Abhorrent? You make it sound like his lack of sympathy for humans in favor of endangered species is the equivalent of eating babies.
Face it, humans are just animals, and their lives are no more important (other than in the thoughts of their friends/relatives) than the lives of animals. If anything, humans are more expendable thanks to their out of control breeding.
Really, it seems that all this handwringing about how precious human life is came from religious foundations, where people seek some sort of justificiation for their inconsequential existence by telling themselves that 'god' said they were the Earth's king shit and that's that.
And to those who would claim that human life is more precious than animal life... why? Because our advanced brain allowed us to creatively exploit and ravage mother nature as opposed to those stupid, underevolved animals who live in harmony with her? Please.
Yes, there is. Every time MS releases an updated WGA.dll, the pirates release a cracked copy. Shows up all over the place. Download, overwite the files in WINDOWS/SYSTEM32, and presto, no more nags, and you can use Windows Update manually too.
I have a feeling it won't be quite so cut and dried with Vista though.
You're right, it's not as clean as I made it out to be, but then again the difference between a loved one dying by the hand of a murderer as opposed to dying in an accident or illness is not so wildly different for their loved ones, except in cases where the death was gruesome and the act itself (or the very ugly result) were witnessed by the loved ones.
Deaths of loved ones happen everyday, whatever the cause. Rape and molestation are not naturally occuring events (I hope), death is.
I would say that the trauma of having one's emotional balance upset by a sexual assault is far more scarring than someone close to you dying, regardless of cause.
The registry is there so that rapists can be punished for the rest of their lives without having the state pay for them in prison. This is clearly the result of frustration over NOT being able to keep them locked up forever (or having them killed, or at LEAST castrated).
The problem with this is that for these types of criminals there's no such thing as having paid their debt to society. Wrecking someone's state of mind for the rest of their lives, be it a molested child's or a raped woman's, is not something that should be forgiven and forgotten, the way a theft can be. As a sexual offender, you don't deserve to 'start a new life' because your victim doesn't get to do that either. Your victim will likely have permanent psychological issues with forming relationships, trust, and a healthy attitude towards sex.
It's been mentioned before, but this kind of crime is much worse than simple murder. Murder inconveniences and temporarily saddens the victim's loved ones, but then they (in most cases) move on and all is more or less well. The victim's dead, they feel no pain. Sexual abuse victims have to live their lives out with a serious disturbance to their emotional health.
Sexual offenders deserve no leniency, no forgiveness, and certainly no one's pity for being exposed to their communities for what they are.
And before this gets modded troll or flamebait, relax, it's just my opinion.
So what you're saying is that you've been burned by a private tracker for being a leech and are now all bitter since you have to get your stuff from public trackers at 2% of the speed?
Requiring users to maintain a good ratio, and penalizing users for hit'n'run leeching is a good thing; it ensures that if you download a torrent, you stand a 99.9% chance of getting it all, and at a decent speed.
Wouldn't it be simpler to buy a 60-100W inverter for your car? At those low wattages it'll plug into a cigarette lighter, and you can split the output and charge more than one low-wattage device. Plus you don't have to buy expensive car chargers for all your goodies, you get to use the included wall-warts.
And as for vocabulary, well, at least we have an understandable one. I rarely see bloody items, I'm not your "chap" ("chaps" here are protective pants for cowboys), and you certainly shouldn't be lecturing about "inefficient" forms of communication.
You could just keep going with this one... How does 'fag' come to mean a cigarette in place of the usual 'smoke,' 'cig,' or even 'butt.' Why's a car's trunk called a boot? How did they arrive at calling the cargo compartment of a motor vehicle after a shoe? Isn't a 'bonnet' a type of hat, as opposed to an engine cover? And why, for the love of god, does a country which uses the metric system still insist on miles and gallons when talking about speed limits and fuel? And if that's not enough, your gallon isn't even the same as the US's (and the US has a bigger population, so they win).
Don't even get me started on the contrived lunacy of rhyming slang.
That said, I love hearing people speak with UK accents (all of'em) and I like all the strange words for things, just because the UK English sounds so much more colorful than the American version.
I think you'll find that any Canadian who's actually BEEN to the US (like me) would never consider Americans in general assholes. We are, as is the rest of the world, justifiably shocked by the rampant idiocy that's been a hallmark of your current gov't administration, but have no problems with the people themselves.
