When faced with something so directly observable, they didn't have a lot of choice, did they?
This is where the definition of the word "Belief" is stressed a little.
True belief is the ability to see an apple fall hundreds of thousands of times and still have a true knowledge in your heart that some day it will rise UP instead, if God so wills it.
2) Design a tiny transmitter, they seemed to be saying these things could be "Daisy Chained" so you would only need to be near one bolt--that means a good transmitter taped to a watch battery could be as small as a quarter. You worked at the company, so figureing out the codes should be a no-brainer, they are probably as easy to hack as RFID.
3) Place the transmitter somewhere under/in a chair (maybe slit the fabric somewhere or bubble-gum attach it underneath on a few dozen planes.
4) It mid-flight, five flights later one goes of and unlatches all the seats, then starts sending an invalid signal every 5 minutes so they cannot be re-latched for landing.
5) send a letter to the airlines saying there are more set to go off in the future, but you'd be glad to sell them the locations
6) profit.
Yeah, I guess that sucks--probably why I'm not a theif.
A point you missed is that as far as I can tell, abstinence is an extremely unhealthy practice, it seems to literally make men sick. The obvious effect on priests has been documented, but that's only scratching the surface.
For a young man, too long a period without any kind of sex makes men much more obsessive about the opposite sex. This is probably why early religions decided to make this an "Evil", so that you would get obsessed with some girl and marry her and increase their holy army (Seems to be the driving force for everything the Catholic church has done).
Now, obviously any obsession is unhealthy, including pornography, but as the original article states, an obsession is usually filling a hole in the person's life--wouldn't it make more sense to fix the holes than to try and plug every potential obsession?
Although I completely agree with you, I can't correlate your post with the fact that I believe bloggers should not be subject to any limitations on what they blog about.
For that matter, publishers should be able to publish their opinion on political candidates.
How do we ensure that these "Opinions" don't become paid advertisements?
A serious question for the parent since you are passionate about the issue and we seem to have similar views.
Back when I was young, monopolies were considered BAD in the US.
Me too. I'm afraid Reagan ushered in a new age of stupidity in otherwise smart people.
So many of these new "free marketeers" are simply 100% ignorant of the ramifications of their beliefs. They have thought it out, and being otherwise intelligent people have decided that greed makes sense and if everyone would just be completely greedy, we'd have this perfect world...
It takes a faith stronger than any Christians' to continue to believe in a completely free market in the face of massive evidence that it needs significant controls, so trying to reason with them isn't useful. Also, remember that many of these people are quite smart and used to being right--it's much more difficult for such an individual to recognize when he's got good logic but is working from bad assumptions.
I think we have to wait for the next reset, probably a massively serious depression, before we swing back to a more worker-based system. Maybe next time we'll pass a few more permanent laws so that the next wave of "neo rich" can't dismantle them so easily.
Americans (Humans?) have such short memories and are doomed to repeat their mistakes no matter how clearly those who actually understand try to explain.
Use FireFox, Use FireFox, Use FireFox, Use FireFox...
I know I'm preaching to the choir, but maybe we need another round of "Spread the word". I keep the "Open in IE" function available for emergencies (like a root login), but by default I use a browser that is not so heavily integrated into the OS, is lighter weight and is peer reviewed.
Why aren't we ALL insisting on these features wherever possible???
All those little tweaks to ensure that Windows 3.1 wouldn't run this program or that, or would run it less efficiently than it's office equivalents are coming back to bite them in the ass?
Actually, there are a few very basic changes that seem so obvious but MS was apparently never able to take that just blow me away.
1) Separate the OS from the applications. You should be able to re-install the OS without re-installing ANY of the applications in any way. This is no technological feat, it's not even hard. You simply have it check for "OS Extensions" in some directory outside windows. The entire Windows OS Storage area should be locked down and NEVER change. The registry was actually a mistake because it encouraged even tighter binding between the OS and the apps.
2) Create an image right after boot and write it to the disk--from then on, boot from the image. Total boot time should be about 10 seconds, maybe less. Much like restoring from a "Hibernate" state (if that ever worked).
There is no reason to ever re-create that image unless your configuration changes. It is perfectly acceptable to tell the user to "Press a shift key if hardware changed" during boot up. Most changes are detected while running anyway and could set a flag to tell the system to boot up manually on the next boot.
