I can personally vouch for that. I'm a State government employee and any time we contract work out (which is generally on construction projects in my department's case) there is a list of minority-owned businesses that we must go through and contact X number of for bids before we can make any decision. Should we decide on a company not minority owned we have to give a lengthy explanation of why they were chosen over the minority-owned companies. This isn't always as hard as it sounds though, since the vast majority of the numbers on the lists (that get updated yearly) are no longer in service (or as in at least one occasion in the past reused by sex hotlines, those are fun). I am all for using minority contractors when they are the best options, but not just because they are minority owned. But I guess that's what reverse discrimination is all about these days..... Oh, I'm sorry, I meant "equal" opportunity.

No, it would more likely convince them that "hey, I got this great customer experience without even ever spending a dime, why spend money for what I can continue getting for free?" Not that I disagree (or agree for that matter) with allowing pirated users the option to use the software, I just think your logic is off.

I agree whole-heartedly. I was in band from the 4th grade all the way through til high school graduation and I saw what copyright "protection" did to our music program. I remember having to share one sheet of music for 4 people because our director didn't want to take a chance at violating copyright by making an extra copy or two; whether a violation would have occurred or not didn't matter (and I'm not sure it would have), the fear of it happening was enough. Except in areas where the band actually makes a profit (all of our concerts were free at the time and open to the public, no profit was made except during marching band season) how is this not all covered under fair use? It's ridiculous. The only reason we didn't have financial problems was because we had such a good group of lobbying parents in the past that pushed the district for money, allowing us to build a substantial back catalog of music we could play from. I can see why smaller schools don't even start up band/orchestra programs though, it's too damn expensive. IMO, the RIAA will be a major culprit in the death of music education in America.

Not at all. The summary clearly states that it requires 2 people that YOU appoint to confirm death before they will send the e-mail. This means these two people need to know about the service. I would suppose in most cases at least one of these two would be your intended recipient, meaning they know to expect the e-mail. Even if people receiving it weren't on your confirmation list I'm sure the site's intention is to warn those who would receive the e-mail before passing so there are no bad surprises.

You may not agree with the service (I know I certainly don't, I agree with you that a hand written message is best) but just because you don't think it's useful doesn't make it pathetic. Ultimately, if people sign up for the service it will survive, if not then it was a bad idea and it will fade away.

Take a look at this. Obviously not the correct model/color but it fits pretty cool in the 2010 Camaro SS "mail slot." Here's the link to where I saw this video a while back. Good for a laugh if nothing else.

I was apparently one of the lucky few to never have to worry about this issue. My university (Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, not too far from St. Louis) rented out texts themselves. I knew we were in the minority but I was actually shocked to not see any other posters state their universities did the same. Each semester the weekend prior to the first week of classes I would stop by the Textbook Services building, print out a list of text books and search the aisles for whatever was on the list. At the end of the semester I'd return the books and be done with them. The most I remember paying for the rental fee was just over $150, for 4 or 5 classes. Great system, and at the end of the semester if you felt the text would be valuable to you in the future you can buy it at a discounted price (it's used after all).

It wasn't until my 400 level classes that I had to buy texts, and even then it was only for 2 of the classes. It really helped cut costs nicely.

At the risk of sounding trollish, Al Gore does not have a PhD in ANYTHING, so he is no more qualified to deal with global warming than the man in question. A PhD is not the only route a person must take to be qualified to speak on a topic.....

This may be off on some random tangent but it sparked some feelings within me that have always been bothersome: why are we so set on the idea that God and science are mutually exclusive? Why is it that evolution negates the very possibility that a god exists while belief in God requires us to reject evolution? Is it simply because of what is said in the Bible....? Perhaps it's my Christian upbringing coupled with my natural curiosity for science (I am by no means a science expert, simply a "fan" so to speak) but my view of the Bible, creationism in particular, is a little more abstract than literal.

Think of it this way: if you are explaining a difficult concept to a small child, how do you go about doing it? You dumb it down, put it into words they can understand. You use ideas that they are familiar with in order to get the message across. Doing so may sometimes change the literal meaning of what you're saying but as long as it helps the child understand the concept your goal is achieved. I believe that is how the Bible was written. Concepts of how the world came to be or how we came onto this planet would have made no sense to the people when the Bible was written, so the message was dumbed down. The important thing is the underlying message, not an exact historical account of what happened. This can also explain the existence of different religions as well since different people would have thought differently.

