Being placed on the Ohio registry, according to the article, includes restrictions on where you can live. So this would seem to be a denial of liberty without the due process (conviction in a criminal trial for a sex offense) required for such.
Ok then there's definitely a deprivation but due process is still (likely) satisfied. The amount of process required is a sliding scale based on the severity of the deprivation. Criminal convictions include jail time, so that deprivation liberty requires a jury verdict. Lesser deprivations don't. Restricting where someone can live isn't nearly as big a deal as locking them away. If the hearing has the proper safeguards (accused gets notice, rebuttal) then it's probably ok. See O'Connor's opinion in Hamdi v Rumsfeld, 542 U.S. 507 for a general discussion of due process requirements (despite the url, I don't go to Cornell. they just have a good online repository.).
I'm a second year law student, here's my take on this:
First of all, it's a civil registry. I don't see an automatic due process issue because the state isn't meting out any punishment to those who are listed (i.e. there's no state-led deprivation of life, liberty, or property). You might argue that being listed is enough of a black mark that it effectively bars finding employment or housing, thereby creating a due process issue, but that hasn't been borne out in practice yet.
If the accused can attend the hearing and present evidence in his defense before the judge, due process is satisfied so the above argument will be moot. Off the top of my head I can't think of any other part of the constitution this law would violate, but I haven't take con law yet so it's possible.
While I'm not in favor of this law, it's not nearly as bad as the knee-jerk reaction indicates. Tossing around any old accusation won't cut it; a judge will be weighing the evidence and making the decision. Presumably the accused can attend the hearing and present his own evidence, lessening the effect of unfounded accusations even further. And for those worried about the crazy maverick judge who's just hell-bent on ruining your life, I would fully expect the decision can be appealed and the appellate court will review all the facts anew (on many issues the presiding judge has unchallenged discretion; this wouldn't be one of them).
I can see where this law could be useful in cases where we know someone has committed a heinous act but the state can't punish him. Maybe the key evidence linking him is inadmissible in court (but still reliable). Maybe the statue of limitations has expired or there are jurisdictional problems. Maybe the victim is unwilling to press charges or has fled. Maybe what the person did is despicable but not criminal, e.g. someone with HIV who knowingly refuses to use protection or inform his/her partners. A criminal conviction is a very high bar. We can't always establish criminal conduct beyond a reasonable doubt even though we know for certain the person has done very bad things. Not saying I think this is the right approach, but it's not as harebrained as many here have suggested.
It's even worse if your cipher of permutations forms a group. In that case, for any two ENC keys k1 and k2, there exists a third ENC k3 such that ENC_k2 (ENC_k1 (x)) = ENC_k3 (x). In other words you can find a third key that produces the same permutation as the composition of keys 1 and 2. This means that breaking a double-encryption (or triple, quadruple, etc) is no harder than breaking a single encryption: the resulting permutation can always be described by a single key.
That's why 3DES uses EDE instead of EEE. While DES doesn't form a group, it does have some group-like structures which reduce the workload quite a bit. This doesn't apply to all ciphers btw; there are many more possible 64-bit permutations than 64-bit keys, so compositions can fall well outside those covered by keyspace.
Linguistics is a post-hoc analysis of language, so the example of learning French versus French grammar is not an informative one.
Actually the real problem with the analogy is similar to that: our brain is hard-wired to acquire language. I'm surprised no one picked that up, but it doesn't matter. The point was to illustrate the fallacy of the approach, and for that it works.
The prerequisite to doing non-trivial work in IT is to know how to think clearly, with a minimum of clutter.... A lot of annoying design and debugging problems are much more soluble if you can set up meaningful tests.... the ability to think abstractly and reason rigorously is essential. Any unforgiving technical or scientific discipline will teach some of this.
I'm with you on all those points. I encourage broad exposure to as many varied languages and programming paradigms as possible to develop a good understanding of ways to solve problems. "When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail". Data structures are essential too.
Where I part company with the OP (and perhaps you, I can't tell from your post) is over what this 'background knowledge' should include. Discrete mathematics, automata theory, computability, and complexity are absolutely the wrong place to start. There's a reason those are upper division and graduate cs courses: they aren't for beginners. And when space is tight, they're the first on my chopping block. They simply don't help problem solving much at the undergraduate level, and that's what an undergraduate cs education is: problem solving. The general logic skills help, but you can develop those a number of more useful ways.
