Incorrect. The people without money, and also the sensible people, will start taking public transportation.
Depends on where you live. There are large cities in the USA that have very poor public transportation. At a former job one of my co-workers was a "flower child" from the 60s and although she had a car, she usually took public transportation to our office. I'd say she could have driven to work in 30-40 minutes most days and driven home in roughly the same time frame. Riding the bus took between 90 minutes and 2 hours each way. While it's certainly cheaper to ride the bus, most rational people would conclude that saving 50-90 minutes each way by driving instead of riding the bus made a lot more sense.
Whatever else he was, he was probably the best chess player ever. I liked how he would come out of obscurity to beat whomever was the current Grandmaster, then disappear again.
This isn't correct. From 1963-68 for a variety of reasons (some of them relating to his religious beliefs at the time), he rarely played, but he played well when he did play. Then in 1969 he got serious about competing for the World Championship and returned to full time active play. After winning the championship in 1972 he essentially permanently retired from chess by simply refusing to play again, coming out of retirement only in 1992 to beat Spassky (the guy he defeated in 1972 for the championship) again in a rematch. Spassky at this time had long stopped being a top notch player and was probably at best in top 70 or so chess players, possibly even lower than that. So to say that Fischer "would come out of obscurity to beat whoever was the current Grandmaster" is completely inaccurate, but he certainly did disappear again.
By the way, there are many "Grandmasters" in chess. While compared to average guy on the street they are chess playing geniuses, there are at any time multi-hundreds of grandmasters in chess. I've known of US ones who were quite good on the US scene and absolutely nothing in terms of their international standing.
While many Americans would love to believe that Fischer was the greatest chess player ever, certainly it was really Garry Kasparov. If some thought that Anatoly Karpov (the man that Fischer lost his title to in 1975 by refusing to play) was better than Fischer, I wouldn't argue it. Karpov was a truly great player. Fischer was truly excellent, but he only played a very limited number of openings with both the white and black pieces. Kasparov and Karpov excelled at all openings with white and black. One of Fischer's favorite defenses with black, the Benoni, has been mostly discredited since his championship title in 1972. The Benoni basically is a losing defense for black if white plays what is called the "Four Pawns Attack" against it. This method of attack by white has never been successfully answered by the black pieces. In fact, this attack is so fearful that most Benoni players will transpose into the Benoni from other openings only after it becomes impossible for white to use this method. No grandmaster is brave enough to start the Benoni from the first move for fear of white adopting the Four Pawns Attack against it. Fischer was a specialist in a very limited repertoire of white and black moves and Karpov and Kasparov could play anything. I'd personally place him 2nd of all time behind Kasparov.
They can discount the players down to zero and they won't sell without software (except for the fact that some of them do upscale DVD's and will play DVD-Audio, SACD, Divx, CD's, and MP3 CD's).
At the beginning of the year, before Warner Brothers got bought out by the BluRay camp, I bought a Toshiba HD AD-30 player. It's their cheapest model that can output 1080p, but not the cheapest model they make (a 1080i output player costs less). As an owner of a Toshiba HD DVD player, I can state that none of the currently available HD DVD players by Toshiba or any other manufacturer support DVD-Audio, SACD, Divx, VCD, SVCD or MP3. They also cannot be put into multi-region mode for DVD playback (the ones sold in the USA and Canada only play region 1 DVDs) and there is no PAL video support, so even region free PAL DVDs won't play. Unfortunately, Toshiba became rather infamous in the earlier part of this decade by selling some DVD players that didn't support VCD and SVCD at all, even though to support them required nothing additional in terms of hardware in the player and only required a firmware change. I have never found Toshiba to be one of the more forward thinking companies in the DVD player market in terms of supporting multiple formats. From what I've read, except for some JPG playback support, BluRay players are even worse than HD DVD in terms of what they support. HD DVD players support burnable DVD media fine (assuming that it is NTSC) and reports I found stated that BluRay players don't support burnable DVD media at all. There is some scattered support for single layer + or - DVD discs and I was unable to find any player that was confirmed to support either DVD+RW or DVD-RW discs.
Also, why did they want . in the first place? that's just "roo" in cyrillic, which is the English spelling for Russia. Wouldn't the Russians themselves rather have.? A.po-equivalent makes more sense for them, since in Russian they call their country Rossiya.
For those who don't understand this point, "Russia" spelled in Cyrillic is written something like "POCCIR" with the "R" being backwards. I can tell you that.ru has been in use for so long that EVERYBODY there on the internet knows about it, so they just transliterated it to ".py" in Cyrillic, even though you can make a case that it might not be the 2 letter code that a native speaker would have chosen.
I have looked into it and from what I have heard none of the other networks plan on upgrading the transmission equipment in the area.
Well, I can assure you that either they will upgrade their transmission equipment to do digital broadcasts or they will shut down the stations. There won't be any more analog broadcasting after Feb. 17, 2009. Do note that many people confuse digital broadcasting with high definition and they are very different. The digital TV standard used in the USA, ATSC, supports non-high definition broadcasts, so going to all digital broadcasts does not in any way require that these broadcasts be in the high definition resolutions of 720p or 1080i.
Like Wal*Mart, Amazon is responsible for destroying a large part of many cities independent retailers because although many people talk a strong talk about supporting a healthy local economy by frequenting small businesses, most of these same people will jump to save $2 on a $30 purchase by buying through these faceless uncaring mega corporations.
OK, so what if your local small bookstore doesn't have what you want? You can certainly have them order it, wait over a week if not two for it to come in, and then pay full price for it. Or you can order it from Amazon.com, get it in 3 days, and when you add in shipping maybe even pay less than it would cost at the local bookstore. You have to be pretty hardcore about supporting local businesses to believe that supporting them in this example is the right thing to do.
When you shop at book sellers like Powell's World of Books, you may pay a little bit more, but you're supporting a healthy business model that is centered around both the employee and customer, instead of lining Jeff Bezo's pocket even more.
Now I understand where you are coming from. For those of you who don't know, Powell's is the largest bookstore in the USA and maybe the world. If you want a book, Powell's probably has it in stock. It's kind of like shopping at Amazon.com in person, if they had a store that had everything in it. So you are lucky enough to have the USA's largest bookstore in your back yard that you can support. Good for you. How about those unfortunate people who live in places where they don't even have Borders and Barnes and Noble? Do you still recommend that they pay more and wait longer to get books rather than mail order them? I'd be curious to know if you'd really follow your own advice if you didn't have access to Powell's.
Er, big difference. If you aren't found guilty, you get your boat and other confiscated things back.
Actually, you often don't get anything back. Once Uncle Sam (this is our nickname for the US government, for you non-Americans out there) has possession of it, it's almost impossible to get it back, even if you win in court. I've read of people who won court cases and in theory were entitled to get their stuff back. Sometimes the government just ignores the pleas to return to seized goods. Other times they'll return it years later after the person who won submits mountains of paperwork. Other times they'll get their stuff back, but in damage and unusable condition. The reality is that once Uncle Sam has your stuff, it will be a miracle if you get any of it back in usable condition.
One of the best 2-3 SF movies ever made in the voiceover version.
