Also interesting: there are no PS3 games in that list. There are three Wii games (4 if you count Wii Play), some DS/PS2/360/PC games, but nothing for the PS3 except the controller and remote.
No kidding. And while we're on the subject, why is it so hard to find a car that - get this - is just a car? No heater, no A/C, no radio, no clock, no storage compartments, no fancypants windows that roll up and down - just seats, a steering wheel, and an engine. Nearly impossible!
I personally am morally appalled that they want to change me for INCOMING minutes. That is double billing; you are charging 2 people for the same call. Not really. The underlying resource isn't "calls", it's radio bandwidth. Cell phones aren't walkie-talkies where the receiver simply listens to the signal being spit out by the sender. If you use your cell phone to call mine, you're occupying a channel for the duration of that call, I'm occupying another channel for the duration of that call, and we each pay our respective carriers for the use of those channels.
Why can't I buy a phone at a store, throw in a sim card for the carrier of my choice. You can, as long as you stick to GSM carriers and unlock your phone. I don't know about the situation in Canada, but in the US you can buy prepaid SIM cards for T-Mobile and AT&T, although they don't advertise that fact.
No US phone company will sell you a phone that hasn't been locked to them, and usually also crippled. Verizon may cripple their phones, but they don't lock them. The service programming menus are hidden behind a request for a code, but the code is all zeros. You can, technically, use any Verizon phone with Sprint, Alltel, or any other CDMA carrier - although in practice you might not be able to, because Sprint (at least) refuses to activate a phone they didn't sell themselves.
1. They don't use SIM cards because those are an artifact of GSM. Most of the US cell phone market, including Verizon Wireless, is non-GSM.
2. You can back up your address book online, over the air, for free, and restore it on your new phone for free. You will get bent over if you want an in-store tech to do it, though.
Young people are KIDS, they are PROTECTED from the world until they reach an agreed age of adulthood. "Agreed"? That word is meaningless here. It's like the old joke about two wolves and a sheep "agreeing" on what to have for dinner - except this time, the sheep doesn't even get a vote.
"Protected" is equally meaningless. If they don't want or need to be protected from something, then standing in their way when they try to do it isn't protection, it's oppression.
You have it damn good, trust me. [...] Just STFU and maybe you will get over yourself in time for your adult life to not be as miserable as you are making your youth life. As the other commenter pointed out, it sounds like you're the one with a miserable life. FTR, I am an adult, and my adult life is a lot better than my life as a minor ever was, thanks in great part to the fact that I have a degree of control and responsibility over it that I never did back then.
I spend half as much time working as I did studying, I enjoy it a hell of a lot more, I get paid for it, and if I stop liking it, I'm free to leave. I'm rewarded, not punished, for thinking independently. I go wherever I want, whenever I want. Just because you wish you could have your "protected" childhood back doesn't mean everyone else does, nor does it mean minors should be thankful for the "protection" you want to force upon them.
Use case - your DVR is full (some suggestions and others flagged), and you are watching a show and you want to record it. Try to save and Tivo will tell you you don't have enough room and you'll need to delete things. If your TiVo really was behaving that way, it was defective. Mine are always full, and they never complain that there isn't enough room for a new recording.
I didn't just get lucky or find some secret option - that's how TiVo is designed to work, and it's how everyone else's works. New recordings push old recordings off into the bit bucket, in the order of (1) recently deleted stuff, (2) suggestions, (3) your own recordings that have expired.
I also found that it would not record things on spec as frequently when your drive was nearly full. Correct, suggestions will only be recorded when you have empty space to fill. This is done to enforce the priority order above: your own recordings always take precedence over suggestions, so if recording a suggestion would require deleting one of your recordings, it won't happen.
Perhaps it is more accurate to say that fat people are th elast socialy acceptable peer group to abuse. No, young people still hold that title. There are no stores installing special sound emitters to keep fat people away, no laws saying fat people have to stay inside after 9:00 PM or that they can't drive with other fat people in the car. Fat people can still vote, work, own property, etc. And although one might argue that not all fat people got that way through their own personal choices, no young person ever had an opportunity to choose the year he was born.
