Print and other traditional media are dying. Hell, even the coherent article is dying. Trouble is, What if you like to read material in that format? Plenty of mags have already bit the dust, and many more have been reduced to unreadable pap ("Games for Windows" is nowhere near the calibre of "Computer Gaming World" in 1990). And while some of bigger circulation giants seem to be holding up well, Like "Rolling Stone" and "Playboy" I worry even about their long term viability. At the very least, where is Rolling Stone going to recruit writers, or Gods of Rock help us, editors in 20, even 10 years? What's going to be left but the incoherent ramblings of Scruffy McBlogger and Ahab al Troll?
Actually those species have a symbiotic relationship with Nitrogen Fixing bacteria that grow in what are usually nodules in the root system. Exceptions include Carnivorous plants like the Venus Fly trap, which consume insects to digest their protein as a nitrogen source. But that's beside the point. The post I was replying to originally claimed that Plants absorb Carbon from sources in the ground which is absolutely wrong. Plants respire, and absorb Carbon Dioxide from the air (or water, for freshwater or marine algae). Plants obtain Carbon from Carbon Dioxide absorbed through their leaves. Plants absorb water, Nitrogenous nutrients, and salts and minerals through their roots.
Plants utilize atmospheric Carbon Dioxide as their Carbon source.
Fossil Fuels are used in fertilizer production as an energy source to manufacture Nitric Acid and Ammonia. Because plants mine the soil for Nitrogen, NOT Carbon dioxide.
People aren't claiming a magic bullet solution. What they are claiming is that a heavily subsidized food product that is present as an additive in almost all mass produced foods sold in the United States has some fairly significant health risks. Which is quite different.
One of the reasons Fructose gets so much coverage lately is a number of discoveries about the way it affects metabolism. Among them the discovery that Fructose, unlike glucose, does not cause a normal satiety response in humans. What does this mean? It means that people can eat fructose heavy foods all day long, and the natural metabolic changes that trigger the sensation in the brain that says "I feel full. I should stop eating." never happen, or are at least strongly suppressed. Is it not clear why many people suspect that's a problem and might lead to increased incidence of obesity? The attention focused is due to the degree to which High Fructose Corn Syrup is used in the American Food Industry. They're trying to focus on the problem areas in the American diet that they suspect change would result in the biggest impact.
Aw come on? nobody has anything to reply with? Just a "yep, that's interesting, I probably agree with that." I'm not even going to get a complaint that using an AI far more capable than anything available today to run a game of D&D (or equivalent) is extremely frivolous?
Peter Molyneux is great at coming up with ideas, not so good at implementation. This cycle has been repeated multiple times. As such, I've learned to just ignore the hype. Fable was pretty fun (certainly an adequate action/adventure/rpg thing) if you came into it like I did, ignoring the hype and hoping for a fun game.
In a broader sense though, I think that gaming really suffers from a lack of Strong AI. Developers have been trying to do what Molyneux hyped up for "Black & White" since at least the early '90's. There was an early preview of a medieval RPG in CGW, whose name I can't remember, but they were hoping to have really deep and complex NPCs, and a dynamic political Arthurian environment that behaved in a natural way, with Romance, and Fights, and the whole shebang (on 486's no less!) Needless to say, they ran into some heavy problems and the project died, never to see the light of day. Can you imagine the kinds of games possible with Strong (or even strong-ish) AI? Games with the real, equivalent of a GM behind them? Stuff that would make Neverwinter Nights with its limited human GM tools look like the first Wizardry from 1980? Truly dynamic scenarios and rewards?
Even more accurate would be to say, water on a planet that is outside of our solar system. Water has been known to exist in interstellar clouds for decades.
Hmmm, reading your post something occurs to me. Wikipedia is a pretty big public resource, wouldn't it make sense to propose supporting it with tax dollars? Like the BBC? Or like how I wish NPR and PBS were supported? What would $100 million/year endowment for support of Wikipedia do? That's nothing on federal budget scales, and with that kind of money, they could have top quality hosting, and plenty of money to buy various sorts of stuff for distribution.
