next to.
So you keep that NIMBY attitude, I'm sure the coal guys will love your ass, me I'll enjoy living in a state where the power is cheap enough many of the apts come with it as part of the rent.
So for those of us who don't speak lawyerese, how good/bad are the odds this patent will stick? I remember SGI was one of the first in the biz doing GPU heavy work so if anybody has patents that would put a serious crimp on mobile my gut tells me it'd be them, but as I said i don't speak lawyerese, especially not at 6AM, so if someone could give odds that would be nice.
I'm waiting to see someone explain WHY, for the love of Pete why? with ALL the trouble Mozilla has had lately, declining share, practically zero adoption in the mobile space, the well documented problems with memory leaks, extensions getting killed by version jumps, extensions making the leaks worse, why are they wasting resources making a fricking browser based MMO?
Hey Moz, you wanna fart around? that's cool, but don't be surprised if you wake up one day and find your share of the browser market dried up. How about instead of wasting money on MMOs, yet another thing we do not need, how about you use that money to do some focus groups or even just ASK your users what they want, and then you actually LISTEN to them, how about that?
I used to hand out Firefox in my free software pack with every new build, but it seems that Mozilla has got that bug that infected the Ubuntu and GNOME guys, the "Fuck what the users think or want we're doing our own thang" bug and its REALLY fucking irritating. So now I hand out Comodo Dragon and Pale Moon, which BTW if you haven't tried it its very good and they LISTEN to the users and have kept the old UI while killing some of the dumb shit FF devs did under the hood like the 256 connections bit. C'mon FF devs, you USED to have focus. remember when you first got us to switch to FF from the suite? Remember how you aid your goal was to be the "fastest most nimble standards compliant browser", remember that? Well at least on the machines passing through my door as well as my own machines you don't seem very fast OR nimble, in fact i get an extra 40 minutes of battery life by NOT using Firefox.
So c'mon Moz, I know you can do better. Quit aping Chrome, quit fucking off with stupid distractions and get focused on being the BEST browser there is. Fix it so FF can update without UAC prompts, fix the memory and CPU hogging, get back to your core strengths and watch your users come back. because i bet there are a lot of them like me using one of the Chromium based that try each new release in the HOPES you'll come back, and would be happy to return to the fold if you did.
But how smooth is the KB/mouse when it comes to space battles? Is it one of those games where the layout feels intuitive, or is it one of those where you need a cheat sheet printed just to keep up with all the buttons? I have both Freelancer and Freespace II and honestly I almost never play Freespace II while I fire up Freelancer at least a couple of times a year because the controls in Freelancer are so much easier to pick up. With Freespace II I always felt like I was playing with a hand tied behind my back if I didn't have a flightstick. That is why I have the MW 4 they gave out free but won't fire it up, as I know it is a game that without a stick while it is POSSIBLE to play, it sure isn't easy or fun.
so bottom line, in the space battles did you feel at ease with the KB/mouse combo or did it feel like you were fighting it?
I guess thoughtcrime is a word you guys have never heard of huh? Or the phrase "freedom of speech"? tell me, when the Mullahs are screaming "Death to the infidels!" in the mosques, do you drag them away? or is it a double standard like here in the USA? When you have blacks throwing words like "Cracka, white devil" around, do they get carted off? i bet they don't.
Its nice to see one sided liberal bullshit isn't limited to the USA.
Yeah that blew my mind as well, EA are usually the greediest of the greedy, right of there with Sony and Activision.
I do have some questions though: Has anyone played it? How well does it control with a keyboard and mouse? is it easy to use or are you screwed without a flightstick? How is the performance? Does it handles widescreen well? sadly i don't have time to answer those questions myself as i got a shitload of games on the Steam Xmas sale and still haven't gotten around to all of them as all the DLC i got for Just Cause II is just too damned fun. i don't know what guy thought mounting a tank gun on a Tuk Tuk was a good idea buts its fun as hell, up on the sidewalk BOOM BOOM BOOM.
But if this game is as easy to control as say Freelancer was with a keyboard and mouse I'd love to give it a shot, its been awhile since i went all X-Wing in space, probably not since Freelancer as a matter of fact.
Sorry about that, we here in the USA may not have health care but one thing we have too much of is tech. Hell i dump late model P4s all day long on Craigslist simply because i don't have any use for them and hate seeing good running machines end up in the dumpster and our CLs are filled to the brim with CRTs. Its a damned shame the shipping would be so insane as i bet I could find 20-24 inch CRTs all day long for less than $100, probably less than $60. Its the same as how I can find dual core desktops all day for a little of nothing because everyone is in the laptop/tablet craze right now and so nobody cares about desktops but gamers who don't want anything less than quads.