This is what we (at least in the USA) call "the original version". I saw this many years ago on HBO, probably a year or so after the film was in the theatres. It left me cold and I never understood why so many people liked the film. However, Ridley Scott is one of my favorite directors and I am actually a little excited about seeing the current edition and think I may like it.
Do note that the vast majority of fans of the film do not consider the original version to be "One of the best 2-3 SF movies ever made". They would consider the 1992 "Director's cut" to be superior to the original US theatrical release.
Can someone explain to me why a company has to pay the FCC huge gobs of money in order to use a frequency in the air?
If you're not American, I can understand your question to a certain extent, but such regulation is also done all around the world. The Communications Act of 1934 set up the FCC in the USA and gave them the authority to regulate all non-Federal Government use of the radio spectrum, which includes radio and TV broadcasting. Since they regulate it, they in effect "own" it and thus can sell the TV spectrum that will be freed up with the conversion to all digital TV broadcasting. Radio and TV broadcasting is regulated everywhere so that it works. Otherwise I'm sure they would be horrible reception issues where some local station puts up a giant tower and broadcasts on the same channel as their rivals across town and you would have a frequency battle going on where nobody wins. Regulation is not necessarily evil, despite what you with your presumed libertarian views might think. The government can sometimes play a vital role in regulating various things, but I would judge this on a case by case basis rather than offering up a blanket statement that "all regulation is evil" or "all regulation is good". I can't think of any countries where TV and radio broadcasting aren't regulated at all.
Too bad it can't be said that Russia has a stable political environment.
Well, actually it does. The majority of Russians are perfectly satisfied with Putin. This is because he cracked down on Chechen terrorists and killed the big ringleaders and essentially ended the war. Because of gas and oil prices skyrocketing, the Russian economy is in very good shape and for a decent number of people, life is good. Putin sends out the police to round up the few people who dare to protest. Russia's elections will be honest, I am absolutely sure of this, because the Russian people will willingly elect his appointed successor by a large majority. There's no real opposition (they keep getting arrested), but the political environment will be stable. There will be no revolution next year after the elections because Putin's successor will win in an honest election and the vast majority of Russians will be OK with him, whoever it is. My money is that it will be Sergei Ivanov.
What Microsoft might want to consider is that corruption will be a big problem in a remote place like Irkutsk. Believe me, it will take a lot less bribe money than Microsoft thinks if someone wants access to that facility and the servers inside it. This whole thing didn't make any sense to me until I read another post where someone suggested that this is an "I scratch your back, you scratch mine" arrangement where Microsoft sends money and jobs to Mother Russia in exchange for more crackdowns on piracy. That makes perfect sense to me.
At a time when video tape was very expensive and it made sense to re-use the tape rather than loading a huge amount onto the cost of each apparently ephemeral program. This "lamented fact" seems to be utterly irrelevent to the main "story" that the Register is reporting, but it does add a nice up front negative spin to everything.
There is some truth to this. Even in the USA, similar practices were followed. NBC saw no value in keeping copies of "The Tonight Show". I don't know the numbers, but a large amount of Johnny Carson's early years as host are gone forever because NBC reused the tapes.
However, it's worth noting that this was not an isolated practice and the BBC is well worth criticizing for its poor judgment at the time. They also routinely wiped audio tapes of BBC radio performances that were recorded uniquely for the BBC. In the 1960s the BBC had limits on how many records it could play on the air, so to get more music on the air, popular artists such as the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and so on would appear on BBC programs like Top Gear and record special versions of their songs for radio broadcast. This also provided an opportunity for the artists to record cover versions of songs they liked, many of which were never recorded for release by these bands. The Beatles easily recorded over 30 songs for BBC radio that they never recorded anywhere else. Audio tape was fairly cheap at the time, certainly a lot cheaper than video tape, yet the BBC still wiped it. It wasn't until around 1966 that they finally saw some value in keeping tapes of these special recordings. It was only through the work of fans who taped shows on primitive recorders and collectors of BBC radio transcription discs that many performances were preserved (albeit in poor sound quality) that would otherwise have been lost forever. Even into the 1970s, the BBC was routinely still wiping video tapes and several Dr. Who episodes exist only because some fan with access to primitive video recording equipment was able to make a copy of the show at the time it was broadcast. Let's not cut the BBC too much slack as they have shown consistently poor judgment over the years about what to keep and what to get rid of.
Rather than to risk setting the precedent, the game's publisher may just push to settle this one quickly for undisclosed terms out of the public's eye.... If they don't, all of this could hinge on 10 morons serving jury duty, and who will vindicate the band by just trying to quickly have the trial over with, and get back to their normal lives rather than agonizing in court for what could turn out to be weeks of boring deliberations.
As an American who has twice served on juries (most recently was 2 years ago), I totally agree with you. All bets are off if this goes to a jury. For those of you who aren't Americans or have never served on a jury, let me assure you that juries are not made up of our best and brightest. Most jury members are guys who work as construction laborers, stay at home moms who got their "Mrs. degree" 20+ years ago and retired people. You're going to get no more than 3 people at most on any jury with tech skills of any kind. Most jury people can barely send email. Some can't even do that. Nobody really wants to be there and there is tremendous pressure to reach a verdict and get the heck out of there. A decent number of people will be self-employed and every day they serve on a jury means lost pay. They will agree with anybody just to get out. All it takes is 1 self-righteous nitwit (both juries I served on had one of these people) who is obsessed with rules and wants to punish evil-doers and then you have that guy arguing for the most severe penalty possible, several people who agree just to get out so they can go back to work and earn money, and you end up with a system that is designed to reach a quick verdict, but not necessarily a fair or just one. Anything can happen when a case gets a jury trial. Even though logically it makes no sense for The Romantics to win this case and the ramifications of them winning would be devastating to a lot of people, I can certainly see how a jury full of moronic self-employed truck drivers just wants to get out of there. When 1 loud mouthed guy wants to "stick it to The Man and stand up for the little guy", they go along with it because it has no impact on their lives whoever wins and they don't mind making the loud mouthed guy happy because they think that maybe the band does have a point and they've been screwed over before, so why not help them out?
Keep in mind too that The Romantics had exactly 2 hit singles and their album sales were fairly poor, so these guys almost certainly aren't millionaires. This may be their last shot at big money and while it is incredibly greedy for them to do this, I doubt they care because they just see it as their last big paycheck.
The point is Judges will rule on what they know, regardless of the facts and laws at hand.
Indeed. Based on what I read from various posts, you seem to be one of the very very few people here who "gets it". People, I'm going to tell you how the legal system works in the USA. Your experience in another country may be completely different. I know attorneys. My best friend is one. I've actually served on a jury - twice in fact. The vast majority of attorneys, as in 99% of them, don't understand technology at all. I am not kidding when I tell you that most attorneys AOL type (l)users. You would really be shocked at how ignorant most attorneys are of the PC world. It's not that they are all stupid - they just don't care, not even a little, to know about how it works. It's not really important to their jobs to know the ins and outs of technology. Judges come from attorneys. So it's not surprising that a judge doesn't much about spam.