And from a personal perspective: I've done a bit of traveling the last few years, across Canada, the US, and Europe, and not only did I enjoy myself the most in the US I found the people to be, on average, the friendliest and most approachable there (I should explain that I stayed clear of the really big cities).
I used to have the 4000 and then (when the 4k got stolen) the 4500. Loved those phones. So naturally the one carrier in Canada that offered Sanyo phones stopped offering them by the time the 4500 died (refused to recharge a battery) I was forced to go with an LG flip phone. Thankfully there's no camera, and it's got an external display and a color display that nevertheless gives you the option of having a simple, Sanyo-like text menu.
It's still alive and well after two years. I guess I made a lucky choice in that one. The only other option I have with other Canadian carriers as far as candybar phones go is nokia, and I can't stand nokias.
Now, I realize that people who live completely isolated from the realities of the outside world, such as the North Koreans, wouldn't have an outside reference to compare their quality of life to. However, if you're starving all the time, and your basic needs are not being met, then outside reference or no, you must, I would imagine, conclude that your life sucks, and it sucks because of the shit country that you're unfortunately stuck in.
So why, in the name of all that's holy (reasonable? Logical? Sane?!) would you bring children into this world? Anywhere in the civilized world, if you kidnap someone and starve them and make them live in their own filth, you'll go to jail. Hence, this sort of treatment is a crime. Then how the hell is it not a crime to sentence a brand new human being to a life as horrible as an abductees, or a Russian inmate's? Do these people not think about what kind of nightmare life their kids are being brought into? Are they no more than animals, only thinking of food and reproduction?
If I was living there I would personally give Kim Jong Il the finger by a) not reproducing and b) by committing suicide. Let him end up running a "country" of a few hundred hangers-on.
That's because to be a successful owner/operator trucker, you have to break those laws in order to compete. My dad has several trucker friends and I've talked to most of them and they'll all happily talk about how they lie in their logbooks so they can get away with driving all night.
If you spend a lot of time driving the freeways at night, notice how it's always the independent trucks that are barely able to stay in their lane, while fleet drivers get their required sleep (mostly because if you're a fleet driver, there's some electronics monitoring your driving, and possibly your position, and big companies don't want the liability of a sleeping driver killing a car full of kids).
A high quality DVD rip of a movie is around 5-7GB.
Most of the time that (or less) is what the original DVD's size is. Quite often even less, since extra space gets taken up by extras and alternate audio tracks. If you're ripping 5GB of MPEG2 into 5GB of MPEG4 you're not doing it right.
Most good games contain elements of all three, but the best focus on one or two areas to deeply satisfy a kind of gamer.
I'd say it's the other way around. Consider the GTA franchise. It had strong elements of simulation, challenges, and an excellent story. And it sold by the millions, which is not all that common.
RPGs, also an immensely popular genre with many bestselling titles, also tend to have elements of all three.
The great games that succeed without all three are actual simulation games where the gameplay challenge and the gameplay mechanics providing the immersion do not require a story to hold things together (Racing sims, Civ/Simcity type games, etc)
Great known writers are unnecessary. Games with a solid premise (i.e. Half-Life) can have their story fleshed out into the HL excellence by nonprofessional writers. When you start with a stupid idea, however, no amount of literary genius will save you.
I always thought it would come from Bush, Ballmer, or Bin Laden
In a way, it does. The catastrophe of Bush becoming president would strongly suggest to the marketing gurus at Walmart that there is indeed a (large, terrifyingly large) group of extremely ignorant, unthinking, mentally-deficient slobs who just might suffer from enough brain damage to actually respond positively to the Hub idea.
Ballmer is the man currently responsible for carrying on the legacy of one Mr. Gates, a man responsible for the dumbing down of computers to the point where people to whom MySpace, or indeed The Hub, seems like a good idea are able to invade the once pristine realm of cyberspace.
And Bin Laden's biggest contribution to the US's downward spiral has, of course, been to rally popular support for Bush so he got to preside over a further four years of America's decline, him and his administration seemingly striving towards the ultimate goal of having a population of 300 million people who chant in unison "Durrrr... terrorism... eeevil... kill" as Walmart looks on in anticipation of profit profit profit from people with brains so terminally softened by government propaganda and nationalistic stupidity that they're very much open to the suggestion that the Hub is the place to be.
