Speaking of, joining a union is actually BAD for people at or near the bottom of the pay scale because there are often (always?) minimum dues, and these may actually negatively impact your salary. When my brother worked for the press union as a filer, he got minimum wage and they garnished $1 of minimum union dues off of ever $4.25 he earned. I worked a non-union minimum wage job at the same time and I got bumped to $5.50 while he was still earning minimum wage minus union dues (he quit when he found another job, but those were the days when neither of us had marketable skills, so it was a bit of a search).
Doing a bit of trolling I take it, but to be fair, you are in some ways correct.
The word communism is a bit broad, but the French Revolution began around 1789 and ended around 1799 and "traditional" principals of communism weren't formally published until 1848 in the Communist Manifesto (by Karl Marx, so this version is Marxism), so in that respect, the GP is correct. However, anarchist-communism have existed since about the 1650s, and the concept has existed probably since the dawn of time, so in that respect, you are correct.
The problem is people tend to use the word communism loosely without specifying which form they mean. The communism I was taught to hate without any reason is Stalinism, though I believe the man himself was one of the most brutal murderers in history, perhaps even worse than Hitler (with as many as 31 million executed, starved, or worked to death by his orders during WW2 and afterward, though the numbers vary wildly - it could be as few as 4 million or as many as 31 million, which shows the shroud of secrecy - we know the mass graves, but there are millions more that were listed as "missing" and never found, and there is no firm count on the number starved and whether it was ordered).
The GGP is actually commenting on some of the basis of Marxist communism - that the proletariat (the poor masses) will eventually overthrow a capitalist government as the working poor get greater and greater separation from the rich and install a Communist government after the anarchy subsides (in the GGP's words, take the media, which makes little sense to me, however - take over production of goods and services makes more sense). Incidentally, the natural degeneration of Marxism is supposed to be anarchist-communism, but no communism has ever existed without a dictator and large state, which is the exact opposite of how communism is supposed to work.
To be fair, the DRM, which I think most tarnished Sony's image before the PSN hack, was actually done by Sony BMG, not Sony itself (a 50-50 venture, and usually these units are fairly, if not entirely, autonomous).
The Playstation hacking was a sad testament, but that is the fault of some (bad) security people or their managers, and it can happen to anyone - I've known h/crackers to hack into banks and credit card companies, political organizations, military, schools, and pharmaceutical companies, though I've disassociated with such groups long ago. I think Sony makes some good products, but they suffer from the NIH (not invented here) syndrome, like Apple, and that bugs a lot of people a lot because it creates proprietary formats and vendor lock-in (my personal peeve is the memory stick - I will not buy a Sony camera with this format because of it - I had the same issue with Olympus HD, though I did like the small form factor [the price was prohibitive, though]). I was minimally affected by the PSN hack, though, having no credit cards on file I had nothing to steal other than a password and username (the password was changed), and I got some free games out of it (I mostly use the PS3 as a Blu-ray player, and don't play any online games on the PS3).
Well the USA tried to ban being German in the first World War - can't speak it in public, can't write it, can't teach it in schools, and while we're at it, we'll discriminate against you as well. They also beat some of my great cousins to death in Leavenworth for being pacifists (Mennonites) causing many of those families to move to Canada. I'm not trying to compare that to Nazi Germany, I'm just sayin' Were we much better in WW2? Nope - then we just made Japanese and to a lesser extent German concentration camps where people died from heat exhaustion and poor conditions (but they weren't death camps).
Anyhow, they weren't trying to ban people from being German, they were trying to ban people from not being what they called the Aryan race - white, preferably blond hair, blue eyes - obviously that was flexible for their yellow brothers (Japanese) and even Hitler himself. I also doubt many Germans knew about the death camps during the war - that's the kind of thing few know about until the end of the war, traditionally - look at Serbia, for example - there had been rumors of mass ethnic killings but nobody really knew the extent of it until the bodies were found. Also the Killing Fields in Cambodia before that. Sometimes it is completely suppressed and later looked upon favorably by the residents - look at Stalin, one of the most genocidal people ever, and yet he suppressed it to the point where people from Russia still think of him as a hero. I know Russians that think it would have been better if Stalin were in power today with a full Communist-Dictatorship rather than their current government.
TWR... probably not Technical Work Request or Tom Walkenshaw Racing... Tower Water Return - that sounds about right. Still no idea what that is as far as nuclear power goes, I thought that was mainly for milk pasteurization.
