That is actually a really good point. We have no such law in AZ that I'm aware but my biology teacher went over all of that stuff. He went over evolution, creationism, and then basically pointed out how ridiculous creationism is. Not to sound dramatic, but that class was life changing. That's when I decided I was agnostic and then eventually atheist. Shitty science teachers will continue doing the same bad teaching they were doing and good teachers will use this as an opportunity to lay out all the flaws in creationism. Or at least, that's what I would assume.
That's the problem though. The wording. People get all caught up on this wording and use it for these terrible arguments. You are, of course correct...but that doesn't change the sad reality of the matter.
That education chalk board picture where 2+2=5 has never been seemed so relevant.
Some day, I'm hoping that all these retarded laws get bitch slapped back. Is it just that I'm young or are these people become more shrill and outspoken about this kind of idiocy? I'm only 25 and I'm hoping this is just a phase before we inevitably tell them all the shut the hell up and move on with things.
It has become increasingly apparently that the 4xxx line was ATi's red headed step child. Everyone with cards AFTER that line seems okay but everyone with a card in that line has the exact same issues I do. It has however been bad enough that I don't think I'm ever going to buy an ATi card again. I'm not even kidding. You have no idea. I guess we'll see but after all the bullshit I've had to deal with, regardless of it being the driver or Catalyst, I am VERY leery about buying another ATi card.
I wouldn't choose them for a Windows machine anyway because they make shitty drivers. You're doing yourself a favor...trust me. I've had a 4870x2 for a year or two now and I've never had such hell with drivers. Just imagine your video driver crashing on YOUTUBE. Or simply refusing to play flash videos properly when hardware acceleration is enabled. Bask in the glory of losing all your catalyst settings in every single upgrade or even just rebooting your computer sometimes.
They certainly have modified their business model to battle piracy and they're failing at it. Is there a single game on the market that you cannot pirate? Other than perhaps an MMO? Hell, even then...don't people setup pirate WoW servers?
However, where exactly did you get the 90% number? I dare say that sounds like you're completely pulling that out of your ass.
Actually, Cox generally isn't first in line. I've had them as an ISP since I was like 14. They aren't perfect but they've always been pretty good guys about most things. They gave us free speed upgrades as they improved their networks over the years and they don't generally seem to find themselves at the top of lists like this. I don't see Cox throttling people, blocking BitTorrent, or engaging in some of the more disgusting practices I see other ISPs in (though I did see their custom search for invalid domains at some point...but then I am not using them for DNS anymore). I always keep a keen eye on that since I've always had them. They did go the way other ISPs did and hide bandwidth caps in their contract but I've never heard of them actually enforcing it before. I think you basically have to be a total jackass downloading TBs of data every month to get on their bad side because I download quite a bit.
Maybe I'm missing stuff over the years but Cox actually seems to be pretty cool for the most part...at least in Arizona. I guess YMMV.
They do irritate me with the port 80 and 25 blocking though. I don't buy the bullshit about how they're protecting their networks because it's clearly a ploy to get you to pay for their MUCH more expensive business internet. I understand that it's on a different network apparently, but that's bullshit. If I want to run a web server on the internet connection, why would you care? Hell, I'll sign an agreement that you can cut it off if you find zombies on my network. I paid for the connection and while I completely understand why you'd block it by default, I'm highly irritated that you basically want me to pay to have it unblocked. If I have the knowledge to ask you to unblock it, I think I should be trusted not to abuse it and if I do...just block it again. I'm not a child. I'm paying you money. Of course EVERY OTHER ISP does this...but that doesn't make it any less annoying.
I wish that these god damn ISPs would just be the dumb pipe I want. I'm sick of playing around with bullshit like the subject of this article or the port blocking things I mentioned above. Give me my internet connection and then leave me the fuck alone.
I run mine on a completely non-standard port via port forwarding at the router.:D
Extra security through obscurity, yes, but hey, most people only bother with the low hanging fruit. It's already encrypted and me not using that port probably stops a shit ton of attacks.
I've seen so many exploits with VNC over the years that it is ridiculous. I'm not a huge fan of Microsoft, but if you're trying to tell me that the VNC servers are a more secure product, you're insane. I was once sitting at my computer and actually had a delightful conversation with someone that hacked into my server while I was physically sitting at it. I immediately switched VNC vendors but I'll never forget that. I always kept it up to date so that was rather horrifying. I hear things like this about VNC server ALL THE TIME. There seem to constantly be new exploits like this and I'm not sure why. Maybe because most Linux users are on SSH and most Windows users use RDP?