To be fair, the story in Super Paper Mario isn't any better. There are a few clever references, but most of it is more sickeningly sweet than any Disney movie. The gameplay is loads of fun, but I started skipping through the dialogue as quickly as possible about halfway through the game.
[Ron Paul has] voted no on everything from the Patriot Act, to the Iraq war, and from little things like giving government grants. As the other response pointed out, that's great if you're one of the people who thinks the government shouldn't be spending money on anything or attempting to address any problems that the market fails to solve.
Most voters, however, are not those people. Most of us want the government to build roads, give out grants for education and research, etc. If we didn't, Ron Paul wouldn't have had to join the Republican party to get noticed - he'd already have been elected president as a Libertarian.
However, I'd love to hear why the freedom to abuse drugs is more important than political freedom, the freedom to be equipped for revolution, and the freedom of self-government. I'm sure you'd be as unmoved by that explanation as I have been by explanations of why owning a gun is so important. You don't care about recreation and relaxation; I don't care about fighting off Red Dawn.
"Political freedom" and "self-government" sound pretty vague, though. I doubt anyone living in a parliamentary democracy would agree that they're lacking either of those.
And free lollipops and peace on earth. No, although if you want to write a free lollipop provision into the bill, I'll second it. The things I mentioned are quite reasonable and practical, seeing as how they've actually been implemented in many other countries.
The president has a higher approval rating than Congress. A minority support an immediate withdrawal from Iraq. Congress always has a low approval rating, and this Congress's rating certainly isn't helped by the fact that they've caved to the executive on Iraq. A vast majority support some form of withdrawal.
Try buying a handgun, in Amsterdam vs the US, or for that matter an assault rifle, and see what your punishment is. The right to bear arms is one of the primary fundamental rights of a free people. The right to smoke pot is an arbitrary and meaningless one, IMO. So, in other words, your position is that the US system is better because it has, so far, preserved the freedoms you care about, at the expense of the ones other people care about. Don't expect to convince anyone with that argument.
The cost of medical services in the U.S. has nothing to do with our form of government or tax rates, but is the result of a number of things revolving around insurance, Medicare, and legal liability. If we simply started buying the same services through the government, our costs would skyrocket even more. Unlikely. Health insurance would be mostly eliminated, Medicare would be reformed, and legal liability can easily be brought in line with other countries (if it isn't already). Remember, most other countries provide health coverage to more citizens while spending less to do it. Their systems are more efficient than ours, even though they're run by the government, thanks to such things as economies of scale, simplified billing and approval procedures, and continuity.
If the president is truly fighting an unnecessary war, they can simply defund the military to make it impossible. Those are all drastic actions, but they would happen at the drop of a hat of the public was overwhelmingly against what the president was doing. Not necessarily. The public is overwhelmingly opposed (read any poll), and yet that hasn't happened.
This is exactly the brain-washing the current parties do. Things do not have to work this way. You're right, they don't. But whining about Republicans and Democrats (or the hilarious "Republocrats") isn't helping. Voting for a third party doesn't really solve anything: first, because our electoral system punishes you for voting for a minor party, and second, because you'll still only have two parties and pretty soon you'll be right back in the same boat. The parties we have are the way they are because that's the only way for a party to survive in the system we have.
If you want things to work a different way, do what I said. Push for a new voting method that will allow voters to vote for third parties without shooting themselves in the foot.
I would be pretty pissed if I spent 7 months writing a book with an agreement that I make some money on the sales only to have someone violate my copyright and take credit for my novel and I go broke. Well, I'd be pretty pissed if my favorite sports team lost the Big Game, or if I found out my girlfriend was cheating on me. But "pissed" doesn't mean "I get to drag their ass to court".
Also, taking credit for someone else's work is fraud. If I try to sell something you wrote by claiming I wrote it, then I'm lying to my customers, just as if I were trying to sell a magic rock by claiming it'd cure cancer. You don't need copyright laws in order to prosecute fraud - you just need laws against fraud.
But copyright enforces credits on who writes what. It may serve that purpose now, but the purpose can be served just as well without copyright.