And who, out of the actual realm of possibilities do you think would be better from a progressive democrat's point of view? Edwards is probably the only real alternative. Hillary is a conservative Bitch. Obama does NOT have a progressive record. So, that leaves what then?
That issue interests me greatly. Remember how that case went? Remember how the judge recommended that Microsoft be broken up? Can you even imagine how devastating that would be to Microsoft today? With the number of divisions (particularly Microsoft Entertainment, that they're supporting Billion dollar/year losses with Office/Windows sales?)
Now, here's where I'm going to get really crazy into progressive fantasy. Suppose a major shake-up happens in the '08 elections. Conservatives get crucified left and right. Bush has been impeached for Obstruction of Justice (which he just did again today, when he invoked "Executive Privilege" to prevent White House Aides from testifying under Oath). Both the house and senate see major shake-ups, and some lefty, like Edwards or (dare to dream) Gore, is sitting in the Oval Office.
Now, seems to me that because of their previous conviction, some nasty complaints to a newly empowered FTC could result in a review of Microsoft's behavior following their conviction. What if they found it necessary to enact the judges original recommendation? Can you imagine the shock-waves? Early '09 "Microsoft Busted," "Microsoft Split into 5 Separate Companies" I'm not saying it's even possible, but just the scenario gives me the shivers!
In general, corporations fucking over everybody that doesn't have a few hundred million dollars to defend themselves with. In my view, Libertarianism works out the same as the Law of he Jungle. If property rights are the only rights that are valued, only the propertied have rights, and the more property they have, the more rights they have. That isn't the kind of world I find appealing. I approve of equality of opportunity, for everyone, to succeed to the best of their ability. And equality of result to the extent to maintain that opportunity for future generations. Call it Wyoming Knott's views from "Moon is a Harsh Mistress," or possibly the societal structure from "For Us the Living" (and I'm not convinced social credit wouldn't work either, I could go on a whole tirade about why what we're doing is worse, our money is just as fiat as the money in that society, but instead of driving demand, and growing the economy by giving the script to the people, we just let Banks control it all)
Not really. He started out pretty Left Wing. Just read "For Us the Living" which lays out his political manifesto in 1938. It's way out there in Hippie-Socialist Commune land (about like things Mike advocated in "Stranger" which was unpublishable in '38, casual nudity, sex, etc. As well as wealth redistribution) As he got older, he shifted to more right wing. Although, I think that was a bit of a reaction to the level of crowding in society. One of the Quotes from the "Notebooks of Lazarus Long" is, I think, illustrative: "When a place gets crowded enough to require ID's, social collapse is not far away. It is time to go elsewhere. The best thing about space travel is that it made it possible to go elsewhere."
His libertarian individualism is really only workable in a frontier society, which is why he tended to write about them so much. Here, that kind of thing results in the trends we see in the world today. At least that's my take on it. "Friday" in my opinion, is late Heinlein at his finest. It's about the Earth, crowded, technologically advanced, paranoid, with various wealthy individuals and corporations pretty well controlling every aspect of peoples lives. (No similarity with the present day at all!)
Har, har. Nice. Now back to the real world in which many times, employers expect to be able to contact their minions whenever and wherever they please. (And the same world where said Hippie-Mormon-Cannibal-Communists living on some island somewhere had their island taken away for not paying taxes. I hear its a very upscale resort now, with some colorful wait staff. They have the coolest cellphones too! You can reach them from the middle of the jungle for a refill of your daquiri!) That real world is where its impossible to get away from it all like that, unless you're already independently wealthy.
The Problem is this: lots of people want, and or are required by their employers to have, reliable cell service. That they can't get it in the USA because of inadequate telecommunications regulatory oversight is a legitimate problem in many peoples lives.
