Have you every actually tried that? If they don't ignore you, they forget what you told them the next day. I've even installed it, said 'this is an antivirus program, it'll run by itself, it'll protect your computer, don't mess with it'...come back later to fix it again and find no trace of any of the software I installed.
Most of the time I get the blank stare of 'yea, sure, whatever. Can I go back to downloading everything that says 'click here' yet?'
Yes, but they still have the mammoth tanks from C&C. I'm pretty sure they have them in all the games...you just can't build them. Some games (Generals I know is one) you can find old abanoned bases...other games they're just in the rules file and you can enable them if you mod it right.
What really angers me about the 'need firearms to protect us from the government' people is that they don't understand what they are really saying. "We need guns so the government doesn't take away our rights" they say.
That's saying that you don't have to comply with the will over the democratically elected government. It's saying that if you don't like the law, yu're going to become a terrorist. That you would rather just become a terrorist than elect people who are going to protect your rights in the first place.
Germans elected Hitler. One of the first things he did was take guns away from the jews and others he didn't like. Aside from which, just because someone's elected doesn't mean you voted for them or approve of them. If the rest of the country goes insane, it doesn't automatically mean I am too.
The people who scream bloody murder about the government taking away the guns they need to protect their rights from the government tend to the VERY SAME PEOPLE who ELECT OFFICIALS WHO TAKE AWAY YOUR RIGHTS!
I'm not. You can't say I elected an official who is taking away our rights, Sure, ANY official you elect will take away some rights, but I already am lacking the right to vote, so there's not much I can do about that. Either way, I've heard many a gun nut say that they won't vote because it's simply giving that person the ability to take away your rights. While I don't agree with that, I see their point.
How many times have you heard someone say "We need guns to protect our rights!" and then say "If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear!"
Never.
How about instead of letting people say "Elect me, and I won't take away your guns!", you elect people who say "Elect me, and I'll repeal the Patriot Act!"
As I've already stated, they haven't yet given me the right to vote. And yes, I'm a citizen.
People who argue that they need guns to protect their rights from the government are just gun nuts. The 'protect us from the government' argument is a red herring. If their RIGHTS were really what is important to them, they'd vote for people who wanted to protect their rights instead of people who wanted to protect their guns.
We can't all vote, and the person we vote for isn't always elected. It is possible, and has happened, that the people the majority vote for is not the person who is elected.
But that's not what happens. Search you without a warrant? Listen in to your phone calls? Arrest and detain you, even if you're a US citizen, without access to courts or a lawyer? Torture people? Sure, we'll reelect that guy, as long as he promises we can keep our guns!
Using the right to bear arms to protect your rights is useless if you're willing to trade away all your other rights just to keep your gun. Then what are you protecting?
You're making generalizations saying that all gun nuts are republicans. Quite a few of us are libertarians. Aside from which, 49% of America didn't vote for Bush. 49% of us are getting screwed by someone we didn't want. And what happens when someone breaks all their campaign promises? There is absolutely no guarantee that the guy you elect will do what you want.
But if they wanna keep the laptop near $100, they're gonna have to strip down the hardware too so that it costs $10, which means they'll have to strip down windoze a bunch more to be able to run on something that bad...and it'll still cost $310 just for the windoze license!
...scissors.
I've never had an injury from one of these things. I have a small pair of school scissors (like, 3 or 4 inches long) that work great. Never had a cut from one of these, never had a problem opening 'em. Personally I don't see the big deal. Aviation snips seems quite a bit extreme to me, 'cause I have yet to find a simple pair of scissors that won't do (Though I did once snap the handle off a pair with it. But it was a cheap pair anyways. I caulked it. It's still in my drawer.)
meh...it's not really that far. The router only reaches across the house. the microwave is in the middle of the house, but one floor down. And it doesn't kill the signal, but it does introduce noticable interferance. It's a fairly new microwave though. But yea, it used to completely kill my signal whenever it was turned on. But turns out that was mostly due to a bad antenna. But still, it was introducing interference from 10 or 20 feet away right through floors and walls.
I gotta agree with you there. My microwave will interfere with my wifi signal at a longer range than my router will even broadcast! Yet no one even considers banning those.
um, I dunno where you live, but where I live, you CAN'T choose not to be a customer anymore. I'd LOVE to dump comcast. I'd pay an extra $20 a month to get rid of 'em. But unless I want dial-up, that ain't happening. Not everyone has a choice in their ISP. In fact, I'm pretty sure most people don't. There are still people that can't get anything better than dial-up. There are many people that have DSL because the cable companies won't put a line to their house. Must be nice wherever you live. I'd kill to be able to choose my ISP. fuckin' comcast....