My brother, a massive conservative (the Rush Limbaugh is always right and Fox News is the only real news kind - the rest are all liberal media), would say never, and he thinks solar and wind are a waste of time - after all, solar only really works half the year in half the country and most of the time the wind turbines seem to be shut off anyway. Wind power also only runs when it's windy, so you need a way of storing the energy (I suggested flywheels and he pshawed me without explaining before continuing his rant against wind). Geothermal depends entirely on digging massive holes (uneconomical in many places) and hydro depends on damming up rivers (scientists say this affects the earth rotation, too), and you can only do so much of that. He also says wind power actually costs more to create than its return in energy cost (I don't know if that is true, but that is what Fox news probably told him).
Just thought I'd mention what the far right thinks... I think he's poorly informed, but he thinks I am - as in global warming is a liberal lie (earth temperatures cycle and we are in the warm part is the Fox News angle) and I'm a sucker for believing it - he also thinks the ozone hole was a natural phenomenon that repeats periodically and not caused by CFCs - CFCs may be able to do damage to ozone, but they drift into space before they make much of an impact - and yes, I'm serious - that is what conservative science thinks. Of course, knowing that, then why did Bush rush bans CFC asthma inhalers so he can say he made a move on a treaty (and this was the ONLY move he made on that treaty)? Asthmatics in return get crappy patented HFA inhalers that don't work and 3/4 of them contain asthma inducing compounds (i.e. alcohol, which many asthmatics react to) because they were rush studied on healthy adults, not asthmatics. That over something that contributed less than 1% of CFCs - incidentally, the space shuttle alone generates 25%, but was exempt from the treaty.
and you missed the Wii factor. I know people in their 70s playing Wii - in fact, mom (grandma) plays with my 3 year old nephew. He kicks her ass at most things, but they have a lot of fun. Most hardcore gamers look at the Wii with disdain, but there still is skill and strategy involved in the games.
Farmville I would call a strategy game, since there is some strategy to it (though it still baffles me why anyone plays it - it seems tedious). Bejeweled is a logic game. Is Tetris not a game? It also falls in the logic/puzzle solving category. Some people seem to define game = first person shooter, and that is a pretty narrow definition. I often get frustrated at FPS's especially since I have friends that can hit a pixel sized target with a sniper rifle and get a headshot every time. When I'm watching his screen, I often don't even see the target - it's absolutely amazing.
Nah - we've got our own basements to live in, but mom lives upstairs sometimes (ok, the classmate I know is technically in an over/under duplex with mom upstairs, but close enough;). I could have mom upstairs if I wanted and live in my basement (I have a mother-in-law apartment down there, aka the party kitchen), but she and dad have their own house.
My generation is the first to grow up with video games. The 2600 is probably the most popular console of the generation (circa 1977), but Pong was popular before that. Some of us (and yes, that means me) were exposed to video games from early childhood - my uncle (an electrician who wrote all electronics off as a business expense to learn how to service them) and cousin (his dad was a rich estate lawyer, so he had everything) had Magnavox Odyssey consoles (my cousin also had the Odyssey TV with built in games and later an Odyssey^2).
Still, I think most of my generation was not really exposed like I was - my wife and her family (3 sisters), for instance, didn't really play games until the Wii came out. I think the Wii really skewed the numbers - if you discount that, most gamers are probably Gen Y (the Nintendo generation).
Speaking of Gen X, and quoting the Replacements in Bastards of Young - "Ya got no war to name us." I always liked that - we're called Gen X because the US wasn't in a major war for the first time in a century (every generation has its war -...the Spanish American War, Great War (WW1), World War 2, Korea, Vietnam, X, Y [Afghanistan/Iraq],...).
Personally I rarely use non-alphanumerics in 8 character passwords - why? Because that is not much better than 7 chars if you try and brute force it, and if I were brute forcing it, I'd guess ! as the last char because I've seen far too many people do it (I do not). Many of my passwords are more than 8 chars though.
As for Sony, I'm in the 1% that used a capital, punctuation, and 8 chars, but also thanks to Sony, my (several years old) password is now 12 chars long and a random string (it is, incidentally, the same as another password I use, but if you breach my work and my work password you can get to the VMWare images I use it on... good luck with that because you also need to figure out the user that password goes with.
It may not be slashdot's fault - my server has run IPv6 is configured to run IPv6, but my current ISP (Qwest, becoming CenturyLink... whee, another "wait and see what everyone else is doing" company, which is why my max DSL speed is one of the lowest in the nation while Comcast offers 40x faster speeds... but eew, Comcast - twice bitten thrice shy).