I've got more bad news for you. Most people on juries are no better and usually worse about technology than attorneys. I've been on juries where the people on them might not have ever, not once in their life, downloaded anything, legal or not. You have people on juries who know nothing about PCs deciding cases involving PCs and you act surprised when it doesn't turn out as you, with your technology background, expected.
Japan is one of few countries that maintain that you must renounce all other citizenship to become a citizen. Dual-citizenship is only permissible for children born to a Japanese and foreign couple, and only then until age 20, after which the individual is given two years to renounce one or the other.
Accept Japanese citizenship -- thanks but no thanks, I'd rather have the flexibility of my existing Canadian passport.
Being an American and not knowing Canadian law, this may or may not apply to you. Countries that allow for dual citizenship usually don't recognize requirements to renounce citizenship to become a citizen of another country. For example, some years ago I talked to British and French colleagues at the job I had at the time and they told me how they were required to "renounce" their British or French citizenship to become American citizens, but their country did not recognize this renunciation and considered them to be dual citizens.
The US Supreme Court finally ruled on the subject of dual citizenship early in the 1990s. The US government position at the time was that dual citizenship was not legal for Americans. The Supreme Court ruled that it was in a fascinating ruling. They also ruled that US citizenship is not renounced if you become a citizen of another country and are forced to renounce your American citizenship to do so. They ruled that such actions are considered to be "under duress" and US citizenship is not lost. In fact it's actually quite difficult to give up your US citizenship and you have to follow some very specific guidelines to renounce it legally or you are still considered to have it. Basically the default position is once an American, always an American unless you go to extreme, fully documented measures to renounce it. I don't know Canadian law, but surely Canada recognizes dual citizenship and as such would not accept your "renunciation" of it just to become a Japanese citizen. Or are you going to tell me that the USA has a more enlightened approach to this?
Worse, he's a GREEDY dinosaur. Has anyone seen his "reality" show? My wife loves it, but I can't stand it because it's all about him trying to sell Kiss' collective souls for as much profit as possible. The guy seems like he cares much more about making money than enjoying life. He comes off as loving money more than his family. I would not look to him for advice on what a good compromise in a new market economy is when it comes to digital distribution. If his show is any indication, that man would make you pay $50 a Kiss record and thank him for the privilege if he thought he'd get away with it.
I'm not a fan at all of KISS or Simmons, but of course I know about him and the group. He is a genius when it comes to maximizing money out of the band. Many groups would not go as far as he does, some (ie. the estate of Elvis Presley) go that far or further. Simmons is all about the money. What some of you might not know is that when former original band members Peter Criss and Ace Frehley left the group originally, they lost everything. They have no rights of any kind to KISS - not the makeup designs, nothing. They probably get royalties, but that's it. When the original group reformed late in the 1990s, Frehley and Criss were put on contract. That's right. That means that Simmons and original member Paul Stanley make almost all the money off KISS. Simmons is really old school so it shouldn't come as any surprise that he thinks the old school methods will work. Among the over-60 group, not a lot of them really understand technology. Mick Jagger and David Bowie do. Offhand I can't really think of anybody else from that generation to whom the internet is more than "just another way to sell records to the kids".
but just a strategic retreat planned by the KGB (now GRU) that would help the Soviets catch up to the west technologically and economically after which they would return back to dictatorship and imperialism.
If this were true, which I doubt, then it came with a very high price - the permanent breakup of the USSR and the loss of 14 Soviet Republics (Republic no. 15 is Russia - there were 15 Republics in the USSR), some of which aren't interested at all in being vassals to Mother Russia - Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Georgia, Ukraine and Moldova. I get the impression that Armenia and Azerbaijan are somewhat indifferent to Russia and the 5 "Stan" countries are interested in Russia only in so far as they can get something (ie. money) out of it. Only Belarus remains loyal to Mother Russia and got paid back earlier in the year by Mother Russia telling it that it better pay up what it owed on natural gas and oil that came from Russia or there would be some, ahem, "unpleasantness".
Japan was back to its pre-war territorial borders, which contain precious few resources (they couldn't even produce enough high-quality steel to fuel their own war effort, which was the original reason for their invasion of China, to secure the necessary resources ), and certainly at that point wasn't a real danger to anyone.
You are overlooking one fact - Japan refused to surrender. There were no peace overtures. The war was still going on. Japan's military had the old samurai attitude of "We know it's hopeless, but rather than surrender we are going to make them fight us to the death. Yes, we will lose for sure, but we will make them pay a high price in blood for their victory". You know how people think that Al Queda members are crazy in how they willingly sacrifice themselves? That's how Japan was. The US military had made full plans to invade Japan. You can get info on it at Wikipedia with maps of proposed invasion routes and estimates of the casualties. Even Nazi Germany's surrender wasn't enough to dissuade the Japanese from continuing the fight. Yes, part of it was to end the war quickly before Russia could steal much Japanese territory (they were able to steal the Kurile Islands before the war ended), but part of it was that Japan just wouldn't give up and they had to be broken so they wouldn't wait a few years and start another war.
I wonder if this is how the British Empire collapsed too.
You are comparing apples to oranges here. First of all, assuming you have an ounce of objectivity, the USA is not by any stretch of the imagination an empire. The USA controls itself and a handful of islands in the Caribbean and Pacific. That's it. While the USA certainly likes to project its power elsewhere (ie. Iraq), it in no way controls other countries. It might like to control them, but it does not do so. Puerto Rico has been told multiple times that they they may choose to become an American state, an independent country or continue the current relationship with the USA. They have consistently chosen to continue the current relationship as a US territory, but it was their choice to do so. Cuba and the Philippines were both former US possessions that are independent countries.
As they said, the sun never set on the British Empire. Look it up in Wikipedia. It spanned the globe. They were everywhere. The problem was that the Brits weren't very enlightened colonial rulers. They looked down on all the non-Europeans and kept them down. For example, while the Gurkhas were one of the most respected fighting forces in the British Army, no Gurkha could rise above the rank of major in the British Army. After all, can't have one of those dark skinned people becoming a colonel or more, can we? Hong Kong was never allowed any say in its local government. The death penalty was legal in Hong Kong for a long time after it was outlawed in Britain. It was only when the Brits realized that China would not extend the lease over the New Territories that Britain finally began to allow the locals to vote for their own government and outlawed the death penalty. After the Brits signed the deal to handover Hong Kong to the Chinese government, it told the roughly 6 million people living there "By the way, you won't be getting British passports before we pull out unless you happen to be rich. We can't have you filthy beggars coming over to the UK and mucking it up, can we?" In contrast, long before Portugal signed a similar deal to handover Macau, the locals had been allowed to elect their own legislature and the death penalty had long been abolished. Portugal told all Macau residents that as far as they were concerned, they were all Portuguese citizens as residents of Macau and any who wanted to could apply for Portuguese passports prior to handover. See the difference? Britain also had various parts of the empire that were just about in open rebellion to gain independence. Kenya was one such place in the 1950s. During WWII the Japanese promised independence to India if they would kick out the British so to counter that, the Brits reluctantly made an offer of post war independence to India in exchange for not helping the Japanese. It became basically impossible to maintain the British Empire. India was promised independence and all of Africa under British control wanted it too. The only way this analogy would work is if a place like Puerto Rico wanted independence and the US government denied it, which is absolutely the opposite of what has happened.
