While I've never actually heard of VisiOn, I do know CDC (one of my former employers) and my guess is if it didn't turn a quick profit, they laid off most of the workers and put the remainder in maintenance mode. I came on after this era, when they were in the "sell profitable divisions to appease shareholders," which kept them in a happy place with stockholders until there were no profitable divisions left and they died a quick and painless death.
GEM, on the other hand, I do know - my Jr. High School Electronics teacher had it (and DR-DOS) installed on the PC in the electronics lab. We also had Windows 2.0 in the computer lab, but I always booted it to DOS, which was not the case with GEM. I admit, I liked Win 3.1 better than GEM, but by the time even Win 3.0 came out, GEM was being driven into the ground by MS exclusive bundling contracts and other anticompetitive practices.
I was going to report the same (can't reproduce), but I noticed my firmware was a little old (2.02.02), so I'll have to try again after upgrading tonight. Maybe this has something to do with default username and password (which I changed before even connecting the thing to the internet)?
Anyhow, it wouldn't work against my WRT54G because I already forward 80 and 443 to my web server (I turned off 443 to test this "flaw," since I don't use https for anything yet). The guy's recommended workaround is to forward 80 and 443 to a non-existent machine if you're really paranoid.
That would put my guess completely off, then, Waimea being a canyon in Kauai called "the Grand Canyon of the Pacific", and Cairo is the capitol of Egypt. Silly codenames:)
Macrovision and maybe the other company whose name I've forgotten already would probably encode it with some kind of shifting technology that distorts the CD if the format is changed. They've done it before.
Not sure how they're going to make copies of the CD uncopyable, though - that sounds impossible without having some kind of DRM tool that you need to use to copy it in the first place. The only other thing I can think of is that maybe they use some kind of write error check, but even then, some software will copy the CDs verbatim (errors and all), so that wouldn't work, either.
This would heavily depend on how the network is wired. Ethernet LANs have problems under heavy load, so if sections of the network are becoming saturated, a broader pipe is necessary. This is because ethernet uses sensing and collisions rather than tokens which work exactly the opposite (bad under light load, good under heavy).
Strangely, though, this doesn't seem to be the case. The Netgear converter typically is connected to a switch, so collisions would be unlikely. Since each user is required to buy one, shared bandwidth isn't the problem. If this were up to me, I'd buy one switch per dorm and buy a much cheaper hub to split to machines and other devices. Unless students are running 3 or 4 (or more, depending on compression) HD-TV quality video streams, they're not going to come close to saturating the bandwidth.
You'ld think the UPS (essentially a battery backup for those of you unfamiliar) would give enough power to handle a call to the Power Company in the case of a power failure, though. I've got 45 minutes backup power on mine (more if the monitor is off) if the power goes out, at which time I can still use my computer and internet connection (DSL, so if the phones go down, I can't connect). The real problem would be if that battery backup died and then the emergency happened. I'd have a solution, since I intend to get another UPS with a longer backup time within the next week, but most people wouldn't.
The problem with cell phone, in this case, is that it seems pitched as a replacement... or maybe not, it could be a cordless phone replacement.
I bet every coffee shop and hotel in town would be shut down if that was the case. If the coppers knock, say you run an ISP (which you essentially do since you sell bandwidth) and they would need to monitor from your site to get the perp. Yeah, you get the visit, but eventually, so would he. Hopefully you ARE allowed to run servers like this (e.g. using a service like Speakeasy and not using, say Comcast). If not, you could be terminated by your ISP for unacceptable use. He'd have to be downloading a boatload of the stuff, anyhow, as the cops wouldn't bother with a minor offender.
I'm running a hotspot out of my home, and there's no telling how much child pornography goes through the wire (hopefully none, but you never know). I don't do much logging on that network (it's a separate LAN) because it is rather pointless to log DHCP addresses unless you have a really long lease time (and even then it's of dubious merit). Tracking a user would be an invasion of privacy, as well, so if the cops or FBI did want to search off of that LAN, I'd want them to get a warrant to protect me from liability (can you say "illegal search and seizure?" - I knew you could!).
