What about John D. Rockefeller? Though I suppose Rockefeller gave his kids some of his money. Then again, if you account for inflation, Rockefeller would have made Gates look poor.
True, but if it's the same measuring of one hour that most guys use, then these things will do that 4" in about 60 seconds, so it turns out for the best.
Call me lazy or what you will, but do any of those sites you linked to (or any site you know of) allow you to enter the names of bands or songs you like and then suggest indie music that is similar. Can I say I like Nirvana, Foo Fighters and Green Day and have them give me a list of bands that I would probably like?
I bought a fit about 5 months ago. I was on a waiting list for about a month for it. Called places in Denver, Las Vegas, and Salt Lake to see if I could get it earlier. Those are nice cars. But yes, the sport is the one to get. My wife and I wanted it (the sport) just for the cruise control alone.
I hope you are referring to drivers trying to time when they hit a light and not about cities timing the lights so that people don't have to stop. Glendale, AZ and a lot of the west side of Phoenix did that several years ago when I lived there and it was beautiful. If you went the speed limit you would hit green lights the vast majority of time. I have fond memories of driving down 67th Ave from I-10 all the way to Camelback Rd. The only red light I got was right off the freeway and even that was hit or miss. But after that I just drove the speed limit and never saw a red light again. It was fun to see people speed way up, get to the next light and stop, then when it turned green I would fly by them at the speed limit and they would be accelerating like it was the Daytona 500.
Alas, where I live now there are lights nearly every 2/10s of a mile. It's impossible to time lights like that. When lights are every mile (like the west side of Phx) you can do it. As it is, I live in a small community of ~30,000 now and because of the lights traffic is no better than in Phoenix. It's really sad.
that's not only Not a fact, it's a bad thing to do.
There are reasons for illegal search and seizure laws.
I'm pretty sure all laws regarding search and seizure and the validity of evidence found in such cases apply only to law enforcement. They don't apply to regular citizens. We have laws against that, such as trespassing, breaking and entering, etc. This guy might have a case against the employees, maybe against the company. But once the evidence was found out, so long as law enforcement officers didn't break the laws that apply to them, then the evidence can be used.
In this case your life could be completely destroyed by someone not trained to identify a type of crime.
People report crimes everyday. I have no statistics, but I'm sure a fair number of police investigations are started due to citizen reporting. Some of those turn out to be bogus and some of those don't. Should we not allow citizens to report any crime at all?
You really want a society where anybody can paw through your stuff at anytime looking for a 'crime'?
This case doesn't really look like it's leading to that. Like I said, we have laws against people trespassing. Personally I think this case comes down to how hard the employees had to look to find the stuff. The guy should still go to jail if he's guilty (which this particular case is not about). However, if his privacy was violated, he should also be able to win a lawsuit against the employee.
However, none of that really matters at this point for this guy. If the ruling stands and he goes to jail, he can sue the employees and maybe win, but he'll still be in jail. If the ruling is overturned and he gets off free, we all know who the police will be watching with a very close eye for any little slip up.
One could easily argue this is a direct result of having cheaper labor for so many years
One could. But then one would also have to explain away the bail outs that the US government gave our own manufacturers.
Higher profits = innovative things
This is false and I seriously hope you don't truly believe it. That being said, it might require money to implement some things, but let's be clear here that in the early days (before Japan came over with their small cars) American auto makers had enough money to innovate.
Maybe in terms of manufacturing, but you still sent your money overseas.
You are right. I also spent more for my car than I would have on an equivalent domestic car. This is partly due to tariffs (which stay in the US) and partly due to me wanting to pay for quality. I get a better mpg rating and am less likely to need to fix it. So, while "more" money left the country, "more" money also stayed in the country as well, because overall "more" money was spent. Call me a stickler for quality.
Buy American, have some pride.