So you take a company being noticed for screwing their customers, and you are looking for ways to give them more money. And people wonder why corporations think they can do anything they want without repercussions.
Actually, the reason for this called "addiction". It happens a lot in the USA because we have so many sports that people feel passionately about. In other countries this usually only happens with what we call "soccer" and they call "football". Where I live, I get the new NHL Channel (NHL is National Hockey League, for people who don't know) on my cable TV. I watched it a few days ago. It's truly awful, a complete waste of time. Yet you can go to fan forums at official websites for various teams in the NHL and you will find plenty of fans gushing about how great it is and how they can't live without it and watch it every day. My best friend from college is a junkie and his drug is football. We went to a smallish university that doesn't have a football team. Yet he has adopted the college his wife went to as his team. It is about a 90 minute drive from his house to the stadium and he goes to every home game. He goes to most of the road games. He only misses 1 or 2 road games a year. Then he goes to every home game of our local NFL team and between 2 and 4 of their road games every year. Every year the prices on his tickets (college and professional) get raised. He pays it. He wears a headset to listen to the game on radio while he is in the stands watching it to be sure he doesn't miss anything. He records the NFL games he watches in person on his DVD recorder from the TV broadcast to watch them again later. While I think my friend is nuts, he's got a mild case of addiction compared to some people. I have known fans of the University of Tennessee's football program that were far worse than my friend. I had one friend who went to school there and when the university was scheduled to play a game in Japan, he was honestly looking into spending over $1000 to go there to the game. I was shocked when he didn't go. I knew another U of T fan who used to wear his jersey EVERYWHERE, even when he went to Canada, in the hopes that wherever he was, he might find another supporter of his school. I remember telling him once that over a billion Chinese people really didn't care at all about US college football so he might put that into perspective about how important US college football was in the scheme of life on earth, but he didn't like that. So don't underestimate sports addiction as a motivator for putting up with this kind of abuse.
Mormons do. Here's a true story. At my 20th year high school reunion (I went to a large US high school and we had over 400 students in my graduating class) we had a small number of teachers who came by. Our principal, who had just retired, dropped by as well. I saw this guy with a lady who seemed to be his wife off to the side. The guy had completely gray hair and he looked to be over 50, as did his wife, who was also completely gray. I asked one of my friends who the guy was, figuring it was a teacher. I was shocked to find out it was a guy who graduated with us who I had quite a few classes with. He looked so old, I thought he was a teacher from years ago, but he wasn't even 40 years old yet. I found out that he and his wife (both Mormons) had either 7 or 8 surviving kids plus one who had died some years earlier. I guess having that many kids just sucked the life out of him because he looked old - really old.
Hans Rieser's explanation is at least plausible. Very attractive women often begin to believe that no rules apply to them.
I would also state that many people in the ex-USSR also believe that no rules apply to them. It's not just attractive women. A few years ago I was engaged to a Ukrainian woman. We didn't get married though. Long story short - her control freak ways and constant anger killed our relationship. I can tell you as someone who can speak Russian relatively well and has spent a lot of time in that part of the world that the USSR just ruined these people for the most part. It left behind a large number of completely amoral people as its legacy. Many Russian, Ukrainians, Belarussians, etc. have no problems with lying, stealing, etc. They use some weird psuedo-Robin Hood type justification for their actions - "rich" foreigners (all foreigners are rich to them) won't miss it, so they can lie and steal to get it. There's also this weird sense of entitlement that seems to permeate the entire society over there. Many people, maybe most of them, have completely unrealistic attitudes about money and wealth. As Jim Morrison sang once, "We want the world and we want it now!" These people have no concept at all of delayed gratification and they want to be rich today. Not tomorrow, but today. You really cannot comprehend how many people are on the take over there until you go there. Justice goes to whoever pays the most. You can literally get away with murder because you can buy off the cops to botch the investigation or pay off the judge to dismiss the charges.
Yes, it's true that the women are really beautiful over there. They take care of themselves, aren't fat, and care about their appearance in public. But there is a dark side to them that gets overlooked. They are controlling. They grow up learning that all men are unfaithful drunks so they don't respect men at all. The whole concept of forgiveness is foreign to them. I can tell you that if you ever make one of these women mad, so will never in a million years forgive you for whatever it was, no matter how trivial. She will bring that stuff up again and again and again. Many of them have no problems with sleeping with other guys. They will rationalize it by saying that they don't love the other guy, so it's OK to sleep with him because it's only being unfaithful if you love the other guy. There are a very few women who aren't like this who are basically normal by Western standards, but the odds are that you'd never meet one if you go over there.
My personal opinion is that she is not in Russia. Unless she got a forged passport (always possible I suppose, but unlikely I think), there would be a trace of her traveling by air. It's also not like these women to disappear. They are vindictive beyond belief. What a Russian woman would do is stick around and watch you suffer in court in a divorce trial by taking your money and kids. And honestly, it is almost impossible to find a Russian person who would willingly leave once they have a taste of life in America. I've known of women who came over almost totally unable to speak English and married guys they met through the internet. These marriages often go horribly wrong because neither party can speak the other's language and they don't know each other well. In these cases, the woman stayed after the marriage ended, even with very poor English skills. So whatever happened to this woman, I'm pretty sure she is not back in Russia.
The Pirate Bay could have been rather more subtle about it:
It would appear that you have never been to the site because subtlety isn't what The Pirate Bay is all about. I've found their email responses to takedown letters to be very humorous, but The Pirate Bay is about as subtle as a jackhammer.
Congress passes a law to protect US citizens from unscrupulous gambling operations that are not subject to the same kind of regulations that Casinos in the U.S. must meet
That is absolutely not why that law was passed. It was passed for several reasons. Your Congressperson, assuming he/she voted for the law, may not necessarily have cared about all of them. 1) Some people object to all gambling on religious reasons. 2) The US government was unable to track the money and thus generate tax revenue on gambling money flowing out of the country via the internet. 3) US gambling businesses were legally unable to do the same thing as the foreign companies and played the "Why can they do it if we can't?" card.
I can promise you that nobody in Congress was looking out for the best interests of US citizens. It was either just a generic objection to gambling (point #1) or all about the money (points #2 and #3).
So they are Suing RedHat and Novell for using whatever it is that violates the patent.
It's a common legal tactic that I believe is called the "Deep Pockets Theory". You sue the people with money (deep pockets) who are barely involved in the issue because the real offender can't pay you off. They know that they can't get any money from KDE and GNOME developers, so they go after the companies that use these products. Interestingly enough, they did not choose to sue Sun, who I believe distributes GNOME with Solaris. Yes, this certainly smells of an action secretly run by Microsoft to try specifically to attack Linux. Novell was warned that they made a deal with the devil when they signed that deal with Microsoft. They aren't going to get much sympathy.
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Incorrect. The people without money, and also the sensible people, will start taking public transportation.