But would that "instant bazillionaire" take a job cleaning puke at the Chuck E Cheese? ya see this is in a way the same argument I've been having with some of the FOSS community on why the GPL doesn't work on the desktop, its the "busted shitter" problem. You can get humans to do creative things for free, to write songs, create art, make some cool piece of software, but NOBODY wants or is willing to do the nasty jobs for free, cleaning the neighbors busted shitters or in the case of FOSS all the regression testing QA, document writing, fixing the current driver model, all those long, boring, dull, tedious and thankless jobs simply wouldn't get done. I mean if everyone has everything they want how would you get someone to spend all day cleaning plasma pipes? you wouldn't and THAT is the problem.
Sadly the ONLY way I see out of the busted shitter dilemma in the ST universe would be to take a page from Star Wars and look into earth's history and create a slave class who were FORCED to clean the busted shitters. that is what the droids really were after all, a slave race forced to do the menial tasks that the other races didn't want to do. In a way we are seeing this problem play out IRL sadly with the ghettos and the third and fourth generation welfare queens. I recently read a very sad article by an inner city schoolteacher that when asking students "what do you want to be when you grow up?" several girls basically said 'i'm gonna have a couple of kids and get paid" and the others in class saw that as a valid "lifestyle" choice. Whether we choose to accept it or not a human can be a VERY lazy and pleasure driven creature and the problem with the ST universe is that given basically unlimited everything you'd have an insane number that would simply sit on their asses, get fat, and watch HoloTV. After all EVERYONE wants to be Picard, but how many would want to be Barclay? Or the guy who spends his day installing the sonic showers?
While I like your idea mine was based on killing the "you're hurting the poor!" arguments I've often seen thrown about, like how they'll always point out some third world country using FOSS in schools or giving it to kids and say 'You'll destroy that you monster!".
So I based my idea on a license that has been around for ages in the Windows world, the "Free for non commercial use" license. this lets individuals and charities, those that are making NO profits on the software, the right to use it. in my modified form you lose NO freedoms, you simply have one freedom modified and that is the right to distribute which says if you distribute then you MUST pay for a license that MUST be offered. This way RMS and his militants can't scream about his four freedoms as they are ALL still there, you have the code, you can modify, you can share your changes, and you can distribute but you can't just take their hard works while giving them nothing in return.
Ultimately as things become ever more complex and integrated i believe you will see the GPL model dying out, simply because good programmers don't have the spare time to futz with software they can't make a cent off of. if the numbers in an article /. posted a few months back is true we are already seeing this, with more going to proprietary or BSD (where they can lock it to hardware and not share changes) than going GPL. If you saw the numbers they posted then you saw that with the introduction of GPL V3 the numbers dived and haven't ever recovered.
IMHO we don't need to throw out the baby with the bathwater as the IDEA of FOSS is sound, its the implementation. if you have read the writings of RMS you can tell as he gets older he truly believes there can be some sort of communist utopia, even going so far as to praise Chavez and Castro on visits to those countries while ignoring the busted shitter dilemma was so bad in the USSR that they would have to assign soldiers to "potato duty" to get the busted shitters fixed and even then there simply wasn't enough people to do it. Everyone wants to be the artist, everyone wants to be the star, NOBODY wants to be the guy that cleans the puke at the Chuck E Cheese, its simply human nature. But guess what happens if you don't pay someone to clean up that puke? it just sits there and stinks up the joint, ruining the whole place in the process. there has to be a way for someone to get paid to clean up the messes, to fix the drivers, do QA, write all the docs, all that boring thankless work that nobody wants to do HAS to get done. I would argue the current model is actually giving a HUGE advantage to companies like MSFT and Apple because by hiding the code THEY can pay someone to do those jobs, whereas FOSS can't so they don't get done. Sad really as the idea could do a lot of good, but nobody wants to deal with software that isn't even 80% done which is what the post I was responding to found out.
I think the whole kayfabe bullshit actually makes wrestlers lives WORSE as people just go 'oh its just fake" and then ignore the truly horrible abuse these guys take in the ring. Yeah sure its fake but in reality its like being a stuntman in that things can and DO go wrong. The hospital my mom worked at treated many a big name wrestler and the amount of "Jesus Christ look at him!" injuries these guys got was just nuts. Compound fractures, guys that had had their bells rung so many times their brains behaved like a 70 year olds when they were 28, just truly rough horrible injuries. my mom said even treating the boxers wasn't as bad as what she'd see on the wrestlers yet they are treated like 'Oh its just all fake' so those injuries don't count.