You know, I was going to give the teenage population of the US a bit of credit and assume that no-one aside from a few drooling idiots would sign up. I therefore find it absolutely tragic that anyone would be so jaded as to expect the drooling idiots to be in the hundreds of thousands instead of, maybe, dozens.
Well, you beat me to it. I was going to suggest the same thing. I don't want to spend a bundle for a fancy huge RAID5 setup, and this way I've got almost 250 DVDs on 50 disc spindles and a simple text file with a full listing of the contents. The individual DVDs are only labeled with a number.
And I've got some spare spindles left over from my CD days so I can shuffle the DVDs around quite easily to get at one in the middle of the stack.
My mother has worked as a teacher for 25 yrs in Tx. She'd love to have the money to go to Europe even once. Yet her crappy salary pays her $40K a year (and she has her Master's). She'll never afford the expense unless I'm the one paying.
What the hell's she been pissing her money away on? I make around $35k in Canada(!) and after all my bills are paid I still have more then enough to take at least one foreign vacation per year.
For the first graph, the units for both the horizontal and vertical axes seem to be Watts. Huh? And why would the power draw of an idle processor rise over time? (Maybe as it heats up?)
But the second graph is the real kicker. 6 labels for 12 bars. The significance of the bars, the power draw in watts is simple enough. But what bar is what? The first two Pentiums seem OK - the first bar, above the label, is the idle power, then the bar next to the label is the peak power.
Then, suddenly, we have a Pentium M, which seems to draw 246W at idle and 101W at peak? Come again? The AMD processors look rather strange too, seeming to use a few watts LESS under peak power than at full load.
Maybe it's my lack of sleep and someone can enlighten me?
Around here that's been a given for as long as I can remember - if you drive like you don't care who's watching (i.e. the typical 5-10km/h over the limit) you're less likely to be pulled over and checked for being under the influence than if you drive exactly the limit like someone who desperately wants to avoid being stopped.
The real trick is driving an inconspicous car. I used to have a Towncar, and now own a Corolla, and so far I've been damn near invisible to cops, considering the stuff I've gotten away with. I'd hate to be a ricer with a lowered, neon lighted Civic on 19" wheels though:)
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Abhorrent? You make it sound like his lack of sympathy for humans in favor of endangered species is the equivalent of eating babies.
Face it, humans are just animals, and their lives are no more important (other than in the thoughts of their friends/relatives) than the lives of animals. If anything, humans are more expendable thanks to their out of control breeding.
Really, it seems that all this handwringing about how precious human life is came from religious foundations, where people seek some sort of justificiation for their inconsequential existence by telling themselves that 'god' said they were the Earth's king shit and that's that.
And to those who would claim that human life is more precious than animal life... why? Because our advanced brain allowed us to creatively exploit and ravage mother nature as opposed to those stupid, underevolved animals who live in harmony with her? Please.
Yes, there is. Every time MS releases an updated WGA .dll, the pirates release a cracked copy. Shows up all over the place. Download, overwite the files in WINDOWS/SYSTEM32, and presto, no more nags, and you can use Windows Update manually too.
I have a feeling it won't be quite so cut and dried with Vista though.
You're right, it's not as clean as I made it out to be, but then again the difference between a loved one dying by the hand of a murderer as opposed to dying in an accident or illness is not so wildly different for their loved ones, except in cases where the death was gruesome and the act itself (or the very ugly result) were witnessed by the loved ones.
Deaths of loved ones happen everyday, whatever the cause. Rape and molestation are not naturally occuring events (I hope), death is.
I would say that the trauma of having one's emotional balance upset by a sexual assault is far more scarring than someone close to you dying, regardless of cause.
The problem with this is that for these types of criminals there's no such thing as having paid their debt to society. Wrecking someone's state of mind for the rest of their lives, be it a molested child's or a raped woman's, is not something that should be forgiven and forgotten, the way a theft can be. As a sexual offender, you don't deserve to 'start a new life' because your victim doesn't get to do that either. Your victim will likely have permanent psychological issues with forming relationships, trust, and a healthy attitude towards sex.
It's been mentioned before, but this kind of crime is much worse than simple murder. Murder inconveniences and temporarily saddens the victim's loved ones, but then they (in most cases) move on and all is more or less well. The victim's dead, they feel no pain. Sexual abuse victims have to live their lives out with a serious disturbance to their emotional health.
Sexual offenders deserve no leniency, no forgiveness, and certainly no one's pity for being exposed to their communities for what they are.
