I can't believe people like JMS after the hideous ending to his storyline for B5.
"I'm afraid of the dark so I'm going to stay here and beat up the little kid's".
I didn't watch season 5. 4 years of buildup for that crappy conclusion?!?!?
It was like the 1st and 2nd season next gen episodes where they would have an incredible build and then just dribble away the last 5 minutes because they had no ending.
There was nothing insightful or meaningful to his ending. It was extremely unsatisfying.
I would much rather have a Joss Whedon do the story than JMS. He ended Buffy and Angel well.
--
As far as Shatner goes- he was a good actor until he became famous. Then he became a star and stopped trying. I respect him for his other SF show Tek Wars tho.
You have to picture being able to call the library and a perfect copy of the book appears on your desk.
Given that do you think libraries would not impact the publishing business?
Personally- I think artists are in some kind of dream world believing they deserve to be millionaires when I bust my butt and barely make a decent living. And the executives who do NOTHING except manage the flow of artists taking 90% of the artists income is even more ludicrous.
We have a growing glut of -good- -high quality- artists. What happens when you have an oversupply of something?
I just know my vote makes no difference.
Over the last 10 years, every single time I voted, it turned out as expected.
The closest I came to making a difference was a local race where it was decided by 31 votes (I was #31 I guess). That's happened 1 time in 10 years.
The incumbants are never voted out because they are CHOOSING their own voters these days. If we are serious about voting then we need to just divide the states up into squares and stop this gerrymandering crap where you have two pieces of districts connected by a 80 mile long piece of spaghetti-wide line.
Not conservative- very liberal and definate anti-american bias.
Definately not fair and balanced.
I listen to a wide variety of news sources including cnn, npr, fox, talk radio, radio pacifica, and BBC.
There are no longer unbiased news services. Even when there -were- unbiased news services there were very few. Unbiased news is very dry.
None report -just the facts- any more. They report opinions or slant their delivery to overlay an opinion on the facts.
I run win2k pro.
My memory usage after bootup is 189mb.
If I have a full system tray (cd burner, winamp, graphics card utility) I come in at 237mb.
If you are running 512mb, you probably want to check all the tasks in your RUN system registry entries. The last time I did that I found some gems such as the sound card registration software (I registered it 2 years ago), the sound card "splash" screen. Utilities for two different old video cards no longer installed in the machine.
These were -not- in the startup- you have to look at the registry to remove them. Just go through each program and search them on the web and you'll find writeups on what they do. It's worth it.
There was no 911 when I was growing up. You kept your local police, hospital and fire station numbers on a sticker on the bottom of the phone or the phone receiver.
I'm suprised how it has grown into some kind of "right" that it has to be working.
You buy a lifetime license to the content when you buy it. They retain a record that you bought it and you only pay media costs (which are zero for downloading). A portion of your purchase price is invested to cover the costs of bandwidth and remembering that you are licensed to this material.
---
But that is isn't going to happen so the answer is never.
The fine point is that if you lower the drinking age you can. You just lose federal highway funding.
It's like being "free" to quit your job but the boss will stop paying you.
Actually it's worse- it's more like your parents taking 1/3 of the money you make at your job and then not giving it to you unless you do what they say.
On the subject of the matter at hand, I do not think there is any way they should be able to keep DNA unless you are -convicted- of a crime.
OTH... think of the benefits once they have everyone's DNA (which is where they are headed-- collect it at birth). When a crime is commited and their is DNA evidence (and they get better at finding it every day) then they can find the suspected party very quickly and prevent a lot of other crimes.
In the hands of a good government, it's a great tool. In the hands of a dictatorship, it is one more lock on permanent power.
The funny thing is, one of the concerns of the dead sea scroll sect was that the morals of the day were declining so they were going to retreat to their little enclave and prepare for the end times which were coming in their lifetimes.
Hehehe. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Ah, but now the networks are starting the show a minute early and running a minute late so you can't DVR it without setting aside a 3 hour block for a 1 hour show.
The first three star wars films were 2 and a 1/2 films of a classic trilogy.
The rest was crap for kids which continued into episode 1.
Ewoks should have been wookies not cute dolls.
It will remain an orphan until it becomes popular and widely used and then someone will turn up wanting money for something that was only popular because it was free.
They should have to pay a fee to the orphan organization for popularizing their work if they do this.
Yea. I think of it as maternity leave since some part of my brain thinks they are taking it because their wife had a baby more than because they had a baby. But paternity is the correct word.
This is a selection block. Once you have it
selected you can boldface it, cut it, paste
it in another document. The text to select
has arbitrary contents. For example in this
document I could select the bold portion an arbitrary rectangular region only.
Or I could cut it out of the middle to get:
This is a selecnce you have it
selected you cit, cut it, paste
it in another de text to select
has arbitrary c example in this
document I could select the bold portion an arbitrary rectangular region only.
