Monopolies don't need 100% market share, they just need enough to be able to shape the nature of the market in that type of good. How the market is defined affects whether or not the entity is considered a monopoly. In the case of desktop OS, the 90% share means MS can affect the market in a big way. It may not be able to dictate terms, but it can certainly shape it.
Not everyone is born able compete in top-level sports. If they can't fit on the bikes, that's just one more set of people who don't have the genes. They'll have to just get a job.
Punitive damages are defined differently. It's essentially additional payment beyond compensating for repair, it's meant to punish and deter the offender.
500 million is more like the cost to fix their damage, punitive damages start after the 500 mil, and apparently Exxon didn't receive any punishment.
Sort of like torching a guy's 200k home and then paying the guy just 200k after 20 years of court battle.
I think it was probably due to the taste rather than the maggots themselves. Maggots are edible and taste like whatever they've been eating. If the meat goes sours then the maggots taste bad too.
I doubt the maggots themselves made primitive humans all that squeamish.
I have no doubt that many will consider me despicable, but I have a feeling that I am not alone in saying that I will not give up meat voluntarily.
It must either be priced out beyond the reach of my disposable income or an alternative must be proposed that is tastier or cheaper than the meat we have right now. Perhaps vat grown meat, perhaps soy meat(It's quite tasty, but not easy to come by). In any case, I will eat meat.
I believe I am not alone in this because wishful thinking only goes so far in changing behavior. Sure we don't need laws if everbody is willing to act properly, but the simple fact is that many people don't behave unless you make it the best strategy. People can cut gas consumption, it's obvious that we can because we already have during the recent gas price jump. The world didn't end. Why didn't we do it earlier? Because the high price wasn't there to force us to use less gas. Republicans want to open up artic drilling as if that was a good thing, but really, our best insurance against Peak Oil is moderately high oil prices to drive alternative energy investment. Talking about it isn't enough, people need to feel pressure in their practical day-to-day lives.
A smug sense of self-righteousness might be a satisfactory replacement for a steak to some people, but not for me. I'll just eat my steak and be happy. If you want people like me to stop, it must be taken from me.
No justification here, I'm just pointing out the reality of the situation.
New Yorkers are extremely cosmopolitan, in that they treat both genders and every race(including their own) equally... with the same rough and rude manner. When you're in New York, get used to it or get out of the way.
Spot on. I pirate almost everything that's not linked to an online account. Steam is the best example, where I've bought a number of games for the convenience and low cost, combined with the worry of jeopardizing my steam account and other games by trying to pirate a new steam game. Xbox Live Arcade also got some money from me, as well as MMOs and Online Account-required multiplayer games.
The convenience of online stores should not be underestimated. I have bought games in online stores that I had already pirated and completed earlier. (Castlevania: Sympony of the Night on XBL and Beyond Good and Evil on Steam, for example). The low cost of the indie games in online stores worked wonders as well. The low cost of these games put their price so low that I'd rather just buy it on the spot, rather than search for a torrent(which might not exist for an indie game which wasn't advertised much). I expect that most of these low cost games do in fact exist in torrents somewhere, but the cost was low enough that I don't care to check. They're in a "throw-away money" price tier.
As for consoles, I only buy what I know I'll replay in the future, otherwise I just rent it through gamefly and return it for a new game instead. There are so many new games I want to play that I will only rarely return to a game, so only a few games are purchased. The ones that are purchased are Gamefly rentals that I've paid to keep(because I already played it and know I like it).
I respect them for having the conscience to consider the consequences of their actions. I hope that they also receive the treatment necessary to ensure that they are not also crippled by their conscience.
I'm worried that none of the people who are in a position to stop the war find a need for this treatment. They are too insulated.
If you can give them a demo, then they might believe you can turn it into a game, otherwise it's pie-in-the-sky imagination, all risk and no idea of what the reward could be.
Take a small level, make 1 minute section of game, just enough done to make 1 minute of game work. It could be a cardboard cutout world that is only finished enough to function for that 1 minute experience. Make the 1 minute as complete as you can. This is how the guys making Deadspace made their pitch to Capcom, they made a small but complete and playable demo level on their own.
Then when its over, present a plan. Not a plan of what the game will be like, but a plan of how to make the game itself. Number and type of employees needed, budget plan, development schedule, organization flows. The people holding the capital want a return on that capital, they want a profitable product, they don't care about making games happen for the sake of making them. They simply want you to convince them you can create a polished product with their money. What idea that product is created on is just a tiny aspect of the pitch(because ideas are cheap and they've already shot down a ton that were probably better than yours).
