When I was in college, having heard about the Dvorak layout, I decided to give it a shot. I switched my keyboard layout, applied some new letter stickers, and spent a couple weeks re-training myself to the new format. After about three months, I gave up and switched back, primarily for two reasons:
First, shortcut keys. The letter layout itself may be (arguably) more efficient, but the placement of shortcut keys is an overlay on top of that which has its own efficiently. Take Copy (Ctrl-C), Paste (Ctrl-V). They're right next to each other, and use the left hand so you can copy/paste while using the mouse with your right hand. If you use Dvorak, Ctrl-V is on the right-hand side of the keyboard, so you have to choose between moving your hand off the mouse, or using your left hand on the right side of the keyboard. I suppose you could re-map all your shortcut keys too, but that becomes an even more involved process with a higher learning curve.
Secondly, it became a struggle to use other computers. Although I'd retrained myself on my keyboard easily enough, it became more difficult to use other computers, and remember to switch back and forth. Hitting the wrong shortcut-key combination can have disastrous results in different applications, and it just became too difficult to deal with.
So, while the QWERTY layout may not be the most optimally efficient, in my opinion the overhead in switching it to anything else is simply too great.
It's still a great case study in how engineering decisions are made though, and I highly recommend giving it a try. Perhaps forcing a classroom of engineering students to do it for a quarter would prevent costly project overruns years down the road...
This law is trying to save, uh.. "Brick & Mortar" casinos.
The irony is that WA state is banning online gambling at the same time they're allowing more and more casinos to be built, including privately-owned ones, and Tribal casinos that aren't actually on reservation property.
So I wouldn't go thinking this legislation is about actually safeguarding gullible people, or is based on some sort of principle. My bet is it's financed largely by WA state tribes and casino owners, and is mainly intended to keep people from leaving the state (via the internet) to gamble elsewhere.
Yep. I have the Clevo D470K, which is shown here as the "Sting 417 Gaming Laptop". I love the machine to death, with the only downside being the annoyingly loud fans on the bottom.
Although not the cheapest option, if I was going to order mine again I'd order it through Sager. Sager appears to provide great support, driver and BIOS updates, and I frequent their site all the time since my vendor is lame, outsources their support (which isn't particularly good anyhow), and refuses to offer BIOS updates. My hard drive went bad, and they wanted me to ship the entire machine to them to get it replaced. As I was about to go on a trip, I ended up just replacing it myself at my own expense.
So, I don't have a problem with boutique laptops per-se, just make sure you buy from a quality vendor, even if it costs a little more.
...you should have done something terrible to the system, destroyed all the accounts, and performed all your malicious acts *before* you put in your two weeks notice.
Sounds pretty reactionary to me, simply assuming that because you've turned in your two weeks, suddenly you're a threat to the company. But as long as you presented yourself professionally, you did all you could.
Be available for your two weeks (after all, they are paying you, and you don't want to burn any bridges). But hey, you know what? It's not your problem anymore, and you don't owe them anything they're not paying you for.
Intel is in the process of building one plant (Fab 32) which contains 45nm processes in Chandler, AZ, and just announced plans to build a second 45nm plant (Fab 28) in Israel.
Unless an application is running on a system in which the processor design, motherboard schematics and BIOS firmware are 100% Open Source, it can not claim to be Open Source.
My daughter likes the Sesame Street site as well. I'd also recommend noggin.com, they have good kid-friendly games. nickjr.com has a few, but they have a lot of ads, and some games don't play well with Firefox.
Now I just have to teach her how to play Warcraft...
the people the Democratic party needs aren't those who buy into Leftwing propaganda...
Actually, I disagree with you here. The Democratic party needs people who buy into leftwing propaganda. Lots of them. In fact, they need all the people who buy into rightwing propoganda to buy into leftwing propaganda instead. That's what propaganda is for.
To a certain extent it is impossible to *not* distort the truth. Every time you take a photograph, you're presenting selective evidence. You're telling the truth about whatever is shown in that 3x4" rectangle, but who knows what's outside the borders. But that's the point of the picture.. to focus the viewer's attention on the subject. It's the nature of the medium.
In the same way, F9/11 is a "photograph" of current issues, foreign policy, and our president. While care is taken to have accurate facts, the purpose of the movie is to focus attention on the subject(s) in an unattractive fashion.
Michael Moore *could have* made a movie about fairly analyzing the facts, including a two-hour debate between right and left-wing propagandists in an attempt to get a balanced look at GWB, but then *nobody* would go see it. Boring as hell, and you can get that on TV. In order to make a successful movie, you have to grab people by their emotions and shake them around a bit.
