I like that "The plural of anecdote is not data", never heard that before:D.
Yeah. It's useful. I got it from Slashdot.:D (And yes, I intended it to apply to myself as much as anyone else.)
Did you try speaking in Spanish?
Yes, I did... in fact, I managed an amazing translation chain at a hotel in Balzano (near the Swiss border): The manager of the hotel only spoke German, so I spoke Spanish to a man who translated to Italian for the son of the hotel manager who then passed on my message in German. It felt like a convoluted game of Telephone... I'm amazed that my requests for a room actually got through fairly un-distorted.
I'm from the USA, and recently traveled to Italy with little warning and thus little preparation. I speak a decent amount of Spanish, but no Italian. I put forth an effort to learn as many useful parts of the language as I could, as fast as I could, but was obviously still woefully unprepared to carry on a conversation in Italian when I arrived.
Some people were nice about it. They'd wait patiently as I consulted a translation dictionary for the missing word, try to help with hand signs or synonyms, or find someone who spoke English if all else failed. (And they were generally happy for my tourism dollars, too.)
Some other people... not quite. I knew enough of the language to know when I was being berated for not speaking correctly (they always say the first words you learn are 'yes', 'no', 'hello', 'thank you', and then all the curses). One gas station attendant even physically shoved me while cursing me (in Italian) for my lack of comprehension when I asked him which gas type my rental car used.
I mean, I live in Silicon Valley and hear at least 5 different languages between the office, the park, and my apartment every day. (And yes, I'm a Midwestern Caucasian of Italian descent.) The only time I'm bothered is when I feel guilty for having to ask someone to repeat themselves because of their accent (and my hearing difficulty).
So yeah. I think people will be people and continue to be widely distributed in their views and bigotries. I wish more Americans would be more understanding of culture differences, and, after traveling to Italy, I wish more Italians would be, too. (And I've never heard someone seriously use that argument, but I can certainly see some people being closed-minded enough to try.) Us "asshole 'Americans' " aren't all bigots, nor are "they" all perfectly welcoming fellows.
*shrug*... The plural of anecdote is not data and It's A Small World After All, etc., etc., etc.
I'm not so certain about that... I've got my quips with Oblivion, but most are easily modded away. Have you looked at the PC-side content creator for Oblivion--the TES Construction Set? It is superior to the Morrowind version, which shows that the programmers certainly didn't forget about their huge PC-modding audience. Oblivion is far more malleable than was Morrowind... though I do return to bask in Morrowind's greatness from time to time.:-)
Take Two hasn't done anything really worthy of praise in recent memory
I guess it depends on your definition of "Recent", but...
TES IV: Oblivion? Civilization IV? Manhunt?
(Yeah, I know, BioShock, too, but I played the old System Shock's and agree that BioShock is just "pop culture junk".) And besides... if EA eats up Take Two, Duke Nukem Forever might be *gasp* published! Think of the earth-numbing anti-climax as a Quake III lookalike narrated by Madden and with ~ 2 hours of gameplay appears from the darkness... *shudder*
Yeah. That one I've played (It was FF IV in Japan, though the Japanese version was actually notably more difficult than the US version... just some odd trivia). But that's easier to find than FF II...... I think there was one re-release as "Final Fantasy Origins" for the PS2 or something, but that's even harder to find.
Wait a minute... do you mean Final Fantasy II for the Famicom or Final Fantasy 2/IV for the SNES? If the latter, I do believe I actually got the item, once (pure luck... I was killing time as a minimum-wage sysadmin/repair-guy waiting for trouble to pop up in the lab where I worked), but failed to realize that you were supposed to trade it for the Adamant armor. But even in this case it's only one suit of armor in the whole game, as opposed to the top 15 or so weapons and all the top level armors in FF XII. In FF XII, you often need to acquire ~10 items, each with 1/64 * 1/64 drop odds. *sheesh*
My apologies, I never did play FF2... or any of the sequel games, either (X-2, those random 7 sequels, etc.). Any idea how one can find FF2 nowadays, anyways?
I would say that Final Fantasy XII is the worst (single player) offender of this nature.
In previous games in the Final Fantasy genre, the great rewards were predictable. A side quest would be handed to the player (or uncovered via exploration), a dungeon would be explored, some bonus plot would be uncovered, a boss would be fought, and a reward given. The plot in the side quests helped remind you that you were still advancing your main goal (to save X or fight Y) and worked as a needed tie-in to the main game. And, if you did everything right, your reward was guaranteed, even if difficult. Once you beat the boss or solved the puzzle or fetched the ingredient, you were done.