Undergraduates (and beginners outside of school) should start with straight programming. Once they have a handle on the basics, they can move on to data structures and algorithms, where they'll encounter big-O notation. That's all the complexity theory a non-academic needs. Nobody programs Turing machines, automata are few and far between. Those things are a waste for a general education, even though I found them somewhat interesting. Their proper place is grad school.
The best approach to learning information technology is to first learn the foundation of the technology.... Once you have trained your mind on the fundamental theory, you will discover that most information technologies are quite simplistic.
By your logic, one should begin learning French by studying the history of French linguistics, cataloguing the phonemes/morphemes, and diagramming the inflectional forms. What a wonderful approach, you'll be speaking French in 5-10 years tops. Sure, you could get some language tapes (or just go to France) and pick up conversational French in a few months, but what's the point? Really, if you can't appreciate the intricate tongue movements of a voiced alveolar fricative, you're nothing but a grunting house-ape.
Once again illustrating the divide between theory and practice.
I'm a big fan of AWStats (awstats.sourceforge.net).
We got sucked in by the pretty graphs too. Internally, awstats is a mess. Some of the worst code spaghetti I've seen in awhile. As I already said, I'm not optimistic of their ability to improve going forward.
What I decided on was http://awstats.sourceforge.net/. It's got a pretty impressive feature list, and I like the look, and the sheer volume of data it can collect.
As someone who setup awstats for a high-traffic site last year, let me warn you -- beyond the available options, it ain't customizable. At all. The html generation is embedded in bits and pieces throughout their perl code. Some of the nastiest, speghettiest mess I've ever seen. They don't even use stylesheets for proper styling. If it does exactly what you want, then fine. But be forewarned: if your needs ever change, don't expect awstats to change with them.
the problem you encounter in becoming 'better' at that language is figuring out how to deal with problems and flush out theories, which takes critical problem solving skills that are better developed in philosophical study.
Except that undergraduate philosophy has very little to do with problem solving. From what I've seen, it's more about analyzing arguments than finding solutions. Logical dissection is a useful skill, especially for testing and debugging, but it's not problem-solving. The problem with philosophy in general is there's no objective basis for comparing solutions: all you can is say is whose argument is less flawed or what assumptions they contain, but there is no objective 'right answer'. I will grant that it promotes flexible thinking though, which helps.
Mathematics is what you really want. Upper division math has nothing to do with numbers or equations and everything to do with proofs. And proofs are nothing but logical problem-solving with highly abstract and symbolic language. You have a bunch of basic tools, now figure out how to get from point A (postulates) to point B (conclusion). Solutions can be evaluated for correctness because each branch starts from a limited set of postulates which everyone agrees on, unlike philosophy where the assumptions are contentious and unbounded.
In the very narrow sense that mathematics is a highly specialized form of logic, which is itself a branch of philosophy, your statement might be accurate. But that meaning is so far afield of the normal usage of the terms that it creates more confusion than elucidation.
FYI I was a math major, spent the next 8 years in computer science, and have a couple friends who majored in philosophy.
much like Amazon does when they profile you to recommend new products... The more info they have, the more they can cross-reference, looking for patterns and comparing with patterns of known profiles (criminals, political enemies, etc.)..
Ah yes, where would the world be without Amazon recommendations:
You've committed shoplifting. People who commit this crime also like
larceny, second degree
mail fraud
perjury
You voted for John Kerry. People who hate George Bush also hate
I think there are different types of law. A VERY precise language should be required for contracts, for instance.
That's a nice idea, but in practice it just wouldn't work. Courts have explicitly rejected the notion for a number of reasons:
the number of things you can contract to do is unlimited. if you can think of it, you can contract for it. about the only exceptions are violations of an inalienable right or public policy.
many, perhaps most contracts are not drafted by lawyers. a lot of contracts aren't even drafted. contracts can be formed based on oral agreements, informal agreements, even inferred from a pattern of behavior. when two people agree to do something and each receives a benefit, it's a contract.
basically, contracts just enforce business relationships. making those relationships harder, slower, and more expensive to enter into stifles commerce. imagine having to read and sign a contract just to pick up a pack of smokes at the corner store.
In other areas, the Latin and ye olde English provide an artificially high bar for laymen, and should be eliminated in favour of a more human readable format.
Definitely. Law has been doing exactly that pretty strenuously for the past 15 years. Schools don't even teach most of the old latin/saxon terms anymore. The only holdup is old-school lawyers and judges, and they'll disappear over time. But while the terms now have descriptive names in modern English, they still carry special meaning in the field. Every field has terms of art: a layman won't understand stacks and queues and binary trees just by knowing the words. There's no way to overcome that problem.