Maybe it's just the Windows versions, I dunno, but holy shit. The command line is just so crappy and foreign to me in Windows that I can't get anything done without GUI (and I'm quite fast with GUI). Give me good old SSH on a Linux box and I'm good to go but I need my GUI tools in Windows unfortunately. As it is right now, I've got the webserver and whatnot running inside a virtualbox on my Windows machine that runs all my media center software as well as various other kinds of servers (minecraft etc). Quite frankly, it's just easier to RDP into it than anything else because there are several different types of things I need to dick with.
Why do people keep posting this? It has been explained a thousand times here on Slashdot in topics like this. Every. Single. Time. They do not have common carrier status because this isn't a phone service. It would be nice if they did, but they don't. Fact of the matter is that they 0 fucks to give.
They might change their tune when the ISPs that aren't owned by a media company (strange coincidence, that one) realize they're losing customers. Or maybe not (depends on who much money the *AA's are giving them). Maybe they'll just keep hamstringing it along and all this is really just a consolidation of existing annoyances processes with a bit of escalation. Up until now, they mostly just emailed you. I have to think that cutting off people's internet is not good for business and hope that they'll eventually tell the *AA where they can take it and put it.
I can't help but think this is probably illegal somehow but that it won't matter. That would require the government who is bought off by Hollywood to actually prosecute them for it and I'd be willing to bet that they actually had a hand in this.
Or how about the obvious sentiment that EVERYONE STARTS SOMEWHERE. No one starts out murdering people, for fuck's sake. You might as well claim that most criminals start out breathing air. Yeah...no shit.
I think it is partly that it is a pain in the ass to switch and partly that we don't really have to. People cater to us and our stupid measurements and we aren't forced to adapt. When we do finally switch (because it does just need to happen) it will really suck. I recognize that the metric system is superior mathematically, but I cannot think in metric having grown up with the English system. I have no idea how many meters tall I am or how much I weight or any of that. It seems like one of those things that we can "switch" to but will take forever to ACTUALLY switch to because you essentially have to wait for all of us to adapt to it. Hell, plenty of "metric" countries still use non-metric measurements. In Canada they still weigh themselves in pounds half the time and I'm fairly certain they measure their heights by feet still (I talk to Canadians rather frequently). It's an odd hodgepodge of measurements.
Right, I'm sure it has nothing to do with what an enormous pain in the ass it is to convert the entirety of the United States to a different system of measurement. It's not like this is a big place or anything, we could do it in a weekend. No, it must be because we hate the French.
I mean come on, that's stupid. No one likes the French...it isn't just us. Give us a little credit here.
It's complete for me. I couldn't give less of a shit about PvP. I don't play Diablo for that and I don't think Diablo was ever really focused on it either. Single/cooperative play is where it's at for this game. Like the GP said, this signals that they are spending all their time on single and for me well...that is just fine.
With the way the skill systems are, they at least won't be able to destroy your character build as far as skills go. With Diablo 3, you would simply start using different skills. The upshot of this, for me, is that I only need to have 1 of each character class in this game. I think I'll like that.:)
Honestly, I don't see the issue with this. Especially if you aren't torrenting (which requires you to share). If I hop on Usenet and download a copy of a movie I own...all I'm doing is taking advantage of the scene ripping the movie FOR me. Hell, they're better at it than I am anyway so there we go. The funny part here too is that it takes me less time to download a digital copy than it would to rip it. The only times I have to rip my own media is when the thing I'm looking for simple isn't on the internet (example: Drinking show called Three Sheets...I got the DVDs and had to rip them myself).
The only really illegal thing I see there is people downloading things that they don't own and the scene people getting busted for making it available, but I hardly see what that has to do with ME.:p
I do have a right for words to be used properly though don't I? The word unlimited means that there are no limits...you know UN-LIMITED. If they want to sell plans based on bandwidth, then just do it. All the other carriers do. If I go to T-Mobile right now, they tell me I can get different tiers of data at high speeds and after I hit my limit, I get bumped down to 2G. It's called, not lying. AT&T should try it some time.
Of course the whole idea of limiting our bandwidth is fucking ridiculous to me, but that is a different discussion that I'm not going to bother with right now.
To underscore this point, we've already seen plenty of games for years now that look a LOT better on PC. More detailed, higher resolutions, textures, tessellation, physics processing, etc. I have no idea why anyone would claim that consoles are in any way superior technologically especially considering that all a console is basically...is a PC with specialized stuff inside that doesn't change for 5+ years. When a console first comes out, yeah, the hardware is pretty sweet, but in this last generation especially we watched PCs blow right past that within a year or two. In fact, consoles are SO far behind now that they've been holding back the PC games because developers are too lazy to use all that power and instead port their console games over to PC rather than the other way around.