Depends on where you live. There are large cities in the USA that have very poor public transportation. At a former job one of my co-workers was a "flower child" from the 60s and although she had a car, she usually took public transportation to our office. I'd say she could have driven to work in 30-40 minutes most days and driven home in roughly the same time frame. Riding the bus took between 90 minutes and 2 hours each way. While it's certainly cheaper to ride the bus, most rational people would conclude that saving 50-90 minutes each way by driving instead of riding the bus made a lot more sense.
Whatever else he was, he was probably the best chess player ever. I liked how he would come out of obscurity to beat whomever was the current Grandmaster, then disappear again.
This isn't correct. From 1963-68 for a variety of reasons (some of them relating to his religious beliefs at the time), he rarely played, but he played well when he did play. Then in 1969 he got serious about competing for the World Championship and returned to full time active play. After winning the championship in 1972 he essentially permanently retired from chess by simply refusing to play again, coming out of retirement only in 1992 to beat Spassky (the guy he defeated in 1972 for the championship) again in a rematch. Spassky at this time had long stopped being a top notch player and was probably at best in top 70 or so chess players, possibly even lower than that. So to say that Fischer "would come out of obscurity to beat whoever was the current Grandmaster" is completely inaccurate, but he certainly did disappear again.
By the way, there are many "Grandmasters" in chess. While compared to average guy on the street they are chess playing geniuses, there are at any time multi-hundreds of grandmasters in chess. I've known of US ones who were quite good on the US scene and absolutely nothing in terms of their international standing.
While many Americans would love to believe that Fischer was the greatest chess player ever, certainly it was really Garry Kasparov. If some thought that Anatoly Karpov (the man that Fischer lost his title to in 1975 by refusing to play) was better than Fischer, I wouldn't argue it. Karpov was a truly great player. Fischer was truly excellent, but he only played a very limited number of openings with both the white and black pieces. Kasparov and Karpov excelled at all openings with white and black. One of Fischer's favorite defenses with black, the Benoni, has been mostly discredited since his championship title in 1972. The Benoni basically is a losing defense for black if white plays what is called the "Four Pawns Attack" against it. This method of attack by white has never been successfully answered by the black pieces. In fact, this attack is so fearful that most Benoni players will transpose into the Benoni from other openings only after it becomes impossible for white to use this method. No grandmaster is brave enough to start the Benoni from the first move for fear of white adopting the Four Pawns Attack against it. Fischer was a specialist in a very limited repertoire of white and black moves and Karpov and Kasparov could play anything. I'd personally place him 2nd of all time behind Kasparov.
They can discount the
players down to zero and they won't sell without software (except for the fact that
some of them do upscale DVD's and will play DVD-Audio, SACD, Divx, CD's, and MP3 CD's).
At the beginning of the year, before Warner Brothers got bought out by the BluRay camp, I bought a Toshiba HD AD-30 player. It's their cheapest model that can output 1080p, but not the cheapest model they make (a 1080i output player costs less). As an owner of a Toshiba HD DVD player, I can state that none of the currently available HD DVD players by Toshiba or any other manufacturer support DVD-Audio, SACD, Divx, VCD, SVCD or MP3. They also cannot be put into multi-region mode for DVD playback (the ones sold in the USA and Canada only play region 1 DVDs) and there is no PAL video support, so even region free PAL DVDs won't play. Unfortunately, Toshiba became rather infamous in the earlier part of this decade by selling some DVD players that didn't support VCD and SVCD at all, even though to support them required nothing additional in terms of hardware in the player and only required a firmware change. I have never found Toshiba to be one of the more forward thinking companies in the DVD player market in terms of supporting multiple formats. From what I've read, except for some JPG playback support, BluRay players are even worse than HD DVD in terms of what they support. HD DVD players support burnable DVD media fine (assuming that it is NTSC) and reports I found stated that BluRay players don't support burnable DVD media at all. There is some scattered support for single layer + or - DVD discs and I was unable to find any player that was confirmed to support either DVD+RW or DVD-RW discs.
Also, why did they want . in the first place? that's just "roo" in cyrillic, which is the English spelling for Russia. Wouldn't the Russians themselves rather have .? A .po-equivalent makes more sense for them, since in Russian they call their country Rossiya.
.ru has been in use for so long that EVERYBODY there on the internet knows about it, so they just transliterated it to ".py" in Cyrillic, even though you can make a case that it might not be the 2 letter code that a native speaker would have chosen.
For those who don't understand this point, "Russia" spelled in Cyrillic is written something like "POCCIR" with the "R" being backwards. I can tell you that
I have looked into it and from what I have heard none of the other networks plan on upgrading the transmission equipment in the area.
Well, I can assure you that either they will upgrade their transmission equipment to do digital broadcasts or they will shut down the stations. There won't be any more analog broadcasting after Feb. 17, 2009. Do note that many people confuse digital broadcasting with high definition and they are very different. The digital TV standard used in the USA, ATSC, supports non-high definition broadcasts, so going to all digital broadcasts does not in any way require that these broadcasts be in the high definition resolutions of 720p or 1080i.
Like Wal*Mart, Amazon is responsible for destroying a large part of many cities independent retailers because although many people talk a strong talk about supporting a healthy local economy by frequenting small businesses, most of these same people will jump to save $2 on a $30 purchase by buying through these faceless uncaring mega corporations.
OK, so what if your local small bookstore doesn't have what you want? You can certainly have them order it, wait over a week if not two for it to come in, and then pay full price for it. Or you can order it from Amazon.com, get it in 3 days, and when you add in shipping maybe even pay less than it would cost at the local bookstore. You have to be pretty hardcore about supporting local businesses to believe that supporting them in this example is the right thing to do.
When you shop at book sellers like Powell's World of Books, you may pay a little bit more, but you're supporting a healthy business model that is centered around both the employee and customer, instead of lining Jeff Bezo's pocket even more.
Now I understand where you are coming from. For those of you who don't know, Powell's is the largest bookstore in the USA and maybe the world. If you want a book, Powell's probably has it in stock. It's kind of like shopping at Amazon.com in person, if they had a store that had everything in it. So you are lucky enough to have the USA's largest bookstore in your back yard that you can support. Good for you. How about those unfortunate people who live in places where they don't even have Borders and Barnes and Noble? Do you still recommend that they pay more and wait longer to get books rather than mail order them? I'd be curious to know if you'd really follow your own advice if you didn't have access to Powell's.
Er, big difference. If you aren't found guilty, you get your boat and other confiscated things back.
Actually, you often don't get anything back. Once Uncle Sam (this is our nickname for the US government, for you non-Americans out there) has possession of it, it's almost impossible to get it back, even if you win in court. I've read of people who won court cases and in theory were entitled to get their stuff back. Sometimes the government just ignores the pleas to return to seized goods. Other times they'll return it years later after the person who won submits mountains of paperwork. Other times they'll get their stuff back, but in damage and unusable condition. The reality is that once Uncle Sam has your stuff, it will be a miracle if you get any of it back in usable condition.
One of the best 2-3 SF movies ever made in the voiceover version.