What your brother (a lawyer) really meant was "please don't tell anybody who might think that's a good idea because then my expensive degree will be worthless."
Actually what he meant was "Law can't be pinned down to precise language out of necessity. Specifying exact rules to cover every particular case is an impossible task. You can't foresee every possibility and even if you could there are too many factors to account for. It's an infinitely larger search space than chess, which is itself completely unmanageable. Hence law mostly relies on relatively short rules and human intelligence to apply them correctly in each situation." Where 'short' means someone who knows where to look can process the relevant ones in finite time.
I'm a programmer and a law student. Trust me, precise grammars are not an option.
Only it's a 100-course meal, the menu is 1000 items long, there's a cellar full of wines (most of them are unpronounceable) and it takes months to find a sequence that people will even TRY to eat all the way through.
Font size is the easiest thing there is for the end user to adjust to their preference if the page is designed correctly. My eyes are not at all good, but a couple of taps on ctrl+ made this page quite easy to view.
Tapping ctrl+ gets old real quick, especially if you do a lot of page-hopping on a bad site. Fortunately Firefox/Mozilla users can enforce a minimum font size through either the font preferences panel (fails on a lot of sites) or a personalized userContent.css. If you wanna go the extra mile like me, you'll setup a web proxy to blast all reduced font sizes before they even reach your browser.
If you ask me font face and size properties should never have been added to the html/css specs. Developers have no business touching my fonts unless they know everything about my monitor (type, size, resolution, viewing distance) and my eyesight. Hint: that would be never.
water? healthy and refreshing, give it a month and you won't go back.
tea? the real stuff is best, get some antioxidants with your caffeine.
coffee? sugar to taste or just straight black for your fix. avoid 4+ cups a day if you want to live awhile.
Whatever you do, I don't recommend chugging 4-packs of Starbucks double-shot espressos. My friend was so wired he kept a death grip on the steering wheel for 3 hours straight then nearly keeled over from a heart attack.
which can be a problem for some Linux users (such as CS students like myself)
As a CS student you should be able to get the sun JRE/JDK going on your linux box. (I speak as a former CS student who just did it... (again)...)
As a former CS student *and* instructor, take my advice: run away from Java as fast as you can. I'm not saying it's a bad langage/environment or doesn't serve some audiences very well. But Java's like cigarettes, starting on them too early stunts your growth.
CS students need to learn as many different programming approaches and concepts as they can. Procedural languages (C et al), iterative (generators, Python/Ruby), functional (lisp), declarative (prolog), message passing, object oriented, generic programming, closures, static vs dynamic typing, etc. Breadth of exposure to different approaches is crucial to knowing what approach to take with real-world problems. This should be coupled with a depth of understanding of what the system does 'under the covers' at each level. It makes all the difference in the world when facing unexpected problems and differentiates a code monkey from an engineer.
Unfortunately Java covers only a couple of these areas and none of them particularly well. Standardizing classes on Java is one of the worst things a CS dept can do. If you're stuck in this boat, all I can suggest is play around with other languages every chance you get.
If Google (which I love, BTW), doesn't like it, they can write their own browser and make Google the default search. To claim MS doesn't put any money into IE is pretty disingenuous.
Flashback to 1997: If Netscape (which I love, BTW) doesn't like MS forcing ISVs to only include IE, they can write their own operating system and make Netscape the default browser. To claim MS doesn't put any money into Windows is pretty disingenuous.
It's cute, and gamers (especially the kind that spend their evenings arguing on the internet) hate cute.
I'm not a gamer and I don't think it's cute. My beef is it's too gimmicky, like a very bad pun. I'm reminded of Jerry's problem with Whatley converting to Judaism:
Jerry: I think he converted just for the jokes. Priest: And this offends you as a Jewish person? Jerry: No, it offends me as a comedian!
I like Google, but this does not limit consumer choice. IE7 doesn't *block* google's web site. You can add Google search to their search box....
Flashback: I like Netscape, but this does not limit consumer choice. IE doesn't *block* Netscape's web site. You can add Netscape browser to their apps box....