3) Relegate all OLD apps to running in a VM. They could supply one VM for windows 3.x, one for 95/98 and one for XP, and there is no reason that it should be in any way noticeable to the user. In fact, I kind of think that may be how they are running old 3.x and dos apps now, just continue to follow that pattern.
4) Although "Root" access may be a difficult concept for many users, it would be trivial to have the OS prompt for a root password when it needed one and disallow defaulting to "Administrator" rights. This isn't perfectly secure and users could be tricked, but it would allow a simple notification that something was up.
This kind of stuff isn't really hard. If they'd stop tweaking transparency level of background widgets for a few months and start addressing the real problems, maybe they'd find they weren't running so far behind after all.
After everything had been cleared up, here is his apology:
"I am sorry that we had to go through the process and accusations to get the problem resolved. It could have been resolved a lot quicker if the initial correspondence with you provided the helpful information that was transmitted in the last messages. My initial contact with VIDIA disallowed any knowledge of creating the problem."
So essentially he was still blaming someone who helped him.
The last thing this guy deserves is respect.
What we really need is a test--you must pass some basic fundamental tests such as demonstrating a minimal ability to react sanely in the face of trivial disaster like your web page being down and show some understanding of the physical world around you to enter government.
If you are unable to demonstrate basic reasoning and some trivial level of intelligence, you should be relegated to some place where you can be cared for and kept from harming yourself or others with your ignorance.
From the article: "Schmidt was quick to say that the acquisition of Writely was not meant to create a competitor to Microsoft Office, which he said solves a complicated and important problem of work productivity..."
Schmidt went on to say "When we create something meant to compete with Microsoft Office, you'll know it."
Tell me, how is making the bank responsible and passing the cost to the consumer any worse than not giving the responsibility to the bank???
I mean, what you said is obvious, but you said it in a way that makes it look like you are counteracting the parent post--or maybe I'm misreading what you said.
The poster 2^ was absolutely right, you make the financial institutions 100% responsible because they are the only ones that can fix it. The cost gets distributed around somewhat, great! but the problem still gets solved.
Very similar to the extreme stupidity that is the "Trickle Down" theory. It works just as well to give the money to the poor and have them spend it on products produced by the rich corporations, but if you give the money to the rich corporations, most of it goes to shareholders and has a tendency to stay among the rich.
If the point wasn't making the rich richer, nobody would have ever thought of "Trickle Down" to justify the theft. Same problem with our more recent presidents giant donations to the rich, except he doesn't have to justify anything, nobody holds him accountable (Makes it all much easier).
...pretty much sucks. I think it has to do with trying to conform to rules built to simplify and decentralize battles and DM Maintenance when those goals are not at all interesting or useful on a PC based platform.
I've never played a good game from TSR, but I played them--pool of radiance, etc... the combat was always yucky and the depth of the character, compared to those of other RPGs (Say M&M or Bards Tale), was pretty minimal.
The feel was generally pretty poor too, but I assume that has to do with their contractors more than the fact that it was created from the company that owned D&D.
When the DS was unavailable a couple years a go it sold like hotcakes, same with xbox360 this year. Special colors (my wife wants a Pink DS) are only released in small quantities and therefore are highly desired.
Making people listen to a song on the radio without making it available for purchase means that it will hit the charts hard when it does release. Is there anyone who could possibly be surprised by this?
It's been a while since I got my Ultimate TV. It's a dead platform now, but mine keeps working and owners of other DVRs are still generally surprised with the usability.
When it dies I suppose I'll go with MythTV--so I haven't been following the TIVO stuff lately at all.
Last I heard, though, TIVO 2 was supposed to stop you from fast forwarding through commercials and allow broadcasters an awful lot of control over your box--possibly even over shows you have already recorded. The broadcasters have even begun to experiment with blocking their customers from recording.
Is this true? If so, does anyone actually buy these things? Is an alternative available (is tivo series 1 still available for instance)?
PS/OT One of the shows I've been watching...I forget which one, must be earl, the office or 2.5 men (I'm afraid it's probably the latter, sorry) seems to post little essays at the end of their show for like 1 second.
The last one (which is the first one I saw) discussed the writers experience "Bumping into" donald trump. It is targeted ONLY at pvr users, nobody else could read it, but it goes past so fast that it's just a glitch at the end of the show--doesn't take as long as "sit ubu, sit" or even "Gurr, argggg"
If an advertiser REALLY wanted to get the attention of PVR owners, he'd get together some good animators and build a 10 second comic book that you could step through frame by frame. You could throw it out at the end of a commercial, or even use the bottom 1/3 of the screen while the top 2/3 contained a traditional commercial.