This is what we (at least in the USA) call "the original version". I saw this many years ago on HBO, probably a year or so after the film was in the theatres. It left me cold and I never understood why so many people liked the film. However, Ridley Scott is one of my favorite directors and I am actually a little excited about seeing the current edition and think I may like it.
Do note that the vast majority of fans of the film do not consider the original version to be "One of the best 2-3 SF movies ever made". They would consider the 1992 "Director's cut" to be superior to the original US theatrical release.
Can someone explain to me why a company has to pay the FCC huge gobs of money in order to use a frequency in the air?
If you're not American, I can understand your question to a certain extent, but such regulation is also done all around the world. The Communications Act of 1934 set up the FCC in the USA and gave them the authority to regulate all non-Federal Government use of the radio spectrum, which includes radio and TV broadcasting. Since they regulate it, they in effect "own" it and thus can sell the TV spectrum that will be freed up with the conversion to all digital TV broadcasting. Radio and TV broadcasting is regulated everywhere so that it works. Otherwise I'm sure they would be horrible reception issues where some local station puts up a giant tower and broadcasts on the same channel as their rivals across town and you would have a frequency battle going on where nobody wins. Regulation is not necessarily evil, despite what you with your presumed libertarian views might think. The government can sometimes play a vital role in regulating various things, but I would judge this on a case by case basis rather than offering up a blanket statement that "all regulation is evil" or "all regulation is good". I can't think of any countries where TV and radio broadcasting aren't regulated at all.
Too bad it can't be said that Russia has a stable political environment.
Well, actually it does. The majority of Russians are perfectly satisfied with Putin. This is because he cracked down on Chechen terrorists and killed the big ringleaders and essentially ended the war. Because of gas and oil prices skyrocketing, the Russian economy is in very good shape and for a decent number of people, life is good. Putin sends out the police to round up the few people who dare to protest. Russia's elections will be honest, I am absolutely sure of this, because the Russian people will willingly elect his appointed successor by a large majority. There's no real opposition (they keep getting arrested), but the political environment will be stable. There will be no revolution next year after the elections because Putin's successor will win in an honest election and the vast majority of Russians will be OK with him, whoever it is.
My money is that it will be Sergei Ivanov.
What Microsoft might want to consider is that corruption will be a big problem in a remote place like Irkutsk. Believe me, it will take a lot less bribe money than Microsoft thinks if someone wants access to that facility and the servers inside it. This whole thing didn't make any sense to me until I read another post where someone suggested that this is an "I scratch your back, you scratch mine" arrangement where Microsoft sends money and jobs to Mother Russia in exchange for more crackdowns on piracy. That makes perfect sense to me.
At a time when video tape was very expensive and it made sense to re-use the tape rather than loading a huge amount onto the cost of each apparently ephemeral program. This "lamented fact" seems to be utterly irrelevent to the main "story" that the Register is reporting, but it does add a nice up front negative spin to everything.
There is some truth to this. Even in the USA, similar practices were followed. NBC saw no value in keeping copies of "The Tonight Show". I don't know the numbers, but a large amount of Johnny Carson's early years as host are gone forever because NBC reused the tapes.
However, it's worth noting that this was not an isolated practice and the BBC is well worth criticizing for its poor judgment at the time. They also routinely wiped audio tapes of BBC radio performances that were recorded uniquely for the BBC. In the 1960s the BBC had limits on how many records it could play on the air, so to get more music on the air, popular artists such as the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and so on would appear on BBC programs like Top Gear and record special versions of their songs for radio broadcast. This also provided an opportunity for the artists to record cover versions of songs they liked, many of which were never recorded for release by these bands. The Beatles easily recorded over 30 songs for BBC radio that they never recorded anywhere else. Audio tape was fairly cheap at the time, certainly a lot cheaper than video tape, yet the BBC still wiped it. It wasn't until around 1966 that they finally saw some value in keeping tapes of these special recordings. It was only through the work of fans who taped shows on primitive recorders and collectors of BBC radio transcription discs that many performances were preserved (albeit in poor sound quality) that would otherwise have been lost forever. Even into the 1970s, the BBC was routinely still wiping video tapes and several Dr. Who episodes exist only because some fan with access to primitive video recording equipment was able to make a copy of the show at the time it was broadcast. Let's not cut the BBC too much slack as they have shown consistently poor judgment over the years about what to keep and what to get rid of.
Rather than to risk setting the precedent, the game's publisher may just push to settle this one quickly for undisclosed terms out of the public's eye.... If they don't, all of this could hinge on 10 morons serving jury duty, and who will vindicate the band by just trying to quickly have the trial over with, and get back to their normal lives rather than agonizing in court for what could turn out to be weeks of boring deliberations.
As an American who has twice served on juries (most recently was 2 years ago), I totally agree with you. All bets are off if this goes to a jury. For those of you who aren't Americans or have never served on a jury, let me assure you that juries are not made up of our best and brightest. Most jury members are guys who work as construction laborers, stay at home moms who got their "Mrs. degree" 20+ years ago and retired people. You're going to get no more than 3 people at most on any jury with tech skills of any kind. Most jury people can barely send email. Some can't even do that. Nobody really wants to be there and there is tremendous pressure to reach a verdict and get the heck out of there. A decent number of people will be self-employed and every day they serve on a jury means lost pay. They will agree with anybody just to get out. All it takes is 1 self-righteous nitwit (both juries I served on had one of these people) who is obsessed with rules and wants to punish evil-doers and then you have that guy arguing for the most severe penalty possible, several people who agree just to get out so they can go back to work and earn money, and you end up with a system that is designed to reach a quick verdict, but not necessarily a fair or just one. Anything can happen when a case gets a jury trial. Even though logically it makes no sense for The Romantics to win this case and the ramifications of them winning would be devastating to a lot of people, I can certainly see how a jury full of moronic self-employed truck drivers just wants to get out of there. When 1 loud mouthed guy wants to "stick it to The Man and stand up for the little guy", they go along with it because it has no impact on their lives whoever wins and they don't mind making the loud mouthed guy happy because they think that maybe the band does have a point and they've been screwed over before, so why not help them out?
Keep in mind too that The Romantics had exactly 2 hit singles and their album sales were fairly poor, so these guys almost certainly aren't millionaires. This may be their last shot at big money and while it is incredibly greedy for them to do this, I doubt they care because they just see it as their last big paycheck.
The point is Judges will rule on what they know, regardless of the facts and laws at hand.
Indeed. Based on what I read from various posts, you seem to be one of the very very few people here who "gets it". People, I'm going to tell you how the legal system works in the USA. Your experience in another country may be completely different. I know attorneys. My best friend is one. I've actually served on a jury - twice in fact. The vast majority of attorneys, as in 99% of them, don't understand technology at all. I am not kidding when I tell you that most attorneys AOL type (l)users. You would really be shocked at how ignorant most attorneys are of the PC world. It's not that they are all stupid - they just don't care, not even a little, to know about how it works. It's not really important to their jobs to know the ins and outs of technology. Judges come from attorneys. So it's not surprising that a judge doesn't much about spam.