Review your history. Before Japan came over with small cars, the American cars were getting bigger and bigger, and more and more wasteful. People were waiting in line for hours at the gas stations. Japan innovated with small cars that got good mpg ratings and also cost less. What did the American manufacturer's do? They could have made smaller cars with better mpg ratings, instead they pleaded for the government's help to raise import tariff's on foreign cars. Over 2 decades later and we're just barely seeing American manufacturer's reaching anywhere near parity in terms of quality with foreign cars. They will be feeling the effects of that reputation for many more years, even if they can achieve the same or better quality. Should I have pride that it took over a quarter century for that to happen?
I take it you didn't read the second article I linked for you. I will quote the most relevant parts:
Last year the Big Three collectively lost money on car sales in North America (and earned a mere 1.8% profit on overall sales). Honda and Nissan earned higher margins and record profits, and Toyota is expected to post similar results.
The stock explanation for this situation is that the foreign makers pay their U.S. workers less in wages and benefits than do the Big Three. But that answer is wrong; the compensation is roughly equivalent. The real reasons for the transplants' success are much more interesting and instructive: more efficient manufacturing systems, better labor relations, more collaborative relationships with suppliers, lower "legacy" costs for retirees' pensions and health benefits, and hard-earned reputations for quality.
Now to address your point.
if everyone bought American cars, they would come down in price and they would go up in quality
Maybe they'd come down in price, but then maybe they would continue to be as inefficient as they have been and you wouldn't see a price drop. Maybe they'd increase in quality but where would the pressure be coming from to do so? After decades of so-called foreign cars being better at quality it's only recently that the big three have even started to get better, but they're not there yet. Why? Probably because so many people were saying "Buy American" so the big three had no motivation to improve. <sarcasm>You were feeding American mouths by buying Ford, what else could you possibly want?</sarcasm>
Buy American, have some pride.
Again, I'll point you to the first article I linked for you. I recently bought a Honda. If you read the article, I bought a more "domestic" car than if I had bought just about anything from the big three.
I'd rather buy domestic and be allowed to complain when they outsource my job to India. Instead of being the guy driving a Mercedes with a dumbfounded look on his face.
You can say that again. It's mostly a transparent green haze from what I can see of it. The guy sitting in the next cubicle just found a good amount of that Warm-Hot gas and has released it into the workplace.
Some machines used for single-player gaming are kept off the Internet on purpose
And that relates to Xbox Live how? If one really wanted to keep their machine off the internet, they wouldn't be able to download demos, they wouldn't even have need for a friends list, let alone be able to access it, and they wouldn't be able to play online either. Very few games require Steam activation unless you purchase them on Steam, but then that means you already have some kind of internet connection. In that same situation on the 360, that person wouldn't be worried at all about Xbox live or its costs. Your statement there (and the bulk of your post) are only valid in the context of a few games that require Steam activation, but isn't even relevant when talking about the comparison between Steam and Xbox Live and their associated costs.
Unlike Warcraft, Diablo, and Starcraft before it, Blizzard's current product does cost per month.
You may also have noticed that WoW is a totally different situation. You mentioned 4 games, but one of them is not like the others. Battle.net doesn't actually host games, just like Xbox Live doesn't. Players host their own games and then report back when done, just like Xbox Live does. WoW, on the other hand, hosts the game and that requires a lot of servers.
Imagery of all kinds, be it violent, pornographic, or of pretty flowers in a field, has effects on people. That shouldn't be the question. The question is does it make you more prone to act on that imagery.
Some examples:
Surgeons are desensitized to blood, but they aren't looking for people to cut up
Garbage men are desensitized to the smell, but they aren't looking for cologne that smells the same
Morticians are desensitized to corpses, but they don't go out every night killing people just to have more
I'm sure you could think of other examples. Just because we become desensitized to something, doesn't mean we are more likely to act out on it. Some people will, that is for sure. Then again, some people were violent long before we even had media (including cave drawings).
Bandwidth costs money - Gold subscribers at $50 a year pay for that. If you have a free account, why shouldn't it be considered a gift that you're able to download these things at all?
And that is why I have no problem paying for Steam and Battle.net. Every month when I see the bills for those services, I am reminded how grateful I should be that some companies saw the opportunity that was there to host online games and have a friends list and the ability to download demos, purchase games and the like. I mean, without my money going to those two services every month, how in the world would they be able to survive?