In Final Fantasy XII, the greatest rewards are dependent upon random chance. They are either rare drops, chests that only appear 1% of the time, or worse, bought in the market only after selling certain specific combinations of ultra-rare drops (Don't believe me? Think this is absurd? Read this guide to acquiring the "Tournesol"). The side quests that lead to these chests/areas/bosses/etc. rarely have a tie-in with the main plot, and the reward only appears a small percentage of the time. But then on your 42nd try, you get the reward, and start rationalizing: "Oh, that wasn't so difficult. Maybe next time I'll be even luckier!".
Final Fantasy XII is the first FF game that I have not thoroughly completed (nobody counts XI), and I do not plan to. And, unlike the rest of the series, I never plan to go back and play it again. Its replay value, for me, is nonexistent. I can't un-purchase the game from Square, but this experience will make me think twice about ever going after FF XIII.
I love my NES. I bought it when I was in elementary school with money I saved in a shoebox under my bed. In college, I manually disassembled, refurbished/cleaned/cut the stupid 10NES chip, and reassembled it and each of my 50-odd games to keep everything in top, working order. I still play many games on it; classics such as Super Mario Brothers 1-3, Final Fantasy, StarTropics II, Crystalis (my absolute favorite), etc.
But for each amazing-classic-game that I own, there are two or three games of pure crap also in my collection. Game publishing companies who had not the least idea what they were doing have put out such horrid titles as "Back to the Future", "Dino Riki", and the like... In fact, I can barely remember most of them, even though I shuffle through their cartridges every time I go to play one of the classics.
So I'm sure that, 10 years down the road, time will have similarly shuffled through what we have today for a few 'new' classics that will survive the test of time....... after all, my old college friends and I still meet online to play StarCraft, Age of Kings, and Diablo II. I'm sure there's still a chance for a few of today's games.
Now I'm no electrical engineer but when you take a working chip and put it in a machine it seems a little odd to blame the packaging it came out of for higher than normal failure rates if it works initially.
IAAEE, so here goes:
A "chip", or integrated circuit (IC), is a tiny (along the lines of 2mm x 2mm x 300um) piece of silicon which, though "overglassed" (actually encased in SiO2, or pure glass) except for the bonding pads, is still amazingly fragile. The glass layer is only microns thick, so a tiny scratch even by abrasive dust can easily destroy the internal circuitry. Additionally, the IC itself is extremely vulnerable to electrostatic discharge (read: electric shocks) orders of magnitude smaller than the blue spark that hits you when you get out of the car. Furthermore, the chip is usually connected to copper by wire bonds up to 500um long and thinner than a human hair. I've breathed funny at a chip, not too long ago, and sadly watched the wire bonds blow away (under a microscope, of course).
As a result, IC's are packaged in... well... what we tend to simply call "packaging". This is the familiar black plastic square or rectangular device that most people are familiar with. The package also helps route the very closely spaced pads on the chip to the more widely spaced traces on the underlying circuit board. This routing can be with wire bonds, copper traces in the packaging, solder dots, flip chips, or any combination of the above.
Packaging problems can take many forms. If a package is not built to sufficiently dissipate heat (or a company fails to choose a sufficiently dissipative package for their chip) then heat build up can damage circuitry on chip or even cause the connections in the packaging (between chip and circuit board) to break down. Additionally, the connections in the packaging slow down the signals between chip and circuit board due to added inductance and resistance. If a chip is not designed to withstand these delays (or the wrong packaging is chosen), then the system can, again, fail to operate in certain cases.
Also, Electrical Engineers must design for wide tolerances, as individual chips and packages, though "identical", can actually have significant variations due to the room in which they were produced, the exact temperature, where on the wafer the chip sits, or even just the random motion and distribution of gas particles during the fabrication of the IC's. If an engineering team fails to provide sufficiently tolerant design and testing doesn't catch the problem (or management drops it anyways), we see what has happened here at Nvidia. Just because one part worked certainly doesn't mean the rest will behave the same.
I always think 'syntax error' right away when I see 'micro$oft'.
Agreed...agreed.