And before this gets modded troll or flamebait, relax, it's just my opinion.
So what you're saying is that you've been burned by a private tracker for being a leech and are now all bitter since you have to get your stuff from public trackers at 2% of the speed?
Requiring users to maintain a good ratio, and penalizing users for hit'n'run leeching is a good thing; it ensures that if you download a torrent, you stand a 99.9% chance of getting it all, and at a decent speed.
Wouldn't it be simpler to buy a 60-100W inverter for your car? At those low wattages it'll plug into a cigarette lighter, and you can split the output and charge more than one low-wattage device. Plus you don't have to buy expensive car chargers for all your goodies, you get to use the included wall-warts.
Obviously a bit of both, hence the ambiguity.
I'm pretty sure he meant "crucial for our nation"
You could just keep going with this one... How does 'fag' come to mean a cigarette in place of the usual 'smoke,' 'cig,' or even 'butt.' Why's a car's trunk called a boot? How did they arrive at calling the cargo compartment of a motor vehicle after a shoe? Isn't a 'bonnet' a type of hat, as opposed to an engine cover? And why, for the love of god, does a country which uses the metric system still insist on miles and gallons when talking about speed limits and fuel? And if that's not enough, your gallon isn't even the same as the US's (and the US has a bigger population, so they win).
Don't even get me started on the contrived lunacy of rhyming slang.
That said, I love hearing people speak with UK accents (all of'em) and I like all the strange words for things, just because the UK English sounds so much more colorful than the American version.
I think you'll find that any Canadian who's actually BEEN to the US (like me) would never consider Americans in general assholes. We are, as is the rest of the world, justifiably shocked by the rampant idiocy that's been a hallmark of your current gov't administration, but have no problems with the people themselves.
And from a personal perspective: I've done a bit of traveling the last few years, across Canada, the US, and Europe, and not only did I enjoy myself the most in the US I found the people to be, on average, the friendliest and most approachable there (I should explain that I stayed clear of the really big cities).
I used to have the 4000 and then (when the 4k got stolen) the 4500. Loved those phones. So naturally the one carrier in Canada that offered Sanyo phones stopped offering them by the time the 4500 died (refused to recharge a battery) I was forced to go with an LG flip phone. Thankfully there's no camera, and it's got an external display and a color display that nevertheless gives you the option of having a simple, Sanyo-like text menu.
It's still alive and well after two years. I guess I made a lucky choice in that one. The only other option I have with other Canadian carriers as far as candybar phones go is nokia, and I can't stand nokias.
Funny, the first thing I did with my copy is download the theme to make it look exactly like 1.5 :)
Then click a few preference checkboxes to make it _behave_ exactly like 1.5.
I'm happy. I was afraid I would be tempted to try IE7 if I didn't like FF2.0's changes.
Now, I realize that people who live completely isolated from the realities of the outside world, such as the North Koreans, wouldn't have an outside reference to compare their quality of life to. However, if you're starving all the time, and your basic needs are not being met, then outside reference or no, you must, I would imagine, conclude that your life sucks, and it sucks because of the shit country that you're unfortunately stuck in.
So why, in the name of all that's holy (reasonable? Logical? Sane?!) would you bring children into this world? Anywhere in the civilized world, if you kidnap someone and starve them and make them live in their own filth, you'll go to jail. Hence, this sort of treatment is a crime. Then how the hell is it not a crime to sentence a brand new human being to a life as horrible as an abductees, or a Russian inmate's? Do these people not think about what kind of nightmare life their kids are being brought into? Are they no more than animals, only thinking of food and reproduction?
If I was living there I would personally give Kim Jong Il the finger by a) not reproducing and b) by committing suicide. Let him end up running a "country" of a few hundred hangers-on.
That's because to be a successful owner/operator trucker, you have to break those laws in order to compete. My dad has several trucker friends and I've talked to most of them and they'll all happily talk about how they lie in their logbooks so they can get away with driving all night.
If you spend a lot of time driving the freeways at night, notice how it's always the independent trucks that are barely able to stay in their lane, while fleet drivers get their required sleep (mostly because if you're a fleet driver, there's some electronics monitoring your driving, and possibly your position, and big companies don't want the liability of a sleeping driver killing a car full of kids).
"but how does resolution have anything to do with brightness"
The extra resolution won't mean much if you're looking at a screen that's too dark...
A high quality DVD rip of a movie is around 5-7GB.