I've got more bad news for you. Most people on juries are no better and usually worse about technology than attorneys. I've been on juries where the people on them might not have ever, not once in their life, downloaded anything, legal or not. You have people on juries who know nothing about PCs deciding cases involving PCs and you act surprised when it doesn't turn out as you, with your technology background, expected.
Japan is one of few countries that maintain that you must renounce all other citizenship to become a citizen. Dual-citizenship is only permissible for children born to a Japanese and foreign couple, and only then until age 20, after which the individual is given two years to renounce one or the other.
Accept Japanese citizenship -- thanks but no thanks, I'd rather have the flexibility of my existing Canadian passport.
Being an American and not knowing Canadian law, this may or may not apply to you. Countries that allow for dual citizenship usually don't recognize requirements to renounce citizenship to become a citizen of another country. For example, some years ago I talked to British and French colleagues at the job I had at the time and they told me how they were required to "renounce" their British or French citizenship to become American citizens, but their country did not recognize this renunciation and considered them to be dual citizens.
The US Supreme Court finally ruled on the subject of dual citizenship early in the 1990s. The US government position at the time was that dual citizenship was not legal for Americans. The Supreme Court ruled that it was in a fascinating ruling. They also ruled that US citizenship is not renounced if you become a citizen of another country and are forced to renounce your American citizenship to do so. They ruled that such actions are considered to be "under duress" and US citizenship is not lost. In fact it's actually quite difficult to give up your US citizenship and you have to follow some very specific guidelines to renounce it legally or you are still considered to have it. Basically the default position is once an American, always an American unless you go to extreme, fully documented measures to renounce it. I don't know Canadian law, but surely Canada recognizes dual citizenship and as such would not accept your "renunciation" of it just to become a Japanese citizen. Or are you going to tell me that the USA has a more enlightened approach to this?
Worse, he's a GREEDY dinosaur. Has anyone seen his "reality" show? My wife loves it, but I can't stand it because it's all about him trying to sell Kiss' collective souls for as much profit as possible. The guy seems like he cares much more about making money than enjoying life. He comes off as loving money more than his family. I would not look to him for advice on what a good compromise in a new market economy is when it comes to digital distribution. If his show is any indication, that man would make you pay $50 a Kiss record and thank him for the privilege if he thought he'd get away with it.
I'm not a fan at all of KISS or Simmons, but of course I know about him and the group. He is a genius when it comes to maximizing money out of the band. Many groups would not go as far as he does, some (ie. the estate of Elvis Presley) go that far or further. Simmons is all about the money. What some of you might not know is that when former original band members Peter Criss and Ace Frehley left the group originally, they lost everything. They have no rights of any kind to KISS - not the makeup designs, nothing. They probably get royalties, but that's it. When the original group reformed late in the 1990s, Frehley and Criss were put on contract. That's right. That means that Simmons and original member Paul Stanley make almost all the money off KISS. Simmons is really old school so it shouldn't come as any surprise that he thinks the old school methods will work. Among the over-60 group, not a lot of them really understand technology. Mick Jagger and David Bowie do. Offhand I can't really think of anybody else from that generation to whom the internet is more than "just another way to sell records to the kids".
Funniest post I've seen on Slashdot this year! Truly excellent. Well done!
but just a strategic retreat planned by the KGB (now GRU) that would help the Soviets catch up to the west technologically and economically after which they would return back to dictatorship and imperialism.
If this were true, which I doubt, then it came with a very high price - the permanent breakup of the USSR and the loss of 14 Soviet Republics (Republic no. 15 is Russia - there were 15 Republics in the USSR), some of which aren't interested at all in being vassals to Mother Russia - Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Georgia, Ukraine and Moldova. I get the impression that Armenia and Azerbaijan are somewhat indifferent to Russia and the 5 "Stan" countries are interested in Russia only in so far as they can get something (ie. money) out of it. Only Belarus remains loyal to Mother Russia and got paid back earlier in the year by Mother Russia telling it that it better pay up what it owed on natural gas and oil that came from Russia or there would be some, ahem, "unpleasantness".
Japan was back to its pre-war territorial borders, which contain precious few resources (they couldn't even produce enough high-quality steel to fuel their own war effort, which was the original reason for their invasion of China, to secure the necessary resources ), and certainly at that point wasn't a real danger to anyone.
You are overlooking one fact - Japan refused to surrender. There were no peace overtures. The war was still going on. Japan's military had the old samurai attitude of "We know it's hopeless, but rather than surrender we are going to make them fight us to the death. Yes, we will lose for sure, but we will make them pay a high price in blood for their victory". You know how people think that Al Queda members are crazy in how they willingly sacrifice themselves? That's how Japan was. The US military had made full plans to invade Japan. You can get info on it at Wikipedia with maps of proposed invasion routes and estimates of the casualties. Even Nazi Germany's surrender wasn't enough to dissuade the Japanese from continuing the fight. Yes, part of it was to end the war quickly before Russia could steal much Japanese territory (they were able to steal the Kurile Islands before the war ended), but part of it was that Japan just wouldn't give up and they had to be broken so they wouldn't wait a few years and start another war.
I wonder if this is how the British Empire collapsed too.
You are comparing apples to oranges here. First of all, assuming you have an ounce of objectivity, the USA is not by any stretch of the imagination an empire. The USA controls itself and a handful of islands in the Caribbean and Pacific. That's it. While the USA certainly likes to project its power elsewhere (ie. Iraq), it in no way controls other countries. It might like to control them, but it does not do so. Puerto Rico has been told multiple times that they they may choose to become an American state, an independent country or continue the current relationship with the USA. They have consistently chosen to continue the current relationship as a US territory, but it was their choice to do so. Cuba and the Philippines were both former US possessions that are independent countries.
As they said, the sun never set on the British Empire. Look it up in Wikipedia. It spanned the globe. They were everywhere. The problem was that the Brits weren't very enlightened colonial rulers. They looked down on all the non-Europeans and kept them down. For example, while the Gurkhas were one of the most respected fighting forces in the British Army, no Gurkha could rise above the rank of major in the British Army. After all, can't have one of those dark skinned people becoming a colonel or more, can we? Hong Kong was never allowed any say in its local government. The death penalty was legal in Hong Kong for a long time after it was outlawed in Britain. It was only when the Brits realized that China would not extend the lease over the New Territories that Britain finally began to allow the locals to vote for their own government and outlawed the death penalty. After the Brits signed the deal to handover Hong Kong to the Chinese government, it told the roughly 6 million people living there "By the way, you won't be getting British passports before we pull out unless you happen to be rich. We can't have you filthy beggars coming over to the UK and mucking it up, can we?" In contrast, long before Portugal signed a similar deal to handover Macau, the locals had been allowed to elect their own legislature and the death penalty had long been abolished. Portugal told all Macau residents that as far as they were concerned, they were all Portuguese citizens as residents of Macau and any who wanted to could apply for Portuguese passports prior to handover. See the difference? Britain also had various parts of the empire that were just about in open rebellion to gain independence. Kenya was one such place in the 1950s. During WWII the Japanese promised independence to India if they would kick out the British so to counter that, the Brits reluctantly made an offer of post war independence to India in exchange for not helping the Japanese. It became basically impossible to maintain the British Empire. India was promised independence and all of Africa under British control wanted it too. The only way this analogy would work is if a place like Puerto Rico wanted independence and the US government denied it, which is absolutely the opposite of what has happened.