Perhaps I should have clarified; old referred to the language, not the programmer. After all, I'm only 24. I started rudimentary programming BASIC on my parents' IBM PCjr (the kind where you have to insert cartridges into the machine to use different languages). My last project before I moved on to bigger and better places (i.e. C++) was a text-based, time-based Space-Quest 1 parody, complete with fights and some lines and boxes moving around the screen (which taxed the PCjr's graphics hardware to the maximum:p )
I can't be the only one... aren't there any other old GW-BASIC programmers out there who keep reading "$cientoloty" as a string variable, name 'cientology'?
Sort of like building your own computer from discrete transistors.
I was at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA, this past weekend. I saw a single 8-bit register that was the size of your average Dell laptop. Not bad for portable computing, as long as you can do some impressive programs with your byte.
Microcenter? They're the only box store I'll buy parts from because their prices are reasonable and their return policies aren't barbaric.
I agree wholeheartedly. They get my business not because of any brand loyalty or grand advertising, but because of a knowledgeable staff, the best assortment of OEM parts I've ever seen at a brick-and-mortar store, and prices that (sometimes) compete with Newegg and the like. It depends on the parts, too... CPU's, PSU's, HDD's and such are usually priced excellently at Microcenter, while graphics cards, motherboards, cases, and the like can be found for much cheaper online.
The last *five* computers that I've built have been a combination of parts from Newegg and Microcenter, and I've never had an issue that wasn't solved immediately.
So... apparently there are only 21 Microcenters in the nation. The last three cities I've lived in have all had a Microcenter in the main shopping plaza... Am I just lucky? Or is it fate?
*shrug* Either way, I think I'll stop by there this afternoon. You never know what hits the clearance racks any given day!
Unfortunately, it appears that the Computer History Museum hosts its home page on an ENIAC replica, as I believe we just slashdotted this site though the *comment* section.
I mean, c'mon. Do that many of us really live in Mountain View?
The Battle of Hastings was *not* won by the French (Gauls).... nor the English.
Rather, the Normans, who previously swept in and pwnd all of northern France, went on to do the same to England. The English and French languages/cultures experienced a mixing due to the cultural turbulence caused by these invasions, and Norman words and ways were dropped into both lands.
I agree wholeheartedly. FF XII, though an interesting version of a "single player MMO", was seriously lacking in the music department, Uematsu having gone over to Microsoft, I believe. The only music in the game that I really enjoy are those tracks borrowed from earlier Uematsu works (FF main theme, victory theme, etc.)
I mean, the game (as often occurs nowadays) has some decent background music, in places. The Pharos background music is appropriately creepy, the Rabanastre background music is appropriately happy and busy, etc. But that's all it is, anymore. Background music. I barely notice it any longer, as I play.
Compare this to earlier Final Fantasy games, or (for example) Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings trilogy, where music shares the foreground with visuals and both work together to really tell you where you are.
Why is it all Nvidia's fault, seems to me it should be a shared responsibilty.
I work for a company big into mobile IC design (like NVIDIA). And I can say that it is very likely NVIDIA's fault because they (as do we), as the design company, specify every last detail of process, circuit, and package, when it comes to IC fabrication. Additionally, the company which produced these chips--TSMC--is the oldest, largest, and possibly most reliable dedicated fab company in existence. If there is a heat dissipation problem, it almost certainly stems from engineering oversight or management's corner-cutting on NVIDIA's part.
Now, IANAL, but my father is the Asst. County Prosecutor, and I have to tell you that the "38 years" quoted in the article is probably calculated by summing the maximum possible penalties for all of the charges, and then assuming that he's an idiot in prison, too, and never recieves parole or other sympathies.
First off, he likely will not be charged with every single charge and given the maximum penalty and be forced to serve sentences consecutively. Remember that a judge still makes the final sentencing decisions, and is likely to take into account the fact that he is only 18, just leaving high school, etc.
If he even shows a bit of remorse, he'll likely get more community service time than jail time, anyways. (Which is probably to both his and the taxpayers' advantage.)
And may I be the first to say...
on
The SUV Is Dethroned
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, yes. The Berners-Lee model for uncovering the truthieness of a web site. Good luck!
I like that "The plural of anecdote is not data", never heard that before :D.
Yeah. It's useful. I got it from Slashdot. :D
(And yes, I intended it to apply to myself as much as anyone else.)