Most of the time that (or less) is what the original DVD's size is. Quite often even less, since extra space gets taken up by extras and alternate audio tracks. If you're ripping 5GB of MPEG2 into 5GB of MPEG4 you're not doing it right.
Most good games contain elements of all three, but the best focus on one or two areas to deeply satisfy a kind of gamer.
I'd say it's the other way around. Consider the GTA franchise. It had strong elements of simulation, challenges, and an excellent story. And it sold by the millions, which is not all that common.
RPGs, also an immensely popular genre with many bestselling titles, also tend to have elements of all three.
The great games that succeed without all three are actual simulation games where the gameplay challenge and the gameplay mechanics providing the immersion do not require a story to hold things together (Racing sims, Civ/Simcity type games, etc)
Great known writers are unnecessary. Games with a solid premise (i.e. Half-Life) can have their story fleshed out into the HL excellence by nonprofessional writers. When you start with a stupid idea, however, no amount of literary genius will save you.
I always thought it would come from Bush, Ballmer, or Bin Laden
In a way, it does. The catastrophe of Bush becoming president would strongly suggest to the marketing gurus at Walmart that there is indeed a (large, terrifyingly large) group of extremely ignorant, unthinking, mentally-deficient slobs who just might suffer from enough brain damage to actually respond positively to the Hub idea.
Ballmer is the man currently responsible for carrying on the legacy of one Mr. Gates, a man responsible for the dumbing down of computers to the point where people to whom MySpace, or indeed The Hub, seems like a good idea are able to invade the once pristine realm of cyberspace.
And Bin Laden's biggest contribution to the US's downward spiral has, of course, been to rally popular support for Bush so he got to preside over a further four years of America's decline, him and his administration seemingly striving towards the ultimate goal of having a population of 300 million people who chant in unison "Durrrr... terrorism... eeevil... kill" as Walmart looks on in anticipation of profit profit profit from people with brains so terminally softened by government propaganda and nationalistic stupidity that they're very much open to the suggestion that the Hub is the place to be.
You know, I was going to give the teenage population of the US a bit of credit and assume that no-one aside from a few drooling idiots would sign up. I therefore find it absolutely tragic that anyone would be so jaded as to expect the drooling idiots to be in the hundreds of thousands instead of, maybe, dozens.
Well, you beat me to it. I was going to suggest the same thing. I don't want to spend a bundle for a fancy huge RAID5 setup, and this way I've got almost 250 DVDs on 50 disc spindles and a simple text file with a full listing of the contents. The individual DVDs are only labeled with a number.
And I've got some spare spindles left over from my CD days so I can shuffle the DVDs around quite easily to get at one in the middle of the stack.
Yes, and why even bother with HD-DVD when (all corporate loyalty aside) BD's got 60% more capacity?
I actually want BluRay to win the war, not because of the movies, but because I want recording media with 25GB per layer.
My mother has worked as a teacher for 25 yrs in Tx. She'd love to have the money to go to Europe even once. Yet her crappy salary pays her $40K a year (and she has her Master's). She'll never afford the expense unless I'm the one paying.
What the hell's she been pissing her money away on? I make around $35k in Canada(!) and after all my bills are paid I still have more then enough to take at least one foreign vacation per year.
This page is complete nonsense.
For the first graph, the units for both the horizontal and vertical axes seem to be Watts. Huh? And why would the power draw of an idle processor rise over time? (Maybe as it heats up?)
But the second graph is the real kicker. 6 labels for 12 bars. The significance of the bars, the power draw in watts is simple enough. But what bar is what? The first two Pentiums seem OK - the first bar, above the label, is the idle power, then the bar next to the label is the peak power.
Then, suddenly, we have a Pentium M, which seems to draw 246W at idle and 101W at peak? Come again? The AMD processors look rather strange too, seeming to use a few watts LESS under peak power than at full load.
Maybe it's my lack of sleep and someone can enlighten me?
Around here that's been a given for as long as I can remember - if you drive like you don't care who's watching (i.e. the typical 5-10km/h over the limit) you're less likely to be pulled over and checked for being under the influence than if you drive exactly the limit like someone who desperately wants to avoid being stopped.
:)
The real trick is driving an inconspicous car. I used to have a Towncar, and now own a Corolla, and so far I've been damn near invisible to cops, considering the stuff I've gotten away with. I'd hate to be a ricer with a lowered, neon lighted Civic on 19" wheels though