"I can understand, though not really approve, movies, pictures and stuff. But why music?"
For reasons that aren't different from movies, pictures, and stuff.
"Are they you still censoring books in the ehh, States ehh, of America?"
As I understand it, some schools won't carry some books in the library for students. (Lame.) Other than that, no, I'm not aware of any books being censored. I've heard of publishers bailing on them because they think they'll tank their P.R. (like the OJ book that was in the works...) but I wouldn't label that censorship.
"And how does it work? Beep? "It was the ever best f*beep* in h*beep*!""
Usually they make the instrumentals a little louder and cover up the word.
"Why would anyone censor *music*?"
I think the idea behind it is that civility breeds civility. Don't expose the kids to the nasty language and they'll be respectful. (Yeah, I agree, silly.) So the FCC puts a mandate in place saying no foul language. The reason for this is that the signal is being broadcast and anybody can pick it up. A kid can pick up a $2 radio, for example, and listen in with no way of verifying age etc. Cable TV is different, people pay for it, they know what they're entering into, you can see all kindsa 'adult' stuff.
So... kids like the music, but it's full of stuff the parents don't approve of. The parents decide they prefer to get their kids the version without the nasty language. Music industry complies, voila. Personally, I don't have a problem with that. Two flavors of the same song, let the customers choose. Fine by me.
"Bullshit. Censorship is censorship. The government doesn't necessarily have to be involved."
Bullshit. Context is important, regardless of what cliches you throw at it. This isn't the gov't trying to prevent you from having independent ideas, it's about Walmart saying they don't want to sell certain things unless they meet certain criteria. The key ingredient here is that you can easily go get that music in a lot of other places. Walmart's doing nothing to prevent that. But... if you want to go ahead and claim censorship is censorship, I suggest you go to Best Buy where they're refusing to sell Hane's underwear. Go get'em!
"How am I supposed to welcome our new microwave-photon overlords if they've already arrived?"
Welp, even if we didn't break the light barrier, at least we finally got a variant of this joke that's funny! Maybe when the warp drive is invented, we'll get another one.
"correction: playstation was NINTENDO's folly, Sony built up samples that became PS to be the manufacture at N64 time and nintendo backed out"
Correction: It would have been Nintendo's folly to have continued with the Playstation. They backed out because Sony got greedy over licesning and branding. The CD-ROM deal with Sony would have been very destructive to Nintendo. They backed out and lost market-share, but they remained very profitable. The PS would have come out either way, at least in this case they didn't lose their brand over it.
"Am I just as bad as the guy rushing home from happy hour blowing.20 while blowing red lights on a crowded street?"
I would say yes, but not because I think the odds of the first situation occuring are as high as the second. Rather, I don't think it takes being at a.2 alcohol level while blowing through lights on a crowded city to kill somebody. Frankly, I just cannot wrap my head around the idea that it's okay for somebody to drive a two-ton machine through populated city streets while intoxicated.
"I am arguing against the all knowing government and the false premise that only the government can make us safe."
I don't think the premise here is that people believe the gov't can make the roads 100% safe. The idea is that there are consequences for willfully putting other people's lives in danger. I don't have a problem with you disagreeing on that point, but c'mon, nanny state? Driving is dangerous enough as it is, it doesn't need slowed reaction times added to the mix. It's not something most people are going to accept.
"Sony stated after the first month the PS2 was sold at a profit. "
What Sony 'stated' was a quarterly stock report with precious few details and a rosy outlook. Everywhere else it was reported they were taking a loss on the system to the tune of $100 per unit. That's why the retailers were pissed that people were buying PS2s but few, if any, games.
Overrated? Okay, I'll phrase it a bit differently.
"Typical nanny state view of life. Why should the state deny your right to move freely throughout the state?... If you were, we would not even have cars. Too dangerous even when sober."
If driving's so dangerous to begin with, why should you have the freedom to drive under conditions are undisputably known to put lives at risk?
"PS2 drove DVD sales?! I would like to see evidence of that."
I cannot give you what you seek, but I can at least share with you something I remember from the PS2 launch. When the PS2 was launched in Japan, the launch selection sucked. In addition to that, DVD players were a recent thing and the PS2 offered a lower-cost solution. Not long after the launch, Next Generation magazine had an article about fears expressed regarding the PS2's DVD compatibility. They found that lots of people were buying PS2s and several DVDs, but few of them were buying more than one game. This was a problem for Sony because they were taking a loss on the system and needed to sell an average of 4 games per system to turn a profit.