In the same way, Moore could have made a two-hour movie about stupid things I've said and done over the last four years, but nobody would go see that either. Then again, I'm not the "leader of the free world", and try as I might, I haven't been able to cause the deaths of tens of thousands of people.
Moore is a filmmaker. He obviously has a message, and has done an exceptional job at creating a movie that people will go see, which gets that message across.
Whether you agree with that message is a totally different issue.
Err... I'm glad that everyone has the best interests of the populations of Iran at heart, but I think there's some confusion about how anonymizer.com actually works.
Anonymizer.com is intended to keep your identity a secret only from the target web server. From the original article: "they can use Anonymizer.com as a kind of jumping-off point, also called a proxy server".
This is correct. The client sends a request for a web page (say google.com) from anonymizer.com (or sedayama.com, or barandaz.com, or whichever). The anonymizer goes out, fetches the page for them, and then feeds it back. In this way, google.com has no idea who they are.
Since anonymizer.com's server is in California, all data must be sent between the server in California and the client in Iran, through the country's firewall and whatever sniffer programs they have running.
In no way whatsoever does this process prevent the Iranian government from snooping the connection between the browser and anonymizer.com to see whatever the heck the client is looking at. In fact, it makes the censor's life easier. All they have to do now is scan for all data to or from anonymizer.com, sedayama, etc. Then they can either parse the data and see what banned sites the client is viewing, or just assume that they're up to no good, raid their house, confiscate their computer and look at the browser cache.
According to the Opennet report, the only real "anonymizing" functionality of this site comes from converting URLs from text to hexadecimal, and the obfuscation from the anonymizer site having to change URLs and IP addresses whenever the Iran government blocks one.
I think the IBB is doing these people a grave disservice by advertising that sites can be viewed anonymously, when in fact they can't. Even if the connection was completely encrypted with SSL, the government censors could determine that a connection was made to an anonymizer site, and that the client is worthy of further investigation.
Again, from the OpenNet report: "Iranian users may not be aware that their use of the service may identify them to Iranian government authorities as citizens wishing to view forbidden content, or as supportive of the ideas found within that content."
Enough said. The people who run the IBB Anonymizer project should realize it was a well-meaning but flawed concept from the start, and it can actually be counter-productive by exposing Iranians who trust the claims of anonymity.
Those claims should be retracted and a big warning banner posted on the site(s), or the project should be killed outright.
My cell phone (a Sanyo SCP-8100) has a GPS receiver built right into it, for "emergency call tracking". I imagine it's for law enforcement tracking as well, although the manual doesn't say that explicitly. I'm a bit miffed that they won't at least allow me to see my own GPS coordinates...
I appreciate your sentiments, although I doubt this will ever see a courtroom. As far as I know, there's no regulation on data collected from Safeway/Thriftway/Fred Meyers "discount" cards, and those are perfectly legal. It's almost the same scheme, although the grocery store can't be sued if you buy too much milk and crash into a house on your way home.
In fact, all most bars would have to do is give a 5% discount to customers who sign up for the card, and otherwise privacy-loving people will be breaking down the door to get one.
Actually, the government has forced it to be their business, since the bar and bartenders can be held liable if you are served alcohol in their establishment, leave, and drunkenly hit someone or something. These are called Social Host Liability laws, or "Dram Shop" acts.
In fact, you could argue that the bars would be negligent in not instituting such a system. They also have monetary incentive since they will probably get insurance breaks for doing so.
If I were designing this thing (well, maybe I should), I'd put the side-scroller down on the side for my thumb. I have a Logitech wheel-mouse that has a thumb-button that I never use, but a side-scrolling wheel (or one of those little nubs that IBM has in their laptop keyboards) would be perfect down there...
If micropayments were feasible, they would have caught on already. The problem with micropayments is that as the amount of payments gets smaller, the number of transactions goes up. This brings with it a necessary increase in the cost of processing transactions due to staffing, processing, database storage, etc.
This is most obvious in services who use credit-card transactions. Many brick-and-mortar stores won't take credit card transactions less than $3 or $4 because they have to pay Visa (or whoever) so much per transaction. Thus, making Visa transactions for less than $.01 payments is ridiculous, unless you can find someone to keep track of all your transactions for essentially free.
If you can't, then you then either have to collect money ahead of time and keep track of usage yourself (subscription), or track the usage and charge at the end of a period of time (billing).