I'm sure I'm not the first to have these ideas but it amazes me how more people don't feel this same way. I don't know, maybe it's just my mind's way of neatly explaining away the inconsistencies with the Bible and the world, but it makes sense to me, and in the end if there is no God but my beliefs help me to live my life as a good person then religion has done its job.

A coworker of mine who lives in a rural area out of range from all the cable and DSL providers was looking into going with a mobile broadband solution. Knowing nothing about the topic he handed me a Kricket brochure and asked if it was a good deal, and it was a good thing for him that he did. His intentions were to set up a webcam in his backyard so he could watch the animals as they came out of the woods. With that in mind I scanned the brochure and happened upon their terms of use, which stated that the service could only be used for normal web activities. Sounds reasonable, until you read their definition of "normal" activities which excluded server hosting, online video gaming and streaming video of any sort, meaning his webcam was out.

The moral? Make sure you read the terms of use to find out what the service allows before committing to it, otherwise you may end up paying for something you can't use.

Bah, very embarrassing to someone who actually uses proper punctuation in and spell checks his text messages.....

Being the good little /.er I am after reading the summary but not the article I'm not too sure that's the case. The example given in the summary tells me that everyone will still see ads from the same company; it's the contents of the ad that will differ. If a company only produces tampons then you will still see a tampon commercial.

Again, I have not read the article and I have a lot of lazing around to do this fine Saturday morning so I can't be bothered to do the proper research to know if I'm write or not. That being said, if I'm wrong this will be followed by fifty different responses from people who DID read the article calling me an idiot and correcting me on the issue, ensuring I don't have to read it anyway. THANKS IN ADVANCE!

Furthermore an ILLINOIS politician said it so it must be true. Here in Illinois we have such honest, civic-minded politicians after all.

Unfortunately voice recognition, at least in my experience, is very hit or miss. First of all, you still have to hit a button to activate voice recognition, then you have to say the name you wish to dial, then you have to keep saying no to all the names the phone thought you said.... And that's only if the number is programmed into the phone already. My experience with voice-to-number dialing has been even worse than voice-to-contact. You'd be amazed at what numbers the phone can confuse with one another.

And all this while speaking in a clean (to me at least) midwestern accent. Throw in someone with a heavy southern drawl or thick New Yawka accent and forget about it. Voice dialing is great and it's come a long way but it is still problematic. As a stop-gap until we get closer-to-perfect voice recognition, or even as a companion to voice dialing, this is a great idea.

It is true that these things happen to even the best of companies and it's impossible to remove 100% of the bugs in software before it's released. The thing I'm sick of though is that had this happened to even the most obscure laptop manufacturer (and remember, this particular case involves a very popular and very expensive laptop) running Windows after a Windows update there would be hundreds of "this wouldn't happen on a Mac" posts. Such a double standard around here really. It's nice every now and then to see Apple and their herd of zombie followers (which by the way I am not including yourself in, generalized comment) brought down a peg and realize their sacred fruit can also be a rotten apple. Now, excuse me while I go finish trying to get the rest of my software running on Vista.....

Obviously they'll figure out amazing things to do with what they have, but that doesn't change the fact the the Wii is unique among consoles in that it doesn't represent that big a difference from the last generation.

Not a big enough difference from the last generation.......? Good God man, what are you smoking...? Do you even know what the Wii is? Because if you ask me, your comment applies to the other two consoles more so than it does to the Wii.

What's so different about the Xbox 360 from the Xbox...? Well, other than a prettier face, nothing really. It uses practically the same controller (moving two buttons does not constitute enough of a change), actually LACKS the built-in hard drive its predecessor had, and introduces wireless controllers, which have been available since at least the SNES era.

How about the PS3....? Again, a prettier face but that's about it here as well. It's pretty much the same damn controller that's been used since the Playstation. It's got a hard drive but that was done last generation. Online service....? Xbox 1 did that. Motion sensor in the controller....? Ummmm, yeah, we won't even get STARTED on that. Oh, but I forgot the biggest difference between the PS3 and the PS2; no one's buying it!

If you sit down and look at it, the Wii is the ONLY system that is really something different from the last generation. The other two systems are more or less visual upgrades to consoles of the past while the Wii demands an entirely new way of looking at and playing video games. To be honest, the Wii is the first console that has shown a real "change" in gaming since the Nintendo 64 introduced the ability to push out games in 3D, everything else has been just visual upgrades, though you can make a case that with Live! Xbox marked a significant change as well (the counter-case would be that PC games had already been doing that for years, but since we're talking consoles here we won't consider that).

Every person who considers how much something has changed by it's looks needs to actually sit down and think about it, because the cosmetics are probably one of the smallest factors of change in my opinion.