...because parents these days don't want to be responsible for their kids. We just need to off all of the stupid parents who let little 5 year old Timmy play GTA.*
*Hyperbole alert.
Seriously though, it is (and should) ultimately be up to the parent to decide what their kid (read: under 18 years old in the US) can play. Even thats a bit arbitrary, as I was sixteen when I was playing Counter Strike, a 'M' rated game. Its more of the fact that I knew it was a game, and knew that it was not real. Six year old Timmy is more than likely unable to properly make the distinction.
Not exactly the fault of the Linux programmers themselves, but the fact that as a whole, people these days are raised with a familiarity with either OSX or MS Windows; both of which, (I'll probably incur a flamebait for this one) are relatively similar in their approach to their GUI. While they look different, they essentially operate on similar wavelengths.
This isn't a problem until any Unix/Linux/BSD/Solaris/etc. environment comes in.
Being a minority in installed OS's, and requiring a higher degree of computer knowledge in order to successfully operate it, the Unix family does turn a lot of people off for that reason, in conjunction with several others. (When someone asks how to learn Linux, I usually tell them to take everything they know about computers, forget it all, and start over. Its what I did/am currently doing.)
Everything has its annoying fanboys who don't help people and decide to just respond with "RTFM" or similar comment. However, I'd be willing to wager that if someone was raised from a young age, having only Unix/Unix derivitave experience and knowledge, they would have some (albeit less) issues with Windows or OSX.
While slightly off topic {I'll probably get blasted for that;-) }, it is interesting to note that in most parts of the United States, libelous/slanderous material falls under the definition of 'defamation per se', which has an interesting legal definition of the fact that the words (pictures, music, etc.) do not have to be defined by the plaintiff as 'causing aggregious harm or unnecessary suffering' to their character.
In other words...
Anything written can be taken at its face value; the burden of proof is removed from the plaintiff, insofar as showing how the words cause harm.
Even further, most states extend this to anything that is posted online, whether visible by the general public or not. So here's a tip to anyone who wants to host a gripe site, public community webpage, etc. Don't post anything that can be considered defamatory speech. Its really not that hard. If, however, you live in Arizona, Arkansas, Mississippi, Missouri, Oregon, Tennessee, there is no distinction of what falls under 'defamation per se', so the law is a bit more vague on that side.
Either way, don't post libelous materials online. I doubt that most people would pay attention to this, but whatever; that's their problem.
While I have never owned a major console product line from Nintendo, and having only owned the Game Boy (Original off-beige clunker that still works to this day) and the Game Boy Color, I have been a little bit behind in my personal purchases of products from Nintendo. I never really got into the whole TV/console gaming scene, and while occasionally playing each successive generation at friends' houses, I can say that each system seemed to have a certain allure that allowed me to look beyond its minor (read: insignificant/nonexistant) flaws, and see the console as a good gaming machine.
There were a few reasons that I went the PC gaming route instead of being a more console focused person. Maybe it was that the computer became more of a main part of my life, and gaming only seemed natural on it. Or maybe it was the fact that when the Xbox/PS2 came out, I was still seeing a very binary view, that of "Console vs. PC."
Or more recently, it was the fact that I could either drop four hundred dollars on a 360 with no games (nevermind the fact that I do not own a high def TV, which is a de facto requirement; if you can output hi-def, then show it on hi-def), or I could drop 300 on a new graphics card and more RAM, and still have money left over for more games.
Maybe it was the fact that I was sick of hearing all the Halo/Halo2 fanboys screaming their heads off how consoles are perfect for FPS's; even though the PC Gamer Magazine challenge to the Xbox Magazine people proved once and for all that the keyboard and mouse is a superior control setup for FPS's when compared to a gamepad (especially that of the Xbox).
Perhaps all of these reasons culminated in the fact that I have not made any additional console gaming purchases since the GameBoy Color era.