Everybody's got game ideas, and there's a ton of good game ideas. But without a good execution they'll never turn into a product, and even boring or plain ideas turn into a good products after good execution.
A company can fire you for overtime quite easily, they just write it differently.
If you have 50 hours of work a week, you can work 40 and blow off 10. You aren't fired for not working the missing 10 needed to complete your work, you're fired for not completing your work. The wording is different but it's exactly the same thing.
That said, the rest of the post is correct. I work 60 hours a week during winter and spring, and normal hours for the middle half of the year. It's the nature of the job and my boss held the same position 4 years ago and look where it got him. Got him a promotion. Sure we'd like to work and have guaranteed rewards that match the effort we put in, but your only guarantees in life are death and taxes.
A free market is a lack of government interference.
Unions are the government, they're not the anti-thesis of a free market. It's collective bargaining. You could say walmart is the anti-thesis of a free market too, they buy in bulk to reap economies of scale to offer lower prices. They're big, so they get to buy in bulk to get that bargain. An employee is just one person and if they don't have enough negotiating power, they are in a free market to permit an attempt to bargain collectively. In a free market they'd be free to fail. If the businesses deal with the union instead of firing them all that's the businesses's problem of not being able to overcome what a free market has thrown at them. Supply and demand is still in effect.
What you might be thinking of is a perfectly competitive market, and the free market doesn't always create perfect competition, and in certain cases it will do the exact opposite. If a company is powerful enough to crush competition with anti-competitive practices in a free market, they'll have no competition in that free market, because there's no government interference. I'm not saying that government involvement is always good, just that a free market isn't always good either. It's a complex and nuanced problem that will need a complex and nuanced solution.
Use it locally and do deals in person in a public place. People are less likely to rip you off if you're in range to punch them in the face. No protective shroud of anonymity. You either meet in honesty or don't meet at all. If you can see the product you can probably get a good handle on whether you want it or not too.
"A good UI lets you remove the extra wheels and tinker under the hood, though. "
This is how Asus handled the issue in their Eee PC line.
It boots up in a simple and easy to use interface so that anyone can access the functions they want, even though the interface is new. It looks like an OS from PlaySkool. There is no command line or any reference to it(which is how it should be).
You can however switch over to advanced mode by reading the manual. If they're able or interested enough to read manuals to go looking for more complex usage, only then should they be faced with the less intuitive interface. The command line is the pinnacle of unintuitive and should be the very last thing they encounter. In a GUI, you can visually search through your options until you find what you want. At the command line, you either know it or you don't.
After they already learned the answers or learned where to learn the answers, then they can sacrifice the intuitive interface for the more powerful but less intuitive command line.
There are wikipedia pages on various issues. Do you know all the nuances of the issues on Wikipedia? It's not hard to search wikipedia for it. If you don't know the nuances of the issues on wikipedia, you're "willfully ignorant" and not significantly different from "stupid".
There are many issues to inform yourself on, and while space is high enough on your list, it is not high on theirs. You're arrogant enough to disparage those who prioritize their lives differently.
I've seen postulations that the brain acts more like a massive number of very very slow cores instead.
Our decision making process is analog rather than digital. A study involved subjects trying being asked timed binary questions with response buttons on opposite sides of the screen. The study tracked the path of the mouse as the subjects made their decision. The mouse wavered between buttons as people made their decisions rather than immediately moving towards an answer and stopping.
Obviously, no solid conclusions can be made with this tiny experiment. but we can imagine the brain as a number of very slow massively parallel cores all weighing different bits of information and pitching contributions together, and its conclusion is whatever answer it has at the time it must answer. We kinda suck at a "single-core" task like calculation compared to most computers. Even simply adding a two seven digit numbers ties up the average person for a few seconds.
Tying back to the article, the writer imagines Google's digital framework returning to an analog existence.
It had a bunch of interesting excerpts, but overall I found a parallel to the "mother earth" concept.
Humans love to find patterns, it makes it easier to conceptualize and organize information. We look at our environment and find a wealth of information, when we expand our vision to include entire ecologies we find interaction between entities, and when we expand enough we become lost in the vastness of it all.
So how can we characterize all this information? We see the earth as a living organism, with a system of self-correcting processes that help sustain it's "life". A predator evolves a new advantage and the prey evolves a new defense. Overly successful species eat themselves to extinction or become eaten by a predator who is flooded with a bountiful food source.