"which was the main thing Dr. Paul argued in both places: don't be hasty."
The slaughter began in February 2003. This act came after 4 years of inaction by the UN. What time frame would Dr. Paul consider to be "not hasty"?
I've seen you do this in another post as well as this one. There is a difference in time frames for what you and the GP are talking about. The GP is talking about hasty on a decision that is put forth to vote on. You are talking about being hasty on a decision about what is going on. So yes, the situation in Sudan has been going on for a while, but how much time was there between the drafting of the bill and the vote? Seriously, I really don't know.
To further illustrate the point, allow me to use a different example. For a long time I have not had a retirement fund (I'm young, give me a break) but I have been aware of that and thinking that I should. So I finally came to a non-hasty decision that I should do something about it. While that decision was not hasty and has been a long time coming, if I went out right now to the first bank I saw on the road and opened the first savings account in the brochure that would still be a hasty decision. Two very different decisions.
Again, you are talking about a decision to do something, the GP is suggesting that Ron Paul thought the actual "what exactly to do" decision was too hasty, not that the "should we do something" decision was too hasty.
You are almost right but wrong. Being a nerd and a father are easy to do at the same time. The problem lies in being a nerd and fathering a child at the same time.
Physics is physics and chemistry is chemistry and heat is heat no matter where you are. The problem is that not all extra-solar planets are like earth. For example gravity is different. Which would mean (all other things being equal) that life on those planets would be much more squat, or a lot more lightweight to overcome gravity. But that is only a small part. The summary mentioned some forms of life on this earth that are very different to what we know. What if we were all descendants of them. Nuclear war would still be a none-too-good thing due to the energy blasts of the bombs, but the resulting nuclear fallout wouldn't affect us that much. Global Warming would be a disrupting event, but the extra few degrees wouldn't begin to reach volcanic vent temperatures.
Our bodies are designed not only to handle, but to require oxygen, which is terribly corrosive to a great deal of things. So what about a life form from a planet that has little to no oxygen? They probably wouldn't like earth much. All of those things have an effect on the way evolution goes.
Evolution isn't trying to reach some definition of perfection other than survival. We're used to seeing a giraffe's long neck so we don't call it weird but they really are. There aren't that many long-necked animals out there. But somewhere in the ancestry of giraffes, some were born with extended necks, which allowed those to survive and others of the ancestral species to either die off or evolve in a separate path. Another example is the elephant. There aren't that many long nosed animals, so they really are strange, but we don't call them that because we are used to seeing them. Somewhere in their ancestry though, some were born with long trunks that allowed them survival while the rest of their kin either died off or evolved in a different path. Take the vortigaunts from Half Life as another fictitious example but one that demonstrates differences. We could say that on their planet, some where in their ancestry some were born with an extra arm and cool powers, but those survived while the others had to either die off, or evolve on a different path.
Disclaimers: Not all traits are specific and necessary to survival. Some are, but some are just related to sexual selection, and some are just traits that didn't lead to the destruction of the species. Any trait is fine, just so long as it doesn't lead to the destruction of the species. If it does, well, we don't see those species around anymore, or at least won't in the future. Also, these processes take a long time, usually not just a few generations.
But is this really the role of congress to investigate something like this. It's like when they investigated the MLB a few years ago. They just asked questions and made a big ruckus over it so that their constituents would think they're doing something. To my knowledge, they didn't do anything other than interview some baseball players about performance enhancing drugs. Is that really the role of congress? I really don't know, but if it is, I don't think it should be.
There are lots of things that congress could be doing, some of them are important, some of them are wasteful and stupid. But I don't see this as a matter of them working on only the important stuff. I see this as them working on something they shouldn't be.