I have a pretty nice PC, a PS3, a Wii, and recently acquired an XBOX 360 for the wife. I think I can say the above with a fair bit of confidence having played games on all platforms for the past few years. Whether or not they sell more games on console is a whole other matter, but the consoles are most certainly not more advanced than PCs. That is patently absurd. Look at real world performance, not stupid shit like how many cores or what the bandwidth is on the PCI-E. That means jack shit in the end.
Right, because breathalyzers are never wrong and neither are cops. Innocent people get caught up in this shit. It's kind of scary when you read about how many things they can fuck up.
Have a look at this. Come off your high horse for a minute. Not everyone that gets busted is doing something wrong. This issue has been blown so far out of proportion that it has become ridiculous. They inflated statistics and force draconian measures on us all in the name of preventing drunk driving but the rules have gotten so far out of control that they're basically pulling in people that aren't drunk and if they can't get them for something they'll try and get something like "intoxicated to the slightest degree" so even if you had 1 beer with a friend before you went to drive, you might still be fucked. That's not drunk driving and it is not justice. It's damn lies and statistics ruining people's lives over nothing.
There are plenty of shitty people that are ACTUALLY driving around drunk so why don't we just process them and stop trying for these little technicalities?
Every single thing you've just whined about can easily be changed. The menu bar especially. Also...why do you need a status bar so bad? The purpose of the status bar was to show the URL you were hovering over mostly and it still does that...so I don't understand this complaint everyone has.
You guys are seriously just ridiculous. You use the most customizable browser in the history of browsers and bitch when anything changes when you know damn well how easy it is to change back. For fuck's sake, you're whining about the fucking MENUS AT THE TOP. That takes 3 clicks to change. The status bar you so desperately need is now in an addon if you need it so bad. OR you could just try something new for a bit and realize that it really doesn't matter and that you're just stubborn and bitching about nothing.
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I still think the OP has a point. Learning to support the points through debate/argument is still a valuable skill.
That is actually a really good point. We have no such law in AZ that I'm aware but my biology teacher went over all of that stuff. He went over evolution, creationism, and then basically pointed out how ridiculous creationism is. Not to sound dramatic, but that class was life changing. That's when I decided I was agnostic and then eventually atheist. Shitty science teachers will continue doing the same bad teaching they were doing and good teachers will use this as an opportunity to lay out all the flaws in creationism. Or at least, that's what I would assume.
That's the problem though. The wording. People get all caught up on this wording and use it for these terrible arguments. You are, of course correct...but that doesn't change the sad reality of the matter.
That education chalk board picture where 2+2=5 has never been seemed so relevant.
Some day, I'm hoping that all these retarded laws get bitch slapped back. Is it just that I'm young or are these people become more shrill and outspoken about this kind of idiocy? I'm only 25 and I'm hoping this is just a phase before we inevitably tell them all the shut the hell up and move on with things.
It has become increasingly apparently that the 4xxx line was ATi's red headed step child. Everyone with cards AFTER that line seems okay but everyone with a card in that line has the exact same issues I do. It has however been bad enough that I don't think I'm ever going to buy an ATi card again. I'm not even kidding. You have no idea. I guess we'll see but after all the bullshit I've had to deal with, regardless of it being the driver or Catalyst, I am VERY leery about buying another ATi card.
I wouldn't choose them for a Windows machine anyway because they make shitty drivers. You're doing yourself a favor...trust me. I've had a 4870x2 for a year or two now and I've never had such hell with drivers. Just imagine your video driver crashing on YOUTUBE. Or simply refusing to play flash videos properly when hardware acceleration is enabled. Bask in the glory of losing all your catalyst settings in every single upgrade or even just rebooting your computer sometimes.
They certainly have modified their business model to battle piracy and they're failing at it. Is there a single game on the market that you cannot pirate? Other than perhaps an MMO? Hell, even then...don't people setup pirate WoW servers?
However, where exactly did you get the 90% number? I dare say that sounds like you're completely pulling that out of your ass.
Actually, Cox generally isn't first in line. I've had them as an ISP since I was like 14. They aren't perfect but they've always been pretty good guys about most things. They gave us free speed upgrades as they improved their networks over the years and they don't generally seem to find themselves at the top of lists like this. I don't see Cox throttling people, blocking BitTorrent, or engaging in some of the more disgusting practices I see other ISPs in (though I did see their custom search for invalid domains at some point...but then I am not using them for DNS anymore). I always keep a keen eye on that since I've always had them. They did go the way other ISPs did and hide bandwidth caps in their contract but I've never heard of them actually enforcing it before. I think you basically have to be a total jackass downloading TBs of data every month to get on their bad side because I download quite a bit.
