Star Traders is one of the best games on the Play Store period, and Cory Trese is a genius. He's one of the few app developers on there that listen carefully to his customers and his patches frequently add new features and tweaks to make the game better than ever.
Google better fix this screw up or there's going to hordes of very pissed off paying customers at their throats, and I will be right there near the front of the line. I bought the game, and I'll be damned if Google is taking it down.
Of course the White House will decline. Because implicating Chris Dodd and the MPAA also implicates Congressmen, since they are the ones being bribed. The White House won't go after their own.
This is really only a problem for people that can't let go of DVDs. I don't even hardly watch DVD's at all anymore. When you are like me, and cut off $80 worth of cable, when I hardly watch it, and can watch Netflix on a relatively cheap wi-fi Blu-Ray player hooked up to a 1080p 42" HDTV, then paying 8-9 dollars a month for a huge selection is friggin awesome. I fail to see the point of the DVD part of Netflix that everyone is bitching about. Scratched up DVD's that can easily get lost in the mail, that may or may not play on your player due to arcane DRM, DO NOT impress me.
I know that I can't get everything Netflix has to offer with only streaming, but there's still a huge amount of content, and new things showing up all the time. Fuck Starz. I wasn't that impressed with their feeble selection anyways. There's a massive load of streaming anime on Netflix now, and I'm happy as hell about it.
I can definitely tell the difference between any mp3 and flac. FLAC is totally lossless and impossible to tell the difference from whatever the source is. As for creating a perfect FLAC from the source, you have to take all settings into account, including 16 or 24 bit (or higher), sampling rate, etc. Just using a higher level for one setting is not enough, it has to match the source, or you are getting loss.
I don't have the sound system to need higher than 44Khz-48Khz and there isn't a massive difference between 16 and 24 bit. If I got rich and had the cash to buy a sound system worth several thousand dollars, sure I'd rebuy. But that's more than likely not going to happen, so if not, I'll keep the 16 bit 48Khz FLAC cd rips.
I learned to use computers and write batch files in msdos when I was around 4-5 years old. In a few years I was programming and was a world ahead of even my grandfather who taught me how to use it. There wasn't much of anything but AOL and Compuserve at the time, but if there would have been some app spying on me at the time, I would have found it. Unless the parent is very tech savvy, this isn't going to work. Most kids today know far more about computers than their parents, and only the newer parents that are more knowledgeable about technology are going to have a leg up.
In any case, trust is important and you can't build trust by spying on your kids completely unwarranted. Then again, you can't be naive either and expect that your "little angel" would never do anything wrong. There's a happy medium without becoming as bad as big brother. Good parenting helps too!
Honestly, anywhere that has a distribution facility in that state, you generally end up paying taxes in that state. It works that way for many other companies, such as Newegg. Every state that they have distribution centers in pay taxes, and in those states it is passed on to the customers. This doesn't fit the governor's interpretation of the law that they need to have a storefront.
If other companies that have distribution centers have to pay taxes, so does Amazon.
You are correct on one point. Mentally ill people do tend to look to drugs to self medicate, mostly because the majority of Big Pharma drugs do little more than placebo. This may very well be the reason that there are some people that smoke pot and it can cause psychosis, because they were already predisposed to it. There's virtually no evidence to show that it can do the same to a mentally healthy person.
I'm not trying to prove what I'm saying as fact, I'm just saying if you try to match the studies correlating pot and psychosis with the sociological data comparing pot users to schizophrenia rates, there seems to be no real link between the two. Take it as you will.
Correlation is not causation. Just checking on the numbers of people that have schizophrenia (or other forms of psychosis) that has not significantly changed in the population compared to the people that use marijuana, which has increased exponentially, it's obvious that your argument is a fallacy. One study with skewed results, funded by anti-drug lobbyists does not make fact.
Nobody likes the tobacco industry. This still doesn't change the fact that Australia has no right to have part of their logo blocked out by the big honking warnings all over them and it is changing the way the logo looks. Therefore, you could consider it real trademark infringement.
I agree with you for the most part, Montezuma, but comparing marijuana to refined drugs is silly. Comparing it to raw coca leaves would be much closer. Coca leaves are pretty much safe, as long as you don't break down the components of them and refine it. And even that's silly, because straight up THC doesn't do any more harm than smoking weed (probably less since it doesn't have the carcinogens that you get from burning a plant.
This is interesting, mostly because I haven't thought of it before. But I really see no real problem with it. It takes an exact match to be usable in court, therefore consent has to be given by any family members tested, or warrants have to be issued if they refuse. So in truth, their privacy is still protected.
Not as if we have any real expectation of privacy, anyway.
People were getting sick all over the place here. And yes, some people it was very tame and didn't make them all that sick. But the majority of that I saw with it were VERY sick, much worse than the normal flu. I don't get all the people calling it all a conspiracy. It was definitely sensationalized, but for most of the ones that got it, it was a nasty virus.
Walmart already sells R rated movies in their electronic section, so I don't see them stopping Redbox from doing it. McDonalds could be another story, but I really doubt it too.
It has nothing to do with whatever is "causing" the alleged "addiction". If it wasn't gaming or chatting, it would be something else that they are obsessed with. Yes, obsession, not addiction to anything. It's not the thing causing the problem. The person had the problem in the first place and the internet is just one of the targets of that obsession. It's just funny that the quacks that want this in the book haven't noticed that most of the people had some other "addiction" (obsession to something else) before the "internet addiction" was "diagnosed".
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Star Traders is one of the best games on the Play Store period, and Cory Trese is a genius. He's one of the few app developers on there that listen carefully to his customers and his patches frequently add new features and tweaks to make the game better than ever.