I disagree. In 1900, the amounts of power required to learn something useful were on the order of Watts. Anybody (even in an area without electricity) could sit and do meaningful research if they had the inclination and they didn't have to work for a living. People like Thomas Edison, Nikolai Tesla, James Clark Maxwell, could be mad scientists in a way that just isn't possible today. By the 1940's the amount of power was up to Megawatts, and fundamental research already required major industrial scale installations, like Oak Ridge, or Bell Labs. Sixty years later, the amounts are orders of magnitude higher. The amount of power required to do the experiments necessary to develop a theory of everything may well be beyond even a solar system scale civilization. Or we may learn all there is to know when the Large Hadron Collider comes online. But we honestly don't know at this point.
You're flirting with proclaiming one of the great evil secrets of the recording industry. The vast majority of all Rock/Pop/Country/Rap/etc music from the 20th century and afterwards is extremely simple. It thus utilizes a fairly small subset of all possible music. The real truth is this: if someone were to compare those works with the works of just the great classical master (Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, Schubert, etc, etc) it is a probability approaching certainty that all modern musical melodies exist in those libraries. What this means is that almost all pop music, that is, the tablature, is really public domain. It is unowned and unownable, for the same reason I can't go out and claim authorship of the works Henry Fielding or Robert Louis Stevenson. Somebody already wrote all of that stuff. It doesn't matter, even if I decide that "two roads diverged in a yellow wood" all on my own, its already been written, and the same is true for all modern music (baring a few far out experimentalists).
See, that's disgusting. The electric chair is an abomination for exactly the reason you cite. It's an excruciatingly painful and slow method of execution. Approximately equal to tossing a human being (instead of a lobster) into a huge pot of boiling water. I'm not actually against the death penalty. I think it should be used more widely than it is, but not the electric chair. A properly executed hanging is far more efficient and far less prurient than the electric chair (a split second drop followed by a broken neck at the base of the skull causes death about as instant as it gets). Hell, if we really wanted to be morally upstanding, we would perform executions by morphine overdose. Sleep followed by death through respiratory depression.
Revenge should have no part in it. It should be all about what is best for society. There are people out there that have a pathological urge to kill, rape, or perform other horrifically destructive acts (rob thousands of people of their life savings and retirement). Many of these are mentally retarded, or otherwise mentally ill, but in my opinion that's probably irrelevant. In the most extreme cases there is little we can do. And in the less extreme cases, we need to do better.
No. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collusion. There is no competition amongst oil producers, because OPEC controls a good 80+% of the supply. The competition only exists between different gas stations (although most of those are owned by OPEC puppets as well) where the small family owned gas stations (there are a couple out there) get squeezed for every last penny.
Except Troika's titles were buggy. I would also argue that Arcanum's art wasn't so much dated, as bad. And there's really no excuse for it. I would argue that the Adventure Genre was killed in much the same way: by companies churning out cheap garbage, which consumers refused to buy, which companies saw as meaning the genre was dead, and therefore didn't make anymore. Release now - Patch later is disastrous, and unnecessary.
For support of my point of view, I point to Telltale Games, they're doing quite well with their new episodic Sam and Max series. (The only reason I haven't bought them is they aren't available for Macs, and unless I upgrade to an Intel Mac before, I'm hoping to get the series on the Wii.) Sure, the fanboys bitched about some things. Max's voice for one. They really could have done a better job finding at least a similar sounding VA to the original games, but it doesn't really matter. The games are stable and bug free, the art is consistent and well designed, and people are buying.
Precisely what I was thinking. FPS enthusiasts usually come in two types: the graphics whore, and now the Drunk Frat Guy who discovered deathmatch with Halo and thinks Microsoft invented the FPS. The Trouble is, both of these are tiny niche markets, yet they dominate the direction of the industry, that is, if you listen to the hype machine and ignore who's raking in the sales and profits. I wish the gaming industry would discover the long tail theory. There's plenty of ready made markets that could support titles in the range of $1million to $5million in development costs, and they go completely ignored. If some companies would start producing really slick, well polished, 2D Adventure, RPG, and Strategy games, they would probably meet with a lot of success without much outlay.