Did you try speaking in Spanish?
Yes, I did... in fact, I managed an amazing translation chain at a hotel in Balzano (near the Swiss border): The manager of the hotel only spoke German, so I spoke Spanish to a man who translated to Italian for the son of the hotel manager who then passed on my message in German. It felt like a convoluted game of Telephone... I'm amazed that my requests for a room actually got through fairly un-distorted.
People are people, no matter where you go.
... The plural of anecdote is not data and It's A Small World After All, etc., etc., etc.
I'm from the USA, and recently traveled to Italy with little warning and thus little preparation. I speak a decent amount of Spanish, but no Italian. I put forth an effort to learn as many useful parts of the language as I could, as fast as I could, but was obviously still woefully unprepared to carry on a conversation in Italian when I arrived.
Some people were nice about it. They'd wait patiently as I consulted a translation dictionary for the missing word, try to help with hand signs or synonyms, or find someone who spoke English if all else failed. (And they were generally happy for my tourism dollars, too.)
Some other people... not quite. I knew enough of the language to know when I was being berated for not speaking correctly (they always say the first words you learn are 'yes', 'no', 'hello', 'thank you', and then all the curses). One gas station attendant even physically shoved me while cursing me (in Italian) for my lack of comprehension when I asked him which gas type my rental car used.
I mean, I live in Silicon Valley and hear at least 5 different languages between the office, the park, and my apartment every day. (And yes, I'm a Midwestern Caucasian of Italian descent.) The only time I'm bothered is when I feel guilty for having to ask someone to repeat themselves because of their accent (and my hearing difficulty).
So yeah. I think people will be people and continue to be widely distributed in their views and bigotries. I wish more Americans would be more understanding of culture differences, and, after traveling to Italy, I wish more Italians would be, too. (And I've never heard someone seriously use that argument, but I can certainly see some people being closed-minded enough to try.) Us "asshole 'Americans' " aren't all bigots, nor are "they" all perfectly welcoming fellows.
*shrug*
I'm not so certain about that... I've got my quips with Oblivion, but most are easily modded away. Have you looked at the PC-side content creator for Oblivion--the TES Construction Set? It is superior to the Morrowind version, which shows that the programmers certainly didn't forget about their huge PC-modding audience. Oblivion is far more malleable than was Morrowind... though I do return to bask in Morrowind's greatness from time to time. :-)
Take Two hasn't done anything really worthy of praise in recent memory
I guess it depends on your definition of "Recent", but ...
TES IV: Oblivion?
Civilization IV?
Manhunt?
(Yeah, I know, BioShock, too, but I played the old System Shock's and agree that BioShock is just "pop culture junk".) And besides... if EA eats up Take Two, Duke Nukem Forever might be *gasp* published! Think of the earth-numbing anti-climax as a Quake III lookalike narrated by Madden and with ~ 2 hours of gameplay appears from the darkness... *shudder*
Yeah. That one I've played (It was FF IV in Japan, though the Japanese version was actually notably more difficult than the US version... just some odd trivia). But that's easier to find than FF II ... ... I think there was one re-release as "Final Fantasy Origins" for the PS2 or something, but that's even harder to find.
Wait a minute... do you mean Final Fantasy II for the Famicom or Final Fantasy 2/IV for the SNES? If the latter, I do believe I actually got the item, once (pure luck... I was killing time as a minimum-wage sysadmin/repair-guy waiting for trouble to pop up in the lab where I worked), but failed to realize that you were supposed to trade it for the Adamant armor. But even in this case it's only one suit of armor in the whole game, as opposed to the top 15 or so weapons and all the top level armors in FF XII. In FF XII, you often need to acquire ~10 items, each with 1/64 * 1/64 drop odds. *sheesh*
My apologies, I never did play FF2... or any of the sequel games, either (X-2, those random 7 sequels, etc.). Any idea how one can find FF2 nowadays, anyways?
I would say that Final Fantasy XII is the worst (single player) offender of this nature.
In previous games in the Final Fantasy genre, the great rewards were predictable. A side quest would be handed to the player (or uncovered via exploration), a dungeon would be explored, some bonus plot would be uncovered, a boss would be fought, and a reward given. The plot in the side quests helped remind you that you were still advancing your main goal (to save X or fight Y) and worked as a needed tie-in to the main game. And, if you did everything right, your reward was guaranteed, even if difficult. Once you beat the boss or solved the puzzle or fetched the ingredient, you were done.