Of course, after playing the new Metroid game on a friend's DS gave me a new outlook on gaming from Nintendo. A first person shooter that has an intuitive control system (albeit tiring, but what's a Nintendo system without the trademark Nintendo Thumb?), that anyone can get used to, either from the PC camp, the console faction, or a new gamer.
I honestly can say that I will be buying a DS Lite (as soon as they come out in the jet/matte/flat black; whatever, so long as it matches my computer coloring scheme of black) and truthfully, I will be purchasing a Wii. There is just something about the control scheme, something about what Nintendo is doing that somehow re-captures the interest of gamers such as myself.
I find the 360 interesting, the control setup has been greatly improved from its predecessor, but I still don't find a need to purchase it.
I somehow doubt the eventual playability of the PS3 will be all that great, given all the information that we've seen that shows Sony's pitfalls in its creation, and of course, the fact that the Blu-Ray technology might follow in the footsteps of every other media format that Sony has brought to market. One would expect them to learn their lesson after the Betamax, MemoryStick(somewhat), UMD, and their ATRAC music format.
I figure that my investment in the Wii and the DS Lite will still be completely worth my money, and if Nintendo puts out 'mature' games (read: Battlefield 2, any game from Rockstar) for the Wii, I can safely say that Nintendo can capture a broader gaming market.
Isn't that what most people do for personal passwords anyways?
I mean, I don't know many people who do the steps that you did (and that's a really good idea to practice what you did, as I'm implementing it for my monthly password change for next month), but for people who type their personal passwords on their personal computers and don't tell anyone the password or write it down, isn't the concept at least the same?
I'm probably wrong here, but I still gotta say, your idea is pretty darn smart, especially with a longer (16+ characters) password.
Well, to answer the questions for you, I'm currently on my ninth unit due to the generation that I had bought. I have the 40GB 4th Generation (Pre-colour), which was plagued with many problems. Oddly enough, I had never recieved the so called 'Audio Defect' that seemed to affect so many other units of this generation.
As for a breakdown of the issues, they are as follows.
1. Melted hard drive. HD Getting caught in an infinite loop plus a firmware defect all sandwiched in a case with no fan or cooling devices causes a fun situation. At first Apple refused to replace it (the unit was only 4 months old at that time) even though I had already purchased the extended warranty, with 20 months of coverage still left on the warranty. After I was forceful with the 'Genius' personnel, (read: asked for full replacement refund-cost at the time was $350) they finally replaced the unit for no charge, and told me that if I ever had any more problems, to just come in and they'd get me a new unit. (I'm cautiously optimistic by this point.)
2. Sad Face-replaced unit
3. File icon-unit replaced (though I could have possibly fixed it myself, I figure I wanted a new unit; why do work when you can get others to do it for you?)
4. Sad Face
5. Sad Face
6. Hard Drive melt (same cause, though this time I was taken care of within twenty minutes)
7. File Icon
8. Sad Face
And that brings me to unit #9, which has worked for me for the past three weeks. I still have until the end of November to have the unit fail (which I fully expect). Given this track record, I will never buy another iPod again. I'm not going to flame Apple on this one, I'm just saying that if I invested $400 on a piece of electronic equipment (plus roughly another $150 on accessories and warranty), I'd like it to not fail every two to four months.
Of course, my next investment is the Neuros 442, and after having done careful research on their warranty provisions, I feel that I can safely say that Neuros is the right choice for me.
Agreed, but for different reasons. I love Nintendo products, and have grown to hate anything from Apple for various reasons (maybe the fact that I've gone through 9 iPuds {intentional misspelling} in a year and a half, not due to user error in any part):-P . If Nintendo could be bought out by Apple, I would most certainly never buy another Nintendo product again, given Apple's success in first-gen products.
Of course, this all is dependent on the truthiness of the article, which I sincerely doubt.