No crap but I bet he is bored to tears in class every damned day! I absolutely HATED public school because it was strictly lowest common denominator, I even had a teacher accuse me of cheating simply because I was better at basic math than he was without having to go through all those stupid steps. the best thing that ever happened to me was a damned dog getting into the spokes of my motorbike at 60MPH because it got me home tutors through the junior HS years because the tutor took one look at the books I was reading like the wonderful "Best sci/fi and horror writers of the year" series and instead of the stupid crap they were teaching in school Ms Edwards had me discussing the pros and cons of grandfather paradoxes and skipped the whole stupid "show your work" crap which just slowed me down.
Sadly some administrator decided 'its not good for him to be isolated like that" and forced me to go to HS. What happened? the first day i got sent to detention because some jarheaded teacher said "Anybody not will to run 10 laps just get out of my class' so myself followed by half the class promptly left, and the football coach took one look at the books I was reading in his detention and for the next 4 years i was given all As even though I never actually attended any classes, how did I do that? simple the coach took me to each class and said "He is in your class, mark him as present and give him an A on all work as he'll be on "special assignment"" which turned out to be running my own class for 4 years teaching jocks how to pass the minimums required to play ball. Turns out over the years I've met several from neighboring "football schools' that had the same "special assignment" as me and all were very bright students that the schools basically didn't know what to do with. I figure I learned more teaching those jocks than the dumbed down classes they taught anyway.
So while this kid will probably have a kick ass career I do NOT envy him ATM, his life is probably equal parts boredom and frustration if he is in the public school system. I ended up giving my two boys home schooling after seeing that public schools had gotten even worse than when I was there, there was bigotry, indifference, and even religious whackos, and we are talking about the teachers. Frankly I wouldn't wish the US public school system on my worst enemy as if you are not lucky enough to be in one of the few upper class ritzy neighborhoods frankly the schools just suck. Good luck kid, just keep your head down and remember that college is just around the corner where the smart CAN get ahead.
While I haven't seen him personally I will give a big bravo to the whole "open magic" movement we have been seeing as of late. look we ALL know its a trick, alright? this ain't the 1600s. Does knowing its a trick ruin it? FUCK NO because it the ARTIST and how they sell it that makes it kick ass. I mean we all knew Heath Ledger wasn't crazy but it was the way he sold the character that has people debating to this day how much was madness and how much was a Zanatos Gambit.
So I'm all for getting rid of the "ohhhh..it's MAGIC!" bullshit like we saw for years so we can get rid of the kayfabe and just concentrate on these folks being damned good entertainers.
The problem is our entire system is designed to let the rich "run out the clock" as it were, letting them drag shit out for years and years because they know that while they can afford to have their own legal team on retainer the people they are crushing simply can't. I got to see this first hand when a friend of mine that was running a little ISP got crushed thanks to a big teleco making sure nobody would sell him backbone access and told him "Yeah just try to sue us". His lawyer said "Oh there is zero doubt you'll win, its as open and shut as it can be, but I hope you have about a mil five and a decade to spare as they will bury you in bullshit motions and appeals until they break you".
That is why I have said for years we need to take the advantage of money OUT of the system, by forcing both sides to pay into a pool from which BOTH sides lawyers are paid. in this way if a rich corp or individual tried to crush the other under "dream team" lawyers they would be forced to put an equal amount at the disposal of the opposing side, thus negating their advantage. I believe this would work for criminal as well, where prosecutors can pile on experts while the defendant runs out of cash.
Proving that FOSSies can't even stay on topic, gee, what a surprise. I'd be happy to post endless statistics to show that frankly nobody gives a shit about your "4 freedumbs" but that would mean taking you away from your rampant circle jerking to bash scripts and I'd hate to bother, since most of you can barely copypasta.
So please go back to posting pointless blather about an OS nobody uses and we'll all go back to completely ignoring it, as we have for the past 20 years.
Not to mention this is NOT "Tron" this is just a variation on slither. These don't even look like light cycles they are just dots. Lame. And since when do we not count all the overhead of the browser? I'm sure you could get a 5Kb checkers game by using all the existing code in ubuntu or Win 7 but we wouldn't say that it was really a 5Kb checkers game would we?