My biggest beef with this is that congress is looking into this at all. It seems in the last few years that congress is doing a lot of stupid publicity-only type inquiries. A few years ago it was steroid use in baseball. They looked into Yahoo's business dealings in China. Now they are looking into the ESRB. I seem to recall other times that congress has gotten into things like this recently but I don't remember any specifics, just that I was thinking at the time "why is congress wasting their time here?" It is my opinion that the MLB was already toughening their drug use policies, Yahoo was in the wrong, and that the ESRB does need to look into their own ratings system. However, I don't think it's congress' responsibility to be inquiring into the matters. Don't they have laws to pass and repeal, a war to oversee, budgets to balance, etc?
I don't want to come across as sounding like congress can't do more than one thing at a time, it's just that I don't see these types of investigations as being part of the job description or even jurisdiction of congress. Maybe I'm wrong though. If I am, somebody please inform me. If I'm not wrong, I'm going to find out my representatives roles in these things and let them know what I think.
Seriously too, did they actually cause you some harm if they did lie
Not at all. They have done themselves harm. I try not to have dealings with people I deem to be dishonest. They haven't hurt me one bit though. I'm not getting frothy at the mouth about not buying Vista. I'm just saying they lied, they're dishonest, thus I don't feel I can trust them about anything else.
Who cares what their reason was anyway? Is it relevent?
In any other case, I wouldn't have cared what their reason was. They could have said it was pygmies threatening to destroy every Taco Bell in Redmond if they back ported it. If that was the reason, I would have thought they should lay off the drugs for a bit, but I would have accepted their reason nonetheless. The reason is only relevant insofar as trust is concerned.
Funny, I seem to recall quite a few angry posts here on/. being pissed off that it was Vista only.
When I said "Hardly at all" that was meant to mean it happened but not to the same extent as the DX10 thing has gone over for them.
The amount of "work" you say they had to do was pretty trivial
Maybe it was trivial. It could have been just: if( Vista ) run(); else quit(); but nonetheless that is more work than not putting it in.
There's nothing crappy about Vista that caused them to lie, I believe they were trying to avoid people screaming
Perhaps there is nothing crappy about Vista. Maybe Vista really is a godsend. So why didn't they tell the truth? No matter what reason they gave, some people would have been upset. So why lie about it and lose face? Why not just say that it would take too much time and effort and money without enough ROI? I have no idea why they chose to go the route they did. I just know that because they chose that route, my gut reaction is to consider them untrustworthy. My gut reaction is to see Vista as not all that worthy of my trust because its makers aren't all that worthy of my trust.
Maybe they didn't want to take the time, effort and money that would require, which means that there was no lie.
None of those are technical reasons, which means that there was a lie if those are the reasons. All of those would have been acceptable reasons. In fact, I believe it was a combination of several of those reasons. But still none of those reasons are technical reasons.
The crux of the matter is this: Could it be done? It's software, so yeah it's possible. MS (with the amount of money and developers it has) has no technical reason why they can't back port DX10 to XP. They have financial and other reasons surely. All through this thread I have stated that while that might make some people upset, I can understand that and appreciate that. If they decided not to back port simply because they rolled the dice or talked to some psychic I would think they're silly but I'd still accept that as their reason. Unfortunately, we're talking about one of the largest companies in the world telling us it is technical reasons they won't back port a piece of software to another piece of software, both of which they have the entire source code base to do so (as an aside, it was also them who decided to make it in such a way as to make it difficult to back port, which plays a part in this).
Notice that they didn't say it was time reasons.
Notice that they didn't say it was money reasons.
Notice that they didn't say it was too few developers.
Notice that they didn't say it was their shareholders.
Notice that they didn't say the psychic down the street told them it would cause bad omens.
No, they said it was technical reasons. There is no technical reason why MS cannot get DX10 to run on windows XP. The change could be in XP, the change could be in DX10, the change could be in both, but the change could happen "technically." So there was a lie.
I've said it before, I will say it again: That DX10 isn't on XP is not the issue. That they lied about the reasons for it is the issue. If they would fess up that they lied and then tell the truth, it would not matter to me what the true reason was. That is, I might find it a silly reason (if the psychic was the reason) but I would be able to cross off one more barrier to me ever buying Vista, and MS would be that much closer to making a sale.