That's fucked up. We need more choices. Well, no kidding. Why do you think I gave a short-term suggestion and a long-term suggestion?
We can't have more choices without a new voting method. Just standing around complaining about the two-party system isn't doing anything to fix it. But actually putting that kind of reform into practice is going to take a long time, and in the meantime, there are still elections to be run and choices to be made. So your long term goal should be voting reform, and your short term goal should be making one of the two parties more like the kind of party you want to vote for - unless you simply don't care what the government does in the meantime.
What, voting for a third party is somehow going to help? They're just a different color of cat.
The problem is with the system: Duverger's law. We have a two-party system because our voting method pushes us in that direction, and once you're down to two parties, it doesn't really matter who they are. They'll be subject to all the same influences as the Republicans and Democrats are now, because they'll be the only ones in power. An interest group that wants a favor will donate to the majority party; a group that's been slighted by the current government will donate to the opposition. It'll be the same thing we have now, with different letters after the names on TV.
If you really want to do something smart, do two things:
Figure out which major party you like more (or hate less), join it, and work from within to change it into the kind of party that represents you. This is how you effect change in the short term.
Push for a new voting method. Approval voting, instant runoff, proportional representation... they're all better than what we have now. This is how you effect change in the long term, with an election structure that makes it easy for more than two parties to thrive.
Leet-man dedazo insultingly blames the users again Well, look: it almost certainly is their fault that they got infected. You don't have to be a super genius to avoid getting infected, you just need enough self-control to not install every search toolbar or smiley-face cursors package that comes along.
That doesn't mean the OS is blameless, though - it can and should be more difficult for idiots to get themselves infected. But educating the users would be more effective. If they all switched to Linux, they'd just start clicking stuff like "Get 1000 free KDE backgrounds!" "Use this ReiserFS journal defragmenter to speed up your Tux Racer!" "Your computer is broadcasting an IP address, click here for a free kernel module to patch this hole!"
ask the drug companies if theyd prefer 100k a year for 20 years or a one off fee that they couldnt justify as being anywhere near that much. Uh.. of course they could justify it. A cure is worth a lot more than a temporary treatment.
What you're ignoring is competition. There's more than one drug company out there, and they want to steal each other's profits. If Pharmex is selling the $100k/yr non-cure, PillCo will want a share of that market, and the way to get it is to sell something better. If PillCo sells the cure for a one-time price of $500k, that's still $500k they weren't getting before - it's in their interest to sell it. Financially, they're even ahead of their competitors for the first 5 years, and they can invest that money and use it to come up with something else to sell 5 years later.
Slashdot Mirror
I know, isn't it crazy? How dare they charge us for the radio airtime we use!
That's a string bet -- not allowed. Take back your raise, sir; the bet stands at "back of a bulldozer".
Actually, the Xbox 360 Elite system is at #19 right now. That's on the first page (1-25).
Also interesting: there are no PS3 games in that list. There are three Wii games (4 if you count Wii Play), some DS/PS2/360/PC games, but nothing for the PS3 except the controller and remote.
10p is still about twice as much as we pay in the US, considering the exchange rates.
No kidding. And while we're on the subject, why is it so hard to find a car that - get this - is just a car? No heater, no A/C, no radio, no clock, no storage compartments, no fancypants windows that roll up and down - just seats, a steering wheel, and an engine. Nearly impossible!
1. They don't use SIM cards because those are an artifact of GSM. Most of the US cell phone market, including Verizon Wireless, is non-GSM.
2. You can back up your address book online, over the air, for free, and restore it on your new phone for free. You will get bent over if you want an in-store tech to do it, though.
"Protected" is equally meaningless. If they don't want or need to be protected from something, then standing in their way when they try to do it isn't protection, it's oppression. You have it damn good, trust me. [...] Just STFU and maybe you will get over yourself in time for your adult life to not be as miserable as you are making your youth life. As the other commenter pointed out, it sounds like you're the one with a miserable life. FTR, I am an adult, and my adult life is a lot better than my life as a minor ever was, thanks in great part to the fact that I have a degree of control and responsibility over it that I never did back then.
