Nintendo engineers have revealed that the accelerated release will happen thanks to "a flashy glowing star thing we found in the employee fridge. After that it was simply a matter of holding B and running to the right."
In order to succeed in any field, you have to outdo the competition. These "free" services are not acknowledging the fact that their direct competition isn't only iTunes, but the illicit file-swapping services. Were I a college student who could magic up a torrent of completely free MP3s or OGGs which are perfectly archivable and portable, the only thing that would really sway me from this (if I were the type to even consider switching) would be something with a comparable level of usability, yet legal. For all but the most paranoid file-swappers, the simple fact that a junky service is OMG LEGAL!!!#$%^ really isn't enough to justify the insane levels of crippling they're doing to the media. And the rest of the kids aren't so against dropping a few dollars on iTunes for what they want.
In order to better serve the users to whom this is directed, the familiar "Edit This Page" link will be replaced a row of links such as "Flame This Page," "Fill This Page With Ethnic Slurs," "Compare This Page to Hitler," "Replace This Page With Tubgirl," and the all-important "Spin The Extremely Unimportant Data On This Page To Favor My Side."
You have to know that that sounds like a terribly weak excuse. If the majority of the spiders you take outside will die, and you know this, but you don't know specifically which ones will die, does that make you a more moral person (if you think that killing the spiders is immoral)?
No person is "more moral" than another, that's like saying one human is "more mammal" than another. Everyone has their own morals.
My yard has lots of trees, full of birds that eat bugs. It's also full of plant and animal life that benefits from dead bugs in the soil. Throwing a single spider out into the mix might not have a measurable effect for better or worse, but I personally feel better keeping it part of the immediate environmental life cycle rather than squashing it on a tissue, throwing it away, and having it end up in some landfill or being bleached into sludge in some recycling plant. It's not killing the spiders that I find immoral, so much as wasting them when they could go to better use.
That's true, but outside they have a fighting chance at either finding someplace else they can live, or feeding some otehr creature. Either way, I find it more useful than squashing them and chucking them in the trash.
'Some of our [digitally distributed first-party] games, by virtue of their design and hardware demands, simply couldn't work on Xbox 360.'"
You could say the same of any Sony game that's written for the proprietary hardware. You can't "simply" run a Speak-and-Spell, Tiger handheld, NES cartridge, Betamax tape, or deck of pinochle cards on XBox 360 either.
If you have someone that loves "all of God's creatures" then you should throw them in pond filled with mosquitoes and see how long it takes them to become a killing machine. Not very long I'd wager. In fact, mosquitoes are pretty good proof that there is no god. Why would a being of infinite good unleash such a horrible plague upon man?
Speaking as someone who upholds strict religious and moral convictions of respect for all life, to the point where I'm known for catching flies or spiders in a cup and chucking them outside rather than squashing them... I'll smash a damned mosquito on my arm without question.
Had that mosquito not been destined for squashing by whatever divine forces one may believe in, it wouldn't have landed on the grandson of a mid-20th-century malaria patient.
Which is terribly sad, really. It has a cult following and all, but crap promotion may have had a hand in the game's miserable sales. I remember almost buying it new, but at the time I had never heard of it, the box art and unimpressive writeup on the back put me off, and I ended up taking home some long-since-forgotten PS1 game or something. Which is really a shame.. I'm playing through it for the first time now (off a reccommendation in a Slashdot comment, actually) and sure, it's a bit dated graphically and the interface needs work, but story-wise I can honestly say it's the best game of this sort I've ever played. If the suits involved had put a little more of whatever it is they do behind this gem, who knows what we could have by now.
Here are just a few other standard, non-proprietary ideas with beginnings similar to ODF. If the distinguished Senator wishes to put his money where his mouth is, he'll have to avoid:
The Web - HTML is a non-proprietary file format that was developed without regard for every last accessibility option in mind. Who was thinking of screen readers in 1981?
In fact, the entire Internet - Who would have thought back when they came up with packet-switching networks in general and TCP in particular, that it would be used in the variety of ways we do now, and adapted to aid the disabled? No more use of digital networking devices for our esteemed Senator.