The second my ISP supports IPv6, my domain will support it - I've had it set up and ready for 4 years (and 10 if you count my previous ISP that supported it) and waiting though, so not holding my breath, and Qwest themselves have said it will never happen (I told them to never say never - Comcast said they would never hand out static IPs to anyone and that is no longer true). CenturyLink has had some 6/4 tunneling in their system, so there may be hope after the merger.
Microsoft's deal with IBM only applied to IBM PCs, not the massive amounts of clones, which used diverse OS offerings in the early years (I was partial to DR-DOS and GEM in the PC world). Microsoft strangled off competition by exclusive bundling agreements and clauses that forbid selling competing products in their contracts, which in return offered extremely reduced prices. They even did nasty tricks in their betas where if you ran Windows on a competing DOS, you'd get a warning message about compatibility. Bill was best at advertising features "coming soon" that didn't appear in products for 2-3 years, if then (many were dropped).
Incidentally, Microsoft didn't have an OS product at the time, but were well (and mainly) known for their BASIC interpreters. They bought the rights to Quick and Dirty DOS (aka 86-DOS), a CP/M clone, and then redirected a DEC lawsuit against them for infringement to Seattle Computer Products (the creator of QDOS) and DEC sued them out of existence for a product they no longer had rights to sell.
MS probably would have never won the OS battle without a little help, especially in the windows GUI age where their products were years behind the competition. They won by promising features to match or better competition years in advance of offering them (FUD), bundling agreements that bundled only MS products (a practice I think should not be legal, but Comcast and others still do it), and signing exclusivity agreements with manufacturers (e.g. if you only sell our products, we'll sell them to you for 20% of list price). MS Office proved the killer app - once they threw Office into the bundling/exclusivity mix, there was no way not to go MS only.
Exactly my first thought. The US government still thinks they can control a worldwide resource with local law, and that just isn't going to happen. What they need to do is create an international body to legislate such action and then enforce it internet wide. If that means the body votes to ban, say, porn, so be it - we would have to obey the rules just like everyone else. I imagine the US would feel this impedes on their freedom, but it is the only way to enforce this kind of legislation.
VirtualPC - once mac Virtualization for running Windows, now it is Windows virtualization for running older versions of Windows (such as XP on Windows 7 Pro or Ultimate). MS pretty much gave that market to Parallels, though VMWare is in there now, as is VirtualBox (not sure the state of the market today, but Parallels owned in marketshare a few years ago, whereas VirtualPC dominated a few years before Microsoft bought them - then MS deprecated the product and it died quickly).
Doubt it - I didn't see any of the promised flying zombies. Thessalonians I 4:13-17 promised me flying zombies and ghosts and stuff that fly up into the clouds with the holy people to meet God in the air. I had my shotgun out waiting for the zombie apocalypse, too:(
There is no timeline in the Bible for after the Rapture until the end of the world. In fact, I believe the only place the end of the world is mentioned is Revelation, which was probably a nasty mushroom trip taken as canon (sorry to you deeply Christian-folk - I personally feel Revelation is a bit out of place - it was written after the rest of the New Testament and I always thought it fit more with apocrypha writing). Some Christian sects think Jesus will rule for 1000 years before the world ends (after the rapture, I think).
Macs have had KAME since at least X.2 and I believe before. I don't know if it was in the GUI setup, but it definitely was in the file system. I set it up because I was trying to get my mac to talk to my work VPN, which used an IPsec protocol (and gee, IPv6 comes with IPsec!). I'm guessing it was there before X.2, possibly X.0, but I'm not going to pull out my X.0 disk to check. I left my previous ISP and was running IPv6 before Tiger was released and will support it again if my current ISP ever does support it (my domain is registered with both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses and IPv6 is running on my server - waiting on Qwest)
Depends on where you live. My max DSL rate is 3 down, 768 up because Qwest hasn't updated their switch to support anything faster. I'm hoping they do soon now that Comcast isn't the only choice (we recently got a WiMax network in the area). If they don't by the time my contract is up, I'm switching (if they offer static IPs, which has been my problem with many ISPs in the past, including Comcast, even though they now offers them).
Anyhow, comparing Comcast's speeds to DSL is not really an apples to apples comparison. Comcast runs a token ring network or something similar (a big loop with all the computers on the loop) and DSL is a star network. The big loop has less wires, but everyone needs to take their turn on it, whereas star goes directly back to the hub. In general, a star network will perform consistently at the same speed whereas a loop will tend to be slower at peak hours. One of the reasons I left Comcast years ago (aside from no static IPs and their overpriced cable packages compared to DISH, especially for non-sports fans) was my neighborhood was oversaturated and got horrible peak data rates (as in, 1-2 second lags in games and hours to download relatively small files). It seems Comcast has resolved that for the most part by vastly improving the infrastructure, but it will take a lot more than that to ever get me back as a customer (my customer service experience was terrible and they never did anything for me - in contrast, DISH gave me a year of Starz for free and has offered several free rewards for loyalty over the past few years).