...except that the first time someone's kid gets routed to animalsex.com or some such, they're going to sue the city. So the city's going to have to install porn filters, and do age verification, and all the other crap that schools and libraries have to put up with in order to even offer desktop-based internet access, at which point it probably won't even be worthwhile.
Not to mention having to provide tech support for an entire metropolitan area...
Or the fact that the people that can afford computers or laptops with 802.11 cards can probably afford decent DSL access anyhow.
More power to 'em if they can pull it off, but there's reasons why Ricochet didn't do so well...
Friday's "Worldwide Caution" from Dept. of State
on
More On Tragedy
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I find it interesting that this past Friday, (September 7th) the U.S. Department of State issued the following "Worldwide Caution" travel bulletin for the benefit of US travelers:
"Over the last several months, the U.S. Government has learned that U.S. citizens and interests abroad may be at increased risk of a terrorist action from extremist groups. In addition, we have received unconfirmed information that terrorist actions may be taken against U.S. military facilities and/or establishments frequented by U.S. military personnel in Korea and Japan. We are also concerned about information we received in May 2001 that American citizens may be the target of a terrorist threat from extremist groups with links to Usama Bin Ladin's Al-Qaida organization. In the past, such individuals have not distinguished between official and civilian targets. As always, we take this information seriously. U.S. Government facilities worldwide remain at a heightened state of alert."
I find it interesting that just this past Friday, (September 7th) the U.S. Department of State issued the following "Worldwide Caution" travel bulletin for the benefit of US travelers:
"Over the last several months, the U.S. Government has learned that U.S. citizens and interests abroad may be at increased risk of a terrorist action from extremist groups. In addition, we have received unconfirmed information that terrorist actions may be taken against U.S. military facilities and/or establishments frequented by U.S. military personnel in Korea and Japan. We are also concerned about information we received in May 2001 that American citizens may be the target of a terrorist threat from extremist groups with links to Usama Bin Ladin's Al-Qaida organization. In the past, such individuals have not distinguished between official and civilian targets. As always, we take this information seriously. U.S. Government facilities worldwide remain at a heightened state of alert."
> Fifth (and finally), if there is piracy, pass new laws to increase the number of police officers. Pass
> new laws to stiffen existing penalties. We have a legal system. The legislative branch creates law,
> the executive branch enforces the law, and the judicial branch does political favors to their
> appointers. Be that as it is, this is a problem of enforcement of existing laws, not the lack of laws.
The same logic applies to the "War on Some Drugs", and we all know how successful that's been. You can spend trillions of dollars enforcing a bad set of laws and never make a difference.
1. If a school official with the computer program told me I could try to crack security software on school computers, I'd believe him.
2. Does anyone think it's possible that the teacher did intend to challenge the students, but when his bosses came up and said "Did you tell them to do this?" he replied something like "umm.. yeah, but I was just kidding..."
3. Who is the software company, and why is the school protecting their identity? Nobody seems to be questioning them. I'd be mighty pissed if I was paying thousands of dollars of taxpayers' money for software that is effectively worthless.
In fact, I am a taxpayer and I'm pissed that my money is being wasted on this crap. More power to Aaron.
How come people always tell you to "think outside the box", and then get mad when you do?
I have never seen a movie as badly mis-directed as this one. I feel cheated out of good memories of my childhood. D&D has been a significant part of my life for the last 15 years. Every time I pick up a D&D book from now on I am going to remember that travesty of a movie and want to retch. It's enough to make me never want to buy anything from Wizards of the Coast ever again. I'm insulted that the D&D logo was actually placed on that eyesore.
I was looking for a movie that, at the least, would give me some visual pictures to go with the actions of the game: how spells are actually cast in combat, maybe some admiration of fighter or thief skills, perhaps getting some insight into the mindset of the cleric? Too much to hope for. This movie doesn't even begin to approach that level of sophistication. I would be embarrassed to take a child to that movie and tell him that it represents a game I've been playing since I was his age.
The movie was painful to watch. Did anyone else notice that the Empress' lines were dubbed over in the dramatic parts? She was so quiet most of the time her voice was flat. Then during the cumulation of her threats to the council, her voice suddenly was loud, resonant, and didn't match her lips?
Just one specific of a movie I cringe to think about. The party "mage" was totally ineffectual (not even one magic missile!), the thieves sucked, but you were supposed to take them seriously during the dramatic parts? There were some lame attempts at drama and history in the elven "tree" (What's all that crap about elves being a "part of magic" anyhow?) The dwarf had like three good lines, and what was up with that huge-breasted "form-fitting" aluminum body armor?