You forget that not being a songwriter often applies to 3/4 of a band. Songwriting ONLY applies to lyrics - it's kind of a misnomer in that way. A musician or musicians could spend 400 hours putting together an orchestration and have a singer write 5 minutes of lyrics and guess who gets 100% of the songwriting royalties? The only way for the musicians to get any songwriting money is IF the singer opts to give them a songwriting credit, which is entirely at his or her discretion.
VERY few singer/songwriters share all of their royalties. Robert Smith (the Cure) is the only one I can name (he gives songwriting credit to the entire band). Some, like Led Zeppelin, shared songwriting royalties between primary song contributors. Most of the time, though, it all goes in the lyric writer's pocket.
It may be slow and buggy (actually, 7.1 isn't that bad, IMO), but it's hard to push open source to businesses because they want someone to hold accountable.
Market forces, on the other hand, have their own way of forcing good software in, regardless of origin. When you risk losing millions in contracts because you don't support Mozilla or Linux, the corporate penny pinchers start to take notice.
Yeah - I was just thinking about all the retro disco stations in my area (exactly 0) compared to classic rock (2, but recently 3). Same era - you'd think they'd play some BeeGees in there somewhere.
And I can't get even get the local 80s station to play GTR or Sly Fox, two bands with one hit and dreadful albums... bastards (no, I don't listen too often, but the stuff they play isn't eclectic enough:)
BIG BIG sticking point - SALARIED Musicians. The only salaried musicians I've known perform in orchestras or teach professionally. Most band-type musicians I know are paid by the gig, including house bands (e.g. wage). Actually, I've never known a rock or hip-hop musician/singer/rapper that earns a salary.
I've said it before, but fees against artists from record companies require a huge volume of album sales to make the artist money. Every expense is skimmed off the top of artist salaries, including the $75000-100000 required to pay independent promoters to play an album on the airwaves.
There are a collection of articles on How Stuff Works that explains how performing artists get screwed.
Read about royalties. The "Who Gets What" section has a great quote -
"If we're not songwriters, and not hugely successful commercially (as in platinum-plus), we [recording artists] don't make a dime off our recordings." - Janis Ian
Best of all Top 40 radio - especially see the section on Independent Promoters and Radio play. I sure wish I'd learned all that from How Stuff Works, rather than the school of hard knocks.
LOL - just what I'd need - a reason for a lawsuit for defamation and slander again, even if it is 100% fitting and deserved. I'd only post a link like that if I clear it with a lawyer, and this certainly isn't worth the effort.
As I said, I've already been in trouble for it - back in college, there was a ops guy who lamented about his 80 hour+ weeks, yet he never got anything done, so I made a web page about what he REALLY was doing using a number of cartoons (none of them lewd, but lots of implication - most people who knew him couldn't stop laughing). The page was unlinked, and had a disclaimer that it was entirely in jest, but word got around and eventually he saw it. Needless to say, he didn't find it very funny. Eventually, our boss got involved, and I was told it was unacceptable conduct by a teaching assistant and given the (blackmail) choice of destroying the page and resigning or being fired, expelled and sued for both slander and defamation (yeah, most of it probably wasn't winnable in court, but they were using scare tactics and I definitely didn't have any leverage beyond begging at that point). I eventually talked my way out of having to resign by defending my reasoning for making the joke in the first place, specifying that I never linked the page and it wasn't meant to be seen by anyone but me, and by writing a letter of apology to him, the school, and posting the apology on the former site. Apparently he must have still taken the court case through early proceedings, because my court appointed lawyer called a couple of times after that asking questions, though I never had to appear in court (I suspect it was dropped... wish they woulda told me).
That was probably the most scary interview/interrogation since I was busted for giving a page of bomb plans from the BBS version of the Anarchist Cookbook to a kid in Jr High who ended up photocopying and selling it for 25 cents a copy in the library. I had no idea it was LEGAL to possess the cookbook until the cop interrogating me told me so and said he couldn't do anything. School policy didn't have anything specifically addressing such things either (it wasn't a weapon), but an appendum was added to the school rules recommending suspension and possible expulsion for "weapons literature" (this was years before Columbine). I'm just the germ of trouble:)
Funny - I have also received free beer (multiple times) and both labor and a discount on a water heater.