In Final Fantasy XII, the greatest rewards are dependent upon random chance. They are either rare drops, chests that only appear 1% of the time, or worse, bought in the market only after selling certain specific combinations of ultra-rare drops (Don't believe me? Think this is absurd? Read this guide to acquiring the "Tournesol"). The side quests that lead to these chests/areas/bosses/etc. rarely have a tie-in with the main plot, and the reward only appears a small percentage of the time. But then on your 42nd try, you get the reward, and start rationalizing: "Oh, that wasn't so difficult. Maybe next time I'll be even luckier!".
Final Fantasy XII is the first FF game that I have not thoroughly completed (nobody counts XI), and I do not plan to. And, unlike the rest of the series, I never plan to go back and play it again. Its replay value, for me, is nonexistent. I can't un-purchase the game from Square, but this experience will make me think twice about ever going after FF XIII.
Agreed.
... ... after all, my old college friends and I still meet online to play StarCraft, Age of Kings, and Diablo II. I'm sure there's still a chance for a few of today's games.
I love my NES. I bought it when I was in elementary school with money I saved in a shoebox under my bed. In college, I manually disassembled, refurbished/cleaned/cut the stupid 10NES chip, and reassembled it and each of my 50-odd games to keep everything in top, working order. I still play many games on it; classics such as Super Mario Brothers 1-3, Final Fantasy, StarTropics II, Crystalis (my absolute favorite), etc.
But for each amazing-classic-game that I own, there are two or three games of pure crap also in my collection. Game publishing companies who had not the least idea what they were doing have put out such horrid titles as "Back to the Future", "Dino Riki", and the like... In fact, I can barely remember most of them, even though I shuffle through their cartridges every time I go to play one of the classics.
So I'm sure that, 10 years down the road, time will have similarly shuffled through what we have today for a few 'new' classics that will survive the test of time.
Now I'm no electrical engineer but when you take a working chip and put it in a machine it seems a little odd to blame the packaging it came out of for higher than normal failure rates if it works initially.
IAAEE, so here goes:
... well... what we tend to simply call "packaging". This is the familiar black plastic square or rectangular device that most people are familiar with. The package also helps route the very closely spaced pads on the chip to the more widely spaced traces on the underlying circuit board. This routing can be with wire bonds, copper traces in the packaging, solder dots, flip chips, or any combination of the above.
A "chip", or integrated circuit (IC), is a tiny (along the lines of 2mm x 2mm x 300um) piece of silicon which, though "overglassed" (actually encased in SiO2, or pure glass) except for the bonding pads, is still amazingly fragile. The glass layer is only microns thick, so a tiny scratch even by abrasive dust can easily destroy the internal circuitry. Additionally, the IC itself is extremely vulnerable to electrostatic discharge (read: electric shocks) orders of magnitude smaller than the blue spark that hits you when you get out of the car. Furthermore, the chip is usually connected to copper by wire bonds up to 500um long and thinner than a human hair. I've breathed funny at a chip, not too long ago, and sadly watched the wire bonds blow away (under a microscope, of course).
As a result, IC's are packaged in
Packaging problems can take many forms. If a package is not built to sufficiently dissipate heat (or a company fails to choose a sufficiently dissipative package for their chip) then heat build up can damage circuitry on chip or even cause the connections in the packaging (between chip and circuit board) to break down. Additionally, the connections in the packaging slow down the signals between chip and circuit board due to added inductance and resistance. If a chip is not designed to withstand these delays (or the wrong packaging is chosen), then the system can, again, fail to operate in certain cases.
Also, Electrical Engineers must design for wide tolerances, as individual chips and packages, though "identical", can actually have significant variations due to the room in which they were produced, the exact temperature, where on the wafer the chip sits, or even just the random motion and distribution of gas particles during the fabrication of the IC's. If an engineering team fails to provide sufficiently tolerant design and testing doesn't catch the problem (or management drops it anyways), we see what has happened here at Nvidia. Just because one part worked certainly doesn't mean the rest will behave the same.
I always think 'syntax error' right away when I see 'micro$oft'.
Agreed...agreed.