Unfortunately in this case, Lawyers have one of the best Unions in the Country (Another being the American Medical Association). It is very hard to get a lawyer disbarred. They basically have to make themselves a big enough embarrassment to other lawyers that they complain (Running around pissing off Judges is a very good way though, and Thompson's done plenty of that). Suffice it to say that Lawyers are very cliqueish and tend to protect their own right up to the point where it becomes a huge public fiasco. This is why, although many, many of them do some pretty disgusting things, and behave in horribly inappropriate ways, it is very, very rare for any one to get disbarred. It's only when the general legal community starts gagging that they do something, and they hear about societies worst every day, it's pretty hard to gross out a seasoned Criminal Lawyer.
I have some knowledge about State Bar Association Ethics Boards, from first hand accounts. It all depends on what they want to know. In the case I know about, the guy being investigated got to pick two doctors, the Board one. His Doctor's testified that he "was not a threat to himself or others" which is doctor-speak for "I couldn't justify to a judge having him involuntarily committed." It doesn't mean any more than that. Fortunately the Ethics board was well aware of that. When asked if they believed he would do the things things that prompted the inquiry again, they admitted it was possible (in the usual non-committal sort of way, but lawyers, unlike juries, understand what that stuff means). The Board's Doctor said the same things in a more formal kind of way. The Board recommended in their report to the State Supreme Court, that he not have his license ever reinstated (he had already been suspended from practicing law due to his actions).
It really depends on the Board. I think its very possible, given his previous history of warnings in the Florida legal system, that Thompson is about to get slapped pretty hard. They aren't happy with him already. As I said, he's received a number of warnings, and has been removed from cases by judges for his behavior.
No, that was not what I said. A natural Monopoly arises because of consumer choice. If company A just makes the product that consumers prefer, how does it enhance consumer choice to force consumers to buy company B's product? If the European prosecutors were taking the stance that DRM itself was illegal, because it was anti-consumer, that would be fine. They could simply require that it be removed from ALL products sold in the European Union. But they aren't. They're going after Apple, whose DRM is actually the least restrictive.
Exactly. Don't want to believe in Science? Watch a video of the Trinity test sometime. Go out to New Mexico and feel a piece of radioactive glass formed by the explosion. It's right there. See it, Feel it, Smell it, Taste it, Chew it (not recommended). Where's God? Second star to the right and straight on till morning?
Now Science can actually explain the feelings of god. Those feelings are essentially a seizure in a certain part of the brain. You can watch it on Video, thanks to Science through an MRI. It's really similar to what happens when you do an MRI on someone who has received a dose of Psychedelic drugs that cause hallucinations.
True, but arguably irrelevant for the reasons sogoodsofarsowhat (662830) cites. If that is the law there, then it is quite foolish. Natural Monopolies just sometimes result from consumers having free choice. Should you limit the amount Coca-Cola Corporation is allowed to produce just because people prefer it to Pepsi, and thereby force them to buy Pepsi or something else instead(Which is not to say there might not be good reasons to limit Soda companies, health among them)? Trying to fight a natural monopoly requires Soviet Russia Style policies, with restriction of freedom and trade embargoes.
No, you didn't read my post. Having a Monopoly is not a crime. Using a monopoly to gain a monopoly in another market is. Can you see the distinction? Microsoft isn't guilty of antitrust violations because of their Monopoly with Windows, they're guilty of antitrust violations for using their Windows Monopoly to gain other monopolies in Office Suites and Internet Browsers. In short: Having a monopoly = not illegal; Having a monopoly and abusing it to gain other monopolies = illegal.