Assuming I recall the numbers from the article properly (and really, there's no guarantee of that), there was an average of like 9 DVDs being sold per PS2. Now, if I am recalling that number correctly, and that statistic happened to be true, it could be stated that the PS2 helped jumpstart DVD sales. However, I dunno if I would call that 'driving DVD sales'. It wasn't long after the PS2 launched that DVD players dropped down to the $100 mark here in the USA. It is difficult for me to picture that the PS2's involvement with DVD sales was very evident after that point.
So.. yeah, I don't have much in terms of cold hard facts to give you on this topic, but maybe this'll give you a little reason as to why somebody would make a statement like that.
"What's in dispute is why people feel the need to say "price point" where "price" conveys the same information *in that context* -- i.e., a context where they're not relying on the economic theory behind price points."
The problem is you picked a bad example. The 'price' of the PS3 is different depending on which country you're in. When one says 'price point', they're saying 'whatever price it happens to be in your localization'. When talking about the PS3 on a site like Slashdot, there's some sense in this.
"If you have a relevant response, I'd like to hear it. Otherwise, just agree, "Okay, 'price' was enough."
Dude, seriously, you're fighting the wrong battle. Price point and SKU are both relevent terms. Even if for some reason they weren't, whoop-de-doo. Acting bitter and condescending won't cause somebody to go "whoah, he's right!"
"I'd have thought it'd be easier to shoot against a blank wall, or a relatively nondescript scene than go and put in a lot of post-production work."
It would have been easier, certainly, but I wouldn't say it was a 'lot' of post-production work. Depending on the length of the video, it would have been far less than an evening's work for one person. Most of that would have been spent waiting for processing of the final video. Chroma-key is very easy to do and even an ameteur can crank it out, especially when it's just a black wall behind the dude. I was doing that 5 years ago with a cheapy DV camera.
"One of the theories is that the solar wind of particles from the sun carried away the atmosphere, and so the oceans just evaporated away until it became so cold the remaining water froze into the polar ice caps. Recent estimates indicate that Mars loses some 100 tons of atmosphere every day. The Earth is protected from the solar wind by its magnetosphere, which results from the magnetic field."
Hmmm... I have a question: Let's say that theory is correct. Would it be possible to pick a decent sized crater on Mars, drop tons and tons and tons of breathable air in it, then artificially create a magnetic field around it to keep it from escaping?
I'm just curious. I wonder what it'd take to make at least a small portion of Mars breathable (including appropriate air pressure) without the need of a dome.
"Honestly, I find it hard to believe that these guys doctored their Videos. I could believe photos, but video? That's fairly advanced to make it look real. I'd be more inclined to believe Muslim political groups and al jazeera did the doctoring."
It's not realy all that advanced. I was doing stuff like that 5 years ago with a cheap DV camera, a computer, and a $500 copy of AfterFX. Al-Qaeda wouldn't need very significant resources or time to doctor the video in the way the article shows. And, frankly, it'd be in their best interests to do so.
"If they are showing video of them in a fancy office, that implies their movement is doing well."
Slightly OT here, but it was probably also done to make them harder to track down. I remember a lot of hoohaw over a Bin Laden tape where there were distinct rocks in the background. One of the major news outlets was making a big deal about how the Gov't could tell where in the world that film was shot just by the geological features. My guess is the group got wise to it and doesn't shoot without a fake background anymore.
(This isn't a rebuttal to what you're saying, just another reason they'd do it.)
"As all of google's money now seems to come from advertising, and they seem to only be innovating new ways to push ads, I'd say that they're going down the wrong path."
You're looking at it from the wrong angle. People want to get away from advertising, but more and more companies want to advertise. Growth there is going up. The more people push back on advertising, the more demand there is for successful advertising models.
I'd say that resistance to ads makes Google more attractive, thus they're going down the right path. That is just my opinion, though.
Slashdot Mirror
Bullshit and bullshit. That's not censorship. Walmart's hold on the music industry is hardly monopolistic.
"I can understand, though not really approve, movies, pictures and stuff. But why music?"
For reasons that aren't different from movies, pictures, and stuff.
"Are they you still censoring books in the ehh, States ehh, of America?"
As I understand it, some schools won't carry some books in the library for students. (Lame.) Other than that, no, I'm not aware of any books being censored. I've heard of publishers bailing on them because they think they'll tank their P.R. (like the OJ book that was in the works...) but I wouldn't label that censorship.
"And how does it work? Beep? "It was the ever best f*beep* in h*beep*!""
Usually they make the instrumentals a little louder and cover up the word.
"Why would anyone censor *music*?"