In order to capture this ongoing balance act, we just call the pattern "life". But the exercise is left to the reader to determine the difference between the natural order and the human concept of "life as we know it"./. can refer to Riker's arguments against Data as a living life form. Pop open the back-plate of Google's head and switch it off. So long as the process requirements are in place, Google can function, but with us, once we die we are irreparably dead even when we bring the body back to life.
"Detroit native Tom Philips, the new unit leader said 'There are a lot of technologies that are two to three years out that are going to provide even more connectivity and innovation. There's such a disconnect between what people experience in their cars and what they experience in the rest of their lives.'"
Maybe, just maybe, the reason for the disconnect is that we're in a giant heap of metal hurtling at 70mph amid a bevy of other giant heaps of metal.
I think a good fix would be simply raising difficulty across the board. Children devour knowledge quite readily and in order to maximize their growth they need some challenge.
It's hard to say what the maximum tolerance of difficulty is before children start to drop out, but I'm pretty sure that the current level of difficulty is not high enough. If you expect nothing from a kid you're likely to get nothing from them.
They don't know what they're capable of, but when you tell all of them they're expected to learn "X" they believe it's possible, after all, everybody else is supposed to do it, why can't they? So they'll have a go at it, and the ball is rolling towards higher levels of achievement.
Something that worked great at Kumon (an after-school math class) was making kids re-do math problems that they got wrong on Saturday. A tutor would help explain where the kid went wrong and then the kid would stay until they could do all the problems correctly, plus the work given on Saturday. Our school let out around 2:30pm, with another ride home at 3:30pm, and another at 5:30pm. Our school was already paying for the extra rides! Have the kids stay at school until they can get it right, otherwise they can't go home at 2:30 like everybody else.
There's no simple solution that will address all the problems( besides parents doing all the teaching themselves), but I think raising the bar of difficulty must be a part of the overall package.
I think what GP was advocating(poorly) was consideration of how we obtain our "rights". Rights are just what we call things we really think we should have, but simply saying you have them doesn't make them exist.
Might makes "right."
The phrase is often used in a perjorative sense and without full understanding of its meaning. Sure if have an argument over who should have the last piece of pie, you can punch out the competition, but you'd still endure the social backlash of being the pie-hogging asshole. For the most part, that threat of social stigma is enough to create a moral impression that knocking people out is not how you should obtain pie. Now he has to cope with social shame. Society's law enforcement may come and arrest him too, maybe rough him up a bit in the process. Society's might is why society has the right to protection from pie-bandits; it's because society is able to create enough disincentives to keep pie-bandits at bay.
It's not a deep revelation, but merely what happens in practice.
Comcast can throttle bittorrent...as long as society allows them to. Everybody's free to do anything and everything unless something or someone else stops them. If we want net neutrality it is up to us to inflict enough pressure to make it happen, through economic or political means(or anything else we can come up with).
Same goes for food. It doesn't come out of nowhere, if someone wants food to live, they need to either get it or make it themselves or guilt someone else into giving it to them. It works on me when someone nearby begs for food. It doesn't work on me when they they're halfway across the world, guilt isn't as powerful from a distance. I also don't get the same immediate sense of satisfaction from feeding people nearby compared to feeding people far away.
So back to internet freedom. How much freedom we have depends on how bad we want it and what we're willing to do to keep it.
A bright green shooting star shot through the sky. Which isn't unusual, except it then stopped there, then went back retracing the same vector, then slowly down along a new angle, then dissapeared.
I was walking with my roommate at the time and after seeing this I turned to him. "Did you..." "...Uh yeah, I saw it too."
It was fun to imagine something more, but really, it was just a UFO, I don't believe in aliens.
I like having both options. I think I'll just go ahead and look in more than 1 place for information. I'll welcome both Knol and Wikipedia as related, but different entities.
Getting back to the issue at hand, they're handing down laws only to look good and expand power.
The 3 big console players have already incorporated parental lock features into their new consoles before this law had passed. The last one was Microsoft adding it to Windows Vista in January 2007.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't tell if that's sarcasm, but that's not the definition of monopoly.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly
Monopolies don't need 100% market share, they just need enough to be able to shape the nature of the market in that type of good. How the market is defined affects whether or not the entity is considered a monopoly. In the case of desktop OS, the 90% share means MS can affect the market in a big way. It may not be able to dictate terms, but it can certainly shape it.