I'm actually a little surprised that so few people have figured this out so far (I've seen it on B5 and the one I just related, and I understand there is a KFC commercial that's hiding a coupon or something)
In Oregon they charge $.05 per can when you buy drinks. When you recycle them, you get the money back. No net loss or gain for anyone, just a motivation to recycle! Stores that sell drinks are required to take back the aluminum for the deposit, so they have a slight burden--but I think most states already require such a system be available.
People apparently need this kind of feedback more often--why would any state not execute such a program?
Couldn't we also extend this to other wasteful products? For one thing, studded tires absolutely destroy roads--they appear to triple the number of times a heavily traveled highway must be redone. Why isn't that extra maintenance put into a studded-tire tax?
Companies that wish to deal with oil products should be paying to make the environment EXACTLY as clean as it would be without them--the price would obviously be reflected in the price of gas--fine.
And why aren't we building residential areas with embedded services? The areas I've seen that tried to do this have been fantastically popular! The ability to live within walking distance of a downtown area raises the price of a house significantly--including the little down-towns that include residence/storefront combo buildings.
The point my parent made about electricity is also fantastic. Companies are so interested in squeezing every last penny out of their pricing curves that they cannot see the advantage in pricing in a way that actually encourages conservation.
All these things are just one step away--what do they need? LAWS!
STOP saying that the government should not interfere in business--it's the ONLY thing they should interfere with! Stop saying that capitalism will make everything perfect if just left alone--that is a stupid, immature and uninformed fantasy created to justify greed. Wake up and watch how people really act (in the real world) instead of living in your little dream world of how people "Would be" if just left alone to their greed.
The funny part is that your parent post has so much invested into his "Scientific proof" that he'll never just look at what you typed and say "Oh, yeah, I never thought of that" and pour it out.
More often than not the fiscal conservatives that so often push these anti-environmental agendas are just as broken as the religious conservatives, but strangely enough often look down on the religious one claiming atheism as "the way" with a conviction as strong (and unfounded) as any christian religious nut.
I love living in this age, so much to observe and so little time left...
Most of the fun I've had playing MUDs and RPGs has been at low levels, espically when I didn't understand the game mechanics.
The higher level you become, the more route the game--until you are not enjoying it at all and are just playing it to regain the good times you had when you first started.
Another thing--I discovered 20 years ago or so that if I wanted to get myself to stop playing a game I was addicted to, all I had to do was use some cheat or exploit that made it easy, I'd immediately get sick of the lameness and stop playing.
Spending money to ruin a gameing experience that you are already paying for just seems silly. Why don't you create a new character and muck around the low levels instead?
Those big high-level fights aren't that much fun anyway.
Oh, a quick fix for this crap? My first mud (Scepter of Goth--essentially THE first mud) had a great system. When you die if you make your constution roll you lost 2 levels, if not you lost half your levels, either way you lose 1 point of con (standard 1-18 range), when you reach 0--start a new char.
This along with a little less power gained per level really makes the game more playable--LEROY might have been a little more careful under those rules--gives 'em something to lose.
Why not look at CD pricing? They have been fixing this crap for decades. Why do we NEVER see market aberrations? We should see the occasional new CD come out for $5.00, right? Everyone involved would still make money, so you'd figure there would HAVE to be a label out there trying to undercut the others this way--at least an ATTEMPT.
The best products represent a collaboration between programmers, designers, artists, usability experts, documenters, and experts in the target market. Open Source needs a lot more than programmers to achieve that.
So it's not "The Best Product". Most open source starts as programmers doing something for themselves. They are the producer and customer of the software.
It's funny how non-programmers say that open source is/isn't successful by examining it's marketing. Marketing is irrelevant, as is usage. People used Linux long before it was mainstream and it helped their business, if others choose not to recognize the advantage, that's not Linux's failure at all.
If your hobby is fishing, do you consider a trip to the lake successful if you are alone catching fish, or is it only successful if you have people lining the shore cheering with each catch (and begging you to throw the fish to them, of course)?
I was going to object to the wording "prejudice against religion or big business". but it really made me think...