DOS versions of Wordperfect didn't suck. They were very good actually. Now, did the Windows versions of Wordperfect suck because Corel was inferior, or because Microsoft wouldn't document their Operating System APIs to make a level playing field? Remember: "DOS isn't Done till Lotus won't Run!"
Slashdot Mirror
Print and other traditional media are dying. Hell, even the coherent article is dying. Trouble is, What if you like to read material in that format? Plenty of mags have already bit the dust, and many more have been reduced to unreadable pap ("Games for Windows" is nowhere near the calibre of "Computer Gaming World" in 1990). And while some of bigger circulation giants seem to be holding up well, Like "Rolling Stone" and "Playboy" I worry even about their long term viability. At the very least, where is Rolling Stone going to recruit writers, or Gods of Rock help us, editors in 20, even 10 years? What's going to be left but the incoherent ramblings of Scruffy McBlogger and Ahab al Troll?
Actually those species have a symbiotic relationship with Nitrogen Fixing bacteria that grow in what are usually nodules in the root system. Exceptions include Carnivorous plants like the Venus Fly trap, which consume insects to digest their protein as a nitrogen source. But that's beside the point. The post I was replying to originally claimed that Plants absorb Carbon from sources in the ground which is absolutely wrong. Plants respire, and absorb Carbon Dioxide from the air (or water, for freshwater or marine algae). Plants obtain Carbon from Carbon Dioxide absorbed through their leaves. Plants absorb water, Nitrogenous nutrients, and salts and minerals through their roots.
Plants utilize atmospheric Carbon Dioxide as their Carbon source.
Fossil Fuels are used in fertilizer production as an energy source to manufacture Nitric Acid and Ammonia. Because plants mine the soil for Nitrogen, NOT Carbon dioxide.
One of the reasons Fructose gets so much coverage lately is a number of discoveries about the way it affects metabolism. Among them the discovery that Fructose, unlike glucose, does not cause a normal satiety response in humans. What does this mean? It means that people can eat fructose heavy foods all day long, and the natural metabolic changes that trigger the sensation in the brain that says "I feel full. I should stop eating." never happen, or are at least strongly suppressed. Is it not clear why many people suspect that's a problem and might lead to increased incidence of obesity? The attention focused is due to the degree to which High Fructose Corn Syrup is used in the American Food Industry. They're trying to focus on the problem areas in the American diet that they suspect change would result in the biggest impact.
Aw come on? nobody has anything to reply with? Just a "yep, that's interesting, I probably agree with that." I'm not even going to get a complaint that using an AI far more capable than anything available today to run a game of D&D (or equivalent) is extremely frivolous?
In a broader sense though, I think that gaming really suffers from a lack of Strong AI. Developers have been trying to do what Molyneux hyped up for "Black & White" since at least the early '90's. There was an early preview of a medieval RPG in CGW, whose name I can't remember, but they were hoping to have really deep and complex NPCs, and a dynamic political Arthurian environment that behaved in a natural way, with Romance, and Fights, and the whole shebang (on 486's no less!) Needless to say, they ran into some heavy problems and the project died, never to see the light of day. Can you imagine the kinds of games possible with Strong (or even strong-ish) AI? Games with the real, equivalent of a GM behind them? Stuff that would make Neverwinter Nights with its limited human GM tools look like the first Wizardry from 1980? Truly dynamic scenarios and rewards?
Even more accurate would be to say, water on a planet that is outside of our solar system. Water has been known to exist in interstellar clouds for decades.
Hmmm, reading your post something occurs to me. Wikipedia is a pretty big public resource, wouldn't it make sense to propose supporting it with tax dollars? Like the BBC? Or like how I wish NPR and PBS were supported? What would $100 million/year endowment for support of Wikipedia do? That's nothing on federal budget scales, and with that kind of money, they could have top quality hosting, and plenty of money to buy various sorts of stuff for distribution.
And who, out of the actual realm of possibilities do you think would be better from a progressive democrat's point of view? Edwards is probably the only real alternative. Hillary is a conservative Bitch. Obama does NOT have a progressive record. So, that leaves what then?