Thank you for correcting my malapropism, (usually I'm the grammar/spelling/word usage police on my other board) and I do agree with you for the most part too. Why do I have to use the last four digits of my SSN to log in to confirm my paycheck has been sent? Why do I have to leave little bits of information that are easily traced back to me everywhere I go? I personally use a different password for every site I have to log in to, and I change them once a month. The issue here, of course, is that the waking world doesn't think/care that security is all that important, or more realistically, people are too confident in their methods of security and deem other methods of keeping information secure unnecessarily complex.
Of course, thats just my opinion.
Re:Why Net Neurtality legislation is so important
on
DRM and Democracy
·
· Score: 1
Fair enough.
Though I was referring to the copying of copyrighted material and distrobution by a party other than the original distributor for profit. Encrypting any material to play on just one type of player (usually from the company who encrypts their work) is socially wrong. From an economic standpoint, its a very shrewd business practice. Though, I'm not here to argue business ethics.
Re:Why Net Neurtality legislation is so important
on
DRM and Democracy
·
· Score: 1
Agreed. Proprietary control over most things is only restricting the potential user base for any given media. Think of it this way, what if we drove cars (All of which are different manufacturers), and could only fill them up in a gas station owned by our car company? What if we could only drive in lanes that were for our car company, or even have our travel to wherever we want restricted, because the city we want to drive to is incompatable with our car model and brand?
I disagree with 99.9% of the DMCA, but that doesn't mean I'm against common sense procedures. Encrypting a DVD to prevent illegal copying is good. On the other hand, encrypting a DVD to cripple it so that it only plays in a certain region is not a good idea. Until enough of us decide to not buy from or support in any way a company that limits our rights to own and utilize our media, we are never going to see any positive changes with current and emerging copyright law.
Question: should He Whose Name Shall Not Be Spoken (Mr. Thompson) be enrolled in a support group for those who are addicted to filing frivolous lawsuits?
Slashdot Mirror
...because parents these days don't want to be responsible for their kids. We just need to off all of the stupid parents who let little 5 year old Timmy play GTA.*
*Hyperbole alert.
Seriously though, it is (and should) ultimately be up to the parent to decide what their kid (read: under 18 years old in the US) can play. Even thats a bit arbitrary, as I was sixteen when I was playing Counter Strike, a 'M' rated game. Its more of the fact that I knew it was a game, and knew that it was not real. Six year old Timmy is more than likely unable to properly make the distinction.
Almost wanted to yell out "OMG FURRY" to your post title.
Then I realised that getting a quick post onto Slashdot has some minor issues.
Not exactly the fault of the Linux programmers themselves, but the fact that as a whole, people these days are raised with a familiarity with either OSX or MS Windows; both of which, (I'll probably incur a flamebait for this one) are relatively similar in their approach to their GUI. While they look different, they essentially operate on similar wavelengths.
This isn't a problem until any Unix/Linux/BSD/Solaris/etc. environment comes in.
Being a minority in installed OS's, and requiring a higher degree of computer knowledge in order to successfully operate it, the Unix family does turn a lot of people off for that reason, in conjunction with several others. (When someone asks how to learn Linux, I usually tell them to take everything they know about computers, forget it all, and start over. Its what I did/am currently doing.)
Everything has its annoying fanboys who don't help people and decide to just respond with "RTFM" or similar comment. However, I'd be willing to wager that if someone was raised from a young age, having only Unix/Unix derivitave experience and knowledge, they would have some (albeit less) issues with Windows or OSX.
Or
sudo apt-get remove kde
"RTFM n00b" Possibly one of the single biggest reasons that more people don't make an effective full switch to Linux.
While slightly off topic {I'll probably get blasted for that ;-) }, it is interesting to note that in most parts of the United States, libelous/slanderous material falls under the definition of 'defamation per se', which has an interesting legal definition of the fact that the words (pictures, music, etc.) do not have to be defined by the plaintiff as 'causing aggregious harm or unnecessary suffering' to their character.
In other words...
Anything written can be taken at its face value; the burden of proof is removed from the plaintiff, insofar as showing how the words cause harm.