I can't say I've actually bartered service, though, since I don't ask for anything. I still have gotten lots of stuff, though.
I've also received Wine and dinner A date (before wife) Dinner sans booze (mom) Concert tickets (to the recent Pixies reunion show) Game Tickets (to, yawn, sports...) a bottle of good quality Tequila (I think...). Sex (albeit from my wife for fixing her computer:) a box of semi or non-functional computer parts (from fixed computers). Nothing (multiple times, including at least once from my wife, damn her - I need my rewards:)
For building PCs, I've received A good Cuban^H^H^H^H^Hforeign cigar 12 bottles of wine. Dinner at Joe's Crab Shack (not gift cert - went out after building PC). Pizza (twice).
The last two were from good friends, the rest mostly strangers (except mom and wife). The date probably wasn't contingent on me fixing a computer, but maybe more of something that happened because I offered to help fix her computer. That girl was a bit too much of a Bible thumper (conservative Catholic) for me and I was too agnostic for her. Bygones.
90% of the above was because I fixed a PC (both a hardware connection problem and ripping out spyware) at a party so a group of mexican-americans could get some soccer scores and pretty soon everyone was asking me to fix their computer, too. All of a sudden, I was the most popular person at the party. Kinda reminds me of the kid who used to pick on me in Jr High School until he learned I was the primary source of cracks (warez) in the school. Actually, that never happened (hey - if Bush never did drugs because 10 years have passed, I never cracked and distributed software:)
Hey - those bimbo... er, models, probably did all their own signs. If they're anything like my cousin, she can cheer, she can draw and design (she's also adept at spurting out kids, signing divorce papers, and collecting alimony and child support from four different fathers, not to mention is a grandmother at 32), but grammar and spelling - ha!
As for booth babes, is E3 mostly male? I suspect yes, so from a marketing standpoint, hiring attractive women to push your product seems like a good idea. The more skin you can show on your models, the more attention your booth will get from the mostly male audience. Most women don't want to see other women naked and most guys don't want to see other guys naked, so there is some justified repulsion from the women as the booth babes get more scantily clad. If E3 were mostly female, I have no doubt that the marketing would be reversed.
Hey - I think that IS my blonde bimbo cousin in one of those pics...
I disagree - I don't think gasoline (oil) had that much to do with it, aside from making some extremists wealthy enough to start elaborate networks (e.g. Osama Bin Laden). I seriously doubt most oil families would support terrorism, because the US (for one) is a cash cow for them. If I were handing you a million dollars or more every day for as long as I lived, would you kill me? It doesn't make logical sense, so only if you feel the money was immoral or immorally obtained would you turn it down and/or off the provider. Saudi Arabia has a good mix of oil and extremism which is probably why many terrorists come from there, but I'm guessing most are disowned by the ones that want to keep getting payed.
Also, the majority of OPEC nations do not practice the extreme form of the muslim religion that justifies suicide bombings. Suicide bombings are not martyr-dom to the majority of muslims, only extremists that distort the words in the Koran to justify it. The martyrs in the Koran were defending their town from attackers, not trying to erradicate the attacker's race.
And how do you explain Afghanistan? Osama bin Laden was basically disowned by his family and their oil fortune. Prior to the World Trade Center bombing, Osama was funding his group through US based relief agencies that funneled money into his terrorist network instead of aiding in relief for the poor. Afghanistan was/is also the largest supplier of Opium in the world but not certainly not oil. Their only oil profits are from pipelines through the country from oil rich neighbors.
Had a Fallout 2 flashback about Myron (a geek that developed a drug called Jet), something like -
"He stays in his room, all alone with nothing but an endless stream of prostitutes coming and going. Typical Project Manager."