Word has done it for years, I'm sure it is not that difficult- just a question of having the resources to do it.
Been using it since november.
Only pain is when it goes down messy it can take an hour to check the 10gb downloads before it restarts downloading them.
My only problem is lack of hard drive space. Got a spare terabyte laying around? I kid you not, I'm at a half a terabyte now.
I do advise you to avoid "hot button" downloads because your I.P. is out there. I've had no problems collecting all the old shows I love that are not on DVD (Get Smart, Hogan's Heroes, etc.)
Let me put it this way (having played various MMogs* since 1999).
Anyway, my response to you is this.
First:
If you play 1 hour a day, you have a 10% chance of getting the goodie.
If you play 10 hours a day you have a 100% chance of getting the goodie.
They seem equal but they are not. By probability theory on average you spend more time to get to a high probability you will get the goody if you only play 1 hour. In fact, you can NEVER get to 100%. The best you can hope for is 99.999%.
Second,
While the first person to get to something gets it without competition. If you are a 4 hour a day person you are competing with many other people for a limited resource so you fall even farther behind. It gets so bad that in some cases you may be buying an expansion for the game which you will not be able to use most of for months or years.
So either you compete at some level or you resign yourself to not playing much of the game. Imagine if you bought Doom3 and only the first person to beat the game could beat it. This situation is very real in Everquest where only one group of people can cause the sleeper's tomb script to run. After that the game changes so it can't be run again.
*Yea, it's MMogs, not MMoRPGS or MMoRGS. Sony specifically dropped the "R" because they were getting to much heat over the fact that the games were really not roleplaying games.
If SF fans can donate millions of dollars to a corporation, why can't we take up a collection for the 4.5 million dollars to keep these missions going? 1 dollar from 4.5 million people would be enough. I'd give 10 bucks and at that rate we would only need 450,000 people to keep it going.
That is always the problem.
They may be funding putting crucifix in piss (true) or trips to africa with their wives (true) or other great things (I could go on sadly).
But the SECOND you talk about cutting taxes, the only programs they talk about are children and old people or police and firemen.
We need a fixed cap. 30% or 35% or 20% but whatever it is, regardless of how they arrange it if your total tax exceeds that rate then you get to choose which taxes you pay and don't pay.
They brought down Al Capone and other criminals on tax evasion.
If they assign a value to illegally downloaded tv shows and mp3's you could suddenly find yourself with a multi-thousand dollar tax bill due for those "free" downloads.
The random rewards start out at 25% likely (20 minutes invested) and decline to insanely low levels (
The best ones require other people so you build social networks and feel "needed" which is powerfully addicting as well.
But what of it? People who spend way more time than 25 hours a week on religion or TV or Sports are not considered addicts.
I think addiction needs to be reserved for when it starts to negatively impact your life.
For example, when Diablo 2 came out, I missed a couple days work because we played so much.
During everquest, I both missed work and worked sub-par because I was exhausted. It also negatively affected my personal relationships with some long-term friends (who I basically ignored to play the game). I'd call that addiction. I still play everquest. But now it is back to 2nd shelf.
I can also see a general internet board addiction. I probably spend a good 6 hours a week following the various boards that I am on. I could be doing productive things with that time- learning a language, getting more sleep, etc.
Finally, I think people have to work WAY to many hours in this world. Whenever I can, I get it down to 35-37 hours a week. I think 40 hours leaves you no life. There is the real addiction- to money. I'm going to break it. I'm already down to 60% of my salary- saving 40%. I think i can get down to 40%- saving 60%.
I have friends with hi-def and I've looked at the sets at the store and I just don't see a reason to drop a thousand bucks for a 1% improvement in image quality.
Likewise, the DVD format has holes and I can make backups. I'm sure the HD-DVD and Blu-Ray are going to be locked down much tighter. Support for those formats means I'm supporting paying.99 every time I want to watch something.
I am heading towards broadband (as the article aludes to). I have half a terabyte of stuff now. Backup is accomplished by DVD-R's for the best stuff and double hard drives for everything else.
Some of the shows (Get Smart) are encoded around 100MB/Hour and that's not enough but at least I can see a show that is not for sale and not currently being broadcast.
Others are (Battlestar Galactica, Lost, Due South) are encoded at 350MB/Hour and that appears to be just below (and with Divx6 right at ) DVD level.
Some I get to see episodes that have not aired here yet.
Others I get to see shows that I didn't hear about until they were on episode.
And some are not for sale and not currently being broadcast.
I'm still buying $40 a week worth of DVD's (latest was friends 9, Eternal Bliss of the.., and Kill Bill 2).