Even further, most states extend this to anything that is posted online, whether visible by the general public or not. So here's a tip to anyone who wants to host a gripe site, public community webpage, etc. Don't post anything that can be considered defamatory speech. Its really not that hard. If, however, you live in Arizona, Arkansas, Mississippi, Missouri, Oregon, Tennessee, there is no distinction of what falls under 'defamation per se', so the law is a bit more vague on that side.
Either way, don't post libelous materials online. I doubt that most people would pay attention to this, but whatever; that's their problem.
I think that I have been wrong about consoles.
While I have never owned a major console product line from Nintendo, and having only owned the Game Boy (Original off-beige clunker that still works to this day) and the Game Boy Color, I have been a little bit behind in my personal purchases of products from Nintendo.
I never really got into the whole TV/console gaming scene, and while occasionally playing each successive generation at friends' houses, I can say that each system seemed to have a certain allure that allowed me to look beyond its minor (read: insignificant/nonexistant) flaws, and see the console as a good gaming machine.
There were a few reasons that I went the PC gaming route instead of being a more console focused person. Maybe it was that the computer became more of a main part of my life, and gaming only seemed natural on it. Or maybe it was the fact that when the Xbox/PS2 came out, I was still seeing a very binary view, that of "Console vs. PC."
Or more recently, it was the fact that I could either drop four hundred dollars on a 360 with no games (nevermind the fact that I do not own a high def TV, which is a de facto requirement; if you can output hi-def, then show it on hi-def), or I could drop 300 on a new graphics card and more RAM, and still have money left over for more games.
Maybe it was the fact that I was sick of hearing all the Halo/Halo2 fanboys screaming their heads off how consoles are perfect for FPS's; even though the PC Gamer Magazine challenge to the Xbox Magazine people proved once and for all that the keyboard and mouse is a superior control setup for FPS's when compared to a gamepad (especially that of the Xbox).
Perhaps all of these reasons culminated in the fact that I have not made any additional console gaming purchases since the GameBoy Color era.
Of course, after playing the new Metroid game on a friend's DS gave me a new outlook on gaming from Nintendo. A first person shooter that has an intuitive control system (albeit tiring, but what's a Nintendo system without the trademark Nintendo Thumb?), that anyone can get used to, either from the PC camp, the console faction, or a new gamer.
I honestly can say that I will be buying a DS Lite (as soon as they come out in the jet/matte/flat black; whatever, so long as it matches my computer coloring scheme of black) and truthfully, I will be purchasing a Wii. There is just something about the control scheme, something about what Nintendo is doing that somehow re-captures the interest of gamers such as myself.
I find the 360 interesting, the control setup has been greatly improved from its predecessor, but I still don't find a need to purchase it.
I somehow doubt the eventual playability of the PS3 will be all that great, given all the information that we've seen that shows Sony's pitfalls in its creation, and of course, the fact that the Blu-Ray technology might follow in the footsteps of every other media format that Sony has brought to market. One would expect them to learn their lesson after the Betamax, MemoryStick(somewhat), UMD, and their ATRAC music format.
I figure that my investment in the Wii and the DS Lite will still be completely worth my money, and if Nintendo puts out 'mature' games (read: Battlefield 2, any game from Rockstar) for the Wii, I can safely say that Nintendo can capture a broader gaming market.
Of course, that's just my opinion.
I called the number for Fernando's New Beginnings, but apparently it was disconnected...
Isn't that what most people do for personal passwords anyways?
I mean, I don't know many people who do the steps that you did (and that's a really good idea to practice what you did, as I'm implementing it for my monthly password change for next month), but for people who type their personal passwords on their personal computers and don't tell anyone the password or write it down, isn't the concept at least the same?
I'm probably wrong here, but I still gotta say, your idea is pretty darn smart, especially with a longer (16+ characters) password.
At least that's just my opinion.