What they're saying in this article is that they've solved the problem with the earlier engine, and this is hardly the first time an earlier technology has been abandoned and then picked up successfully - see scramjet. Speaking of scramjet, that theoretically can reach near orbital velocities without a rocket engine, so I think this is entirely within the realm of possibility (and incidentally, one of the major hurdles with those is cooling).
The article even says they have focused on the engine and the rest of the craft has yet to be developed, so I wouldn't expect test craft until at least 2020. If it were NASA, I wouldn't expect test craft until 2050, so good thing they aren't in charge.
Not to be a counterpoint, but I disliked New Rose Hotel as much as I disliked Johnny Mnemonic. The X Files episode Kill Switch was good, though (written by Gibson). Maybe if Gibson wrote the script...
There are better Dystopic future movies, IMO, with Blade Runner probably sitting at the forefront, or maybe Terminator (though that is only partially set in the future). I liked Hardware, as well, but most of my friends hated it (I also didn't expect Terminator set in the future part and they did). Iggy Pop and Lemmy from Motorhead are in it... how can it be bad with those two?
If you just want bad movies with known actors, how about Cyborg 2 with the 19 year old Angelina Jolie and the ancient Jack Palance? It was worth a cable viewing (Cyborg 3 is not, and 1 depends on if you like professional dancer turned actor/fake martial artist Jean Claude Van Damme, because that is the only redeeming value, and it isn't very redeeming).
The books were also dated in some ways by the time I read them around 1987, and much worse by the time I read them again in the mid-1990s. The matrix idea was pretty cool, but I could see many things that were missed entirely (Gibson even admits he missed some things entirely - like cell phones). In contrast, I think Stephenson's books have stood the test of time better tech-wise, though I found some of his material is a bit messed up. Hopefully the vision will stay true, though - Gibson said Blade Runner was a near-perfect vision of the dystopian future he envisioned while writing the book, so if the director uses that as a mental model and drops the tech-fail ideas from the script, it could work.
Incidentally, Blade Runner was filmed at the same time as Neuromancer was written, which I've always found a bit uncanny (you can't claim one is influenced by the other). I definitely didn't envision the urban decay world Ridley Scott did when I read Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? In fact, I envisioned it more as 60s camp ala Barbarella with a more disturbing theme (but plenty of oddball devices like the mood organ for dial a mood, which still seems like a total trip idea).
No slick-road driving skills (myself included), lack of road-clearing equipment
reminds me of when my parents were driving in Texas when there was a fairly minor freezing rain - spinouts everywhere, people continuing to drive 80MPH in a 55 and wiping out despite the obvious hazard, massive pileups (one near Dallas was 200+ cars)... it was pretty fun to watch, but probably not so much fun for the natives. I think my parents may have even stopped and put chains on the tires (which we did until they were banned, but I'm not sure the year they were banned).
Google (via YouTube) and Facebook are way ahead of you on figuring that one out.
Incidentally, the last I heard before this, Netflix had something like 26.9% of prime time traffic (and were #1) with YouTube and Facebook distant #2 and #3 (at 19% and 17% I believe), so the only news here is their % went up ~3% (I made a post on that about a month ago).
Where I've found streaming really shines is with kids that consume the same 8 shows hundreds of times. I think I've pulled up Shawn the Sheep about that when my niece and nephew are over (or when my other niece and nephew are over)...
It doesn't even matter - they're not coining money, this is like having a debit card with the cash value electronically on the card instead of at a third party (e.g. bank) - you put some money in and have a certain amount to spend, spend it like cash using peer-to-peer transfers (so no bank) and then at some point someone cashes it out. The problem pointed out is there is no middleman, so the money trail can't be traced, which is ideal for drug dealers and people evading taxes (if you can pay in bitcoins, there is no accountability and no paper trail).
I believe they mean it is peer-to-peer, so there is no middleman, unlike something like PayPal where PayPal is the middleman, so it can't be traced unless you are there. In addition, if it doesn't save the "from" source after the transaction, there is no way to tell where the money came from.
Seems like it would make money laundering and tax evasion easy. Of course, there is an easy way to fix that as far as drugs go - make all drugs legal and tax them, then spend the money that went into enforcement on education (like Portugal did).