I think the idea behind it is that civility breeds civility. Don't expose the kids to the nasty language and they'll be respectful. (Yeah, I agree, silly.) So the FCC puts a mandate in place saying no foul language. The reason for this is that the signal is being broadcast and anybody can pick it up. A kid can pick up a $2 radio, for example, and listen in with no way of verifying age etc. Cable TV is different, people pay for it, they know what they're entering into, you can see all kindsa 'adult' stuff.
So... kids like the music, but it's full of stuff the parents don't approve of. The parents decide they prefer to get their kids the version without the nasty language. Music industry complies, voila. Personally, I don't have a problem with that. Two flavors of the same song, let the customers choose. Fine by me.
"Bullshit. Censorship is censorship. The government doesn't necessarily have to be involved."
Bullshit. Context is important, regardless of what cliches you throw at it. This isn't the gov't trying to prevent you from having independent ideas, it's about Walmart saying they don't want to sell certain things unless they meet certain criteria. The key ingredient here is that you can easily go get that music in a lot of other places. Walmart's doing nothing to prevent that. But... if you want to go ahead and claim censorship is censorship, I suggest you go to Best Buy where they're refusing to sell Hane's underwear. Go get'em!
I'm amazed that they sussed this out. I mean, everybody knows how to send the numbers 1 and 2 through the sewer pipes. But... how do you send a 0?!
"I was (sarcastically) making the point that, as far as I'm concerned, Windows Mobile is no better than, and just as proprietary as, the iPhone's OS."
Developers are better supported on Windows Mobile. You'll have trouble getting your sarcasm across to everybody that knows that.
"Downloading is theft!"
So how do you justify all the times you've committed theft?
"How am I supposed to welcome our new microwave-photon overlords if they've already arrived?"
Welp, even if we didn't break the light barrier, at least we finally got a variant of this joke that's funny! Maybe when the warp drive is invented, we'll get another one.
"correction: playstation was NINTENDO's folly, Sony built up samples that became PS to be the manufacture at N64 time and nintendo backed out"
Correction: It would have been Nintendo's folly to have continued with the Playstation. They backed out because Sony got greedy over licesning and branding. The CD-ROM deal with Sony would have been very destructive to Nintendo. They backed out and lost market-share, but they remained very profitable. The PS would have come out either way, at least in this case they didn't lose their brand over it.
"But maybe I'm just a geek that way and other people want their homepages to look like a neon strip mall."
If you were a geek you'd never see the home page of your search engine.
"I disagree. We do need SOMETHING capable of running Vista well..."
A A!!!
Ahaha! HaahahahAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAA
That was AWESOME!!
I'd say more, but there's a Police Academy marathon I'm really itching to catch. CYA!!!
"Am I just as bad as the guy rushing home from happy hour blowing .20 while blowing red lights on a crowded street?"
.2 alcohol level while blowing through lights on a crowded city to kill somebody. Frankly, I just cannot wrap my head around the idea that it's okay for somebody to drive a two-ton machine through populated city streets while intoxicated.
I would say yes, but not because I think the odds of the first situation occuring are as high as the second. Rather, I don't think it takes being at a
"I am arguing against the all knowing government and the false premise that only the government can make us safe."
I don't think the premise here is that people believe the gov't can make the roads 100% safe. The idea is that there are consequences for willfully putting other people's lives in danger. I don't have a problem with you disagreeing on that point, but c'mon, nanny state? Driving is dangerous enough as it is, it doesn't need slowed reaction times added to the mix. It's not something most people are going to accept.
"Sony stated after the first month the PS2 was sold at a profit. "
What Sony 'stated' was a quarterly stock report with precious few details and a rosy outlook. Everywhere else it was reported they were taking a loss on the system to the tune of $100 per unit. That's why the retailers were pissed that people were buying PS2s but few, if any, games.
"So why pile drunk driving on top of it?"
... If you were, we would not even have cars. Too dangerous even when sober."
Overrated? Okay, I'll phrase it a bit differently.
"Typical nanny state view of life. Why should the state deny your right to move freely throughout the state?
If driving's so dangerous to begin with, why should you have the freedom to drive under conditions are undisputably known to put lives at risk?
"PS2 drove DVD sales?! I would like to see evidence of that."
I cannot give you what you seek, but I can at least share with you something I remember from the PS2 launch. When the PS2 was launched in Japan, the launch selection sucked. In addition to that, DVD players were a recent thing and the PS2 offered a lower-cost solution. Not long after the launch, Next Generation magazine had an article about fears expressed regarding the PS2's DVD compatibility. They found that lots of people were buying PS2s and several DVDs, but few of them were buying more than one game. This was a problem for Sony because they were taking a loss on the system and needed to sell an average of 4 games per system to turn a profit.