Well, to answer the questions for you, I'm currently on my ninth unit due to the generation that I had bought. I have the 40GB 4th Generation (Pre-colour), which was plagued with many problems. Oddly enough, I had never recieved the so called 'Audio Defect' that seemed to affect so many other units of this generation.
As for a breakdown of the issues, they are as follows.
1. Melted hard drive. HD Getting caught in an infinite loop plus a firmware defect all sandwiched in a case with no fan or cooling devices causes a fun situation. At first Apple refused to replace it (the unit was only 4 months old at that time) even though I had already purchased the extended warranty, with 20 months of coverage still left on the warranty. After I was forceful with the 'Genius' personnel, (read: asked for full replacement refund-cost at the time was $350) they finally replaced the unit for no charge, and told me that if I ever had any more problems, to just come in and they'd get me a new unit. (I'm cautiously optimistic by this point.)
2. Sad Face-replaced unit
3. File icon-unit replaced (though I could have possibly fixed it myself, I figure I wanted a new unit; why do work when you can get others to do it for you?)
4. Sad Face
5. Sad Face
6. Hard Drive melt (same cause, though this time I was taken care of within twenty minutes)
7. File Icon
8. Sad Face
And that brings me to unit #9, which has worked for me for the past three weeks. I still have until the end of November to have the unit fail (which I fully expect). Given this track record, I will never buy another iPod again. I'm not going to flame Apple on this one, I'm just saying that if I invested $400 on a piece of electronic equipment (plus roughly another $150 on accessories and warranty), I'd like it to not fail every two to four months.
Of course, my next investment is the Neuros 442, and after having done careful research on their warranty provisions, I feel that I can safely say that Neuros is the right choice for me.
Agreed, but for different reasons. I love Nintendo products, and have grown to hate anything from Apple for various reasons (maybe the fact that I've gone through 9 iPuds {intentional misspelling} in a year and a half, not due to user error in any part) :-P . If Nintendo could be bought out by Apple, I would most certainly never buy another Nintendo product again, given Apple's success in first-gen products.
Of course, this all is dependent on the truthiness of the article, which I sincerely doubt.
Would this be Dr. Demento worthy? I think so.
Thank you for correcting my malapropism, (usually I'm the grammar/spelling/word usage police on my other board) and I do agree with you for the most part too. Why do I have to use the last four digits of my SSN to log in to confirm my paycheck has been sent? Why do I have to leave little bits of information that are easily traced back to me everywhere I go? I personally use a different password for every site I have to log in to, and I change them once a month. The issue here, of course, is that the waking world doesn't think/care that security is all that important, or more realistically, people are too confident in their methods of security and deem other methods of keeping information secure unnecessarily complex.
Of course, thats just my opinion.
Fair enough.
Though I was referring to the copying of copyrighted material and distrobution by a party other than the original distributor for profit. Encrypting any material to play on just one type of player (usually from the company who encrypts their work) is socially wrong. From an economic standpoint, its a very shrewd business practice. Though, I'm not here to argue business ethics.
Agreed. Proprietary control over most things is only restricting the potential user base for any given media. Think of it this way, what if we drove cars (All of which are different manufacturers), and could only fill them up in a gas station owned by our car company? What if we could only drive in lanes that were for our car company, or even have our travel to wherever we want restricted, because the city we want to drive to is incompatable with our car model and brand?
I disagree with 99.9% of the DMCA, but that doesn't mean I'm against common sense procedures. Encrypting a DVD to prevent illegal copying is good. On the other hand, encrypting a DVD to cripple it so that it only plays in a certain region is not a good idea. Until enough of us decide to not buy from or support in any way a company that limits our rights to own and utilize our media, we are never going to see any positive changes with current and emerging copyright law.
Definitely read that one too fast and almost started a flaming fight. Sarcasm, thy name is GlobalEcho.
Question: should He Whose Name Shall Not Be Spoken (Mr. Thompson) be enrolled in a support group for those who are addicted to filing frivolous lawsuits?