Remember kids - if you want booth babes, try Project Manager or Marketing (though expect to die young in a drunken speed boating accident in the latter), not programming;)
If you consider satellite, make sure you investigate if lag is an issue. I remember from a class that it is about 4 tenths of a second for a satellite in a geosynchronous orbit, but I can't remember if that was up-down-up-down or just up-down. The timing was better for LEO (Low Earth Orbit) clusters because they are quite a bit closer to the earth, but this was fairly new tech at the time and my class didn't cover it.
Also remember that dish connections don't like heavy storms, and that may also be an issue, depending on area weather and emergency services that would be checked through the connection. I have both satellite and land line connections, and have never lost both during a storm (100 minute UPS helps for those power outages), but losing one or the other is not uncommon.
Yeah - I realized that after posting, but it was too late by then:)
kauf is purchase, kopf is head. 3 seconds later, the mnemonic I used came back - Kaufman (purchaseman) and Schwartzkopf (blackhead, referring to hair, not a zit).
Actually, what's interesting is that both Singles, Playboy Mansion, and the new Leisure Suit Larry sequel _ARE_ getting press coverage from major online sites. The new Larry was even in the "top 10" list of games IGN wanted to see at E3 (posted sometime last week, and which begins today). I've seen coverage of both on Gamespy and Gamespot, and I usually just browse through the front page to see what's new without actually looking in-depth.
The rating systems in the USA are embarassingly broken, and I think need to be re-evaluated.
Movies: Violence - takes a lot to affect rating, a tiny amount can occur in G rated movies. PG if not gory, PG-13 if tiny amount of gore or lots of violence (e.g. Red Dawn), R if really gory. NC-17 is practically impossible without also having sex (take Passion of Christ, for instance) Nudity - automatic PG-13, but takes a lot for more than R. Sex (faked) - R unless excessive, then NC-17 Sex (real/graphical) - NC-17/AO Drug Paraphenalia - automatic PG-13 Drug Use - PG-13 if brief or implied, usually R.
Games: Violence - Teen start, can get very gory at M Nudity - automatic M, AO if not brief. Sex (faked) - adult situations (romance plots)=Teen, implied sex seems to pretty much get an M, more than brief=AO. Sex (graphical) - AO Drug Paraphenalia - nothing, as far as I can tell - at worst it would be Teen. Drug Use - Teen if effects not shown, M if shown (Gothic is the only example I know of).
Basically, the ratings are fairly close except when it comes to nudity/sex, most likely because of the ESRB's horribly-proven-as-wrong preconception that gamers are all kids. I guess there's still the fear that kids might stumble across the game while playing on their parent's computer or something, but the parent should be responsible enough to either hide the CD or put a password on a user. I mean, seriously - parents could just as easily leave the gun cabinet unlocked or pornography out on the coffee table for their kids to view.
You had ample opportunity to sample the pleasures of this game in a form called a "text adventure" at a much younger age. Soft Porn, the game Leisure Suit Larry was based on, came out WAAAY back in 1981 (you can also find references to it on Al Lowe's site, but this one had history).
Unfortunately for me, the only thing available at that age was Custer's Revenge, and my mom wouldn't let me rent it, so I got a late start on sexual discovery. Fortunately for me, a friend down the street was adept at stealing his dad's Playboys - if it weren't for that, I woulda been just like the bible thumping white suburbanites that create these inane rules.
My German's a bit rusty (15 years of disuse), but all those words are familiar - "I heads for a dollar" or maybe "I head is for a dollar" (my German grammar is DOA - apostrophe necessary?)
Linksys is now Cisco's cheap (er, consumer) router division. If the connections are as reliable as mine, you probably won't know if you've been disconnected by Comcast or if the connection was dropped for no apparent reason. I did read recent reviews of the one I bought that were really bad, and not all of them are, but which do you think Comcast would put in:)
Slashdot Mirror
That looks like a typo - it should be:
Phallicy: Appeal to Ridicule
While I've never actually heard of VisiOn, I do know CDC (one of my former employers) and my guess is if it didn't turn a quick profit, they laid off most of the workers and put the remainder in maintenance mode. I came on after this era, when they were in the "sell profitable divisions to appease shareholders," which kept them in a happy place with stockholders until there were no profitable divisions left and they died a quick and painless death.