Assuming I recall the numbers from the article properly (and really, there's no guarantee of that), there was an average of like 9 DVDs being sold per PS2. Now, if I am recalling that number correctly, and that statistic happened to be true, it could be stated that the PS2 helped jumpstart DVD sales. However, I dunno if I would call that 'driving DVD sales'. It wasn't long after the PS2 launched that DVD players dropped down to the $100 mark here in the USA. It is difficult for me to picture that the PS2's involvement with DVD sales was very evident after that point.
So.. yeah, I don't have much in terms of cold hard facts to give you on this topic, but maybe this'll give you a little reason as to why somebody would make a statement like that.
"You are not guaranteed a safe life. If you were, we would not even have cars. Too dangerous even when sober."
So why pile drunk driving on top of it?
"What's in dispute is why people feel the need to say "price point" where "price" conveys the same information *in that context* -- i.e., a context where they're not relying on the economic theory behind price points."
The problem is you picked a bad example. The 'price' of the PS3 is different depending on which country you're in. When one says 'price point', they're saying 'whatever price it happens to be in your localization'. When talking about the PS3 on a site like Slashdot, there's some sense in this.
"If you have a relevant response, I'd like to hear it. Otherwise, just agree, "Okay, 'price' was enough."
Dude, seriously, you're fighting the wrong battle. Price point and SKU are both relevent terms. Even if for some reason they weren't, whoop-de-doo. Acting bitter and condescending won't cause somebody to go "whoah, he's right!"
"I think what they considered newsworthy about it is the fact that it can be done in 6 words."
:P
I think they considered it newsworthy because 'bringing it down in six words' is a Doctor Who reference.
"What happens if all the molecules in your body suddenly repels eachother?"
Okay, that's a good safety tip. Don't cross the streams!
"I'd have thought it'd be easier to shoot against a blank wall, or a relatively nondescript scene than go and put in a lot of post-production work."
It would have been easier, certainly, but I wouldn't say it was a 'lot' of post-production work. Depending on the length of the video, it would have been far less than an evening's work for one person. Most of that would have been spent waiting for processing of the final video. Chroma-key is very easy to do and even an ameteur can crank it out, especially when it's just a black wall behind the dude. I was doing that 5 years ago with a cheapy DV camera.
"One of the theories is that the solar wind of particles from the sun carried away the atmosphere, and so the oceans just evaporated away until it became so cold the remaining water froze into the polar ice caps. Recent estimates indicate that Mars loses some 100 tons of atmosphere every day. The Earth is protected from the solar wind by its magnetosphere, which results from the magnetic field."
Hmmm... I have a question: Let's say that theory is correct. Would it be possible to pick a decent sized crater on Mars, drop tons and tons and tons of breathable air in it, then artificially create a magnetic field around it to keep it from escaping?
I'm just curious. I wonder what it'd take to make at least a small portion of Mars breathable (including appropriate air pressure) without the need of a dome.
"Honestly, I find it hard to believe that these guys doctored their Videos. I could believe photos, but video? That's fairly advanced to make it look real. I'd be more inclined to believe Muslim political groups and al jazeera did the doctoring."
It's not realy all that advanced. I was doing stuff like that 5 years ago with a cheap DV camera, a computer, and a $500 copy of AfterFX. Al-Qaeda wouldn't need very significant resources or time to doctor the video in the way the article shows. And, frankly, it'd be in their best interests to do so.
"If they are showing video of them in a fancy office, that implies their movement is doing well."
Slightly OT here, but it was probably also done to make them harder to track down. I remember a lot of hoohaw over a Bin Laden tape where there were distinct rocks in the background. One of the major news outlets was making a big deal about how the Gov't could tell where in the world that film was shot just by the geological features. My guess is the group got wise to it and doesn't shoot without a fake background anymore.
(This isn't a rebuttal to what you're saying, just another reason they'd do it.)
"As all of google's money now seems to come from advertising, and they seem to only be innovating new ways to push ads, I'd say that they're going down the wrong path."
You're looking at it from the wrong angle. People want to get away from advertising, but more and more companies want to advertise. Growth there is going up. The more people push back on advertising, the more demand there is for successful advertising models.
I'd say that resistance to ads makes Google more attractive, thus they're going down the right path. That is just my opinion, though.
"my girlfriend has 3 artificial bones. she keeps them in the sock drawer"
Pity they only fit when she's inflated.
"And the victim of a rape should be compensated according to the duration of the rape?"
Umm.. yeah, I didn't read past that. Sorry.
Of all the things the lameness filter doesn't pick up....