I'm also prejudice against evil, greed, hate, ignorance, murder, stealing, corruption and encouraging child-molestation through practices like abstinence and denial.
I suppose if you are not prejudiced against the latter group, you are quite likely to embrace the former.
Thanks, this really helped me understand some stuff. Mod the parent up!
But let's look at an extreme example - I own an ISP that is blocked by Google. All of my users want access to Google, users leave, I am caused financial hardships.
Okay, so this is your "Extreme" example. Let's see how that works.
Sometimes when I do searches for complicated Java questions on Google I come across a (always the same) pay for answers site.
This is a complete abuse of Google. You really think that google doesn't have the right--or business obligation to block these guys?
Same with anyone else who feeds their pagerank system, it's stated in their usage agreement.
You may not WANT them to block your site because it costs you money, but then you may want me to send you money and I'll tell you right now I'm just not gonna do it.
What makes you think you are entitled to that revenue forwarded from someone else's site?
If google shuts down, can you sue them??? No, but if they delist your site (Exactly same effect on you) you can? Well, of course you can always sue someone and you might just win--there is a lot of ignorance out there (and in here)--but that has nothing to do with the law...
You're kinda missing the implication here. The point is that Intel is paying Skype to do this, It doesn't really have anything to do with technical ability or processor speed.
Since when did allowing someone to access my web server become a right instead of a privilege that I specifically grant and can take away from anyone I choose at any time?
If I want to block all addresses starting with 66.6.x.x because i don't like the number 666, I have every right to.
That's like saying that just because a person hasn't done anything illegal you are required to let them walk though your house.
Damn there are a lot of strange opinions stated as fact on/.
Now, if it's a provider that I am using, I as a customer have the right to demand that they fix their broken router or I go to another provider--and I might even have the ability to sue, but that's a big maybe.
Another example. My firewall blocks everyone I don't specifically allow to access my web server. Am I doing something illegal?
Slashdot Mirror
When faced with something so directly observable, they didn't have a lot of choice, did they?
This is where the definition of the word "Belief" is stressed a little.
True belief is the ability to see an apple fall hundreds of thousands of times and still have a true knowledge in your heart that some day it will rise UP instead, if God so wills it.
I'd be seriously tempted to earn my millions...
1) Wait for full deplyoment.
2) Design a tiny transmitter, they seemed to be saying these things could be "Daisy Chained" so you would only need to be near one bolt--that means a good transmitter taped to a watch battery could be as small as a quarter. You worked at the company, so figureing out the codes should be a no-brainer, they are probably as easy to hack as RFID.
3) Place the transmitter somewhere under/in a chair (maybe slit the fabric somewhere or bubble-gum attach it underneath on a few dozen planes.
4) It mid-flight, five flights later one goes of and unlatches all the seats, then starts sending an invalid signal every 5 minutes so they cannot be re-latched for landing.
5) send a letter to the airlines saying there are more set to go off in the future, but you'd be glad to sell them the locations
6) profit.
Yeah, I guess that sucks--probably why I'm not a theif.
A point you missed is that as far as I can tell, abstinence is an extremely unhealthy practice, it seems to literally make men sick. The obvious effect on priests has been documented, but that's only scratching the surface.
For a young man, too long a period without any kind of sex makes men much more obsessive about the opposite sex. This is probably why early religions decided to make this an "Evil", so that you would get obsessed with some girl and marry her and increase their holy army (Seems to be the driving force for everything the Catholic church has done).
Now, obviously any obsession is unhealthy, including pornography, but as the original article states, an obsession is usually filling a hole in the person's life--wouldn't it make more sense to fix the holes than to try and plug every potential obsession?
Although I completely agree with you, I can't correlate your post with the fact that I believe bloggers should not be subject to any limitations on what they blog about.
For that matter, publishers should be able to publish their opinion on political candidates.
How do we ensure that these "Opinions" don't become paid advertisements?
A serious question for the parent since you are passionate about the issue and we seem to have similar views.
Back when I was young, monopolies were considered BAD in the US.
Me too. I'm afraid Reagan ushered in a new age of stupidity in otherwise smart people.
So many of these new "free marketeers" are simply 100% ignorant of the ramifications of their beliefs. They have thought it out, and being otherwise intelligent people have decided that greed makes sense and if everyone would just be completely greedy, we'd have this perfect world...