Maybe I'm missing stuff over the years but Cox actually seems to be pretty cool for the most part...at least in Arizona. I guess YMMV.
They do irritate me with the port 80 and 25 blocking though. I don't buy the bullshit about how they're protecting their networks because it's clearly a ploy to get you to pay for their MUCH more expensive business internet. I understand that it's on a different network apparently, but that's bullshit. If I want to run a web server on the internet connection, why would you care? Hell, I'll sign an agreement that you can cut it off if you find zombies on my network. I paid for the connection and while I completely understand why you'd block it by default, I'm highly irritated that you basically want me to pay to have it unblocked. If I have the knowledge to ask you to unblock it, I think I should be trusted not to abuse it and if I do...just block it again. I'm not a child. I'm paying you money. Of course EVERY OTHER ISP does this...but that doesn't make it any less annoying.
I wish that these god damn ISPs would just be the dumb pipe I want. I'm sick of playing around with bullshit like the subject of this article or the port blocking things I mentioned above. Give me my internet connection and then leave me the fuck alone.
I run mine on a completely non-standard port via port forwarding at the router. :D
Extra security through obscurity, yes, but hey, most people only bother with the low hanging fruit. It's already encrypted and me not using that port probably stops a shit ton of attacks.
I've seen so many exploits with VNC over the years that it is ridiculous. I'm not a huge fan of Microsoft, but if you're trying to tell me that the VNC servers are a more secure product, you're insane. I was once sitting at my computer and actually had a delightful conversation with someone that hacked into my server while I was physically sitting at it. I immediately switched VNC vendors but I'll never forget that. I always kept it up to date so that was rather horrifying. I hear things like this about VNC server ALL THE TIME. There seem to constantly be new exploits like this and I'm not sure why. Maybe because most Linux users are on SSH and most Windows users use RDP?
Maybe it's just the Windows versions, I dunno, but holy shit. The command line is just so crappy and foreign to me in Windows that I can't get anything done without GUI (and I'm quite fast with GUI). Give me good old SSH on a Linux box and I'm good to go but I need my GUI tools in Windows unfortunately. As it is right now, I've got the webserver and whatnot running inside a virtualbox on my Windows machine that runs all my media center software as well as various other kinds of servers (minecraft etc). Quite frankly, it's just easier to RDP into it than anything else because there are several different types of things I need to dick with.
Why do people keep posting this? It has been explained a thousand times here on Slashdot in topics like this. Every. Single. Time. They do not have common carrier status because this isn't a phone service. It would be nice if they did, but they don't. Fact of the matter is that they 0 fucks to give.
They might change their tune when the ISPs that aren't owned by a media company (strange coincidence, that one) realize they're losing customers. Or maybe not (depends on who much money the *AA's are giving them). Maybe they'll just keep hamstringing it along and all this is really just a consolidation of existing annoyances processes with a bit of escalation. Up until now, they mostly just emailed you. I have to think that cutting off people's internet is not good for business and hope that they'll eventually tell the *AA where they can take it and put it.
I can't help but think this is probably illegal somehow but that it won't matter. That would require the government who is bought off by Hollywood to actually prosecute them for it and I'd be willing to bet that they actually had a hand in this.
Or how about the obvious sentiment that EVERYONE STARTS SOMEWHERE. No one starts out murdering people, for fuck's sake. You might as well claim that most criminals start out breathing air. Yeah...no shit.
I think it is partly that it is a pain in the ass to switch and partly that we don't really have to. People cater to us and our stupid measurements and we aren't forced to adapt. When we do finally switch (because it does just need to happen) it will really suck. I recognize that the metric system is superior mathematically, but I cannot think in metric having grown up with the English system. I have no idea how many meters tall I am or how much I weight or any of that. It seems like one of those things that we can "switch" to but will take forever to ACTUALLY switch to because you essentially have to wait for all of us to adapt to it. Hell, plenty of "metric" countries still use non-metric measurements. In Canada they still weigh themselves in pounds half the time and I'm fairly certain they measure their heights by feet still (I talk to Canadians rather frequently). It's an odd hodgepodge of measurements.