I spend half as much time working as I did studying, I enjoy it a hell of a lot more, I get paid for it, and if I stop liking it, I'm free to leave. I'm rewarded, not punished, for thinking independently. I go wherever I want, whenever I want. Just because you wish you could have your "protected" childhood back doesn't mean everyone else does, nor does it mean minors should be thankful for the "protection" you want to force upon them.
I didn't just get lucky or find some secret option - that's how TiVo is designed to work, and it's how everyone else's works. New recordings push old recordings off into the bit bucket, in the order of (1) recently deleted stuff, (2) suggestions, (3) your own recordings that have expired. I also found that it would not record things on spec as frequently when your drive was nearly full. Correct, suggestions will only be recorded when you have empty space to fill. This is done to enforce the priority order above: your own recordings always take precedence over suggestions, so if recording a suggestion would require deleting one of your recordings, it won't happen.
Eating and exercise habits take a lot of work to change, just like religious habits. I wouldn't assume they're any easier.
To be fair, the story in Super Paper Mario isn't any better. There are a few clever references, but most of it is more sickeningly sweet than any Disney movie. The gameplay is loads of fun, but I started skipping through the dialogue as quickly as possible about halfway through the game.
Most voters, however, are not those people. Most of us want the government to build roads, give out grants for education and research, etc. If we didn't, Ron Paul wouldn't have had to join the Republican party to get noticed - he'd already have been elected president as a Libertarian.
"Political freedom" and "self-government" sound pretty vague, though. I doubt anyone living in a parliamentary democracy would agree that they're lacking either of those. And free lollipops and peace on earth. No, although if you want to write a free lollipop provision into the bill, I'll second it. The things I mentioned are quite reasonable and practical, seeing as how they've actually been implemented in many other countries. The president has a higher approval rating than Congress. A minority support an immediate withdrawal from Iraq. Congress always has a low approval rating, and this Congress's rating certainly isn't helped by the fact that they've caved to the executive on Iraq. A vast majority support some form of withdrawal.
If you want things to work a different way, do what I said. Push for a new voting method that will allow voters to vote for third parties without shooting themselves in the foot.
Also, taking credit for someone else's work is fraud. If I try to sell something you wrote by claiming I wrote it, then I'm lying to my customers, just as if I were trying to sell a magic rock by claiming it'd cure cancer. You don't need copyright laws in order to prosecute fraud - you just need laws against fraud. But copyright enforces credits on who writes what. It may serve that purpose now, but the purpose can be served just as well without copyright.
We can't have more choices without a new voting method. Just standing around complaining about the two-party system isn't doing anything to fix it. But actually putting that kind of reform into practice is going to take a long time, and in the meantime, there are still elections to be run and choices to be made. So your long term goal should be voting reform, and your short term goal should be making one of the two parties more like the kind of party you want to vote for - unless you simply don't care what the government does in the meantime.
The problem is with the system: Duverger's law. We have a two-party system because our voting method pushes us in that direction, and once you're down to two parties, it doesn't really matter who they are. They'll be subject to all the same influences as the Republicans and Democrats are now, because they'll be the only ones in power. An interest group that wants a favor will donate to the majority party; a group that's been slighted by the current government will donate to the opposition. It'll be the same thing we have now, with different letters after the names on TV.
If you really want to do something smart, do two things:
That doesn't mean the OS is blameless, though - it can and should be more difficult for idiots to get themselves infected. But educating the users would be more effective. If they all switched to Linux, they'd just start clicking stuff like "Get 1000 free KDE backgrounds!" "Use this ReiserFS journal defragmenter to speed up your Tux Racer!" "Your computer is broadcasting an IP address, click here for a free kernel module to patch this hole!"
What you're ignoring is competition. There's more than one drug company out there, and they want to steal each other's profits. If Pharmex is selling the $100k/yr non-cure, PillCo will want a share of that market, and the way to get it is to sell something better. If PillCo sells the cure for a one-time price of $500k, that's still $500k they weren't getting before - it's in their interest to sell it. Financially, they're even ahead of their competitors for the first 5 years, and they can invest that money and use it to come up with something else to sell 5 years later.