:p )
Perhaps I should have clarified; old referred to the language, not the programmer. After all, I'm only 24. I started rudimentary programming BASIC on my parents' IBM PCjr (the kind where you have to insert cartridges into the machine to use different languages). My last project before I moved on to bigger and better places (i.e. C++) was a text-based, time-based Space-Quest 1 parody, complete with fights and some lines and boxes moving around the screen (which taxed the PCjr's graphics hardware to the maximum
I can't be the only one... aren't there any other old GW-BASIC programmers out there who keep reading "$cientoloty" as a string variable, name 'cientology'?
Sort of like building your own computer from discrete transistors.
I was at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA, this past weekend. I saw a single 8-bit register that was the size of your average Dell laptop. Not bad for portable computing, as long as you can do some impressive programs with your byte.
Microcenter? They're the only box store I'll buy parts from because their prices are reasonable and their return policies aren't barbaric.
I agree wholeheartedly. They get my business not because of any brand loyalty or grand advertising, but because of a knowledgeable staff, the best assortment of OEM parts I've ever seen at a brick-and-mortar store, and prices that (sometimes) compete with Newegg and the like. It depends on the parts, too... CPU's, PSU's, HDD's and such are usually priced excellently at Microcenter, while graphics cards, motherboards, cases, and the like can be found for much cheaper online.
The last *five* computers that I've built have been a combination of parts from Newegg and Microcenter, and I've never had an issue that wasn't solved immediately.
So... apparently there are only 21 Microcenters in the nation. The last three cities I've lived in have all had a Microcenter in the main shopping plaza... Am I just lucky? Or is it fate?
*shrug* Either way, I think I'll stop by there this afternoon. You never know what hits the clearance racks any given day!
Unfortunately, it appears that the Computer History Museum hosts its home page on an ENIAC replica, as I believe we just slashdotted this site though the *comment* section.
I mean, c'mon. Do that many of us really live in Mountain View?
*ahem*
... nor the English.
[taps desk]
The Battle of Hastings was *not* won by the French (Gauls).
Rather, the Normans, who previously swept in and pwnd all of northern France, went on to do the same to England. The English and French languages/cultures experienced a mixing due to the cultural turbulence caused by these invasions, and Norman words and ways were dropped into both lands.
Oh yeah. And Napoleon? He's a Corsican.
I agree wholeheartedly. FF XII, though an interesting version of a "single player MMO", was seriously lacking in the music department, Uematsu having gone over to Microsoft, I believe. The only music in the game that I really enjoy are those tracks borrowed from earlier Uematsu works (FF main theme, victory theme, etc.)
I mean, the game (as often occurs nowadays) has some decent background music, in places. The Pharos background music is appropriately creepy, the Rabanastre background music is appropriately happy and busy, etc. But that's all it is, anymore. Background music. I barely notice it any longer, as I play.
Compare this to earlier Final Fantasy games, or (for example) Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings trilogy, where music shares the foreground with visuals and both work together to really tell you where you are.
Resolution greater than 600 x 800? Really?
Holy non sequitur batman!
It's worse than that!
Try:
*sheesh*
Because...
I laughed.
And the opening ceremonies were utterly amazing.
And it's still funny.
Why is it all Nvidia's fault, seems to me it should be a shared responsibilty.
I work for a company big into mobile IC design (like NVIDIA). And I can say that it is very likely NVIDIA's fault because they (as do we), as the design company, specify every last detail of process, circuit, and package, when it comes to IC fabrication. Additionally, the company which produced these chips--TSMC--is the oldest, largest, and possibly most reliable dedicated fab company in existence. If there is a heat dissipation problem, it almost certainly stems from engineering oversight or management's corner-cutting on NVIDIA's part.
Now, IANAL, but my father is the Asst. County Prosecutor, and I have to tell you that the "38 years" quoted in the article is probably calculated by summing the maximum possible penalties for all of the charges, and then assuming that he's an idiot in prison, too, and never recieves parole or other sympathies.
First off, he likely will not be charged with every single charge and given the maximum penalty and be forced to serve sentences consecutively. Remember that a judge still makes the final sentencing decisions, and is likely to take into account the fact that he is only 18, just leaving high school, etc.
If he even shows a bit of remorse, he'll likely get more community service time than jail time, anyways. (Which is probably to both his and the taxpayers' advantage.)
...good riddance.
Never mind, I found it!
It was the 2001 eTrade SuperBowl commercial.
...hmm. Maybe I didn't remember it so well, after all.