Right, I'm sure it has nothing to do with what an enormous pain in the ass it is to convert the entirety of the United States to a different system of measurement. It's not like this is a big place or anything, we could do it in a weekend. No, it must be because we hate the French.
I mean come on, that's stupid. No one likes the French...it isn't just us. Give us a little credit here.
It's complete for me. I couldn't give less of a shit about PvP. I don't play Diablo for that and I don't think Diablo was ever really focused on it either. Single/cooperative play is where it's at for this game. Like the GP said, this signals that they are spending all their time on single and for me well...that is just fine.
With the way the skill systems are, they at least won't be able to destroy your character build as far as skills go. With Diablo 3, you would simply start using different skills. The upshot of this, for me, is that I only need to have 1 of each character class in this game. I think I'll like that. :)
Read that as Saren at first. Too much Mass Effect for me. :3
Honestly, I don't see the issue with this. Especially if you aren't torrenting (which requires you to share). If I hop on Usenet and download a copy of a movie I own...all I'm doing is taking advantage of the scene ripping the movie FOR me. Hell, they're better at it than I am anyway so there we go. The funny part here too is that it takes me less time to download a digital copy than it would to rip it. The only times I have to rip my own media is when the thing I'm looking for simple isn't on the internet (example: Drinking show called Three Sheets...I got the DVDs and had to rip them myself).
:p
The only really illegal thing I see there is people downloading things that they don't own and the scene people getting busted for making it available, but I hardly see what that has to do with ME.
I do have a right for words to be used properly though don't I? The word unlimited means that there are no limits...you know UN-LIMITED. If they want to sell plans based on bandwidth, then just do it. All the other carriers do. If I go to T-Mobile right now, they tell me I can get different tiers of data at high speeds and after I hit my limit, I get bumped down to 2G. It's called, not lying. AT&T should try it some time.
Of course the whole idea of limiting our bandwidth is fucking ridiculous to me, but that is a different discussion that I'm not going to bother with right now.
You seem to have a problem with reading comprehension. Try reading his entire post again (or perhaps for the first time). He's clearly joking.
To underscore this point, we've already seen plenty of games for years now that look a LOT better on PC. More detailed, higher resolutions, textures, tessellation, physics processing, etc. I have no idea why anyone would claim that consoles are in any way superior technologically especially considering that all a console is basically...is a PC with specialized stuff inside that doesn't change for 5+ years. When a console first comes out, yeah, the hardware is pretty sweet, but in this last generation especially we watched PCs blow right past that within a year or two. In fact, consoles are SO far behind now that they've been holding back the PC games because developers are too lazy to use all that power and instead port their console games over to PC rather than the other way around.
I have a pretty nice PC, a PS3, a Wii, and recently acquired an XBOX 360 for the wife. I think I can say the above with a fair bit of confidence having played games on all platforms for the past few years. Whether or not they sell more games on console is a whole other matter, but the consoles are most certainly not more advanced than PCs. That is patently absurd. Look at real world performance, not stupid shit like how many cores or what the bandwidth is on the PCI-E. That means jack shit in the end.
Right, because breathalyzers are never wrong and neither are cops. Innocent people get caught up in this shit. It's kind of scary when you read about how many things they can fuck up.
Have a look at this. Come off your high horse for a minute. Not everyone that gets busted is doing something wrong. This issue has been blown so far out of proportion that it has become ridiculous. They inflated statistics and force draconian measures on us all in the name of preventing drunk driving but the rules have gotten so far out of control that they're basically pulling in people that aren't drunk and if they can't get them for something they'll try and get something like "intoxicated to the slightest degree" so even if you had 1 beer with a friend before you went to drive, you might still be fucked. That's not drunk driving and it is not justice. It's damn lies and statistics ruining people's lives over nothing.
There are plenty of shitty people that are ACTUALLY driving around drunk so why don't we just process them and stop trying for these little technicalities?
Well at least I know it's not just me. I also throw in an index.html.bak, index.html.bak2 sometimes as well. :)
We didn't That still isn't reasonable.
Every single thing you've just whined about can easily be changed. The menu bar especially. Also...why do you need a status bar so bad? The purpose of the status bar was to show the URL you were hovering over mostly and it still does that...so I don't understand this complaint everyone has.
You guys are seriously just ridiculous. You use the most customizable browser in the history of browsers and bitch when anything changes when you know damn well how easy it is to change back. For fuck's sake, you're whining about the fucking MENUS AT THE TOP. That takes 3 clicks to change. The status bar you so desperately need is now in an addon if you need it so bad. OR you could just try something new for a bit and realize that it really doesn't matter and that you're just stubborn and bitching about nothing.