And like I'm supposed to believe that intelligent thieves had been trying to get through that stupid three-room maze (when they could watch everyone else solve the puzzle) for fifteen years? I tried my best to generate some "suspension of disbelief" for this movie, but it was simply impossible. Believing fifteen impossible things before breakfast won't make it through this mess.
I was relieved when the killed off Snails because it made the movie a bit less painful. I could rant all day. The plastic talking skeleton was a joke, the plastic dragon staves were a joke, the elven "cleric" was a joke, and what the hell was up with that ending? "Your friend is waiting for you". Aaaarrgh!
The CGI wasn't even that good. The dungeons sucked, the dragons sucked, the plot sucked. Richard O'Brien (The thief guild leader) was the best part of the movie. It's pretty much impossible to mis-direct him, he's such a freak in real life.
Ugh. (shiver)
There is nothing more painful than watching good actors forced into doing a bad job. I know it's not their fault. Blame the director? Blame WoC? I don't know, but I feel dirty having just seen it. Please don't let any more people spend money on this movie. I'm glad I only paid matinee price, but I still wish I could take it back.
I feel that, if you're making a movie based on a game that has been around as long as D&D, and has such a large following, there is a responsibility to make the movie intellectually appealing to people who played the game. Having watched this movie, I feel horribly let down. I feel that my intelligence has been insulted, and the years I have enjoyed playing the game have been cheapened. I'm pissed off, and I want an apology.
When I was in high school, I laughed at the D.A.R.E. program and thought it was very patronizing. Of course, I also had Nancy Reagan saying "Ignore everything we just taught you and JUST SAY NO!".
However, looking back I am actually in favor of DARE, but not for the reasons it's proponents give. I approve of DARE because it was the ONLY drug education I received anywhere other than the street. After going through DARE I knew, more or less, what the difference was between barbituates, opiates, and hallucinogens were. I knew which drugs were heavily "physically addictive", while others were "psychologically addictive", or habit-forming. I was able to use this information in my later years to avoid certain substances.
Nobody else ever told me anything substantical about illegal substances. Without DARE, I would have known nothing, and may well have equated pot on the same "level" as crack or heroin, and ended up hooked on something, completely ignorant of the consequences. At least with DARE I had a basic set of guidelines to go with.
I could have used less propaganda and more factual information, but I'll take what I can get, and I'm glad the kids in this country are getting any information at all.
If linking to "illegal files" becomes illegal, and if British Telecom "owns linking" (Wired: "British Telecom: We Own Linking"), then apparently the RIAA should be suing British Telecom for enabling easy access to information that violates copyright laws, instead of MP3.com.:)
At least one issue here is that you really have no idea where the news you read is coming from. I've learned to take everything I read off MSNBC (or see on KING5 news, since they're the same thing) with a huge grain of salt. However, until I read that article, I was blissfully unaware that CNN was owned by AOL/TW. I made the mistake of thinking they were a respectable, independent news source. I don't see any news shows on my local public access channel. So, this mean that every daily news show I have access to on my cable TV (the provider of which is probably owned by AOL/TW), the news I hear on all the radio stations I listen to (which are probably owned by some large media company), and the majority of the news I get off the 'net (with the possible exception of Slashdot), are all owned and controlled by huge companies. The point is that the majority of the U.S. population does not take the time to watch the 6:00 news, then get online and check the facts with different news sources. People pretty much believe what they see on Channel X news, or read on msnbc.com. As an example, during the WTO "riots" (cough cough) in Seattle, I watched around 300 people standing in an intersection get teargassed by local police on Capitol Hill. There wasn't a single mention of that incident on any major media source. All the news reports focused on the same footage of six guys breaking windows downtown. Every story, however, does mention that "downtown businesses lost $18 million in damages and lost sales". Like it's a huge tragedy if *one* Nordstrom's store doesn't make their $10 million in sales that day? Who owns Nordstrom's anyway? It would help if there were some easy way to check who owned what company, and whose interests each company is likely pandering to. I haven't been able to find a site that really links this info together, does anyone know of a site that does, or some other relatively easy way to correlate this information?