Now, here's where I'm going to get really crazy into progressive fantasy. Suppose a major shake-up happens in the '08 elections. Conservatives get crucified left and right. Bush has been impeached for Obstruction of Justice (which he just did again today, when he invoked "Executive Privilege" to prevent White House Aides from testifying under Oath). Both the house and senate see major shake-ups, and some lefty, like Edwards or (dare to dream) Gore, is sitting in the Oval Office.
Now, seems to me that because of their previous conviction, some nasty complaints to a newly empowered FTC could result in a review of Microsoft's behavior following their conviction. What if they found it necessary to enact the judges original recommendation? Can you imagine the shock-waves? Early '09 "Microsoft Busted," "Microsoft Split into 5 Separate Companies" I'm not saying it's even possible, but just the scenario gives me the shivers!
In general, corporations fucking over everybody that doesn't have a few hundred million dollars to defend themselves with. In my view, Libertarianism works out the same as the Law of he Jungle. If property rights are the only rights that are valued, only the propertied have rights, and the more property they have, the more rights they have. That isn't the kind of world I find appealing. I approve of equality of opportunity, for everyone, to succeed to the best of their ability. And equality of result to the extent to maintain that opportunity for future generations. Call it Wyoming Knott's views from "Moon is a Harsh Mistress," or possibly the societal structure from "For Us the Living" (and I'm not convinced social credit wouldn't work either, I could go on a whole tirade about why what we're doing is worse, our money is just as fiat as the money in that society, but instead of driving demand, and growing the economy by giving the script to the people, we just let Banks control it all)
His libertarian individualism is really only workable in a frontier society, which is why he tended to write about them so much. Here, that kind of thing results in the trends we see in the world today. At least that's my take on it. "Friday" in my opinion, is late Heinlein at his finest. It's about the Earth, crowded, technologically advanced, paranoid, with various wealthy individuals and corporations pretty well controlling every aspect of peoples lives. (No similarity with the present day at all!)
The Problem is this: lots of people want, and or are required by their employers to have, reliable cell service. That they can't get it in the USA because of inadequate telecommunications regulatory oversight is a legitimate problem in many peoples lives.
I disagree. In 1900, the amounts of power required to learn something useful were on the order of Watts. Anybody (even in an area without electricity) could sit and do meaningful research if they had the inclination and they didn't have to work for a living. People like Thomas Edison, Nikolai Tesla, James Clark Maxwell, could be mad scientists in a way that just isn't possible today. By the 1940's the amount of power was up to Megawatts, and fundamental research already required major industrial scale installations, like Oak Ridge, or Bell Labs. Sixty years later, the amounts are orders of magnitude higher. The amount of power required to do the experiments necessary to develop a theory of everything may well be beyond even a solar system scale civilization. Or we may learn all there is to know when the Large Hadron Collider comes online. But we honestly don't know at this point.
You're flirting with proclaiming one of the great evil secrets of the recording industry. The vast majority of all Rock/Pop/Country/Rap/etc music from the 20th century and afterwards is extremely simple. It thus utilizes a fairly small subset of all possible music. The real truth is this: if someone were to compare those works with the works of just the great classical master (Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, Schubert, etc, etc) it is a probability approaching certainty that all modern musical melodies exist in those libraries. What this means is that almost all pop music, that is, the tablature, is really public domain. It is unowned and unownable, for the same reason I can't go out and claim authorship of the works Henry Fielding or Robert Louis Stevenson. Somebody already wrote all of that stuff. It doesn't matter, even if I decide that "two roads diverged in a yellow wood" all on my own, its already been written, and the same is true for all modern music (baring a few far out experimentalists).
Revenge should have no part in it. It should be all about what is best for society. There are people out there that have a pathological urge to kill, rape, or perform other horrifically destructive acts (rob thousands of people of their life savings and retirement). Many of these are mentally retarded, or otherwise mentally ill, but in my opinion that's probably irrelevant. In the most extreme cases there is little we can do. And in the less extreme cases, we need to do better.
No. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collusion. There is no competition amongst oil producers, because OPEC controls a good 80+% of the supply. The competition only exists between different gas stations (although most of those are owned by OPEC puppets as well) where the small family owned gas stations (there are a couple out there) get squeezed for every last penny.
For support of my point of view, I point to Telltale Games, they're doing quite well with their new episodic Sam and Max series. (The only reason I haven't bought them is they aren't available for Macs, and unless I upgrade to an Intel Mac before, I'm hoping to get the series on the Wii.) Sure, the fanboys bitched about some things. Max's voice for one. They really could have done a better job finding at least a similar sounding VA to the original games, but it doesn't really matter. The games are stable and bug free, the art is consistent and well designed, and people are buying.
Precisely what I was thinking. FPS enthusiasts usually come in two types: the graphics whore, and now the Drunk Frat Guy who discovered deathmatch with Halo and thinks Microsoft invented the FPS. The Trouble is, both of these are tiny niche markets, yet they dominate the direction of the industry, that is, if you listen to the hype machine and ignore who's raking in the sales and profits. I wish the gaming industry would discover the long tail theory. There's plenty of ready made markets that could support titles in the range of $1million to $5million in development costs, and they go completely ignored. If some companies would start producing really slick, well polished, 2D Adventure, RPG, and Strategy games, they would probably meet with a lot of success without much outlay.
Unfortunately in this case, Lawyers have one of the best Unions in the Country (Another being the American Medical Association). It is very hard to get a lawyer disbarred. They basically have to make themselves a big enough embarrassment to other lawyers that they complain (Running around pissing off Judges is a very good way though, and Thompson's done plenty of that). Suffice it to say that Lawyers are very cliqueish and tend to protect their own right up to the point where it becomes a huge public fiasco. This is why, although many, many of them do some pretty disgusting things, and behave in horribly inappropriate ways, it is very, very rare for any one to get disbarred. It's only when the general legal community starts gagging that they do something, and they hear about societies worst every day, it's pretty hard to gross out a seasoned Criminal Lawyer.
It really depends on the Board. I think its very possible, given his previous history of warnings in the Florida legal system, that Thompson is about to get slapped pretty hard. They aren't happy with him already. As I said, he's received a number of warnings, and has been removed from cases by judges for his behavior.
No, that was not what I said. A natural Monopoly arises because of consumer choice. If company A just makes the product that consumers prefer, how does it enhance consumer choice to force consumers to buy company B's product? If the European prosecutors were taking the stance that DRM itself was illegal, because it was anti-consumer, that would be fine. They could simply require that it be removed from ALL products sold in the European Union. But they aren't. They're going after Apple, whose DRM is actually the least restrictive.
Now Science can actually explain the feelings of god. Those feelings are essentially a seizure in a certain part of the brain. You can watch it on Video, thanks to Science through an MRI. It's really similar to what happens when you do an MRI on someone who has received a dose of Psychedelic drugs that cause hallucinations.
True, but arguably irrelevant for the reasons sogoodsofarsowhat (662830) cites. If that is the law there, then it is quite foolish. Natural Monopolies just sometimes result from consumers having free choice. Should you limit the amount Coca-Cola Corporation is allowed to produce just because people prefer it to Pepsi, and thereby force them to buy Pepsi or something else instead(Which is not to say there might not be good reasons to limit Soda companies, health among them)? Trying to fight a natural monopoly requires Soviet Russia Style policies, with restriction of freedom and trade embargoes.
DOS versions of Wordperfect didn't suck. They were very good actually. Now, did the Windows versions of Wordperfect suck because Corel was inferior, or because Microsoft wouldn't document their Operating System APIs to make a level playing field? Remember: "DOS isn't Done till Lotus won't Run!"