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What about John D. Rockefeller? Though I suppose Rockefeller gave his kids some of his money. Then again, if you account for inflation, Rockefeller would have made Gates look poor.
True, but if it's the same measuring of one hour that most guys use, then these things will do that 4" in about 60 seconds, so it turns out for the best.
Call me lazy or what you will, but do any of those sites you linked to (or any site you know of) allow you to enter the names of bands or songs you like and then suggest indie music that is similar. Can I say I like Nirvana, Foo Fighters and Green Day and have them give me a list of bands that I would probably like?
I bought a fit about 5 months ago. I was on a waiting list for about a month for it. Called places in Denver, Las Vegas, and Salt Lake to see if I could get it earlier. Those are nice cars. But yes, the sport is the one to get. My wife and I wanted it (the sport) just for the cruise control alone.
Holy crap. I wonder if we have the same name.
I hope you are referring to drivers trying to time when they hit a light and not about cities timing the lights so that people don't have to stop. Glendale, AZ and a lot of the west side of Phoenix did that several years ago when I lived there and it was beautiful. If you went the speed limit you would hit green lights the vast majority of time. I have fond memories of driving down 67th Ave from I-10 all the way to Camelback Rd. The only red light I got was right off the freeway and even that was hit or miss. But after that I just drove the speed limit and never saw a red light again. It was fun to see people speed way up, get to the next light and stop, then when it turned green I would fly by them at the speed limit and they would be accelerating like it was the Daytona 500.
Alas, where I live now there are lights nearly every 2/10s of a mile. It's impossible to time lights like that. When lights are every mile (like the west side of Phx) you can do it. As it is, I live in a small community of ~30,000 now and because of the lights traffic is no better than in Phoenix. It's really sad.
However, none of that really matters at this point for this guy. If the ruling stands and he goes to jail, he can sue the employees and maybe win, but he'll still be in jail. If the ruling is overturned and he gets off free, we all know who the police will be watching with a very close eye for any little slip up.
Some examples:
- Surgeons are desensitized to blood, but they aren't looking for people to cut up
- Garbage men are desensitized to the smell, but they aren't looking for cologne that smells the same
- Morticians are desensitized to corpses, but they don't go out every night killing people just to have more
I'm sure you could think of other examples. Just because we become desensitized to something, doesn't mean we are more likely to act out on it. Some people will, that is for sure. Then again, some people were violent long before we even had media (including cave drawings).This. Newsletter please.
To further illustrate the point, allow me to use a different example. For a long time I have not had a retirement fund (I'm young, give me a break) but I have been aware of that and thinking that I should. So I finally came to a non-hasty decision that I should do something about it. While that decision was not hasty and has been a long time coming, if I went out right now to the first bank I saw on the road and opened the first savings account in the brochure that would still be a hasty decision. Two very different decisions.
Again, you are talking about a decision to do something, the GP is suggesting that Ron Paul thought the actual "what exactly to do" decision was too hasty, not that the "should we do something" decision was too hasty.
You are almost right but wrong. Being a nerd and a father are easy to do at the same time. The problem lies in being a nerd and fathering a child at the same time.
Physics is physics and chemistry is chemistry and heat is heat no matter where you are. The problem is that not all extra-solar planets are like earth. For example gravity is different. Which would mean (all other things being equal) that life on those planets would be much more squat, or a lot more lightweight to overcome gravity. But that is only a small part. The summary mentioned some forms of life on this earth that are very different to what we know. What if we were all descendants of them. Nuclear war would still be a none-too-good thing due to the energy blasts of the bombs, but the resulting nuclear fallout wouldn't affect us that much. Global Warming would be a disrupting event, but the extra few degrees wouldn't begin to reach volcanic vent temperatures.
Our bodies are designed not only to handle, but to require oxygen, which is terribly corrosive to a great deal of things. So what about a life form from a planet that has little to no oxygen? They probably wouldn't like earth much. All of those things have an effect on the way evolution goes.