Slashdot Mirror
Ok then there's definitely a deprivation but due process is still (likely) satisfied. The amount of process required is a sliding scale based on the severity of the deprivation. Criminal convictions include jail time, so that deprivation liberty requires a jury verdict. Lesser deprivations don't. Restricting where someone can live isn't nearly as big a deal as locking them away. If the hearing has the proper safeguards (accused gets notice, rebuttal) then it's probably ok. See O'Connor's opinion in Hamdi v Rumsfeld, 542 U.S. 507 for a general discussion of due process requirements (despite the url, I don't go to Cornell. they just have a good online repository.).
I'm a second year law student, here's my take on this:
First of all, it's a civil registry. I don't see an automatic due process issue because the state isn't meting out any punishment to those who are listed (i.e. there's no state-led deprivation of life, liberty, or property). You might argue that being listed is enough of a black mark that it effectively bars finding employment or housing, thereby creating a due process issue, but that hasn't been borne out in practice yet.
If the accused can attend the hearing and present evidence in his defense before the judge, due process is satisfied so the above argument will be moot. Off the top of my head I can't think of any other part of the constitution this law would violate, but I haven't take con law yet so it's possible.
While I'm not in favor of this law, it's not nearly as bad as the knee-jerk reaction indicates. Tossing around any old accusation won't cut it; a judge will be weighing the evidence and making the decision. Presumably the accused can attend the hearing and present his own evidence, lessening the effect of unfounded accusations even further. And for those worried about the crazy maverick judge who's just hell-bent on ruining your life, I would fully expect the decision can be appealed and the appellate court will review all the facts anew (on many issues the presiding judge has unchallenged discretion; this wouldn't be one of them).
I can see where this law could be useful in cases where we know someone has committed a heinous act but the state can't punish him. Maybe the key evidence linking him is inadmissible in court (but still reliable). Maybe the statue of limitations has expired or there are jurisdictional problems. Maybe the victim is unwilling to press charges or has fled. Maybe what the person did is despicable but not criminal, e.g. someone with HIV who knowingly refuses to use protection or inform his/her partners. A criminal conviction is a very high bar. We can't always establish criminal conduct beyond a reasonable doubt even though we know for certain the person has done very bad things. Not saying I think this is the right approach, but it's not as harebrained as many here have suggested.
Looks like Pluto took the words straight out of LL Cool J's mouth:
"Don't call it a comeback
I been here for years
Rockin my peers and puttin suckas in fear"
It's even worse if your cipher of permutations forms a group. In that case, for any two ENC keys k1 and k2, there exists a third ENC k3 such that ENC_k2 (ENC_k1 (x)) = ENC_k3 (x). In other words you can find a third key that produces the same permutation as the composition of keys 1 and 2. This means that breaking a double-encryption (or triple, quadruple, etc) is no harder than breaking a single encryption: the resulting permutation can always be described by a single key.
That's why 3DES uses EDE instead of EEE. While DES doesn't form a group, it does have some group-like structures which reduce the workload quite a bit. This doesn't apply to all ciphers btw; there are many more possible 64-bit permutations than 64-bit keys, so compositions can fall well outside those covered by keyspace.
I think this is covered in chapter 7 of the Handbook of Applied Cryptography.
Linguistics is a post-hoc analysis of language, so the example of learning French versus French grammar is not an informative one.
Actually the real problem with the analogy is similar to that: our brain is hard-wired to acquire language. I'm surprised no one picked that up, but it doesn't matter. The point was to illustrate the fallacy of the approach, and for that it works.
The prerequisite to doing non-trivial work in IT is to know how to think clearly, with a minimum of clutter. ... A lot of annoying design and debugging problems are much more soluble if you can set up meaningful tests. ... the ability to think abstractly and reason rigorously is essential. Any unforgiving technical or scientific discipline will teach some of this.
I'm with you on all those points. I encourage broad exposure to as many varied languages and programming paradigms as possible to develop a good understanding of ways to solve problems. "When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail". Data structures are essential too.
Where I part company with the OP (and perhaps you, I can't tell from your post) is over what this 'background knowledge' should include. Discrete mathematics, automata theory, computability, and complexity are absolutely the wrong place to start. There's a reason those are upper division and graduate cs courses: they aren't for beginners. And when space is tight, they're the first on my chopping block. They simply don't help problem solving much at the undergraduate level, and that's what an undergraduate cs education is: problem solving. The general logic skills help, but you can develop those a number of more useful ways.
Undergraduates (and beginners outside of school) should start with straight programming. Once they have a handle on the basics, they can move on to data structures and algorithms, where they'll encounter big-O notation. That's all the complexity theory a non-academic needs. Nobody programs Turing machines, automata are few and far between. Those things are a waste for a general education, even though I found them somewhat interesting. Their proper place is grad school.