Television - When the first moving pictures were broadcast in the first half of the 20th Century, nobody had come up with a way for the hearing-impaired to more fully enjoy the content. Because it took until the 1970s to include sign-language translators in the lower corner of the screen (remember them?) and later develop closed captioning, modern TV should never have taken off like it did, and we should have fully investigated more proprietary standards than what was used. Boycott it all.
In fact, Faraday and his ilk weren't considering any of this when they were poking around the EM spectrum in the 19th century, so the Senator should avoid wireless transmissions entirely. No radio, no mobile phone, no ordering burgers through the drive-in speaker.
Speaking of driving, the inconsiderate cave person who developed the wheel never even bothered to take into account how to properly implement his or her creation in a wheelchair for the physically challenged. It took ages (literally!) before such a solution was put into practice. Screw the damned inconsiderate neolithics and their crappy invention. No wheels.
Ten years ago, people said the same of AOL's chatrooms. Should AOL then have logged every conversation in every chatroom on their service? How about instant messaging, since predators could have spoken to children that way? But, logically, people could just move off AOL onto the real Internet.. so we have to log every convo and PM in every IRC room as well, right? Also every message board, guestbook, IRC channel, blog, and every other site that allows people to comment or contact each other in any way, including this site, and your site. It doesn't matter if it's a site or service intended for kids or not, kids can always lie about their age as they do to get on Myspace, so everyone needs to keep full access records of everything ever.
And it's not just online! What about the phone? Predators use those to talk to kids as well. I propose we let the phone companies... oh, wait, they actually do that already. Nevermind.
They really are so cute, so adorably innocent and naive, as they go about their daily business, chatting away to other people, getting crazy naive ideas in their inexperienced little heads. Of course they think what they're doing is right, but they just don't have the capacity or life experience to understand. If only we could gather them around, hug them, tell them it's all going to be okay as long as they stop for a moment and consider what they're doing, and educate them about the full, terrible impact their actions will have not only on themselves, but on everyone else around them. But, of course, they don't want to listen to wisdom, not at their age..
..I'm referring, of course, to the damn fool parents groups and lawmakers.
Working anonymously has always been a basic right of writers, and nobody questions a book being written under a pen name. Why should writers of software be treated any differently, especially on the Internet where it's fully possible to know someone only as "John_D," "CaptKirkFan1969," or even something as ridiculous as my own?
You know, if we submit a story to Slashdot about Slashdot's new Backslash, we can Slashdot Backslash on Slashdot and then Backslash the Slashdot post about Backslash on Slashdot.
There is no state church in Finland per se, and citizens are not born into Lutherian church by default. Their parents can also choose otherwise, ie. not to became members of ANY church.
Thank you for the correction. May I ask what the situation is like for alternative churches in Finland, that have nothing to do with this Lutheran denomination? Is the only state-sponsored option to be Lutheran or no church at all? Are there difficulties in place for members of non-Lutheran denominations such as Catholicism, Judaism, or Islam, or ones even further from the "mainstream?" For example, a friend of mine is a Finnish Neopagan, and often describes facing social difficulties beyond my own experience as an American Neopagan, though this could be a regional rather than national issue in both our cases.
Unless I'm misreading, this is about resigning from one particular, state-run church which you are born into as a citizen. Are people who follow different faiths "anti-religion" even though they can devote their every waking moment to a religion which doesn't include this particular Lutheran denomination? Read this and get back to us.
Slashdot Mirror
It's times like this I start to miss the 1990s, and looking at grainy pics of JenniCam's cat sleeping on a bookshelf for three hours.
Nintendo engineers have revealed that the accelerated release will happen thanks to "a flashy glowing star thing we found in the employee fridge. After that it was simply a matter of holding B and running to the right."