Slashdot Mirror
When I was in college, having heard about the Dvorak layout, I decided to give it a shot. I switched my keyboard layout, applied some new letter stickers, and spent a couple weeks re-training myself to the new format. After about three months, I gave up and switched back, primarily for two reasons:
First, shortcut keys. The letter layout itself may be (arguably) more efficient, but the placement of shortcut keys is an overlay on top of that which has its own efficiently. Take Copy (Ctrl-C), Paste (Ctrl-V). They're right next to each other, and use the left hand so you can copy/paste while using the mouse with your right hand. If you use Dvorak, Ctrl-V is on the right-hand side of the keyboard, so you have to choose between moving your hand off the mouse, or using your left hand on the right side of the keyboard. I suppose you could re-map all your shortcut keys too, but that becomes an even more involved process with a higher learning curve.
Secondly, it became a struggle to use other computers. Although I'd retrained myself on my keyboard easily enough, it became more difficult to use other computers, and remember to switch back and forth. Hitting the wrong shortcut-key combination can have disastrous results in different applications, and it just became too difficult to deal with.
So, while the QWERTY layout may not be the most optimally efficient, in my opinion the overhead in switching it to anything else is simply too great.
It's still a great case study in how engineering decisions are made though, and I highly recommend giving it a try. Perhaps forcing a classroom of engineering students to do it for a quarter would prevent costly project overruns years down the road...
Wait.. the earth is estimated to be 4.5 billion years old itself... so the entire universe is only ~3 times older than the earth itself?
This law is trying to save, uh.. "Brick & Mortar" casinos.
The irony is that WA state is banning online gambling at the same time they're allowing more and more casinos to be built, including privately-owned ones, and Tribal casinos that aren't actually on reservation property.
So I wouldn't go thinking this legislation is about actually safeguarding gullible people, or is based on some sort of principle. My bet is it's financed largely by WA state tribes and casino owners, and is mainly intended to keep people from leaving the state (via the internet) to gamble elsewhere.
Yep. I have the Clevo D470K, which is shown here as the "Sting 417 Gaming Laptop". I love the machine to death, with the only downside being the annoyingly loud fans on the bottom.
Although not the cheapest option, if I was going to order mine again I'd order it through Sager. Sager appears to provide great support, driver and BIOS updates, and I frequent their site all the time since my vendor is lame, outsources their support (which isn't particularly good anyhow), and refuses to offer BIOS updates. My hard drive went bad, and they wanted me to ship the entire machine to them to get it replaced. As I was about to go on a trip, I ended up just replacing it myself at my own expense.
So, I don't have a problem with boutique laptops per-se, just make sure you buy from a quality vendor, even if it costs a little more.
...you should have done something terrible to the system, destroyed all the accounts, and performed all your malicious acts *before* you put in your two weeks notice.
Sounds pretty reactionary to me, simply assuming that because you've turned in your two weeks, suddenly you're a threat to the company. But as long as you presented yourself professionally, you did all you could.
Be available for your two weeks (after all, they are paying you, and you don't want to burn any bridges). But hey, you know what? It's not your problem anymore, and you don't owe them anything they're not paying you for.
Intel is in the process of building one plant (Fab 32) which contains 45nm processes in Chandler, AZ, and just announced plans to build a second 45nm plant (Fab 28) in Israel.
See for yourself.
Unless an application is running on a system in which the processor design, motherboard schematics and BIOS firmware are 100% Open Source, it can not claim to be Open Source.
Sound reasonable?
My daughter likes the Sesame Street site as well. I'd also recommend noggin.com, they have good kid-friendly games. nickjr.com has a few, but they have a lot of ads, and some games don't play well with Firefox.
Now I just have to teach her how to play Warcraft...
the people the Democratic party needs aren't those who buy into Leftwing propaganda...
Actually, I disagree with you here. The Democratic party needs people who buy into leftwing propaganda. Lots of them. In fact, they need all the people who buy into rightwing propoganda to buy into leftwing propaganda instead. That's what propaganda is for.
To a certain extent it is impossible to *not* distort the truth. Every time you take a photograph, you're presenting selective evidence. You're telling the truth about whatever is shown in that 3x4" rectangle, but who knows what's outside the borders. But that's the point of the picture.. to focus the viewer's attention on the subject. It's the nature of the medium.
In the same way, F9/11 is a "photograph" of current issues, foreign policy, and our president. While care is taken to have accurate facts, the purpose of the movie is to focus attention on the subject(s) in an unattractive fashion.
Michael Moore *could have* made a movie about fairly analyzing the facts, including a two-hour debate between right and left-wing propagandists in an attempt to get a balanced look at GWB, but then *nobody* would go see it. Boring as hell, and you can get that on TV. In order to make a successful movie, you have to grab people by their emotions and shake them around a bit.