Slashdot Mirror
Speaking of, joining a union is actually BAD for people at or near the bottom of the pay scale because there are often (always?) minimum dues, and these may actually negatively impact your salary. When my brother worked for the press union as a filer, he got minimum wage and they garnished $1 of minimum union dues off of ever $4.25 he earned. I worked a non-union minimum wage job at the same time and I got bumped to $5.50 while he was still earning minimum wage minus union dues (he quit when he found another job, but those were the days when neither of us had marketable skills, so it was a bit of a search).
Doing a bit of trolling I take it, but to be fair, you are in some ways correct.
The word communism is a bit broad, but the French Revolution began around 1789 and ended around 1799 and "traditional" principals of communism weren't formally published until 1848 in the Communist Manifesto (by Karl Marx, so this version is Marxism), so in that respect, the GP is correct. However, anarchist-communism have existed since about the 1650s, and the concept has existed probably since the dawn of time, so in that respect, you are correct.
The problem is people tend to use the word communism loosely without specifying which form they mean. The communism I was taught to hate without any reason is Stalinism, though I believe the man himself was one of the most brutal murderers in history, perhaps even worse than Hitler (with as many as 31 million executed, starved, or worked to death by his orders during WW2 and afterward, though the numbers vary wildly - it could be as few as 4 million or as many as 31 million, which shows the shroud of secrecy - we know the mass graves, but there are millions more that were listed as "missing" and never found, and there is no firm count on the number starved and whether it was ordered).
The GGP is actually commenting on some of the basis of Marxist communism - that the proletariat (the poor masses) will eventually overthrow a capitalist government as the working poor get greater and greater separation from the rich and install a Communist government after the anarchy subsides (in the GGP's words, take the media, which makes little sense to me, however - take over production of goods and services makes more sense). Incidentally, the natural degeneration of Marxism is supposed to be anarchist-communism, but no communism has ever existed without a dictator and large state, which is the exact opposite of how communism is supposed to work.
To be fair, the DRM, which I think most tarnished Sony's image before the PSN hack, was actually done by Sony BMG, not Sony itself (a 50-50 venture, and usually these units are fairly, if not entirely, autonomous).
The Playstation hacking was a sad testament, but that is the fault of some (bad) security people or their managers, and it can happen to anyone - I've known h/crackers to hack into banks and credit card companies, political organizations, military, schools, and pharmaceutical companies, though I've disassociated with such groups long ago. I think Sony makes some good products, but they suffer from the NIH (not invented here) syndrome, like Apple, and that bugs a lot of people a lot because it creates proprietary formats and vendor lock-in (my personal peeve is the memory stick - I will not buy a Sony camera with this format because of it - I had the same issue with Olympus HD, though I did like the small form factor [the price was prohibitive, though]). I was minimally affected by the PSN hack, though, having no credit cards on file I had nothing to steal other than a password and username (the password was changed), and I got some free games out of it (I mostly use the PS3 as a Blu-ray player, and don't play any online games on the PS3).
Well the USA tried to ban being German in the first World War - can't speak it in public, can't write it, can't teach it in schools, and while we're at it, we'll discriminate against you as well. They also beat some of my great cousins to death in Leavenworth for being pacifists (Mennonites) causing many of those families to move to Canada. I'm not trying to compare that to Nazi Germany, I'm just sayin' Were we much better in WW2? Nope - then we just made Japanese and to a lesser extent German concentration camps where people died from heat exhaustion and poor conditions (but they weren't death camps).
Anyhow, they weren't trying to ban people from being German, they were trying to ban people from not being what they called the Aryan race - white, preferably blond hair, blue eyes - obviously that was flexible for their yellow brothers (Japanese) and even Hitler himself. I also doubt many Germans knew about the death camps during the war - that's the kind of thing few know about until the end of the war, traditionally - look at Serbia, for example - there had been rumors of mass ethnic killings but nobody really knew the extent of it until the bodies were found. Also the Killing Fields in Cambodia before that. Sometimes it is completely suppressed and later looked upon favorably by the residents - look at Stalin, one of the most genocidal people ever, and yet he suppressed it to the point where people from Russia still think of him as a hero. I know Russians that think it would have been better if Stalin were in power today with a full Communist-Dictatorship rather than their current government.
TWR... probably not Technical Work Request or Tom Walkenshaw Racing... Tower Water Return - that sounds about right. Still no idea what that is as far as nuclear power goes, I thought that was mainly for milk pasteurization.