GEM, on the other hand, I do know - my Jr. High School Electronics teacher had it (and DR-DOS) installed on the PC in the electronics lab. We also had Windows 2.0 in the computer lab, but I always booted it to DOS, which was not the case with GEM. I admit, I liked Win 3.1 better than GEM, but by the time even Win 3.0 came out, GEM was being driven into the ground by MS exclusive bundling contracts and other anticompetitive practices.
I was going to report the same (can't reproduce), but I noticed my firmware was a little old (2.02.02), so I'll have to try again after upgrading tonight. Maybe this has something to do with default username and password (which I changed before even connecting the thing to the internet)?
Anyhow, it wouldn't work against my WRT54G because I already forward 80 and 443 to my web server (I turned off 443 to test this "flaw," since I don't use https for anything yet). The guy's recommended workaround is to forward 80 and 443 to a non-existent machine if you're really paranoid.
That would put my guess completely off, then, Waimea being a canyon in Kauai called "the Grand Canyon of the Pacific", and Cairo is the capitol of Egypt. Silly codenames :)
Macrovision and maybe the other company whose name I've forgotten already would probably encode it with some kind of shifting technology that distorts the CD if the format is changed. They've done it before.
Not sure how they're going to make copies of the CD uncopyable, though - that sounds impossible without having some kind of DRM tool that you need to use to copy it in the first place. The only other thing I can think of is that maybe they use some kind of write error check, but even then, some software will copy the CDs verbatim (errors and all), so that wouldn't work, either.
This would heavily depend on how the network is wired. Ethernet LANs have problems under heavy load, so if sections of the network are becoming saturated, a broader pipe is necessary. This is because ethernet uses sensing and collisions rather than tokens which work exactly the opposite (bad under light load, good under heavy).
Strangely, though, this doesn't seem to be the case. The Netgear converter typically is connected to a switch, so collisions would be unlikely. Since each user is required to buy one, shared bandwidth isn't the problem. If this were up to me, I'd buy one switch per dorm and buy a much cheaper hub to split to machines and other devices. Unless students are running 3 or 4 (or more, depending on compression) HD-TV quality video streams, they're not going to come close to saturating the bandwidth.
You'ld think the UPS (essentially a battery backup for those of you unfamiliar) would give enough power to handle a call to the Power Company in the case of a power failure, though. I've got 45 minutes backup power on mine (more if the monitor is off) if the power goes out, at which time I can still use my computer and internet connection (DSL, so if the phones go down, I can't connect). The real problem would be if that battery backup died and then the emergency happened. I'd have a solution, since I intend to get another UPS with a longer backup time within the next week, but most people wouldn't.
The problem with cell phone, in this case, is that it seems pitched as a replacement... or maybe not, it could be a cordless phone replacement.
I bet every coffee shop and hotel in town would be shut down if that was the case. If the coppers knock, say you run an ISP (which you essentially do since you sell bandwidth) and they would need to monitor from your site to get the perp. Yeah, you get the visit, but eventually, so would he. Hopefully you ARE allowed to run servers like this (e.g. using a service like Speakeasy and not using, say Comcast). If not, you could be terminated by your ISP for unacceptable use. He'd have to be downloading a boatload of the stuff, anyhow, as the cops wouldn't bother with a minor offender.
I'm running a hotspot out of my home, and there's no telling how much child pornography goes through the wire (hopefully none, but you never know). I don't do much logging on that network (it's a separate LAN) because it is rather pointless to log DHCP addresses unless you have a really long lease time (and even then it's of dubious merit). Tracking a user would be an invasion of privacy, as well, so if the cops or FBI did want to search off of that LAN, I'd want them to get a warrant to protect me from liability (can you say "illegal search and seizure?" - I knew you could!).