In the same way, Moore could have made a two-hour movie about stupid things I've said and done over the last four years, but nobody would go see that either. Then again, I'm not the "leader of the free world", and try as I might, I haven't been able to cause the deaths of tens of thousands of people.
Moore is a filmmaker. He obviously has a message, and has done an exceptional job at creating a movie that people will go see, which gets that message across.
Whether you agree with that message is a totally different issue.
Err... I'm glad that everyone has the best interests of the populations of Iran at heart, but I think there's some confusion about how anonymizer.com actually works.
Anonymizer.com is intended to keep your identity a secret only from the target web server. From the original article: "they can use Anonymizer.com as a kind of jumping-off point, also called a proxy server".
This is correct. The client sends a request for a web page (say google.com) from anonymizer.com (or sedayama.com, or barandaz.com, or whichever). The anonymizer goes out, fetches the page for them, and then feeds it back. In this way, google.com has no idea who they are.
Since anonymizer.com's server is in California, all data must be sent between the server in California and the client in Iran, through the country's firewall and whatever sniffer programs they have running.
In no way whatsoever does this process prevent the Iranian government from snooping the connection between the browser and anonymizer.com to see whatever the heck the client is looking at. In fact, it makes the censor's life easier. All they have to do now is scan for all data to or from anonymizer.com, sedayama, etc. Then they can either parse the data and see what banned sites the client is viewing, or just assume that they're up to no good, raid their house, confiscate their computer and look at the browser cache.
According to the Opennet report, the only real "anonymizing" functionality of this site comes from converting URLs from text to hexadecimal, and the obfuscation from the anonymizer site having to change URLs and IP addresses whenever the Iran government blocks one.
I think the IBB is doing these people a grave disservice by advertising that sites can be viewed anonymously, when in fact they can't. Even if the connection was completely encrypted with SSL, the government censors could determine that a connection was made to an anonymizer site, and that the client is worthy of further investigation.
Again, from the OpenNet report: "Iranian users may not be aware that their use of the service may identify them to Iranian government authorities as citizens wishing to view forbidden content, or as supportive of the ideas found within that content."
Enough said. The people who run the IBB Anonymizer project should realize it was a well-meaning but flawed concept from the start, and it can actually be counter-productive by exposing Iranians who trust the claims of anonymity.
Those claims should be retracted and a big warning banner posted on the site(s), or the project should be killed outright.
My cell phone (a Sanyo SCP-8100) has a GPS receiver built right into it, for "emergency call tracking". I imagine it's for law enforcement tracking as well, although the manual doesn't say that explicitly. I'm a bit miffed that they won't at least allow me to see my own GPS coordinates...
I appreciate your sentiments, although I doubt this will ever see a courtroom. As far as I know, there's no regulation on data collected from Safeway/Thriftway/Fred Meyers "discount" cards, and those are perfectly legal. It's almost the same scheme, although the grocery store can't be sued if you buy too much milk and crash into a house on your way home.
In fact, all most bars would have to do is give a 5% discount to customers who sign up for the card, and otherwise privacy-loving people will be breaking down the door to get one.
Actually, the government has forced it to be their business, since the bar and bartenders can be held liable if you are served alcohol in their establishment, leave, and drunkenly hit someone or something. These are called Social Host Liability laws, or "Dram Shop" acts.
In fact, you could argue that the bars would be negligent in not instituting such a system. They also have monetary incentive since they will probably get insurance breaks for doing so.
If I were designing this thing (well, maybe I should), I'd put the side-scroller down on the side for my thumb. I have a Logitech wheel-mouse that has a thumb-button that I never use, but a side-scrolling wheel (or one of those little nubs that IBM has in their laptop keyboards) would be perfect down there...
If micropayments were feasible, they would have caught on already. The problem with micropayments is that as the amount of payments gets smaller, the number of transactions goes up. This brings with it a necessary increase in the cost of processing transactions due to staffing, processing, database storage, etc.
This is most obvious in services who use credit-card transactions. Many brick-and-mortar stores won't take credit card transactions less than $3 or $4 because they have to pay Visa (or whoever) so much per transaction. Thus, making Visa transactions for less than $.01 payments is ridiculous, unless you can find someone to keep track of all your transactions for essentially free.
If you can't, then you then either have to collect money ahead of time and keep track of usage yourself (subscription), or track the usage and charge at the end of a period of time (billing).