My brother, a massive conservative (the Rush Limbaugh is always right and Fox News is the only real news kind - the rest are all liberal media), would say never, and he thinks solar and wind are a waste of time - after all, solar only really works half the year in half the country and most of the time the wind turbines seem to be shut off anyway. Wind power also only runs when it's windy, so you need a way of storing the energy (I suggested flywheels and he pshawed me without explaining before continuing his rant against wind). Geothermal depends entirely on digging massive holes (uneconomical in many places) and hydro depends on damming up rivers (scientists say this affects the earth rotation, too), and you can only do so much of that. He also says wind power actually costs more to create than its return in energy cost (I don't know if that is true, but that is what Fox news probably told him).
Just thought I'd mention what the far right thinks... I think he's poorly informed, but he thinks I am - as in global warming is a liberal lie (earth temperatures cycle and we are in the warm part is the Fox News angle) and I'm a sucker for believing it - he also thinks the ozone hole was a natural phenomenon that repeats periodically and not caused by CFCs - CFCs may be able to do damage to ozone, but they drift into space before they make much of an impact - and yes, I'm serious - that is what conservative science thinks. Of course, knowing that, then why did Bush rush bans CFC asthma inhalers so he can say he made a move on a treaty (and this was the ONLY move he made on that treaty)? Asthmatics in return get crappy patented HFA inhalers that don't work and 3/4 of them contain asthma inducing compounds (i.e. alcohol, which many asthmatics react to) because they were rush studied on healthy adults, not asthmatics. That over something that contributed less than 1% of CFCs - incidentally, the space shuttle alone generates 25%, but was exempt from the treaty.
and you missed the Wii factor. I know people in their 70s playing Wii - in fact, mom (grandma) plays with my 3 year old nephew. He kicks her ass at most things, but they have a lot of fun. Most hardcore gamers look at the Wii with disdain, but there still is skill and strategy involved in the games.
Farmville I would call a strategy game, since there is some strategy to it (though it still baffles me why anyone plays it - it seems tedious). Bejeweled is a logic game. Is Tetris not a game? It also falls in the logic/puzzle solving category. Some people seem to define game = first person shooter, and that is a pretty narrow definition. I often get frustrated at FPS's especially since I have friends that can hit a pixel sized target with a sniper rifle and get a headshot every time. When I'm watching his screen, I often don't even see the target - it's absolutely amazing.
You mean you're - a contraction of you are. Your is possessive. Yes, I am saying this to poke fun at the person above me ;)
Nah - we've got our own basements to live in, but mom lives upstairs sometimes (ok, the classmate I know is technically in an over/under duplex with mom upstairs, but close enough ;). I could have mom upstairs if I wanted and live in my basement (I have a mother-in-law apartment down there, aka the party kitchen), but she and dad have their own house.
My generation is the first to grow up with video games. The 2600 is probably the most popular console of the generation (circa 1977), but Pong was popular before that. Some of us (and yes, that means me) were exposed to video games from early childhood - my uncle (an electrician who wrote all electronics off as a business expense to learn how to service them) and cousin (his dad was a rich estate lawyer, so he had everything) had Magnavox Odyssey consoles (my cousin also had the Odyssey TV with built in games and later an Odyssey^2).
Still, I think most of my generation was not really exposed like I was - my wife and her family (3 sisters), for instance, didn't really play games until the Wii came out. I think the Wii really skewed the numbers - if you discount that, most gamers are probably Gen Y (the Nintendo generation).
Speaking of Gen X, and quoting the Replacements in Bastards of Young - "Ya got no war to name us." I always liked that - we're called Gen X because the US wasn't in a major war for the first time in a century (every generation has its war - ...the Spanish American War, Great War (WW1), World War 2, Korea, Vietnam, X, Y [Afghanistan/Iraq], ...).
Personally I rarely use non-alphanumerics in 8 character passwords - why? Because that is not much better than 7 chars if you try and brute force it, and if I were brute forcing it, I'd guess ! as the last char because I've seen far too many people do it (I do not). Many of my passwords are more than 8 chars though.
As for Sony, I'm in the 1% that used a capital, punctuation, and 8 chars, but also thanks to Sony, my (several years old) password is now 12 chars long and a random string (it is, incidentally, the same as another password I use, but if you breach my work and my work password you can get to the VMWare images I use it on... good luck with that because you also need to figure out the user that password goes with.
It may not be slashdot's fault - my server has run IPv6 is configured to run IPv6, but my current ISP (Qwest, becoming CenturyLink... whee, another "wait and see what everyone else is doing" company, which is why my max DSL speed is one of the lowest in the nation while Comcast offers 40x faster speeds... but eew, Comcast - twice bitten thrice shy).