The best approach to learning information technology is to first learn the foundation of the technology.... Once you have trained your mind on the fundamental theory, you will discover that most information technologies are quite simplistic.
By your logic, one should begin learning French by studying the history of French linguistics, cataloguing the phonemes/morphemes, and diagramming the inflectional forms. What a wonderful approach, you'll be speaking French in 5-10 years tops. Sure, you could get some language tapes (or just go to France) and pick up conversational French in a few months, but what's the point? Really, if you can't appreciate the intricate tongue movements of a voiced alveolar fricative, you're nothing but a grunting house-ape.
Once again illustrating the divide between theory and practice.
Robert Cringley has written a thought-provoking article...
segmentation fault, core dumped
Browser Stats: 90.08% MSIE 6.0 - 4.06% Firefox 1.5.0 - 2.10% MSIE 5.0 - 1.75% Firefox 1.0.7 - 0.89% MSIE 5.5 - 0.38% MSIE 5.01 - 0.38% MSIE 5.23 - 0.16% Firefox 1.0.1 - 0.08% Opera 8.51 - 0.05% Safari 1.2 - 0.03% Netscape 7.1 - 0.03% Firefox 1.0 - 0.03% Mozilla 5.0
Quick, post a link to your site so I can make lynx skyrocket up those charts! I should at least pass IE 5.5 by lunch tomorrow.
While I'm at it, what OSes would you like to see more of? Atari? CP/M? Goodbye Windows ME, hello Tenex and Multics!
I'm a big fan of AWStats (awstats.sourceforge.net).
We got sucked in by the pretty graphs too. Internally, awstats is a mess. Some of the worst code spaghetti I've seen in awhile. As I already said, I'm not optimistic of their ability to improve going forward.
What I decided on was http://awstats.sourceforge.net/. It's got a pretty impressive feature list, and I like the look, and the sheer volume of data it can collect.
As someone who setup awstats for a high-traffic site last year, let me warn you -- beyond the available options, it ain't customizable. At all. The html generation is embedded in bits and pieces throughout their perl code. Some of the nastiest, speghettiest mess I've ever seen. They don't even use stylesheets for proper styling. If it does exactly what you want, then fine. But be forewarned: if your needs ever change, don't expect awstats to change with them.
the problem you encounter in becoming 'better' at that language is figuring out how to deal with problems and flush out theories, which takes critical problem solving skills that are better developed in philosophical study.
Except that undergraduate philosophy has very little to do with problem solving. From what I've seen, it's more about analyzing arguments than finding solutions. Logical dissection is a useful skill, especially for testing and debugging, but it's not problem-solving. The problem with philosophy in general is there's no objective basis for comparing solutions: all you can is say is whose argument is less flawed or what assumptions they contain, but there is no objective 'right answer'. I will grant that it promotes flexible thinking though, which helps.
Mathematics is what you really want. Upper division math has nothing to do with numbers or equations and everything to do with proofs. And proofs are nothing but logical problem-solving with highly abstract and symbolic language. You have a bunch of basic tools, now figure out how to get from point A (postulates) to point B (conclusion). Solutions can be evaluated for correctness because each branch starts from a limited set of postulates which everyone agrees on, unlike philosophy where the assumptions are contentious and unbounded.
In the very narrow sense that mathematics is a highly specialized form of logic, which is itself a branch of philosophy, your statement might be accurate. But that meaning is so far afield of the normal usage of the terms that it creates more confusion than elucidation.
FYI I was a math major, spent the next 8 years in computer science, and have a couple friends who majored in philosophy.
much like Amazon does when they profile you to recommend new products... The more info they have, the more they can cross-reference, looking for patterns and comparing with patterns of known profiles (criminals, political enemies, etc.)..
Ah yes, where would the world be without Amazon recommendations:
You've committed shoplifting. People who commit this crime also like
You voted for John Kerry. People who hate George Bush also hate
That's a nice idea, but in practice it just wouldn't work. Courts have explicitly rejected the notion for a number of reasons:
In other areas, the Latin and ye olde English provide an artificially high bar for laymen, and should be eliminated in favour of a more human readable format.
Definitely. Law has been doing exactly that pretty strenuously for the past 15 years. Schools don't even teach most of the old latin/saxon terms anymore. The only holdup is old-school lawyers and judges, and they'll disappear over time. But while the terms now have descriptive names in modern English, they still carry special meaning in the field. Every field has terms of art: a layman won't understand stacks and queues and binary trees just by knowing the words. There's no way to overcome that problem.