It takes a faith stronger than any Christians' to continue to believe in a completely free market in the face of massive evidence that it needs significant controls, so trying to reason with them isn't useful. Also, remember that many of these people are quite smart and used to being right--it's much more difficult for such an individual to recognize when he's got good logic but is working from bad assumptions.
I think we have to wait for the next reset, probably a massively serious depression, before we swing back to a more worker-based system. Maybe next time we'll pass a few more permanent laws so that the next wave of "neo rich" can't dismantle them so easily.
Americans (Humans?) have such short memories and are doomed to repeat their mistakes no matter how clearly those who actually understand try to explain.
Use FireFox, Use FireFox, Use FireFox, Use FireFox...
I know I'm preaching to the choir, but maybe we need another round of "Spread the word". I keep the "Open in IE" function available for emergencies (like a root login), but by default I use a browser that is not so heavily integrated into the OS, is lighter weight and is peer reviewed.
Why aren't we ALL insisting on these features wherever possible???
All those little tweaks to ensure that Windows 3.1 wouldn't run this program or that, or would run it less efficiently than it's office equivalents are coming back to bite them in the ass?
Actually, there are a few very basic changes that seem so obvious but MS was apparently never able to take that just blow me away.
1) Separate the OS from the applications. You should be able to re-install the OS without re-installing ANY of the applications in any way. This is no technological feat, it's not even hard. You simply have it check for "OS Extensions" in some directory outside windows. The entire Windows OS Storage area should be locked down and NEVER change. The registry was actually a mistake because it encouraged even tighter binding between the OS and the apps.
2) Create an image right after boot and write it to the disk--from then on, boot from the image. Total boot time should be about 10 seconds, maybe less. Much like restoring from a "Hibernate" state (if that ever worked).
There is no reason to ever re-create that image unless your configuration changes. It is perfectly acceptable to tell the user to "Press a shift key if hardware changed" during boot up. Most changes are detected while running anyway and could set a flag to tell the system to boot up manually on the next boot.
3) Relegate all OLD apps to running in a VM. They could supply one VM for windows 3.x, one for 95/98 and one for XP, and there is no reason that it should be in any way noticeable to the user. In fact, I kind of think that may be how they are running old 3.x and dos apps now, just continue to follow that pattern.
4) Although "Root" access may be a difficult concept for many users, it would be trivial to have the OS prompt for a root password when it needed one and disallow defaulting to "Administrator" rights. This isn't perfectly secure and users could be tricked, but it would allow a simple notification that something was up.
This kind of stuff isn't really hard. If they'd stop tweaking transparency level of background widgets for a few months and start addressing the real problems, maybe they'd find they weren't running so far behind after all.
After everything had been cleared up, here is his apology:
"I am sorry that we had to go through the process and accusations to get the problem resolved. It could have been resolved a lot quicker if the initial correspondence with you provided the helpful information that was transmitted in the last messages. My initial contact with VIDIA disallowed any knowledge of creating the problem."
So essentially he was still blaming someone who helped him.
The last thing this guy deserves is respect.
What we really need is a test--you must pass some basic fundamental tests such as demonstrating a minimal ability to react sanely in the face of trivial disaster like your web page being down and show some understanding of the physical world around you to enter government.
If you are unable to demonstrate basic reasoning and some trivial level of intelligence, you should be relegated to some place where you can be cared for and kept from harming yourself or others with your ignorance.
Just jumped the shark.
i41 WON AOL's.
From the article: "Schmidt was quick to say that the acquisition of Writely was not meant to create a competitor to Microsoft Office, which he said solves a complicated and important problem of work productivity..."
Schmidt went on to say "When we create something meant to compete with Microsoft Office, you'll know it."
"No one will need more than 637 kb of memory for a personal computer."
"We will never make a 32-bit operating system, but I'll always love IBM." (at the launch of MSX)
"There are no significant bugs in our released software that any significant number of users want fixed." (1995)
"There are people who don't like capitalism, and people who don't like PCs. But there's no one who likes the PC who doesn't like Microsoft."
Tell me, how is making the bank responsible and passing the cost to the consumer any worse than not giving the responsibility to the bank???
I mean, what you said is obvious, but you said it in a way that makes it look like you are counteracting the parent post--or maybe I'm misreading what you said.
The poster 2^ was absolutely right, you make the financial institutions 100% responsible because they are the only ones that can fix it. The cost gets distributed around somewhat, great! but the problem still gets solved.