So you take a company being noticed for screwing their customers, and you are looking for ways to give them more money. And people wonder why corporations think they can do anything they want without repercussions.
Actually, the reason for this called "addiction". It happens a lot in the USA because we have so many sports that people feel passionately about. In other countries this usually only happens with what we call "soccer" and they call "football". Where I live, I get the new NHL Channel (NHL is National Hockey League, for people who don't know) on my cable TV. I watched it a few days ago. It's truly awful, a complete waste of time. Yet you can go to fan forums at official websites for various teams in the NHL and you will find plenty of fans gushing about how great it is and how they can't live without it and watch it every day. My best friend from college is a junkie and his drug is football. We went to a smallish university that doesn't have a football team. Yet he has adopted the college his wife went to as his team. It is about a 90 minute drive from his house to the stadium and he goes to every home game. He goes to most of the road games. He only misses 1 or 2 road games a year. Then he goes to every home game of our local NFL team and between 2 and 4 of their road games every year. Every year the prices on his tickets (college and professional) get raised. He pays it. He wears a headset to listen to the game on radio while he is in the stands watching it to be sure he doesn't miss anything. He records the NFL games he watches in person on his DVD recorder from the TV broadcast to watch them again later. While I think my friend is nuts, he's got a mild case of addiction compared to some people. I have known fans of the University of Tennessee's football program that were far worse than my friend. I had one friend who went to school there and when the university was scheduled to play a game in Japan, he was honestly looking into spending over $1000 to go there to the game. I was shocked when he didn't go. I knew another U of T fan who used to wear his jersey EVERYWHERE, even when he went to Canada, in the hopes that wherever he was, he might find another supporter of his school. I remember telling him once that over a billion Chinese people really didn't care at all about US college football so he might put that into perspective about how important US college football was in the scheme of life on earth, but he didn't like that. So don't underestimate sports addiction as a motivator for putting up with this kind of abuse.
Seriously...who has SEVEN CHILDREN? On PURPOSE?
Mormons do. Here's a true story. At my 20th year high school reunion (I went to a large US high school and we had over 400 students in my graduating class) we had a small number of teachers who came by. Our principal, who had just retired, dropped by as well. I saw this guy with a lady who seemed to be his wife off to the side. The guy had completely gray hair and he looked to be over 50, as did his wife, who was also completely gray. I asked one of my friends who the guy was, figuring it was a teacher. I was shocked to find out it was a guy who graduated with us who I had quite a few classes with. He looked so old, I thought he was a teacher from years ago, but he wasn't even 40 years old yet. I found out that he and his wife (both Mormons) had either 7 or 8 surviving kids plus one who had died some years earlier. I guess having that many kids just sucked the life out of him because he looked old - really old.
Hans Rieser's explanation is at least plausible. Very attractive women often begin to believe that no rules apply to them.
I would also state that many people in the ex-USSR also believe that no rules apply to them. It's not just attractive women. A few years ago I was engaged to a Ukrainian woman. We didn't get married though. Long story short - her control freak ways and constant anger killed our relationship. I can tell you as someone who can speak Russian relatively well and has spent a lot of time in that part of the world that the USSR just ruined these people for the most part. It left behind a large number of completely amoral people as its legacy. Many Russian, Ukrainians, Belarussians, etc. have no problems with lying, stealing, etc. They use some weird psuedo-Robin Hood type justification for their actions - "rich" foreigners (all foreigners are rich to them) won't miss it, so they can lie and steal to get it. There's also this weird sense of entitlement that seems to permeate the entire society over there. Many people, maybe most of them, have completely unrealistic attitudes about money and wealth. As Jim Morrison sang once, "We want the world and we want it now!" These people have no concept at all of delayed gratification and they want to be rich today. Not tomorrow, but today. You really cannot comprehend how many people are on the take over there until you go there. Justice goes to whoever pays the most. You can literally get away with murder because you can buy off the cops to botch the investigation or pay off the judge to dismiss the charges.
Yes, it's true that the women are really beautiful over there. They take care of themselves, aren't fat, and care about their appearance in public. But there is a dark side to them that gets overlooked. They are controlling. They grow up learning that all men are unfaithful drunks so they don't respect men at all. The whole concept of forgiveness is foreign to them. I can tell you that if you ever make one of these women mad, so will never in a million years forgive you for whatever it was, no matter how trivial. She will bring that stuff up again and again and again. Many of them have no problems with sleeping with other guys. They will rationalize it by saying that they don't love the other guy, so it's OK to sleep with him because it's only being unfaithful if you love the other guy. There are a very few women who aren't like this who are basically normal by Western standards, but the odds are that you'd never meet one if you go over there.
My personal opinion is that she is not in Russia. Unless she got a forged passport (always possible I suppose, but unlikely I think), there would be a trace of her traveling by air. It's also not like these women to disappear. They are vindictive beyond belief. What a Russian woman would do is stick around and watch you suffer in court in a divorce trial by taking your money and kids. And honestly, it is almost impossible to find a Russian person who would willingly leave once they have a taste of life in America. I've known of women who came over almost totally unable to speak English and married guys they met through the internet. These marriages often go horribly wrong because neither party can speak the other's language and they don't know each other well. In these cases, the woman stayed after the marriage ended, even with very poor English skills. So whatever happened to this woman, I'm pretty sure she is not back in Russia.
The Pirate Bay could have been rather more subtle about it:
It would appear that you have never been to the site because subtlety isn't what The Pirate Bay is all about. I've found their email responses to takedown letters to be very humorous, but The Pirate Bay is about as subtle as a jackhammer.
Congress passes a law to protect US citizens from unscrupulous gambling operations that are not subject to the same kind of regulations that Casinos in the U.S. must meet
That is absolutely not why that law was passed. It was passed for several reasons. Your Congressperson, assuming he/she voted for the law, may not necessarily have cared about all of them.
1) Some people object to all gambling on religious reasons.
2) The US government was unable to track the money and thus generate tax revenue on gambling money flowing out of the country via the internet.
3) US gambling businesses were legally unable to do the same thing as the foreign companies and played the "Why can they do it if we can't?" card.
I can promise you that nobody in Congress was looking out for the best interests of US citizens. It was either just a generic objection to gambling (point #1) or all about the money (points #2 and #3).
So they are Suing RedHat and Novell for using whatever it is that violates the patent.
It's a common legal tactic that I believe is called the "Deep Pockets Theory". You sue the people with money (deep pockets) who are barely involved in the issue because the real offender can't pay you off. They know that they can't get any money from KDE and GNOME developers, so they go after the companies that use these products. Interestingly enough, they did not choose to sue Sun, who I believe distributes GNOME with Solaris.
Yes, this certainly smells of an action secretly run by Microsoft to try specifically to attack Linux. Novell was warned that they made a deal with the devil when they signed that deal with Microsoft. They aren't going to get much sympathy.