In order to succeed in any field, you have to outdo the competition. These "free" services are not acknowledging the fact that their direct competition isn't only iTunes, but the illicit file-swapping services. Were I a college student who could magic up a torrent of completely free MP3s or OGGs which are perfectly archivable and portable, the only thing that would really sway me from this (if I were the type to even consider switching) would be something with a comparable level of usability, yet legal. For all but the most paranoid file-swappers, the simple fact that a junky service is OMG LEGAL!!!#$%^ really isn't enough to justify the insane levels of crippling they're doing to the media. And the rest of the kids aren't so against dropping a few dollars on iTunes for what they want.
In order to better serve the users to whom this is directed, the familiar "Edit This Page" link will be replaced a row of links such as "Flame This Page," "Fill This Page With Ethnic Slurs," "Compare This Page to Hitler," "Replace This Page With Tubgirl," and the all-important "Spin The Extremely Unimportant Data On This Page To Favor My Side."
Never mind your fancy metrics, what does that work out to in Imperial shitloads?
My yard has lots of trees, full of birds that eat bugs. It's also full of plant and animal life that benefits from dead bugs in the soil. Throwing a single spider out into the mix might not have a measurable effect for better or worse, but I personally feel better keeping it part of the immediate environmental life cycle rather than squashing it on a tissue, throwing it away, and having it end up in some landfill or being bleached into sludge in some recycling plant. It's not killing the spiders that I find immoral, so much as wasting them when they could go to better use.
Nature FTW. Those are my morals.
That's true, but outside they have a fighting chance at either finding someplace else they can live, or feeding some otehr creature. Either way, I find it more useful than squashing them and chucking them in the trash.
Had that mosquito not been destined for squashing by whatever divine forces one may believe in, it wouldn't have landed on the grandson of a mid-20th-century malaria patient.
..people want to attack bigger targets more than smaller ones.
I'm just going to keep all my important stuff on a TI-99/4a from now on. Let's see the botnets get hold of that!
Ten years ago, people said the same of AOL's chatrooms. Should AOL then have logged every conversation in every chatroom on their service? How about instant messaging, since predators could have spoken to children that way? But, logically, people could just move off AOL onto the real Internet.. so we have to log every convo and PM in every IRC room as well, right? Also every message board, guestbook, IRC channel, blog, and every other site that allows people to comment or contact each other in any way, including this site, and your site. It doesn't matter if it's a site or service intended for kids or not, kids can always lie about their age as they do to get on Myspace, so everyone needs to keep full access records of everything ever.
And it's not just online! What about the phone? Predators use those to talk to kids as well. I propose we let the phone companies... oh, wait, they actually do that already. Nevermind.
They really are so cute, so adorably innocent and naive, as they go about their daily business, chatting away to other people, getting crazy naive ideas in their inexperienced little heads. Of course they think what they're doing is right, but they just don't have the capacity or life experience to understand. If only we could gather them around, hug them, tell them it's all going to be okay as long as they stop for a moment and consider what they're doing, and educate them about the full, terrible impact their actions will have not only on themselves, but on everyone else around them. But, of course, they don't want to listen to wisdom, not at their age..
..I'm referring, of course, to the damn fool parents groups and lawmakers.
Working anonymously has always been a basic right of writers, and nobody questions a book being written under a pen name. Why should writers of software be treated any differently, especially on the Internet where it's fully possible to know someone only as "John_D," "CaptKirkFan1969," or even something as ridiculous as my own?
NASA has just released a photo of their chief scientist in charge of remote control technology.
Alas, no mod points, but that post just totally made my day.
Description: This cursed weapon deals +3 damage against wielder's own feet.
Price: Credibility and market share.
Weight penalty: Ponderous, especially to those with foot damage.
I wonder what this will mean for people with this setup who get pulled over.
You know, if we submit a story to Slashdot about Slashdot's new Backslash, we can Slashdot Backslash on Slashdot and then Backslash the Slashdot post about Backslash on Slashdot.
And then we'll simply implode!
Unless I'm misreading, this is about resigning from one particular, state-run church which you are born into as a citizen. Are people who follow different faiths "anti-religion" even though they can devote their every waking moment to a religion which doesn't include this particular Lutheran denomination? Read this and get back to us.
Because Dick Tracy beat Futurama by about 70 years.