Very similar to the extreme stupidity that is the "Trickle Down" theory. It works just as well to give the money to the poor and have them spend it on products produced by the rich corporations, but if you give the money to the rich corporations, most of it goes to shareholders and has a tendency to stay among the rich.
If the point wasn't making the rich richer, nobody would have ever thought of "Trickle Down" to justify the theft. Same problem with our more recent presidents giant donations to the rich, except he doesn't have to justify anything, nobody holds him accountable (Makes it all much easier).
...pretty much sucks. I think it has to do with trying to conform to rules built to simplify and decentralize battles and DM Maintenance when those goals are not at all interesting or useful on a PC based platform.
I've never played a good game from TSR, but I played them--pool of radiance, etc... the combat was always yucky and the depth of the character, compared to those of other RPGs (Say M&M or Bards Tale), was pretty minimal.
The feel was generally pretty poor too, but I assume that has to do with their contractors more than the fact that it was created from the company that owned D&D.
When the DS was unavailable a couple years a go it sold like hotcakes, same with xbox360 this year. Special colors (my wife wants a Pink DS) are only released in small quantities and therefore are highly desired.
Making people listen to a song on the radio without making it available for purchase means that it will hit the charts hard when it does release. Is there anyone who could possibly be surprised by this?
It's been a while since I got my Ultimate TV. It's a dead platform now, but mine keeps working and owners of other DVRs are still generally surprised with the usability.
When it dies I suppose I'll go with MythTV--so I haven't been following the TIVO stuff lately at all.
Last I heard, though, TIVO 2 was supposed to stop you from fast forwarding through commercials and allow broadcasters an awful lot of control over your box--possibly even over shows you have already recorded. The broadcasters have even begun to experiment with blocking their customers from recording.
Is this true? If so, does anyone actually buy these things? Is an alternative available (is tivo series 1 still available for instance)?
PS/OT
One of the shows I've been watching...I forget which one, must be earl, the office or 2.5 men (I'm afraid it's probably the latter, sorry) seems to post little essays at the end of their show for like 1 second.
The last one (which is the first one I saw) discussed the writers experience "Bumping into" donald trump. It is targeted ONLY at pvr users, nobody else could read it, but it goes past so fast that it's just a glitch at the end of the show--doesn't take as long as "sit ubu, sit" or even "Gurr, argggg"
If an advertiser REALLY wanted to get the attention of PVR owners, he'd get together some good animators and build a 10 second comic book that you could step through frame by frame. You could throw it out at the end of a commercial, or even use the bottom 1/3 of the screen while the top 2/3 contained a traditional commercial.
I'm actually a little surprised that so few people have figured this out so far (I've seen it on B5 and the one I just related, and I understand there is a KFC commercial that's hiding a coupon or something)
Sorry about the O/T
In Oregon they charge $.05 per can when you buy drinks. When you recycle them, you get the money back. No net loss or gain for anyone, just a motivation to recycle! Stores that sell drinks are required to take back the aluminum for the deposit, so they have a slight burden--but I think most states already require such a system be available.
People apparently need this kind of feedback more often--why would any state not execute such a program?
Couldn't we also extend this to other wasteful products? For one thing, studded tires absolutely destroy roads--they appear to triple the number of times a heavily traveled highway must be redone. Why isn't that extra maintenance put into a studded-tire tax?
Companies that wish to deal with oil products should be paying to make the environment EXACTLY as clean as it would be without them--the price would obviously be reflected in the price of gas--fine.
And why aren't we building residential areas with embedded services? The areas I've seen that tried to do this have been fantastically popular! The ability to live within walking distance of a downtown area raises the price of a house significantly--including the little down-towns that include residence/storefront combo buildings.
The point my parent made about electricity is also fantastic. Companies are so interested in squeezing every last penny out of their pricing curves that they cannot see the advantage in pricing in a way that actually encourages conservation.
All these things are just one step away--what do they need? LAWS!
STOP saying that the government should not interfere in business--it's the ONLY thing they should interfere with! Stop saying that capitalism will make everything perfect if just left alone--that is a stupid, immature and uninformed fantasy created to justify greed. Wake up and watch how people really act (in the real world) instead of living in your little dream world of how people "Would be" if just left alone to their greed.