You forget that not being a songwriter often applies to 3/4 of a band. Songwriting ONLY applies to lyrics - it's kind of a misnomer in that way. A musician or musicians could spend 400 hours putting together an orchestration and have a singer write 5 minutes of lyrics and guess who gets 100% of the songwriting royalties? The only way for the musicians to get any songwriting money is IF the singer opts to give them a songwriting credit, which is entirely at his or her discretion.
VERY few singer/songwriters share all of their royalties. Robert Smith (the Cure) is the only one I can name (he gives songwriting credit to the entire band). Some, like Led Zeppelin, shared songwriting royalties between primary song contributors. Most of the time, though, it all goes in the lyric writer's pocket.
It may be slow and buggy (actually, 7.1 isn't that bad, IMO), but it's hard to push open source to businesses because they want someone to hold accountable.
Market forces, on the other hand, have their own way of forcing good software in, regardless of origin. When you risk losing millions in contracts because you don't support Mozilla or Linux, the corporate penny pinchers start to take notice.
Yeah - I was just thinking about all the retro disco stations in my area (exactly 0) compared to classic rock (2, but recently 3). Same era - you'd think they'd play some BeeGees in there somewhere.
:)
And I can't get even get the local 80s station to play GTR or Sly Fox, two bands with one hit and dreadful albums... bastards (no, I don't listen too often, but the stuff they play isn't eclectic enough
BIG BIG sticking point - SALARIED Musicians. The only salaried musicians I've known perform in orchestras or teach professionally. Most band-type musicians I know are paid by the gig, including house bands (e.g. wage). Actually, I've never known a rock or hip-hop musician/singer/rapper that earns a salary.
I've said it before, but fees against artists from record companies require a huge volume of album sales to make the artist money. Every expense is skimmed off the top of artist salaries, including the $75000-100000 required to pay independent promoters to play an album on the airwaves.
There are a collection of articles on How Stuff Works that explains how performing artists get screwed.
Read about royalties.
The "Who Gets What" section has a great quote -
"If we're not songwriters, and not hugely successful commercially (as in platinum-plus), we [recording artists] don't make a dime off our recordings." - Janis Ian
Here's one on Recording contracts
Best of all Top 40 radio - especially see the section on Independent Promoters and Radio play. I sure wish I'd learned all that from How Stuff Works, rather than the school of hard knocks.
Even earlier - as far back as 1971 Maze Wars
I remember playing this on a mac in the late '80s.
LOL - just what I'd need - a reason for a lawsuit for defamation and slander again, even if it is 100% fitting and deserved. I'd only post a link like that if I clear it with a lawyer, and this certainly isn't worth the effort.
:)
As I said, I've already been in trouble for it - back in college, there was a ops guy who lamented about his 80 hour+ weeks, yet he never got anything done, so I made a web page about what he REALLY was doing using a number of cartoons (none of them lewd, but lots of implication - most people who knew him couldn't stop laughing). The page was unlinked, and had a disclaimer that it was entirely in jest, but word got around and eventually he saw it. Needless to say, he didn't find it very funny. Eventually, our boss got involved, and I was told it was unacceptable conduct by a teaching assistant and given the (blackmail) choice of destroying the page and resigning or being fired, expelled and sued for both slander and defamation (yeah, most of it probably wasn't winnable in court, but they were using scare tactics and I definitely didn't have any leverage beyond begging at that point). I eventually talked my way out of having to resign by defending my reasoning for making the joke in the first place, specifying that I never linked the page and it wasn't meant to be seen by anyone but me, and by writing a letter of apology to him, the school, and posting the apology on the former site. Apparently he must have still taken the court case through early proceedings, because my court appointed lawyer called a couple of times after that asking questions, though I never had to appear in court (I suspect it was dropped... wish they woulda told me).
That was probably the most scary interview/interrogation since I was busted for giving a page of bomb plans from the BBS version of the Anarchist Cookbook to a kid in Jr High who ended up photocopying and selling it for 25 cents a copy in the library. I had no idea it was LEGAL to possess the cookbook until the cop interrogating me told me so and said he couldn't do anything. School policy didn't have anything specifically addressing such things either (it wasn't a weapon), but an appendum was added to the school rules recommending suspension and possible expulsion for "weapons literature" (this was years before Columbine). I'm just the germ of trouble
Funny - I have also received free beer (multiple times) and both labor and a discount on a water heater.