What your brother (a lawyer) really meant was "please don't tell anybody who might think that's a good idea because then my expensive degree will be worthless."
Actually what he meant was "Law can't be pinned down to precise language out of necessity. Specifying exact rules to cover every particular case is an impossible task. You can't foresee every possibility and even if you could there are too many factors to account for. It's an infinitely larger search space than chess, which is itself completely unmanageable. Hence law mostly relies on relatively short rules and human intelligence to apply them correctly in each situation." Where 'short' means someone who knows where to look can process the relevant ones in finite time.
I'm a programmer and a law student. Trust me, precise grammars are not an option.
Only it's a 100-course meal, the menu is 1000 items long, there's a cellar full of wines (most of them are unpronounceable) and it takes months to find a sequence that people will even TRY to eat all the way through.
Nice try, we know who you really are.
Font size is the easiest thing there is for the end user to adjust to their preference if the page is designed correctly. My eyes are not at all good, but a couple of taps on ctrl+ made this page quite easy to view.
Tapping ctrl+ gets old real quick, especially if you do a lot of page-hopping on a bad site. Fortunately Firefox/Mozilla users can enforce a minimum font size through either the font preferences panel (fails on a lot of sites) or a personalized userContent.css. If you wanna go the extra mile like me, you'll setup a web proxy to blast all reduced font sizes before they even reach your browser.
If you ask me font face and size properties should never have been added to the html/css specs. Developers have no business touching my fonts unless they know everything about my monitor (type, size, resolution, viewing distance) and my eyesight. Hint: that would be never.
Have you considered:
Whatever you do, I don't recommend chugging 4-packs of Starbucks double-shot espressos. My friend was so wired he kept a death grip on the steering wheel for 3 hours straight then nearly keeled over from a heart attack.
this means that Windows will be the only major OS that can't seem to come with Java delivered right out of the box.
In other words, running Windows does have some benefits after all.
As a former CS student *and* instructor, take my advice: run away from Java as fast as you can. I'm not saying it's a bad langage/environment or doesn't serve some audiences very well. But Java's like cigarettes, starting on them too early stunts your growth.
CS students need to learn as many different programming approaches and concepts as they can. Procedural languages (C et al), iterative (generators, Python/Ruby), functional (lisp), declarative (prolog), message passing, object oriented, generic programming, closures, static vs dynamic typing, etc. Breadth of exposure to different approaches is crucial to knowing what approach to take with real-world problems. This should be coupled with a depth of understanding of what the system does 'under the covers' at each level. It makes all the difference in the world when facing unexpected problems and differentiates a code monkey from an engineer.
Unfortunately Java covers only a couple of these areas and none of them particularly well. Standardizing classes on Java is one of the worst things a CS dept can do. If you're stuck in this boat, all I can suggest is play around with other languages every chance you get.
If Google (which I love, BTW), doesn't like it, they can write their own browser and make Google the default search. To claim MS doesn't put any money into IE is pretty disingenuous.
Flashback to 1997: If Netscape (which I love, BTW) doesn't like MS forcing ISVs to only include IE, they can write their own operating system and make Netscape the default browser. To claim MS doesn't put any money into Windows is pretty disingenuous.
Wii are tired of hearing about how many bad puns we can do with the name. Wii don't care. Wii want to try the console. Wii want to try the controler.
Wii wants it. Wii wants.... our preeecccciiousssssssss
It's cute, and gamers (especially the kind that spend their evenings arguing on the internet) hate cute.
I'm not a gamer and I don't think it's cute. My beef is it's too gimmicky, like a very bad pun. I'm reminded of Jerry's problem with Whatley converting to Judaism:
Jerry: I think he converted just for the jokes.
Priest: And this offends you as a Jewish person?
Jerry: No, it offends me as a comedian!
So, then you're just reenforcing my statement that it's not an antitrust issue?
Reductio ad absurdum and I disagree.
And as a personal rant I have to say that as a consumer I have never felt hurt by MS's monopoly
Something about absence of evidence vs evidence of absense springs to mind.
I like Google, but this does not limit consumer choice. IE7 doesn't *block* google's web site. You can add Google search to their search box....
Flashback: I like Netscape, but this does not limit consumer choice. IE doesn't *block* Netscape's web site. You can add Netscape browser to their apps box....