The second my ISP supports IPv6, my domain will support it - I've had it set up and ready for 4 years (and 10 if you count my previous ISP that supported it) and waiting though, so not holding my breath, and Qwest themselves have said it will never happen (I told them to never say never - Comcast said they would never hand out static IPs to anyone and that is no longer true). CenturyLink has had some 6/4 tunneling in their system, so there may be hope after the merger.
Microsoft's deal with IBM only applied to IBM PCs, not the massive amounts of clones, which used diverse OS offerings in the early years (I was partial to DR-DOS and GEM in the PC world). Microsoft strangled off competition by exclusive bundling agreements and clauses that forbid selling competing products in their contracts, which in return offered extremely reduced prices. They even did nasty tricks in their betas where if you ran Windows on a competing DOS, you'd get a warning message about compatibility. Bill was best at advertising features "coming soon" that didn't appear in products for 2-3 years, if then (many were dropped).
Incidentally, Microsoft didn't have an OS product at the time, but were well (and mainly) known for their BASIC interpreters. They bought the rights to Quick and Dirty DOS (aka 86-DOS), a CP/M clone, and then redirected a DEC lawsuit against them for infringement to Seattle Computer Products (the creator of QDOS) and DEC sued them out of existence for a product they no longer had rights to sell.
MS probably would have never won the OS battle without a little help, especially in the windows GUI age where their products were years behind the competition. They won by promising features to match or better competition years in advance of offering them (FUD), bundling agreements that bundled only MS products (a practice I think should not be legal, but Comcast and others still do it), and signing exclusivity agreements with manufacturers (e.g. if you only sell our products, we'll sell them to you for 20% of list price). MS Office proved the killer app - once they threw Office into the bundling/exclusivity mix, there was no way not to go MS only.
Exactly my first thought. The US government still thinks they can control a worldwide resource with local law, and that just isn't going to happen. What they need to do is create an international body to legislate such action and then enforce it internet wide. If that means the body votes to ban, say, porn, so be it - we would have to obey the rules just like everyone else. I imagine the US would feel this impedes on their freedom, but it is the only way to enforce this kind of legislation.
VirtualPC - once mac Virtualization for running Windows, now it is Windows virtualization for running older versions of Windows (such as XP on Windows 7 Pro or Ultimate). MS pretty much gave that market to Parallels, though VMWare is in there now, as is VirtualBox (not sure the state of the market today, but Parallels owned in marketshare a few years ago, whereas VirtualPC dominated a few years before Microsoft bought them - then MS deprecated the product and it died quickly).
Doubt it - I didn't see any of the promised flying zombies. Thessalonians I 4:13-17 promised me flying zombies and ghosts and stuff that fly up into the clouds with the holy people to meet God in the air. I had my shotgun out waiting for the zombie apocalypse, too :(
There is no timeline in the Bible for after the Rapture until the end of the world. In fact, I believe the only place the end of the world is mentioned is Revelation, which was probably a nasty mushroom trip taken as canon (sorry to you deeply Christian-folk - I personally feel Revelation is a bit out of place - it was written after the rest of the New Testament and I always thought it fit more with apocrypha writing). Some Christian sects think Jesus will rule for 1000 years before the world ends (after the rapture, I think).
Macs have had KAME since at least X.2 and I believe before. I don't know if it was in the GUI setup, but it definitely was in the file system. I set it up because I was trying to get my mac to talk to my work VPN, which used an IPsec protocol (and gee, IPv6 comes with IPsec!). I'm guessing it was there before X.2, possibly X.0, but I'm not going to pull out my X.0 disk to check. I left my previous ISP and was running IPv6 before Tiger was released and will support it again if my current ISP ever does support it (my domain is registered with both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses and IPv6 is running on my server - waiting on Qwest)
Depends on where you live. My max DSL rate is 3 down, 768 up because Qwest hasn't updated their switch to support anything faster. I'm hoping they do soon now that Comcast isn't the only choice (we recently got a WiMax network in the area). If they don't by the time my contract is up, I'm switching (if they offer static IPs, which has been my problem with many ISPs in the past, including Comcast, even though they now offers them).
Anyhow, comparing Comcast's speeds to DSL is not really an apples to apples comparison. Comcast runs a token ring network or something similar (a big loop with all the computers on the loop) and DSL is a star network. The big loop has less wires, but everyone needs to take their turn on it, whereas star goes directly back to the hub. In general, a star network will perform consistently at the same speed whereas a loop will tend to be slower at peak hours. One of the reasons I left Comcast years ago (aside from no static IPs and their overpriced cable packages compared to DISH, especially for non-sports fans) was my neighborhood was oversaturated and got horrible peak data rates (as in, 1-2 second lags in games and hours to download relatively small files). It seems Comcast has resolved that for the most part by vastly improving the infrastructure, but it will take a lot more than that to ever get me back as a customer (my customer service experience was terrible and they never did anything for me - in contrast, DISH gave me a year of Starz for free and has offered several free rewards for loyalty over the past few years).