:) :)
:)
I can't say I've actually bartered service, though, since I don't ask for anything. I still have gotten lots of stuff, though.
I've also received
Wine and dinner
A date (before wife)
Dinner sans booze (mom)
Concert tickets (to the recent Pixies reunion show)
Game Tickets (to, yawn, sports...)
a bottle of good quality Tequila (I think...).
Sex (albeit from my wife for fixing her computer
a box of semi or non-functional computer parts (from fixed computers).
Nothing (multiple times, including at least once from my wife, damn her - I need my rewards
For building PCs, I've received
A good Cuban^H^H^H^H^Hforeign cigar
12 bottles of wine.
Dinner at Joe's Crab Shack (not gift cert - went out after building PC).
Pizza (twice).
The last two were from good friends, the rest mostly strangers (except mom and wife). The date probably wasn't contingent on me fixing a computer, but maybe more of something that happened because I offered to help fix her computer. That girl was a bit too much of a Bible thumper (conservative Catholic) for me and I was too agnostic for her. Bygones.
90% of the above was because I fixed a PC (both a hardware connection problem and ripping out spyware) at a party so a group of mexican-americans could get some soccer scores and pretty soon everyone was asking me to fix their computer, too. All of a sudden, I was the most popular person at the party. Kinda reminds me of the kid who used to pick on me in Jr High School until he learned I was the primary source of cracks (warez) in the school. Actually, that never happened (hey - if Bush never did drugs because 10 years have passed, I never cracked and distributed software
Hey - those bimbo... er, models, probably did all their own signs. If they're anything like my cousin, she can cheer, she can draw and design (she's also adept at spurting out kids, signing divorce papers, and collecting alimony and child support from four different fathers, not to mention is a grandmother at 32), but grammar and spelling - ha!
As for booth babes, is E3 mostly male? I suspect yes, so from a marketing standpoint, hiring attractive women to push your product seems like a good idea. The more skin you can show on your models, the more attention your booth will get from the mostly male audience. Most women don't want to see other women naked and most guys don't want to see other guys naked, so there is some justified repulsion from the women as the booth babes get more scantily clad. If E3 were mostly female, I have no doubt that the marketing would be reversed.
Hey - I think that IS my blonde bimbo cousin in one of those pics...
I disagree - I don't think gasoline (oil) had that much to do with it, aside from making some extremists wealthy enough to start elaborate networks (e.g. Osama Bin Laden). I seriously doubt most oil families would support terrorism, because the US (for one) is a cash cow for them. If I were handing you a million dollars or more every day for as long as I lived, would you kill me? It doesn't make logical sense, so only if you feel the money was immoral or immorally obtained would you turn it down and/or off the provider. Saudi Arabia has a good mix of oil and extremism which is probably why many terrorists come from there, but I'm guessing most are disowned by the ones that want to keep getting payed.
Also, the majority of OPEC nations do not practice the extreme form of the muslim religion that justifies suicide bombings. Suicide bombings are not martyr-dom to the majority of muslims, only extremists that distort the words in the Koran to justify it. The martyrs in the Koran were defending their town from attackers, not trying to erradicate the attacker's race.
And how do you explain Afghanistan? Osama bin Laden was basically disowned by his family and their oil fortune. Prior to the World Trade Center bombing, Osama was funding his group through US based relief agencies that funneled money into his terrorist network instead of aiding in relief for the poor. Afghanistan was/is also the largest supplier of Opium in the world but not certainly not oil. Their only oil profits are from pipelines through the country from oil rich neighbors.
The US has Caffeine free Mt Dew. I've seen the stuff, but never drank any.
I find it humorous that there is more "citrus" in Mt Dew, which contains Orange Juice, than in Minute Maid lemonade, which is usually 0% juice.