But that STILL doesn't explain rare stuff like what Kirk had. He had Romulan ale, he had 300+ year old glasses, these things are RARE with a capital R, so how did he get them? Was he REALLY lucky? There has to be, even with replicators, a way to decide who gets the rare things because even with a replicator an original thing is gonna be more treasured than a copy, its just human nature. And as you pointed out how do you deal with other races? Janeway pointed out on Voyager there are STRICT rules about giving replicator tech to other races because of the obvious life changing implications, but there are still gonna be times when you need to deal with other races as not everything can be replicated, such as starship fuel.
I personally think Rodenberry just never sat down and thought things through and left a couple of glaring plot holes nobody said anything about. Because lets think about it, you have replicators AND holodecks...why the fuck would you ever work? How do you get people to do the shitty jobs, like the guy that crawls in the tubes running the wiring? Why would you do the shitty jobs when you can push a button and have a feast and walk into this room and instantly be God? I can't remember which Sci-Fi writer wrote this but I agree that they didn't think Star Trek through, as any race with holodecks and replicators would probably be wiped out. aliens would land to find mummified corpses in holodecks as why deal with reality when you can have perfection? Why would you care when a simple button press gives you anything you desire? I just don't see how if one logically thought the process through it would work.
How EXACTLY is it offtopic to explain that a certain zealtry bunch is completely ignoring the topic? Fine lets use a /. car analogy shall we? The TFA is about a new car GPS system and someone posts "I replaced the one in my Focus with this unit and it runs great" and so another poster asks "What makes this unit better than the one in your Focus" and suddenly a bunch of zealots pop in with "It works great in my Honda ricer herp derp".
Now how EXACTLY is a question about the Ford Focus in ANY way shape or form require multiple comments about Honda ricers? Answer IT ISN'T but sadly FOSSies are like Moonies and can't STFU, even when the subject doesn't have a God damned thing to do with their crap. you got more time than money and want to waste it dumpster diving and forum hunting for fixes? that's cool, its your time to waste but do NOT waste everyopne else's time chiming in on subjects that have fuck all to do with your busted OS, kay. Nobody cares, your OS is lower than JavaME and will NEVER even crack the 10% mark EVAR. So let the grownups that actually have money talk occasionally, okay sparky? Go compile something as we are really sick about your harping on about your "freedoms" especially when you are running Windows at work and probably dual boot just to get shit done.
The problem with FOSS is what I call the "Busted shitter dilemma" which you ran into when you couldn't find a replacement for Vegas. As you pointed out taking one of the existing FOSS editors and bringing it to to Vegas level? Really really REALLY not fun, instead it'll be long, slow, headache inducing thankless work. Since as you have pointed out it is VERY difficult to make money with FOSS except in some very niche circumstances that work simply doesn't get done.
I bet the FOSS editing software you looked at had lousy or incomplete docs, obvious features missing, and one or more nasty bugs that had been well documented but not fixed. That isn't because all FOSS software is shit, its because of human nature. We humans love to create new things but HATE long boring tedious jobs. Ask for someone to write you a song or paint you a portrait for free? you'll probably find several willing to do so. Ask them to come fix your busted shitter? Watch as you have ZERO willing to do this, its just the way it is.
That is why I have been saying for years we need a NEW license, one that will allow companies like Canonical the ability to get paid for fixing busted shitters. Wouldn't it be nice if Canonical didn't have to flail around trying to find some way to make money, like slapping together Unity and trying to sell it to TV and phone OEMs that will never bite? Wouldn't it be nice if instead they could pay developers to ONLY make things better? Better docs, QA, regression testing, insuring that all software fit the UI conventions, in short making a truly world class OS? Wouldn't that be nice? Because like it or not for every creative job you have in FOSS you have 100 that are about as pleasant as being the guy that cleans up the puke at the Chuck E Cheese. So instead we need a new license i call the "Hard Work" license, because I think we would all agree if you bust your ass you should get to be paid for your labor. here is the new license:
1.-You are allowed to have the code, 2.-You are free to modify that code for personal use in any way you desire, 3.-If you distribute that code YOU MUST PAY for a license, which must be offered.
See how simple that is? You still get ALL your freedoms, even the freedom to distribute (since the other company can't just refuse to sell you a license) but those that actually fix the busted shitters can be paid for their doing the thankless jobs nobody will do for free. Imagine how truly incredible the FOSS landscape would be in less than 5 years...Vegas? There would be software MUCH better since the devs would get feedback direct from the users and wouldn't have to depend on selling new features. Operating systems? Apple and MSFT are stunned when the latest releases come out and ALL the complaints have been wiped out, all drivers are solid and stable, upgrades never break, all the docs are well written and helpful, the entire ecosystem thanks to having the users and devs tied tightly together and the devs having a monetary incentive to listen to their users causes a complete change, no more itch scratching and "will not fix" blowing off the users since those that strive for a "it all just works perfectly" mantra get rewarded for their hard work.