DVD's are not going to go away and broadband is going to enhance it.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't believe people like JMS after the hideous ending to his storyline for B5. "I'm afraid of the dark so I'm going to stay here and beat up the little kid's". I didn't watch season 5. 4 years of buildup for that crappy conclusion?!?!? It was like the 1st and 2nd season next gen episodes where they would have an incredible build and then just dribble away the last 5 minutes because they had no ending. There was nothing insightful or meaningful to his ending. It was extremely unsatisfying. I would much rather have a Joss Whedon do the story than JMS. He ended Buffy and Angel well. -- As far as Shatner goes- he was a good actor until he became famous. Then he became a star and stopped trying. I respect him for his other SF show Tek Wars tho.
You have to picture being able to call the library and a perfect copy of the book appears on your desk.
Given that do you think libraries would not impact the publishing business?
Personally- I think artists are in some kind of dream world believing they deserve to be millionaires when I bust my butt and barely make a decent living. And the executives who do NOTHING except manage the flow of artists taking 90% of the artists income is even more ludicrous.
We have a growing glut of -good- -high quality- artists. What happens when you have an oversupply of something?
I just know my vote makes no difference. Over the last 10 years, every single time I voted, it turned out as expected.
The closest I came to making a difference was a local race where it was decided by 31 votes (I was #31 I guess). That's happened 1 time in 10 years.
The incumbants are never voted out because they are CHOOSING their own voters these days. If we are serious about voting then we need to just divide the states up into squares and stop this gerrymandering crap where you have two pieces of districts connected by a 80 mile long piece of spaghetti-wide line.
Not conservative- very liberal and definate anti-american bias. Definately not fair and balanced. I listen to a wide variety of news sources including cnn, npr, fox, talk radio, radio pacifica, and BBC. There are no longer unbiased news services. Even when there -were- unbiased news services there were very few. Unbiased news is very dry. None report -just the facts- any more. They report opinions or slant their delivery to overlay an opinion on the facts.
I run win2k pro. My memory usage after bootup is 189mb. If I have a full system tray (cd burner, winamp, graphics card utility) I come in at 237mb. If you are running 512mb, you probably want to check all the tasks in your RUN system registry entries. The last time I did that I found some gems such as the sound card registration software (I registered it 2 years ago), the sound card "splash" screen. Utilities for two different old video cards no longer installed in the machine. These were -not- in the startup- you have to look at the registry to remove them. Just go through each program and search them on the web and you'll find writeups on what they do. It's worth it.
There was no 911 when I was growing up. You kept your local police, hospital and fire station numbers on a sticker on the bottom of the phone or the phone receiver. I'm suprised how it has grown into some kind of "right" that it has to be working.
You buy a lifetime license to the content when you buy it. They retain a record that you bought it and you only pay media costs (which are zero for downloading). A portion of your purchase price is invested to cover the costs of bandwidth and remembering that you are licensed to this material. --- But that is isn't going to happen so the answer is never.
The fine point is that if you lower the drinking age you can. You just lose federal highway funding. It's like being "free" to quit your job but the boss will stop paying you. Actually it's worse- it's more like your parents taking 1/3 of the money you make at your job and then not giving it to you unless you do what they say. On the subject of the matter at hand, I do not think there is any way they should be able to keep DNA unless you are -convicted- of a crime. OTH... think of the benefits once they have everyone's DNA (which is where they are headed-- collect it at birth). When a crime is commited and their is DNA evidence (and they get better at finding it every day) then they can find the suspected party very quickly and prevent a lot of other crimes. In the hands of a good government, it's a great tool. In the hands of a dictatorship, it is one more lock on permanent power.
The funny thing is, one of the concerns of the dead sea scroll sect was that the morals of the day were declining so they were going to retreat to their little enclave and prepare for the end times which were coming in their lifetimes. Hehehe. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
hehe. That's pretty clever.
Ah, but now the networks are starting the show a minute early and running a minute late so you can't DVR it without setting aside a 3 hour block for a 1 hour show.
The first three star wars films were 2 and a 1/2 films of a classic trilogy. The rest was crap for kids which continued into episode 1. Ewoks should have been wookies not cute dolls.
It will remain an orphan until it becomes popular and widely used and then someone will turn up wanting money for something that was only popular because it was free. They should have to pay a fee to the orphan organization for popularizing their work if they do this.
Yea. I think of it as maternity leave since some part of my brain thinks they are taking it because their wife had a baby more than because they had a baby. But paternity is the correct word.
Men are increasingly taking maternity leave too. And personally I think they should.
I can't troll Slashdot to get dates with hot I.T. women any more? I mean this place is better than the vegetable section at the supermarket!
This is a selection block. Once you have it
selected you can boldface it, cut it, paste
it in another document. The text to select
has arbitrary contents. For example in this
document I could select the bold portion an arbitrary rectangular region only.
Or I could cut it out of the middle to get: Word has done it for years, I'm sure it is not that difficult- just a question of having the resources to do it.