What they're saying in this article is that they've solved the problem with the earlier engine, and this is hardly the first time an earlier technology has been abandoned and then picked up successfully - see scramjet. Speaking of scramjet, that theoretically can reach near orbital velocities without a rocket engine, so I think this is entirely within the realm of possibility (and incidentally, one of the major hurdles with those is cooling).
The article even says they have focused on the engine and the rest of the craft has yet to be developed, so I wouldn't expect test craft until at least 2020. If it were NASA, I wouldn't expect test craft until 2050, so good thing they aren't in charge.
Not to be a counterpoint, but I disliked New Rose Hotel as much as I disliked Johnny Mnemonic. The X Files episode Kill Switch was good, though (written by Gibson). Maybe if Gibson wrote the script...
There are better Dystopic future movies, IMO, with Blade Runner probably sitting at the forefront, or maybe Terminator (though that is only partially set in the future). I liked Hardware, as well, but most of my friends hated it (I also didn't expect Terminator set in the future part and they did). Iggy Pop and Lemmy from Motorhead are in it... how can it be bad with those two?
If you just want bad movies with known actors, how about Cyborg 2 with the 19 year old Angelina Jolie and the ancient Jack Palance? It was worth a cable viewing (Cyborg 3 is not, and 1 depends on if you like professional dancer turned actor/fake martial artist Jean Claude Van Damme, because that is the only redeeming value, and it isn't very redeeming).
The books were also dated in some ways by the time I read them around 1987, and much worse by the time I read them again in the mid-1990s. The matrix idea was pretty cool, but I could see many things that were missed entirely (Gibson even admits he missed some things entirely - like cell phones). In contrast, I think Stephenson's books have stood the test of time better tech-wise, though I found some of his material is a bit messed up. Hopefully the vision will stay true, though - Gibson said Blade Runner was a near-perfect vision of the dystopian future he envisioned while writing the book, so if the director uses that as a mental model and drops the tech-fail ideas from the script, it could work.
Incidentally, Blade Runner was filmed at the same time as Neuromancer was written, which I've always found a bit uncanny (you can't claim one is influenced by the other). I definitely didn't envision the urban decay world Ridley Scott did when I read Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? In fact, I envisioned it more as 60s camp ala Barbarella with a more disturbing theme (but plenty of oddball devices like the mood organ for dial a mood, which still seems like a total trip idea).
reminds me of when my parents were driving in Texas when there was a fairly minor freezing rain - spinouts everywhere, people continuing to drive 80MPH in a 55 and wiping out despite the obvious hazard, massive pileups (one near Dallas was 200+ cars)... it was pretty fun to watch, but probably not so much fun for the natives. I think my parents may have even stopped and put chains on the tires (which we did until they were banned, but I'm not sure the year they were banned).
Google (via YouTube) and Facebook are way ahead of you on figuring that one out.
Incidentally, the last I heard before this, Netflix had something like 26.9% of prime time traffic (and were #1) with YouTube and Facebook distant #2 and #3 (at 19% and 17% I believe), so the only news here is their % went up ~3% (I made a post on that about a month ago).
Where I've found streaming really shines is with kids that consume the same 8 shows hundreds of times. I think I've pulled up Shawn the Sheep about that when my niece and nephew are over (or when my other niece and nephew are over)...
It doesn't even matter - they're not coining money, this is like having a debit card with the cash value electronically on the card instead of at a third party (e.g. bank) - you put some money in and have a certain amount to spend, spend it like cash using peer-to-peer transfers (so no bank) and then at some point someone cashes it out. The problem pointed out is there is no middleman, so the money trail can't be traced, which is ideal for drug dealers and people evading taxes (if you can pay in bitcoins, there is no accountability and no paper trail).
I believe they mean it is peer-to-peer, so there is no middleman, unlike something like PayPal where PayPal is the middleman, so it can't be traced unless you are there. In addition, if it doesn't save the "from" source after the transaction, there is no way to tell where the money came from.
Seems like it would make money laundering and tax evasion easy. Of course, there is an easy way to fix that as far as drugs go - make all drugs legal and tax them, then spend the money that went into enforcement on education (like Portugal did).