Are you friggin' crazy? I've got a 1985 IBM Model M that still types (and for that matter, looks) brand new. My mom's got a dell branded, logitech made rubber dome keyboard that's pretty much done after about 2 years. Half the keys don't work anymore. And before my Model M I had an older rubber dome that did survive around 5 years, but it's totally shot now. Half the F- keys don't work, the space bar takes about 20 pounds of pressure to register, if it does...neither of the enter keys work, and pretty much half the other keys are randomly shot to hell.
I'm sure half the reason Model Ms are so solid is that they're actually well built, with the massive steel plate and heavy plastic and everything, unlike the modern 3oz rubber dome...but really, have you ever taken apart a dome keyboard? That stuff is so thin and flimsy it's amazing they last more than a year!
Unless you're gonna buy a business package, the fastest internet service you can get where I live is 2.4Mbps cable. And I know a lot of people who don't even get cable. It's not that they're too far away...some aren't more than 20 feet away from the nearest cable line...it's just that the cable company won't run a line more than 3 feet if they aren't gonna get another 5 houses from it. Hell, there are areas in the middle of the town that don't have any cable service. Yea, it's a small town, but it's not THAT small. 15,000 as of 2000 according to Wikipedia, and I'm guessing that doesn't include the college students.
Reminds me of a fake news story a while ago that the RIAA was saying only the person who owned a car was allowed to listen to it's radio.
The difference is because once my friend brings over his computer he is within my household and therefore is not breaking the user agreement. If I can successfully argue at court that we like to picnic across the street at the park while using my wireless network, then it would still not break the user agreement. But if you just have your network open for anyone to use it at any time for any reason, you are breaking your user agreement.
So, the first part you say anyone can use it as long as they're inside your house, and the second you say you can use it anywhere. Does it belong to you and only you, or to anyone in the house, but only while they're in the house? What if my friend is out on the deck? He's still on my property, right? Well, some random guy sitting on my driveway, what about him? he's on my property too. What if some random guy came up and sat on my deck? Would that be OK? What if some stranger walked up to the house and asked to use it? He's still not paying for it, but he's in the house now.
Between my freenet, my brother's torrents, and my parents web browsing, I pretty much guarantee we're using all our bandwidth, all the time. If the ISP can't give you the service they promise, then that's their problem, not yours. Do they say you can only use it at certain hours, or that you can only use a certain percent of your bandwidth? They ASSUME you won't, the same way airlines and concerts and stuff sell more tickets than they have seats. You can still give your tickets to someone else.
My ISP specifically says in their FAQ you're allowed to use routers. What's the difference if you friend uses your computer or brings over and plugs in his own? And what's the difference if you friend comes over and plugs in or some guy you don't know comes over and connects? Your ISP gives you a set amount of bandwidth. If you don't use it, give it away. That's like saying I'm not allowed to give my dog the rest of my pizza because he's not the one paying for it.
There really AREN'T alternatives for most people. I dunno about cedega, but wine is pretty much completely useless, and even simple things like web browsing is a bit difficult. That whole no flash 9 thing is a pain, considering about 90% of popular non-geek websites use flash everywhere.
Personally...I use Linux. And I like it. But between the lack of plugins for web browsing, the incredibly difficulty of installing things, and the lack of any real good compatibility for windoze apps, it's nowhere near good enough for most people.
Maybe if ReactOS or Syllable started gaining some momentum....
You can call it 'the AIDS virus'. That works too. We're studying this in my 11th grade health class right now, and they usually say 'The AIDS virus, also known as HIV' or 'HIV, also known as the AIDS virus'. They're both correct.
I agree that people wouldn't sit there if the US army attacked their city, but I'm saying I don't think it'll come to that. They may be ordeded in in extreme cases, in which case the general population will say 'oh, thank god they're doing something to restore order.' My point is that a revolution is never going to happen because people don't care enough. The government may be stupid, but they're not stupid enough to blindly attack their own citizens...and that's pretty much what it'd take to get us off our ass.
How many people do you actually think will revolt? 99% of America would be perfectly happy if Bush declared himself dictator, as long as they still had American Idol. And probably 90% of those that WOULD care wouldn't be willing to kill and be killed for it. When the second revolution comes, they won't be telling the army to clean out the resistance in NYC, they'll be telling them to stop the 1000 crazies in DC. And I don't think they'd have much of a problem with that.
