On the whole, I enjoy the changes. I just really wish there was a way to turn gChat off. I know you can stay logged off, but I'd really like to be able to get rid of it entirely.
I have Charter (who I hate BTW, I had to switch from Comcast to Charter the last time I moved and am now paying more money for worse service), and am still getting the standard "Page Not Found" screen. Of course, I'm running Firefox on a Mac, so . . .
The main reason that I use Netflix (as opposed to downloading movies over Bittorrent) is that I have a nice TV, surround sound system, etc. and prefer DVD quality as opposed to anything you can get over the internet. Until Netflix can offer a similar service over the internet (at least 480p, 5.1 surround), I'm not that interested.
I agree. I'm perfectly cool with letting the Christians kill Muslims in their video game, as long as they don't complain about me beating hookers in mine.
OTOH, I enjoyed the first book enough that I'm willing to give Bear another chance. Any recommendations?
Bear is rather hit or miss to me, but The Forges of God is one of my favorite novels of all time, sci-fi or otherwise. I also dug Blood Music and Moving Mars. Eon is probably his most popular, but I thought it was kind of over-rated and its two sequels Eternity and Legacy were pretty much a waste of time.
"the program and its derivative work will neither be modified or executed to harm any human being nor through inaction permit any human being to be harmed."
One of the constant threads that ran through Asimov's robot stories were how the first law of robotics (of which this is a derivative) can still be up to interpretation. The military could simply come back with a "zeroth" law, that they're working for the good of humanity, not just humans.
Comparing magnetic hard drive to optical disks isn't exactly fair. Optical disks are an archival format and hard drives aren't. Compare blu-ray to hd-dvd, dvd, and cd-r in price/gb.
The creation of man whom God in His foreknowledge knew doomed to sin was the awful index of God's omnipotence. For it would have been a thing of trifling and contemptible ease for Perfection to create mere perfection. To do so would, to speak truth, be not creation but extension. Separateness is identity and the only way for God to create, truly create, man was to make him separate from God Himself, and to be separate from God is to be sinful. The creation of evil is therefore the index of God's glory and His power. That had to be so that the creation of good might be the index of man's glory and power. But by God's help. By His help and His wisdom.
-All The King's Men by Robert Penn Warren
(my favorite book)
The burning question is - how can they call it a "trojan asteroid" if it doesn't occupy the same orbit as Neptune? A significant orbital inclination vis a vis Neptune makes it a passing stranger at best, not something captured in Neptune's Lagrange points.
Not quite. The L4 and L5 Lagrange points are kind of like gravitational collection points. There is a fairly large area surrounding these points where objects can play around based on whatever other forces are affecting them, but still remain trapped by the Lagrange point. So, if you look at a "top-down" view of the solar system, the asteroid would be moving in lock-step with Neptune's orbit at the Lagrange point. But if you look at a "side-on" view, the orbit would follow kind of a wave patern, with one period equal to one orbit.
I have to say that the runner-up is so much better it hurts.
I don't have any mod points, so I'll just add a me too. The winner doesn't really improve anything. It's just the same as the current design except with rounded corners. Collapsable stories and menus would really improve the functionality.
But that just MHO.
Perhaps the nuttiest part of the policy is that you can't go back and change a password within 7 days. That may originally have been set up to stop a user immediately putting the password back to a previously used password, but now the change mechanism stores the last 6 or more words, so that's largely irrelevant.
Never underestimate the tenacity of lazy people. There would be certain people who would diligently sit there and change their password 7 times until it cycles back so they can use the original.
Microsoft obviously failed to find the appropriate point on the supply/demand curve for the market.
Consoles always make their money from selling games. Microsoft intensionally sold below the market curve for consoles in order to drive the sales of games which are priced about $10 higher than new PS2/X-box games.
This is actually something that I admire about Blizzard. If they think a game isn't working, they can it, even if it's been in development for years. See: Warcraft Aventures.
This country is going to have to come to a serious reckoning very soon on the subject of Intellectual Property. I may be annoyed by HBO threatening to sue me over shifting a few bits around the network, but there are things far worse. My mother recently had her gall bladder removed. But what if her doctor had not been able to tell her the result of the test to determine that because someone else held a patent on that diagnosis?
I do understand the need for patents. It is entirely reasonable to protect an idea long enough for a company to produce a product and start making money. However, when a company can file patents and put them in a drawer waiting to sue someone who actually figures out how to implement them ( NPT vs. Blackberry); Microsoft can patent "A method, comprising: selecting pixels to be used as an emoticon; assigning a character sequence to the pixels; and transmitting the character sequence to a destination to allow for reconstruction of the pixels at the destination" (Smiley Face Patent); and, as mentioned in Crichton's article, a company can patent a link between elevated homocysteine levels and vitamin deficiency, something needs to be done.
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On the whole, I enjoy the changes. I just really wish there was a way to turn gChat off. I know you can stay logged off, but I'd really like to be able to get rid of it entirely.
Is this really news? To be completely honest, it had never occurred to me that there wouldn't be caves on Mars.
I have Charter (who I hate BTW, I had to switch from Comcast to Charter the last time I moved and am now paying more money for worse service), and am still getting the standard "Page Not Found" screen. Of course, I'm running Firefox on a Mac, so . . .
The main reason that I use Netflix (as opposed to downloading movies over Bittorrent) is that I have a nice TV, surround sound system, etc. and prefer DVD quality as opposed to anything you can get over the internet. Until Netflix can offer a similar service over the internet (at least 480p, 5.1 surround), I'm not that interested.
I agree. I'm perfectly cool with letting the Christians kill Muslims in their video game, as long as they don't complain about me beating hookers in mine.
Comparing magnetic hard drive to optical disks isn't exactly fair. Optical disks are an archival format and hard drives aren't. Compare blu-ray to hd-dvd, dvd, and cd-r in price/gb.
You may know it as Myanmar, but it will always be Burma to me. -J. Peterman
The burning question is - how can they call it a "trojan asteroid" if it doesn't occupy the same orbit as Neptune? A significant orbital inclination vis a vis Neptune makes it a passing stranger at best, not something captured in Neptune's Lagrange points.
Not quite. The L4 and L5 Lagrange points are kind of like gravitational collection points. There is a fairly large area surrounding these points where objects can play around based on whatever other forces are affecting them, but still remain trapped by the Lagrange point. So, if you look at a "top-down" view of the solar system, the asteroid would be moving in lock-step with Neptune's orbit at the Lagrange point. But if you look at a "side-on" view, the orbit would follow kind of a wave patern, with one period equal to one orbit.
This is actually something that I admire about Blizzard. If they think a game isn't working, they can it, even if it's been in development for years. See: Warcraft Aventures.
This country is going to have to come to a serious reckoning very soon on the subject of Intellectual Property. I may be annoyed by HBO threatening to sue me over shifting a few bits around the network, but there are things far worse. My mother recently had her gall bladder removed. But what if her doctor had not been able to tell her the result of the test to determine that because someone else held a patent on that diagnosis? I do understand the need for patents. It is entirely reasonable to protect an idea long enough for a company to produce a product and start making money. However, when a company can file patents and put them in a drawer waiting to sue someone who actually figures out how to implement them ( NPT vs. Blackberry); Microsoft can patent "A method, comprising: selecting pixels to be used as an emoticon; assigning a character sequence to the pixels; and transmitting the character sequence to a destination to allow for reconstruction of the pixels at the destination" (Smiley Face Patent); and, as mentioned in Crichton's article, a company can patent a link between elevated homocysteine levels and vitamin deficiency, something needs to be done.