Been using it since november. Only pain is when it goes down messy it can take an hour to check the 10gb downloads before it restarts downloading them. My only problem is lack of hard drive space. Got a spare terabyte laying around? I kid you not, I'm at a half a terabyte now. I do advise you to avoid "hot button" downloads because your I.P. is out there. I've had no problems collecting all the old shows I love that are not on DVD (Get Smart, Hogan's Heroes, etc.)
Let me put it this way (having played various MMogs* since 1999).
Anyway, my response to you is this.
First: If you play 1 hour a day, you have a 10% chance of getting the goodie.
If you play 10 hours a day you have a 100% chance of getting the goodie.
They seem equal but they are not. By probability theory on average you spend more time to get to a high probability you will get the goody if you only play 1 hour. In fact, you can NEVER get to 100%. The best you can hope for is 99.999%.
Second,
While the first person to get to something gets it without competition. If you are a 4 hour a day person you are competing with many other people for a limited resource so you fall even farther behind. It gets so bad that in some cases you may be buying an expansion for the game which you will not be able to use most of for months or years.
So either you compete at some level or you resign yourself to not playing much of the game. Imagine if you bought Doom3 and only the first person to beat the game could beat it. This situation is very real in Everquest where only one group of people can cause the sleeper's tomb script to run. After that the game changes so it can't be run again.
*Yea, it's MMogs, not MMoRPGS or MMoRGS. Sony specifically dropped the "R" because they were getting to much heat over the fact that the games were really not roleplaying games.
If SF fans can donate millions of dollars to a corporation, why can't we take up a collection for the 4.5 million dollars to keep these missions going? 1 dollar from 4.5 million people would be enough. I'd give 10 bucks and at that rate we would only need 450,000 people to keep it going.
That is always the problem. They may be funding putting crucifix in piss (true) or trips to africa with their wives (true) or other great things (I could go on sadly). But the SECOND you talk about cutting taxes, the only programs they talk about are children and old people or police and firemen. We need a fixed cap. 30% or 35% or 20% but whatever it is, regardless of how they arrange it if your total tax exceeds that rate then you get to choose which taxes you pay and don't pay.
Yea but they could say "Apple sells these for .99" so even though you got it for free, you still owe .07 in taxes.
They did something like this with marijuana tax stamps back in the 90's.
They brought down Al Capone and other criminals on tax evasion. If they assign a value to illegally downloaded tv shows and mp3's you could suddenly find yourself with a multi-thousand dollar tax bill due for those "free" downloads.
This is completely correct.
Short and long term rewards.
Certain and Random rewards.
The random rewards start out at 25% likely (20 minutes invested) and decline to insanely low levels (
The best ones require other people so you build social networks and feel "needed" which is powerfully addicting as well.
But what of it? People who spend way more time than 25 hours a week on religion or TV or Sports are not considered addicts.
I think addiction needs to be reserved for when it starts to negatively impact your life.
For example, when Diablo 2 came out, I missed a couple days work because we played so much.
During everquest, I both missed work and worked sub-par because I was exhausted. It also negatively affected my personal relationships with some long-term friends (who I basically ignored to play the game). I'd call that addiction. I still play everquest. But now it is back to 2nd shelf.
I can also see a general internet board addiction. I probably spend a good 6 hours a week following the various boards that I am on. I could be doing productive things with that time- learning a language, getting more sleep, etc.
Finally, I think people have to work WAY to many hours in this world. Whenever I can, I get it down to 35-37 hours a week. I think 40 hours leaves you no life. There is the real addiction- to money. I'm going to break it. I'm already down to 60% of my salary- saving 40%. I think i can get down to 40%- saving 60%.
I completely agree with this.
.99 every time I want to watch something.
DVD is "good enough".
I have friends with hi-def and I've looked at the sets at the store and I just don't see a reason to drop a thousand bucks for a 1% improvement in image quality.
Likewise, the DVD format has holes and I can make backups. I'm sure the HD-DVD and Blu-Ray are going to be locked down much tighter. Support for those formats means I'm supporting paying
I am heading towards broadband (as the article aludes to). I have half a terabyte of stuff now. Backup is accomplished by DVD-R's for the best stuff and double hard drives for everything else.
Some of the shows (Get Smart) are encoded around 100MB/Hour and that's not enough but at least I can see a show that is not for sale and not currently being broadcast.
Others are (Battlestar Galactica, Lost, Due South) are encoded at 350MB/Hour and that appears to be just below (and with Divx6 right at ) DVD level. Some I get to see episodes that have not aired here yet.
Others I get to see shows that I didn't hear about until they were on episode. And some are not for sale and not currently being broadcast.
I'm still buying $40 a week worth of DVD's (latest was friends 9, Eternal Bliss of the.., and Kill Bill 2).
DVD's are not going to go away and broadband is going to enhance it.