This is correct. They piggyback on the cabling already installed in the house.
Not everyone is born able compete in top-level sports. If they can't fit on the bikes, that's just one more set of people who don't have the genes. They'll have to just get a job.
Punitive damages are defined differently. It's essentially additional payment beyond compensating for repair, it's meant to punish and deter the offender.
500 million is more like the cost to fix their damage, punitive damages start after the 500 mil, and apparently Exxon didn't receive any punishment.
Sort of like torching a guy's 200k home and then paying the guy just 200k after 20 years of court battle.
I think it was probably due to the taste rather than the maggots themselves. Maggots are edible and taste like whatever they've been eating. If the meat goes sours then the maggots taste bad too.
I doubt the maggots themselves made primitive humans all that squeamish.
I have no doubt that many will consider me despicable, but I have a feeling that I am not alone in saying that I will not give up meat voluntarily.
It must either be priced out beyond the reach of my disposable income or an alternative must be proposed that is tastier or cheaper than the meat we have right now. Perhaps vat grown meat, perhaps soy meat(It's quite tasty, but not easy to come by). In any case, I will eat meat.
I believe I am not alone in this because wishful thinking only goes so far in changing behavior. Sure we don't need laws if everbody is willing to act properly, but the simple fact is that many people don't behave unless you make it the best strategy. People can cut gas consumption, it's obvious that we can because we already have during the recent gas price jump. The world didn't end. Why didn't we do it earlier? Because the high price wasn't there to force us to use less gas. Republicans want to open up artic drilling as if that was a good thing, but really, our best insurance against Peak Oil is moderately high oil prices to drive alternative energy investment. Talking about it isn't enough, people need to feel pressure in their practical day-to-day lives.
A smug sense of self-righteousness might be a satisfactory replacement for a steak to some people, but not for me. I'll just eat my steak and be happy. If you want people like me to stop, it must be taken from me.
No justification here, I'm just pointing out the reality of the situation.
That's not it at all.
New Yorkers are extremely cosmopolitan, in that they treat both genders and every race(including their own) equally... with the same rough and rude manner. When you're in New York, get used to it or get out of the way.
Spot on. I pirate almost everything that's not linked to an online account. Steam is the best example, where I've bought a number of games for the convenience and low cost, combined with the worry of jeopardizing my steam account and other games by trying to pirate a new steam game. Xbox Live Arcade also got some money from me, as well as MMOs and Online Account-required multiplayer games.
The convenience of online stores should not be underestimated. I have bought games in online stores that I had already pirated and completed earlier. (Castlevania: Sympony of the Night on XBL and Beyond Good and Evil on Steam, for example). The low cost of the indie games in online stores worked wonders as well. The low cost of these games put their price so low that I'd rather just buy it on the spot, rather than search for a torrent(which might not exist for an indie game which wasn't advertised much). I expect that most of these low cost games do in fact exist in torrents somewhere, but the cost was low enough that I don't care to check. They're in a "throw-away money" price tier.
As for consoles, I only buy what I know I'll replay in the future, otherwise I just rent it through gamefly and return it for a new game instead. There are so many new games I want to play that I will only rarely return to a game, so only a few games are purchased. The ones that are purchased are Gamefly rentals that I've paid to keep(because I already played it and know I like it).
I respect them for having the conscience to consider the consequences of their actions. I hope that they also receive the treatment necessary to ensure that they are not also crippled by their conscience.
I'm worried that none of the people who are in a position to stop the war find a need for this treatment. They are too insulated.
If you can give them a demo, then they might believe you can turn it into a game, otherwise it's pie-in-the-sky imagination, all risk and no idea of what the reward could be.
Take a small level, make 1 minute section of game, just enough done to make 1 minute of game work. It could be a cardboard cutout world that is only finished enough to function for that 1 minute experience. Make the 1 minute as complete as you can. This is how the guys making Deadspace made their pitch to Capcom, they made a small but complete and playable demo level on their own.
Then when its over, present a plan. Not a plan of what the game will be like, but a plan of how to make the game itself. Number and type of employees needed, budget plan, development schedule, organization flows. The people holding the capital want a return on that capital, they want a profitable product, they don't care about making games happen for the sake of making them. They simply want you to convince them you can create a polished product with their money. What idea that product is created on is just a tiny aspect of the pitch(because ideas are cheap and they've already shot down a ton that were probably better than yours).
Everybody's got game ideas, and there's a ton of good game ideas. But without a good execution they'll never turn into a product, and even boring or plain ideas turn into a good products after good execution.