Google better fix this screw up or there's going to hordes of very pissed off paying customers at their throats, and I will be right there near the front of the line. I bought the game, and I'll be damned if Google is taking it down.
Implicating one, implicates the other...
Of course the White House will decline. Because implicating Chris Dodd and the MPAA also implicates Congressmen, since they are the ones being bribed. The White House won't go after their own.
Not a problem for streamers
This is really only a problem for people that can't let go of DVDs. I don't even hardly watch DVD's at all anymore. When you are like me, and cut off $80 worth of cable, when I hardly watch it, and can watch Netflix on a relatively cheap wi-fi Blu-Ray player hooked up to a 1080p 42" HDTV, then paying 8-9 dollars a month for a huge selection is friggin awesome. I fail to see the point of the DVD part of Netflix that everyone is bitching about. Scratched up DVD's that can easily get lost in the mail, that may or may not play on your player due to arcane DRM, DO NOT impress me.
I know that I can't get everything Netflix has to offer with only streaming, but there's still a huge amount of content, and new things showing up all the time. Fuck Starz. I wasn't that impressed with their feeble selection anyways. There's a massive load of streaming anime on Netflix now, and I'm happy as hell about it.
(untitled comment)
I can definitely tell the difference between any mp3 and flac. FLAC is totally lossless and impossible to tell the difference from whatever the source is. As for creating a perfect FLAC from the source, you have to take all settings into account, including 16 or 24 bit (or higher), sampling rate, etc. Just using a higher level for one setting is not enough, it has to match the source, or you are getting loss.
I don't have the sound system to need higher than 44Khz-48Khz and there isn't a massive difference between 16 and 24 bit. If I got rich and had the cash to buy a sound system worth several thousand dollars, sure I'd rebuy. But that's more than likely not going to happen, so if not, I'll keep the 16 bit 48Khz FLAC cd rips.
(untitled comment)
I learned to use computers and write batch files in msdos when I was around 4-5 years old. In a few years I was programming and was a world ahead of even my grandfather who taught me how to use it. There wasn't much of anything but AOL and Compuserve at the time, but if there would have been some app spying on me at the time, I would have found it. Unless the parent is very tech savvy, this isn't going to work. Most kids today know far more about computers than their parents, and only the newer parents that are more knowledgeable about technology are going to have a leg up.
In any case, trust is important and you can't build trust by spying on your kids completely unwarranted. Then again, you can't be naive either and expect that your "little angel" would never do anything wrong. There's a happy medium without becoming as bad as big brother. Good parenting helps too!
(untitled comment)
Honestly, anywhere that has a distribution facility in that state, you generally end up paying taxes in that state. It works that way for many other companies, such as Newegg. Every state that they have distribution centers in pay taxes, and in those states it is passed on to the customers. This doesn't fit the governor's interpretation of the law that they need to have a storefront.
If other companies that have distribution centers have to pay taxes, so does Amazon.
Re:
You are correct on one point. Mentally ill people do tend to look to drugs to self medicate, mostly because the majority of Big Pharma drugs do little more than placebo. This may very well be the reason that there are some people that smoke pot and it can cause psychosis, because they were already predisposed to it. There's virtually no evidence to show that it can do the same to a mentally healthy person.
I'm not trying to prove what I'm saying as fact, I'm just saying if you try to match the studies correlating pot and psychosis with the sociological data comparing pot users to schizophrenia rates, there seems to be no real link between the two. Take it as you will.
(untitled comment)
@AC
Correlation is not causation. Just checking on the numbers of people that have schizophrenia (or other forms of psychosis) that has not significantly changed in the population compared to the people that use marijuana, which has increased exponentially, it's obvious that your argument is a fallacy. One study with skewed results, funded by anti-drug lobbyists does not make fact.
Logo obfuscation
Nobody likes the tobacco industry. This still doesn't change the fact that Australia has no right to have part of their logo blocked out by the big honking warnings all over them and it is changing the way the logo looks. Therefore, you could consider it real trademark infringement.
Re: Re: Re:
I agree with you for the most part, Montezuma, but comparing marijuana to refined drugs is silly. Comparing it to raw coca leaves would be much closer. Coca leaves are pretty much safe, as long as you don't break down the components of them and refine it. And even that's silly, because straight up THC doesn't do any more harm than smoking weed (probably less since it doesn't have the carcinogens that you get from burning a plant.
(untitled comment)
This is interesting, mostly because I haven't thought of it before. But I really see no real problem with it. It takes an exact match to be usable in court, therefore consent has to be given by any family members tested, or warrants have to be issued if they refuse. So in truth, their privacy is still protected.
Not as if we have any real expectation of privacy, anyway.
Re: Re: Re: Re: to all the people...
And this has to do with H1N1...what exactly?
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Yeah...Google was stupid and did something that could be considered immoral, but you'd have a hell of a time proving criminal intent.
(untitled comment)
People were getting sick all over the place here. And yes, some people it was very tame and didn't make them all that sick. But the majority of that I saw with it were VERY sick, much worse than the normal flu. I don't get all the people calling it all a conspiracy. It was definitely sensationalized, but for most of the ones that got it, it was a nasty virus.
Re: Real world will take care of this...
Walmart already sells R rated movies in their electronic section, so I don't see them stopping Redbox from doing it. McDonalds could be another story, but I really doubt it too.
(untitled comment)
It has nothing to do with whatever is "causing" the alleged "addiction". If it wasn't gaming or chatting, it would be something else that they are obsessed with. Yes, obsession, not addiction to anything. It's not the thing causing the problem. The person had the problem in the first place and the internet is just one of the targets of that obsession. It's just funny that the quacks that want this in the book haven't noticed that most of the people had some other "addiction" (obsession to something else) before the "internet addiction" was "diagnosed".