Well, all you'd need for that is to take Wikipedia, maybe make it a bit more detailed, and print it all out. You might have to do a pretty good amount of cross-referencing (to refine metal A, you need chemical B, which is created through process C, etc...), but it would probably be possible. It would just take a while. Admittedly, it probably wouldn't be of much help to someone who didn't have a bit of an idea already...but even if you could teach a caveman how to build a computer, it wouldn't help much if they didn't understand how it works. They'd never be able to improve upon it.
I haven't had much experience with mac computers, but the small amount I have had, I've hated them.
Having said that...based on iPods (and pretty much ONLY iPods), hardware seems to be the only thing apple is good at. My iPod locks up all the time, the software leaves a LOT to be desired (compared to, say, an RCA Lyra)...but the damn things are durable as hell. I've got an iPod that I bought off this girl at school 'cause it was broken. All it took to fix it was a firmware flash. It's still working great...even though it's probably at least 5 years old now. It freezes all the time, but the only hardware I've had to replace is the battery. Compare that to my bro's RCA lyra, where the software is quite possibly the best I've ever seen on an MP3 player, but the harddrive died less than a year after getting it.
Would she be suing the school if it had happened there? I doubt it.
Believe it or not, you can get past web filters. You can get past spyware. You can get past anything. I've gone into school, found my cgi-proxy page blocked, and created a new one WHILE SITTING IN COMPUTER SCIENCE CLASS. It took all of about 10 seconds. I then proceeded to check slashdot, techdirt, and my email.
Parents can't sit there behind there kid every second of every day. They shouldn't. The kids will never be able to function normally in society if they did that. And...we have things like Tor, Freenet, and I2P, and people like the EFF, Peacefire, and the ACLU to help us with that nasty spyware thing. Not to mention that the kids could probably just hop on to another nearby wifi network. I mean, not everyone has wireless, but wireless cards are quite cheap to get, and networks extremely easy to find.
Ah, but how do we define the worst offender? Who commits the greater crime, the man who steals $20 from 10 people, or the man who steals $100 from one person? All depends on your perspective, really.
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Have you every actually tried that? If they don't ignore you, they forget what you told them the next day. I've even installed it, said 'this is an antivirus program, it'll run by itself, it'll protect your computer, don't mess with it'...come back later to fix it again and find no trace of any of the software I installed. Most of the time I get the blank stare of 'yea, sure, whatever. Can I go back to downloading everything that says 'click here' yet?'
Yes, but they still have the mammoth tanks from C&C. I'm pretty sure they have them in all the games...you just can't build them. Some games (Generals I know is one) you can find old abanoned bases...other games they're just in the rules file and you can enable them if you mod it right.
What really angers me about the 'need firearms to protect us from the government' people is that they don't understand what they are really saying. "We need guns so the government doesn't take away our rights" they say.
That's saying that you don't have to comply with the will over the democratically elected government. It's saying that if you don't like the law, yu're going to become a terrorist. That you would rather just become a terrorist than elect people who are going to protect your rights in the first place.
Germans elected Hitler. One of the first things he did was take guns away from the jews and others he didn't like. Aside from which, just because someone's elected doesn't mean you voted for them or approve of them. If the rest of the country goes insane, it doesn't automatically mean I am too.
The people who scream bloody murder about the government taking away the guns they need to protect their rights from the government tend to the VERY SAME PEOPLE who ELECT OFFICIALS WHO TAKE AWAY YOUR RIGHTS!
I'm not. You can't say I elected an official who is taking away our rights, Sure, ANY official you elect will take away some rights, but I already am lacking the right to vote, so there's not much I can do about that. Either way, I've heard many a gun nut say that they won't vote because it's simply giving that person the ability to take away your rights. While I don't agree with that, I see their point.
How many times have you heard someone say "We need guns to protect our rights!" and then say "If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear!"
Never.
How about instead of letting people say "Elect me, and I won't take away your guns!", you elect people who say "Elect me, and I'll repeal the Patriot Act!"
As I've already stated, they haven't yet given me the right to vote. And yes, I'm a citizen.
People who argue that they need guns to protect their rights from the government are just gun nuts. The 'protect us from the government' argument is a red herring. If their RIGHTS were really what is important to them, they'd vote for people who wanted to protect their rights instead of people who wanted to protect their guns.
We can't all vote, and the person we vote for isn't always elected. It is possible, and has happened, that the people the majority vote for is not the person who is elected.
But that's not what happens. Search you without a warrant? Listen in to your phone calls? Arrest and detain you, even if you're a US citizen, without access to courts or a lawyer? Torture people? Sure, we'll reelect that guy, as long as he promises we can keep our guns!