A company can fire you for overtime quite easily, they just write it differently.
If you have 50 hours of work a week, you can work 40 and blow off 10. You aren't fired for not working the missing 10 needed to complete your work, you're fired for not completing your work. The wording is different but it's exactly the same thing.
That said, the rest of the post is correct. I work 60 hours a week during winter and spring, and normal hours for the middle half of the year. It's the nature of the job and my boss held the same position 4 years ago and look where it got him. Got him a promotion. Sure we'd like to work and have guaranteed rewards that match the effort we put in, but your only guarantees in life are death and taxes.
A free market is a lack of government interference.
Unions are the government, they're not the anti-thesis of a free market. It's collective bargaining. You could say walmart is the anti-thesis of a free market too, they buy in bulk to reap economies of scale to offer lower prices. They're big, so they get to buy in bulk to get that bargain. An employee is just one person and if they don't have enough negotiating power, they are in a free market to permit an attempt to bargain collectively. In a free market they'd be free to fail. If the businesses deal with the union instead of firing them all that's the businesses's problem of not being able to overcome what a free market has thrown at them. Supply and demand is still in effect.
What you might be thinking of is a perfectly competitive market, and the free market doesn't always create perfect competition, and in certain cases it will do the exact opposite. If a company is powerful enough to crush competition with anti-competitive practices in a free market, they'll have no competition in that free market, because there's no government interference. I'm not saying that government involvement is always good, just that a free market isn't always good either. It's a complex and nuanced problem that will need a complex and nuanced solution.
Use it locally and do deals in person in a public place. People are less likely to rip you off if you're in range to punch them in the face. No protective shroud of anonymity. You either meet in honesty or don't meet at all. If you can see the product you can probably get a good handle on whether you want it or not too.
"A good UI lets you remove the extra wheels and tinker under the hood, though. "
This is how Asus handled the issue in their Eee PC line.
It boots up in a simple and easy to use interface so that anyone can access the functions they want, even though the interface is new. It looks like an OS from PlaySkool. There is no command line or any reference to it(which is how it should be).
You can however switch over to advanced mode by reading the manual. If they're able or interested enough to read manuals to go looking for more complex usage, only then should they be faced with the less intuitive interface. The command line is the pinnacle of unintuitive and should be the very last thing they encounter. In a GUI, you can visually search through your options until you find what you want. At the command line, you either know it or you don't.
After they already learned the answers or learned where to learn the answers, then they can sacrifice the intuitive interface for the more powerful but less intuitive command line.
There are wikipedia pages on various issues. Do you know all the nuances of the issues on Wikipedia? It's not hard to search wikipedia for it. If you don't know the nuances of the issues on wikipedia, you're "willfully ignorant" and not significantly different from "stupid".
There are many issues to inform yourself on, and while space is high enough on your list, it is not high on theirs. You're arrogant enough to disparage those who prioritize their lives differently.
Streisand effect.
Basically, the desktop stays on MS's side and we all just remote desktop into it.
MS would do all the upkeep and hardware upgrades on the desktop on their end, with no change for us who are just using remote desktop.
There's a difference in the implementation, but in practice for the user, that's what would be going on.
I've seen postulations that the brain acts more like a massive number of very very slow cores instead.
Our decision making process is analog rather than digital. A study involved subjects trying being asked timed binary questions with response buttons on opposite sides of the screen. The study tracked the path of the mouse as the subjects made their decision. The mouse wavered between buttons as people made their decisions rather than immediately moving towards an answer and stopping.
Obviously, no solid conclusions can be made with this tiny experiment. but we can imagine the brain as a number of very slow massively parallel cores all weighing different bits of information and pitching contributions together, and its conclusion is whatever answer it has at the time it must answer. We kinda suck at a "single-core" task like calculation compared to most computers. Even simply adding a two seven digit numbers ties up the average person for a few seconds.
Tying back to the article, the writer imagines Google's digital framework returning to an analog existence.
It had a bunch of interesting excerpts, but overall I found a parallel to the "mother earth" concept.
Humans love to find patterns, it makes it easier to conceptualize and organize information. We look at our environment and find a wealth of information, when we expand our vision to include entire ecologies we find interaction between entities, and when we expand enough we become lost in the vastness of it all.
So how can we characterize all this information? We see the earth as a living organism, with a system of self-correcting processes that help sustain it's "life". A predator evolves a new advantage and the prey evolves a new defense. Overly successful species eat themselves to extinction or become eaten by a predator who is flooded with a bountiful food source.