Had a Fallout 2 flashback about Myron (a geek that developed a drug called Jet), something like -
;)
"He stays in his room, all alone with nothing but an endless stream of prostitutes coming and going. Typical Project Manager."
Remember kids - if you want booth babes, try Project Manager or Marketing (though expect to die young in a drunken speed boating accident in the latter), not programming
If you consider satellite, make sure you investigate if lag is an issue. I remember from a class that it is about 4 tenths of a second for a satellite in a geosynchronous orbit, but I can't remember if that was up-down-up-down or just up-down. The timing was better for LEO (Low Earth Orbit) clusters because they are quite a bit closer to the earth, but this was fairly new tech at the time and my class didn't cover it.
Also remember that dish connections don't like heavy storms, and that may also be an issue, depending on area weather and emergency services that would be checked through the connection. I have both satellite and land line connections, and have never lost both during a storm (100 minute UPS helps for those power outages), but losing one or the other is not uncommon.
Yeah - I realized that after posting, but it was too late by then :)
kauf is purchase, kopf is head. 3 seconds later, the mnemonic I used came back - Kaufman (purchaseman) and Schwartzkopf (blackhead, referring to hair, not a zit).
Actually, what's interesting is that both Singles, Playboy Mansion, and the new Leisure Suit Larry sequel _ARE_ getting press coverage from major online sites. The new Larry was even in the "top 10" list of games IGN wanted to see at E3 (posted sometime last week, and which begins today). I've seen coverage of both on Gamespy and Gamespot, and I usually just browse through the front page to see what's new without actually looking in-depth.
The rating systems in the USA are embarassingly broken, and I think need to be re-evaluated.
Movies:
Violence - takes a lot to affect rating, a tiny amount can occur in G rated movies. PG if not gory, PG-13 if tiny amount of gore or lots of violence (e.g. Red Dawn), R if really gory. NC-17 is practically impossible without also having sex (take Passion of Christ, for instance)
Nudity - automatic PG-13, but takes a lot for more than R.
Sex (faked) - R unless excessive, then NC-17
Sex (real/graphical) - NC-17/AO
Drug Paraphenalia - automatic PG-13
Drug Use - PG-13 if brief or implied, usually R.
Games:
Violence - Teen start, can get very gory at M
Nudity - automatic M, AO if not brief.
Sex (faked) - adult situations (romance plots)=Teen, implied sex seems to pretty much get an M, more than brief=AO.
Sex (graphical) - AO
Drug Paraphenalia - nothing, as far as I can tell - at worst it would be Teen.
Drug Use - Teen if effects not shown, M if shown (Gothic is the only example I know of).
Basically, the ratings are fairly close except when it comes to nudity/sex, most likely because of the ESRB's horribly-proven-as-wrong preconception that gamers are all kids. I guess there's still the fear that kids might stumble across the game while playing on their parent's computer or something, but the parent should be responsible enough to either hide the CD or put a password on a user. I mean, seriously - parents could just as easily leave the gun cabinet unlocked or pornography out on the coffee table for their kids to view.
Wow - that old?
You had ample opportunity to sample the pleasures of this game in a form called a "text adventure" at a much younger age. Soft Porn, the game Leisure Suit Larry was based on, came out WAAAY back in 1981 (you can also find references to it on Al Lowe's site, but this one had history).
Unfortunately for me, the only thing available at that age was Custer's Revenge, and my mom wouldn't let me rent it, so I got a late start on sexual discovery. Fortunately for me, a friend down the street was adept at stealing his dad's Playboys - if it weren't for that, I woulda been just like the bible thumping white suburbanites that create these inane rules.
My German's a bit rusty (15 years of disuse), but all those words are familiar -
:)
"I heads for a dollar" or maybe "I head is for a dollar" (my German grammar is DOA - apostrophe necessary?)
I can see how that's funny
Linksys is now Cisco's cheap (er, consumer) router division. If the connections are as reliable as mine, you probably won't know if you've been disconnected by Comcast or if the connection was dropped for no apparent reason. I did read recent reviews of the one I bought that were really bad, and not all of them are, but which do you think Comcast would put in :)