Evolution isn't trying to reach some definition of perfection other than survival. We're used to seeing a giraffe's long neck so we don't call it weird but they really are. There aren't that many long-necked animals out there. But somewhere in the ancestry of giraffes, some were born with extended necks, which allowed those to survive and others of the ancestral species to either die off or evolve in a separate path. Another example is the elephant. There aren't that many long nosed animals, so they really are strange, but we don't call them that because we are used to seeing them. Somewhere in their ancestry though, some were born with long trunks that allowed them survival while the rest of their kin either died off or evolved in a different path. Take the vortigaunts from Half Life as another fictitious example but one that demonstrates differences. We could say that on their planet, some where in their ancestry some were born with an extra arm and cool powers, but those survived while the others had to either die off, or evolve on a different path.
Disclaimers: Not all traits are specific and necessary to survival. Some are, but some are just related to sexual selection, and some are just traits that didn't lead to the destruction of the species. Any trait is fine, just so long as it doesn't lead to the destruction of the species. If it does, well, we don't see those species around anymore, or at least won't in the future. Also, these processes take a long time, usually not just a few generations.
But is this really the role of congress to investigate something like this. It's like when they investigated the MLB a few years ago. They just asked questions and made a big ruckus over it so that their constituents would think they're doing something. To my knowledge, they didn't do anything other than interview some baseball players about performance enhancing drugs. Is that really the role of congress? I really don't know, but if it is, I don't think it should be.
There are lots of things that congress could be doing, some of them are important, some of them are wasteful and stupid. But I don't see this as a matter of them working on only the important stuff. I see this as them working on something they shouldn't be.
My biggest beef with this is that congress is looking into this at all. It seems in the last few years that congress is doing a lot of stupid publicity-only type inquiries. A few years ago it was steroid use in baseball. They looked into Yahoo's business dealings in China. Now they are looking into the ESRB. I seem to recall other times that congress has gotten into things like this recently but I don't remember any specifics, just that I was thinking at the time "why is congress wasting their time here?" It is my opinion that the MLB was already toughening their drug use policies, Yahoo was in the wrong, and that the ESRB does need to look into their own ratings system. However, I don't think it's congress' responsibility to be inquiring into the matters. Don't they have laws to pass and repeal, a war to oversee, budgets to balance, etc?
I don't want to come across as sounding like congress can't do more than one thing at a time, it's just that I don't see these types of investigations as being part of the job description or even jurisdiction of congress. Maybe I'm wrong though. If I am, somebody please inform me. If I'm not wrong, I'm going to find out my representatives roles in these things and let them know what I think.
The crux of the matter is this: Could it be done? It's software, so yeah it's possible. MS (with the amount of money and developers it has) has no technical reason why they can't back port DX10 to XP. They have financial and other reasons surely. All through this thread I have stated that while that might make some people upset, I can understand that and appreciate that. If they decided not to back port simply because they rolled the dice or talked to some psychic I would think they're silly but I'd still accept that as their reason. Unfortunately, we're talking about one of the largest companies in the world telling us it is technical reasons they won't back port a piece of software to another piece of software, both of which they have the entire source code base to do so (as an aside, it was also them who decided to make it in such a way as to make it difficult to back port, which plays a part in this).
Notice that they didn't say it was time reasons.
Notice that they didn't say it was money reasons.
Notice that they didn't say it was too few developers.
Notice that they didn't say it was their shareholders.
Notice that they didn't say the psychic down the street told them it would cause bad omens.
No, they said it was technical reasons. There is no technical reason why MS cannot get DX10 to run on windows XP. The change could be in XP, the change could be in DX10, the change could be in both, but the change could happen "technically." So there was a lie.
I've said it before, I will say it again: That DX10 isn't on XP is not the issue. That they lied about the reasons for it is the issue. If they would fess up that they lied and then tell the truth, it would not matter to me what the true reason was. That is, I might find it a silly reason (if the psychic was the reason) but I would be able to cross off one more barrier to me ever buying Vista, and MS would be that much closer to making a sale.