In order to capture this ongoing balance act, we just call the pattern "life". But the exercise is left to the reader to determine the difference between the natural order and the human concept of "life as we know it". /. can refer to Riker's arguments against Data as a living life form. Pop open the back-plate of Google's head and switch it off. So long as the process requirements are in place, Google can function, but with us, once we die we are irreparably dead even when we bring the body back to life.
"Detroit native Tom Philips, the new unit leader said 'There are a lot of technologies that are two to three years out that are going to provide even more connectivity and innovation. There's such a disconnect between what people experience in their cars and what they experience in the rest of their lives.'"
Maybe, just maybe, the reason for the disconnect is that we're in a giant heap of metal hurtling at 70mph amid a bevy of other giant heaps of metal.
I think we should preserve that disconnect.
I think a good fix would be simply raising difficulty across the board. Children devour knowledge quite readily and in order to maximize their growth they need some challenge.
It's hard to say what the maximum tolerance of difficulty is before children start to drop out, but I'm pretty sure that the current level of difficulty is not high enough. If you expect nothing from a kid you're likely to get nothing from them.
They don't know what they're capable of, but when you tell all of them they're expected to learn "X" they believe it's possible, after all, everybody else is supposed to do it, why can't they? So they'll have a go at it, and the ball is rolling towards higher levels of achievement.
Something that worked great at Kumon (an after-school math class) was making kids re-do math problems that they got wrong on Saturday. A tutor would help explain where the kid went wrong and then the kid would stay until they could do all the problems correctly, plus the work given on Saturday. Our school let out around 2:30pm, with another ride home at 3:30pm, and another at 5:30pm. Our school was already paying for the extra rides! Have the kids stay at school until they can get it right, otherwise they can't go home at 2:30 like everybody else.
There's no simple solution that will address all the problems( besides parents doing all the teaching themselves), but I think raising the bar of difficulty must be a part of the overall package.
I think what GP was advocating(poorly) was consideration of how we obtain our "rights". Rights are just what we call things we really think we should have, but simply saying you have them doesn't make them exist.
Might makes "right."
The phrase is often used in a perjorative sense and without full understanding of its meaning. Sure if have an argument over who should have the last piece of pie, you can punch out the competition, but you'd still endure the social backlash of being the pie-hogging asshole. For the most part, that threat of social stigma is enough to create a moral impression that knocking people out is not how you should obtain pie. Now he has to cope with social shame. Society's law enforcement may come and arrest him too, maybe rough him up a bit in the process. Society's might is why society has the right to protection from pie-bandits; it's because society is able to create enough disincentives to keep pie-bandits at bay.
It's not a deep revelation, but merely what happens in practice.
Comcast can throttle bittorrent...as long as society allows them to. Everybody's free to do anything and everything unless something or someone else stops them. If we want net neutrality it is up to us to inflict enough pressure to make it happen, through economic or political means(or anything else we can come up with).
Same goes for food. It doesn't come out of nowhere, if someone wants food to live, they need to either get it or make it themselves or guilt someone else into giving it to them. It works on me when someone nearby begs for food. It doesn't work on me when they they're halfway across the world, guilt isn't as powerful from a distance. I also don't get the same immediate sense of satisfaction from feeding people nearby compared to feeding people far away.
So back to internet freedom. How much freedom we have depends on how bad we want it and what we're willing to do to keep it.
I saw a UFO too.
A bright green shooting star shot through the sky. Which isn't unusual, except it then stopped there, then went back retracing the same vector, then slowly down along a new angle, then dissapeared.
I was walking with my roommate at the time and after seeing this I turned to him. "Did you..." "...Uh yeah, I saw it too."
It was fun to imagine something more, but really, it was just a UFO, I don't believe in aliens.
I like having both options. I think I'll just go ahead and look in more than 1 place for information. I'll welcome both Knol and Wikipedia as related, but different entities.
Getting back to the issue at hand, they're handing down laws only to look good and expand power.
The 3 big console players have already incorporated parental lock features into their new consoles before this law had passed. The last one was Microsoft adding it to Windows Vista in January 2007.
As for ratings? http://www.esrb.org/index-js.jsp
Already implemented by the industry, just like movie ratings.
http://www.gamercenteronline.net/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/gow2-boxshot.jpg
Is there some problem in seeing the big fat M: MATURE 17+