The funny part is that your parent post has so much invested into his "Scientific proof" that he'll never just look at what you typed and say "Oh, yeah, I never thought of that" and pour it out.
More often than not the fiscal conservatives that so often push these anti-environmental agendas are just as broken as the religious conservatives, but strangely enough often look down on the religious one claiming atheism as "the way" with a conviction as strong (and unfounded) as any christian religious nut.
I love living in this age, so much to observe and so little time left...
Most of the fun I've had playing MUDs and RPGs has been at low levels, espically when I didn't understand the game mechanics.
The higher level you become, the more route the game--until you are not enjoying it at all and are just playing it to regain the good times you had when you first started.
Another thing--I discovered 20 years ago or so that if I wanted to get myself to stop playing a game I was addicted to, all I had to do was use some cheat or exploit that made it easy, I'd immediately get sick of the lameness and stop playing.
Spending money to ruin a gameing experience that you are already paying for just seems silly. Why don't you create a new character and muck around the low levels instead?
Those big high-level fights aren't that much fun anyway.
Oh, a quick fix for this crap? My first mud (Scepter of Goth--essentially THE first mud) had a great system. When you die if you make your constution roll you lost 2 levels, if not you lost half your levels, either way you lose 1 point of con (standard 1-18 range), when you reach 0--start a new char.
This along with a little less power gained per level really makes the game more playable--LEROY might have been a little more careful under those rules--gives 'em something to lose.
It also REALLY stops the macro farmers.
Why not look at CD pricing? They have been fixing this crap for decades. Why do we NEVER see market aberrations? We should see the occasional new CD come out for $5.00, right? Everyone involved would still make money, so you'd figure there would HAVE to be a label out there trying to undercut the others this way--at least an ATTEMPT.
The best products represent a collaboration between programmers, designers, artists, usability experts, documenters, and experts in the target market. Open Source needs a lot more than programmers to achieve that.
So it's not "The Best Product". Most open source starts as programmers doing something for themselves. They are the producer and customer of the software.
It's funny how non-programmers say that open source is/isn't successful by examining it's marketing. Marketing is irrelevant, as is usage. People used Linux long before it was mainstream and it helped their business, if others choose not to recognize the advantage, that's not Linux's failure at all.
If your hobby is fishing, do you consider a trip to the lake successful if you are alone catching fish, or is it only successful if you have people lining the shore cheering with each catch (and begging you to throw the fish to them, of course)?
That's a pretty good analogy actually...
I was going to object to the wording "prejudice against religion or big business". but it really made me think...
I'm also prejudice against evil, greed, hate, ignorance, murder, stealing, corruption and encouraging child-molestation through practices like abstinence and denial.
I suppose if you are not prejudiced against the latter group, you are quite likely to embrace the former.
Thanks, this really helped me understand some stuff. Mod the parent up!
But let's look at an extreme example - I own an ISP that is blocked by Google. All of my users want access to Google, users leave, I am caused financial hardships.
Okay, so this is your "Extreme" example. Let's see how that works.
Sometimes when I do searches for complicated Java questions on Google I come across a (always the same) pay for answers site.
This is a complete abuse of Google. You really think that google doesn't have the right--or business obligation to block these guys?
Same with anyone else who feeds their pagerank system, it's stated in their usage agreement.
You may not WANT them to block your site because it costs you money, but then you may want me to send you money and I'll tell you right now I'm just not gonna do it.
What makes you think you are entitled to that revenue forwarded from someone else's site?
If google shuts down, can you sue them??? No, but if they delist your site (Exactly same effect on you) you can? Well, of course you can always sue someone and you might just win--there is a lot of ignorance out there (and in here)--but that has nothing to do with the law...
You're kinda missing the implication here. The point is that Intel is paying Skype to do this, It doesn't really have anything to do with technical ability or processor speed.
Since when did allowing someone to access my web server become a right instead of a privilege that I specifically grant and can take away from anyone I choose at any time?
/.
If I want to block all addresses starting with 66.6.x.x because i don't like the number 666, I have every right to.
That's like saying that just because a person hasn't done anything illegal you are required to let them walk though your house.
Damn there are a lot of strange opinions stated as fact on
Now, if it's a provider that I am using, I as a customer have the right to demand that they fix their broken router or I go to another provider--and I might even have the ability to sue, but that's a big maybe.
Another example. My firewall blocks everyone I don't specifically allow to access my web server. Am I doing something illegal?