And then we're right back where we started...
...except that the first time someone's kid gets routed to animalsex.com or some such, they're going to sue the city. So the city's going to have to install porn filters, and do age verification, and all the other crap that schools and libraries have to put up with in order to even offer desktop-based internet access, at which point it probably won't even be worthwhile.
Not to mention having to provide tech support for an entire metropolitan area...
Or the fact that the people that can afford computers or laptops with 802.11 cards can probably afford decent DSL access anyhow.
More power to 'em if they can pull it off, but there's reasons why Ricochet didn't do so well...
I find it interesting that this past Friday, (September 7th) the U.S. Department of State issued the following "Worldwide Caution" travel bulletin for the benefit of US travelers:
"Over the last several months, the U.S. Government has learned that U.S. citizens and interests abroad may be at increased risk of a terrorist action from extremist groups. In addition, we have received unconfirmed information that terrorist actions may be taken against U.S. military facilities and/or establishments frequented by U.S. military personnel in Korea and Japan. We are also concerned about information we received in May 2001 that American citizens may be the target of a terrorist threat from extremist groups with links to Usama Bin Ladin's Al-Qaida organization. In the past, such individuals have not distinguished between official and civilian targets. As always, we take this information seriously. U.S. Government facilities worldwide remain at a heightened state of alert."
[From: http://travel.state.gov/wwc1.html]
The U.S. Department of State apparently knew that something was up, just not exactly what.
I find it interesting that just this past Friday, (September 7th) the U.S. Department of State issued the following "Worldwide Caution" travel bulletin for the benefit of US travelers:
"Over the last several months, the U.S. Government has learned that U.S. citizens and interests abroad may be at increased risk of a terrorist action from extremist groups. In addition, we have received unconfirmed information that terrorist actions may be taken against U.S. military facilities and/or establishments frequented by U.S. military personnel in Korea and Japan. We are also concerned about information we received in May 2001 that American citizens may be the target of a terrorist threat from extremist groups with links to Usama Bin Ladin's Al-Qaida organization. In the past, such individuals have not distinguished between official and civilian targets. As always, we take this information seriously. U.S. Government facilities worldwide remain at a heightened state of alert."
[From: http://travel.state.gov/wwc1.html ]
> Fifth (and finally), if there is piracy, pass new laws to increase the number of police officers. Pass
> new laws to stiffen existing penalties. We have a legal system. The legislative branch creates law,
> the executive branch enforces the law, and the judicial branch does political favors to their
> appointers. Be that as it is, this is a problem of enforcement of existing laws, not the lack of laws.
The same logic applies to the "War on Some Drugs", and we all know how successful that's been. You can spend trillions of dollars enforcing a bad set of laws and never make a difference.
Bleh. Big difference.
Three points:
1. If a school official with the computer program told me I could try to crack security software on school computers, I'd believe him.
2. Does anyone think it's possible that the teacher did intend to challenge the students, but when his bosses came up and said "Did you tell them to do this?" he replied something like "umm.. yeah, but I was just kidding..."
3. Who is the software company, and why is the school protecting their identity? Nobody seems to be questioning them. I'd be mighty pissed if I was paying thousands of dollars of taxpayers' money for software that is effectively worthless.
In fact, I am a taxpayer and I'm pissed that my money is being wasted on this crap. More power to Aaron.
How come people always tell you to "think outside the box", and then get mad when you do?
I have never seen a movie as badly mis-directed as this one. I feel cheated out of good memories of my childhood. D&D has been a significant part of my life for the last 15 years. Every time I pick up a D&D book from now on I am going to remember that travesty of a movie and want to retch. It's enough to make me never want to buy anything from Wizards of the Coast ever again. I'm insulted that the D&D logo was actually placed on that eyesore.
I was looking for a movie that, at the least, would give me some visual pictures to go with the actions of the game: how spells are actually cast in combat, maybe some admiration of fighter or thief skills, perhaps getting some insight into the mindset of the cleric? Too much to hope for. This movie doesn't even begin to approach that level of sophistication. I would be embarrassed to take a child to that movie and tell him that it represents a game I've been playing since I was his age.
The movie was painful to watch. Did anyone else notice that the Empress' lines were dubbed over in the dramatic parts? She was so quiet most of the time her voice was flat. Then during the cumulation of her threats to the council, her voice suddenly was loud, resonant, and didn't match her lips?