Its really simple folks, the GPL works in SOME places but not ALL places and I would argue not even in most places does the GPL license work. It works in both servers and embedded because large corporations make money on those servers and embedded devices and thus see it as an investment, this model simply doesn't work on the desktop or on software that will primarily be used on a desktop. What you end up with is what we have now, where companies that try to treat FOSS as more than a hobby blow millions before finally folding for lack of a way to recoup costs. The landscape is littered with the dead, gOS, Xandros, Linspire, Novell, Mandriva any day now and within 3 years Canonical. If you want the desktop software to get beyond some guy's hobby and the desktops to have more polish than "Bob's distro" then you simply have to
Excuse #267 "ZOMG M$!!!" and you know what? RMS may turn into a superhero and fly by lighting his own farts. If you want to dislike the UI, or some feature, that's cool but when you are so desperate to hate something you have to come up with something they MIGHT do in the far flung future it makes you sound more than a little batshit.
Oh and BTW your Linux? ILLEGAL, just nobody has busted your collective asses for it yet. Most of those codecs like X264? ILLEGAL in any country that signed Berne, all that? Is patented. So unless you live in a country that hasn't signed Berne you might as well be running a pirated version of Windows because you are on the same legal ground. Like it or not ALL the major formats ARE PATENTED and unless you have bought the right to use the codecs (I believe there is a grand total of one company that sells Linux codecs and they don't cover all the major formats) then legally you can't. Both MSFT and Apple paid for the rights to use those formats, your distro? Did not. You can scream about copyrights and patents but until the law is changed it IS the law.
So standing on a soapbox proclaiming MSFT may burn the customer in the future while you violate patents right this very minute is more than a little pot meet kettle. Oh and mark my words, tried to warn ya but nobody would listen, now that Flash is all but gone now that you don't have Adobe paying for the right to play H.264 on Linux when H.265 gets released you WILL pay your license fees, MPEG-LA will see to that. Mark my words the next version of H.26x WILL have DRM support which means if you try to reverse engineer protected path you WILL be on the hook for DMCA, and probably some extra charges like facilitating copyright infringement.
But considering MSFT has had support for DRM in Windows since WinXP and you don't hear anybody complaining, everything "just works" and if anything thanks to WMC Windows is easier than ever to copy content your doom and gloom prediction doesn't seem to have much of a leg to stand on. Frankly after pulseaudio, the trashing of the DEs, the mess that is the Linux driver model? MSFT could charge triple what they currently do and DRM the shit out of it and it'd be cheap at twice the price. I would go back to running OS/2 Warp on a Pentium 1 before I'd ever touch Linux again.
Uhhhh...did you and the other Linux guys not even bother to read before responding? The question was " What advantages do you see (((over Windows Media Center in Windows 7)))" which means talking about Linux makes ZERO sense in regards to the question! Its not like any of the major distros actually come with Media Center software with a 10 foot interface so you pretty much HAVE to go DIY but with Win 7 that isn't the case.
So while I'm glad you got it to run,the question has ZERO to do with Linux and has no bearing on the thread and doesn't really address in any way shape or form what myself and the other poster was discussing and thus is completely pointless, sorry. Glad it works for you, wouldn't take Linux on a bet, really only want to hear comparisons between WMC and XBMC, kthnx.
Ya know I never figured out how that was supposed to work. Using credits or some plastic chips? i could see that. But if NOBODY has anything that takes the place of currency then how do you decide who gets something rare? I mean you watch the movies and Kirk had some seriously old collector's items, so how did he get it? they have a lotto or something and he was REALLY lucky? Hell even in DS-9 Nog was able to use barter with the Federation crewmen so they had to actually own things otherwise they wouldn't have anything to trade.
Question: What advantages do you see over Windows media center in Windows 7? Not having run XBMC since leaving XP in 09 I am curious as to what advantages you find over what is built into Win 7, is it better on resources? does it give you more Internet TV options? How is its hardware acceleration? Because while i can see the advantages clearly for something like the pi, where you are talking about a device that takes less power than your average cable box I just don't see offhand what advantages one could get from XBMC running on top of win 7.