Using the right to bear arms to protect your rights is useless if you're willing to trade away all your other rights just to keep your gun. Then what are you protecting?
You're making generalizations saying that all gun nuts are republicans. Quite a few of us are libertarians. Aside from which, 49% of America didn't vote for Bush. 49% of us are getting screwed by someone we didn't want. And what happens when someone breaks all their campaign promises? There is absolutely no guarantee that the guy you elect will do what you want.
But if they wanna keep the laptop near $100, they're gonna have to strip down the hardware too so that it costs $10, which means they'll have to strip down windoze a bunch more to be able to run on something that bad...and it'll still cost $310 just for the windoze license!
...scissors.
I've never had an injury from one of these things. I have a small pair of school scissors (like, 3 or 4 inches long) that work great. Never had a cut from one of these, never had a problem opening 'em. Personally I don't see the big deal. Aviation snips seems quite a bit extreme to me, 'cause I have yet to find a simple pair of scissors that won't do (Though I did once snap the handle off a pair with it. But it was a cheap pair anyways. I caulked it. It's still in my drawer.)
meh...it's not really that far. The router only reaches across the house. the microwave is in the middle of the house, but one floor down. And it doesn't kill the signal, but it does introduce noticable interferance. It's a fairly new microwave though. But yea, it used to completely kill my signal whenever it was turned on. But turns out that was mostly due to a bad antenna. But still, it was introducing interference from 10 or 20 feet away right through floors and walls.
I gotta agree with you there. My microwave will interfere with my wifi signal at a longer range than my router will even broadcast! Yet no one even considers banning those.
um, I dunno where you live, but where I live, you CAN'T choose not to be a customer anymore. I'd LOVE to dump comcast. I'd pay an extra $20 a month to get rid of 'em. But unless I want dial-up, that ain't happening. Not everyone has a choice in their ISP. In fact, I'm pretty sure most people don't. There are still people that can't get anything better than dial-up. There are many people that have DSL because the cable companies won't put a line to their house. Must be nice wherever you live. I'd kill to be able to choose my ISP. fuckin' comcast....
Are you friggin' crazy? I've got a 1985 IBM Model M that still types (and for that matter, looks) brand new. My mom's got a dell branded, logitech made rubber dome keyboard that's pretty much done after about 2 years. Half the keys don't work anymore. And before my Model M I had an older rubber dome that did survive around 5 years, but it's totally shot now. Half the F- keys don't work, the space bar takes about 20 pounds of pressure to register, if it does...neither of the enter keys work, and pretty much half the other keys are randomly shot to hell. I'm sure half the reason Model Ms are so solid is that they're actually well built, with the massive steel plate and heavy plastic and everything, unlike the modern 3oz rubber dome...but really, have you ever taken apart a dome keyboard? That stuff is so thin and flimsy it's amazing they last more than a year!
Unless you're gonna buy a business package, the fastest internet service you can get where I live is 2.4Mbps cable. And I know a lot of people who don't even get cable. It's not that they're too far away...some aren't more than 20 feet away from the nearest cable line...it's just that the cable company won't run a line more than 3 feet if they aren't gonna get another 5 houses from it. Hell, there are areas in the middle of the town that don't have any cable service. Yea, it's a small town, but it's not THAT small. 15,000 as of 2000 according to Wikipedia, and I'm guessing that doesn't include the college students.
Reminds me of a fake news story a while ago that the RIAA was saying only the person who owned a car was allowed to listen to it's radio. The difference is because once my friend brings over his computer he is within my household and therefore is not breaking the user agreement. If I can successfully argue at court that we like to picnic across the street at the park while using my wireless network, then it would still not break the user agreement. But if you just have your network open for anyone to use it at any time for any reason, you are breaking your user agreement. So, the first part you say anyone can use it as long as they're inside your house, and the second you say you can use it anywhere. Does it belong to you and only you, or to anyone in the house, but only while they're in the house? What if my friend is out on the deck? He's still on my property, right? Well, some random guy sitting on my driveway, what about him? he's on my property too. What if some random guy came up and sat on my deck? Would that be OK? What if some stranger walked up to the house and asked to use it? He's still not paying for it, but he's in the house now. Between my freenet, my brother's torrents, and my parents web browsing, I pretty much guarantee we're using all our bandwidth, all the time. If the ISP can't give you the service they promise, then that's their problem, not yours. Do they say you can only use it at certain hours, or that you can only use a certain percent of your bandwidth? They ASSUME you won't, the same way airlines and concerts and stuff sell more tickets than they have seats. You can still give your tickets to someone else.