Just one specific of a movie I cringe to think about. The party "mage" was totally ineffectual (not even one magic missile!), the thieves sucked, but you were supposed to take them seriously during the dramatic parts? There were some lame attempts at drama and history in the elven "tree" (What's all that crap about elves being a "part of magic" anyhow?) The dwarf had like three good lines, and what was up with that huge-breasted "form-fitting" aluminum body armor?
And like I'm supposed to believe that intelligent thieves had been trying to get through that stupid three-room maze (when they could watch everyone else solve the puzzle) for fifteen years? I tried my best to generate some "suspension of disbelief" for this movie, but it was simply impossible. Believing fifteen impossible things before breakfast won't make it through this mess.
I was relieved when the killed off Snails because it made the movie a bit less painful. I could rant all day. The plastic talking skeleton was a joke, the plastic dragon staves were a joke, the elven "cleric" was a joke, and what the hell was up with that ending? "Your friend is waiting for you". Aaaarrgh!
The CGI wasn't even that good. The dungeons sucked, the dragons sucked, the plot sucked. Richard O'Brien (The thief guild leader) was the best part of the movie. It's pretty much impossible to mis-direct him, he's such a freak in real life.
Ugh. (shiver)
There is nothing more painful than watching good actors forced into doing a bad job. I know it's not their fault. Blame the director? Blame WoC? I don't know, but I feel dirty having just seen it. Please don't let any more people spend money on this movie. I'm glad I only paid matinee price, but I still wish I could take it back.
I feel that, if you're making a movie based on a game that has been around as long as D&D, and has such a large following, there is a responsibility to make the movie intellectually appealing to people who played the game. Having watched this movie, I feel horribly let down. I feel that my intelligence has been insulted, and the years I have enjoyed playing the game have been cheapened. I'm pissed off, and I want an apology.
When I was in high school, I laughed at the D.A.R.E. program and thought it was very patronizing. Of course, I also had Nancy Reagan saying "Ignore everything we just taught you and JUST SAY NO!". However, looking back I am actually in favor of DARE, but not for the reasons it's proponents give. I approve of DARE because it was the ONLY drug education I received anywhere other than the street. After going through DARE I knew, more or less, what the difference was between barbituates, opiates, and hallucinogens were. I knew which drugs were heavily "physically addictive", while others were "psychologically addictive", or habit-forming. I was able to use this information in my later years to avoid certain substances. Nobody else ever told me anything substantical about illegal substances. Without DARE, I would have known nothing, and may well have equated pot on the same "level" as crack or heroin, and ended up hooked on something, completely ignorant of the consequences. At least with DARE I had a basic set of guidelines to go with. I could have used less propaganda and more factual information, but I'll take what I can get, and I'm glad the kids in this country are getting any information at all.
If linking to "illegal files" becomes illegal, and if British Telecom "owns linking" (Wired: "British Telecom: We Own Linking"), then apparently the RIAA should be suing British Telecom for enabling easy access to information that violates copyright laws, instead of MP3.com. :)
I must admit, this article does seem like a perfect example of media being fascinated with itself.
At least one issue here is that you really have no idea where the news you read is coming from. I've learned to take everything I read off MSNBC (or see on KING5 news, since they're the same thing) with a huge grain of salt. However, until I read that article, I was blissfully unaware that CNN was owned by AOL/TW. I made the mistake of thinking they were a respectable, independent news source. I don't see any news shows on my local public access channel. So, this mean that every daily news show I have access to on my cable TV (the provider of which is probably owned by AOL/TW), the news I hear on all the radio stations I listen to (which are probably owned by some large media company), and the majority of the news I get off the 'net (with the possible exception of Slashdot), are all owned and controlled by huge companies. The point is that the majority of the U.S. population does not take the time to watch the 6:00 news, then get online and check the facts with different news sources. People pretty much believe what they see on Channel X news, or read on msnbc.com. As an example, during the WTO "riots" (cough cough) in Seattle, I watched around 300 people standing in an intersection get teargassed by local police on Capitol Hill. There wasn't a single mention of that incident on any major media source. All the news reports focused on the same footage of six guys breaking windows downtown. Every story, however, does mention that "downtown businesses lost $18 million in damages and lost sales". Like it's a huge tragedy if *one* Nordstrom's store doesn't make their $10 million in sales that day? Who owns Nordstrom's anyway? It would help if there were some easy way to check who owned what company, and whose interests each company is likely pandering to. I haven't been able to find a site that really links this info together, does anyone know of a site that does, or some other relatively easy way to correlate this information?