My ISP specifically says in their FAQ you're allowed to use routers. What's the difference if you friend uses your computer or brings over and plugs in his own? And what's the difference if you friend comes over and plugs in or some guy you don't know comes over and connects? Your ISP gives you a set amount of bandwidth. If you don't use it, give it away. That's like saying I'm not allowed to give my dog the rest of my pizza because he's not the one paying for it.
There really AREN'T alternatives for most people. I dunno about cedega, but wine is pretty much completely useless, and even simple things like web browsing is a bit difficult. That whole no flash 9 thing is a pain, considering about 90% of popular non-geek websites use flash everywhere.
Personally...I use Linux. And I like it. But between the lack of plugins for web browsing, the incredibly difficulty of installing things, and the lack of any real good compatibility for windoze apps, it's nowhere near good enough for most people.
Maybe if ReactOS or Syllable started gaining some momentum....
You can call it 'the AIDS virus'. That works too. We're studying this in my 11th grade health class right now, and they usually say 'The AIDS virus, also known as HIV' or 'HIV, also known as the AIDS virus'. They're both correct.
Where's Ted Stevens? He ought to be lowest scoring in SOMETHING.
They could at least give him honorable mention or something! lol
Oh wow. My load times suck because I'm running freenet, but that pipelining thing just cut them in half.
There's a memory leak in firefox? Maybe that's why I have to close and restart my browser every week.... (using 1.5 btw)
I agree that people wouldn't sit there if the US army attacked their city, but I'm saying I don't think it'll come to that. They may be ordeded in in extreme cases, in which case the general population will say 'oh, thank god they're doing something to restore order.' My point is that a revolution is never going to happen because people don't care enough. The government may be stupid, but they're not stupid enough to blindly attack their own citizens...and that's pretty much what it'd take to get us off our ass.
How many people do you actually think will revolt? 99% of America would be perfectly happy if Bush declared himself dictator, as long as they still had American Idol. And probably 90% of those that WOULD care wouldn't be willing to kill and be killed for it. When the second revolution comes, they won't be telling the army to clean out the resistance in NYC, they'll be telling them to stop the 1000 crazies in DC. And I don't think they'd have much of a problem with that.
Well, all you'd need for that is to take Wikipedia, maybe make it a bit more detailed, and print it all out. You might have to do a pretty good amount of cross-referencing (to refine metal A, you need chemical B, which is created through process C, etc...), but it would probably be possible. It would just take a while. Admittedly, it probably wouldn't be of much help to someone who didn't have a bit of an idea already...but even if you could teach a caveman how to build a computer, it wouldn't help much if they didn't understand how it works. They'd never be able to improve upon it.
I haven't had much experience with mac computers, but the small amount I have had, I've hated them.
Having said that...based on iPods (and pretty much ONLY iPods), hardware seems to be the only thing apple is good at. My iPod locks up all the time, the software leaves a LOT to be desired (compared to, say, an RCA Lyra)...but the damn things are durable as hell. I've got an iPod that I bought off this girl at school 'cause it was broken. All it took to fix it was a firmware flash. It's still working great...even though it's probably at least 5 years old now. It freezes all the time, but the only hardware I've had to replace is the battery. Compare that to my bro's RCA lyra, where the software is quite possibly the best I've ever seen on an MP3 player, but the harddrive died less than a year after getting it.
Would she be suing the school if it had happened there? I doubt it.
Believe it or not, you can get past web filters. You can get past spyware. You can get past anything. I've gone into school, found my cgi-proxy page blocked, and created a new one WHILE SITTING IN COMPUTER SCIENCE CLASS. It took all of about 10 seconds. I then proceeded to check slashdot, techdirt, and my email.
Parents can't sit there behind there kid every second of every day. They shouldn't. The kids will never be able to function normally in society if they did that. And...we have things like Tor, Freenet, and I2P, and people like the EFF, Peacefire, and the ACLU to help us with that nasty spyware thing. Not to mention that the kids could probably just hop on to another nearby wifi network. I mean, not everyone has wireless, but wireless cards are quite cheap to get, and networks extremely easy to find.
Does this mean I can sue my school after I use cgi-proxy to circumvent their web filters and do one of these and/or look at porn or somethnig???
Yes, but many people pretend to be 20, so that their page can be public. There's no point in even having a myspace if it's private.
Ah, but how do we define the worst offender? Who commits the greater crime, the man who steals $20 from 10 people, or the man who steals $100 from one person? All depends on your perspective, really.