Comment Re:Wait a fricken' second. (Score 1) 157
Mod this guy up, please
Stage one, preparation. For this you will need one room which you will not leave. Soothing music. Tomato soup, ten tins of. Mushroom soup, eight tins of, for consumption cold. Ice cream, vanilla, one large tub of. Magnesia, milk of, one bottle. Paracetamol, mouthwash, vitamins. Mineral water, Lucozade, pornography. One mattress. One bucket for urine, one for feces and one for vomitus. One television and one bottle of Valium.
That's a big list. Can you point me to a website that can offer a one-stop shopping experience for listed items?
After Future Shop in Canada got bought up, they've dumped their non-monster cables and stuff. "Oh, you want an HDMI to go with that TV? That'll be $80. Do you want a fucking $400 god damn power bar? It cleans the power gremlins out of your filthy filthy wall socket. Without the filter the gremlins will take a hammer to the inside of your TV, and eat all your bags of chips. It also somehow makes the sound one hundred times crisper because resonance waves from your dirty power account for a huge portion of the signal noise from home amplifiers and receivers. It also has a display to show the current voltage, so you know just how dirty your power was before we made it sparkling fresh!"
Mock the $100-200 Monster surge protectors all you like, but at least educate yourself first.
All surge protectors they try to sell you as accessories when you buy TV have different numbers on the box. Some of the numbers are actual specifications, but the number most people want to see is the liability coverage. Liability. A monetary value. It's the reimbursement value the company will pay you if your equipment is damaged, and their surge protector didn't prevent it. Having quality surge protectors is basically a form of insurance.
Formers coworker at Circuit City went all out on his home theater, and that includes the cables. I'm willing to bet you've never seen what a Monster Cable surge protector looks like after lightning strikes a pole on your road. You may not be old enough, but the surge protector looked like over cooked Jiffy Pop; the non-microwavable kind. Charred, huge hole in the center, plastic curling away from the crater... It's XXXXing AWESOME. And nothing that was hooked up to those surge protectors took any damage. Worth every penny, even without employee discount.
Here is the list of charges http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Bradley_Manning#Listing_of_charges:_First_set
He won't spend another day as a free man.
Sure he will.
If he gets convicted, and has to serve time, I guarantee you he'll get a presidential pardon, from a Democrat leaving office with an incoming Republican.
It's used to be the case that some companies would squirt epoxy into the USB ports on devices - Doesn't really work any more as many devices no longer have PS2 mouse and keyboard ports.
Um, dude... That stuff may have been sticky, but it sure wasn't epoxy!
I can think of one good use for rear-view cameras... dealing with tailgaters! Imagine being able to record some video of some primo dickbag in his BMW X5, angrily following five feet behind you at 50mph because you aren't willing to go significantly above the speed limit for him. The computer's technology can measure how far away the other car is and overlay it on the screen. Then, hit a button on your dashboard, it sends the video (with a capture of his license plate, if he's got one) off to the police and they mail him a ticket. If enough people catch the same person doing it, fuck'im, take his license away and force him to take the bus.
On a more cheerful note, there is another use that Jeremy Clarkson recently suggested on Top Gear -- looking at pretty girls in the car behind you while sitting at a traffic light. Lech-o-matic!
And while you're watching this record, the car in front of you hits the brakes, and you rear end them.
I'm fairly certain regulations are going to mandate these cameras should only operate while the vehicle is in reverse.
If publishers were smart enough to get in on this, they could be making an absolute killing.
But apparently they aren't. Their loss.
Now that eBook readers capable of color have hit the market, it makes more sense then ever. Colored comics rendered in B/W? Not a fun prospect. But with tablets and color eBook readers on the market, being able to carry my collection around in my backpack wherever I go? Very appealing.
Even though there's hardly digital comics you can purchase, people still take the time to manually scan each comic as it comes out.
For manga, people even take the time to TRANSLATE it before they release it.
Just like anything else, piracy is based on demand, not convienence. People don't do all that work just because its easy, they do it because people want them.
The demand for ebook piracy may increase as people get more and more used to the idea of reading digital books, but wether or not a publisher decides to sell their books digitally would have no bearing on the chances of it getting pirated.
As a comic book collector, I love the pirated comic scans you can find on the web. why?
1) Simplicity in back issues. I have a physical copy of the entire Marvel comics run of Transformers, but going through my boxes, finding the books, unbagging them, reading them, rebagging them, putting them back in the boxes, etc, can be a pain. If I can download a PDF of the entire run, and read them on my computer, that's just great. Did it hurt anyone's sales? No, I already own them, I'm just happy for a different way to access the content.
2) Missed issues. This may seem like theft of a sale, but seriously? I'm a collector. I want the damned book. If I can't get my hands on the physical book for some reason, this is a great stop gap until one of my stores, offline and online, can get me a copy. Even if I'm never able to get the copy (some books skyrocket in price) at least it means I'm current with the storyline, and will continue to buy the title monthly. If I lose part of the storyline, often enough, I'll stop buying the book because I'm losing parts of the plot.
3) Recommended titles. If someone at a shop or show tells me "dude, you gotta check this out," I'm usually fair game. If it's still only 3 or 4 issues in, it's not a problem to buy all 3 or 4 issues. But if it's up to issue 12, or 25, or 50, it becomes unrealistic. If I can download the series and give it a shot, one of two things happen: I either dislike the book, and delete it, or I like the book, add all new issues to my weekly purchases, and then make an attempt to acquire as many of those back issues as I can. Remember, I'm a collector. That means I *WANT* the books.
Basically, I turn to comic scans to keep my interest, or gain my interest. When my interest is kept, I keep buying my weekly books, and both the publishers and the retailers are happy. When I become interested in something new, both the publishers and retailers enjoy my weekly purchases, and the retailer also enjoys additional purchases from their back issue stock. In my case, both the retailers and publishers are more likely to lose my money, had I no access to some of these scans. Is everyone like me? Unlikely, but I can't be the only one.
The barrier isn't technological, it's psychological. My mom has a cable box she doesn't need. The installer told her she needed to get cable. I told her to take it back and demand a refund. She won't. During the 80's, you had to have a box to get channels above 13, because that was the highest a TV could tune. Then the FCC mandated cable-ready TV's, and you didn't need a box at all except for pay TV. There was no education or information given to the public, so a lot of people went through the 90's still believing they need a box, and the cablecos still play on that. The only was to solve the problem is to educate the public, something like forcing the cablecos to hand their customers a pamphlet clearly showing what channels do and do not require a box.
This argument is based on an assumption that is, at least in part, flawed.
My TV isn't state of the art, but it's not that badly dated. Bought it in 2004, 1080i resolution. Cable ready. Which is great, except the built in tuner is analog. Half of the basic cable channels have already gone digital only, so I lose them. Like many "cable ready" TVs, the channels stop around 120. Add the fact that some cable companies are moving channels up into the 200, 300, 400, 500, etc, channels, that means even with the basic cable packages, I'm paying for a majority of channels I can't even watch.
And before you go off on a tangent about those moves being to force people to rent the STBs, I'll point out that the companies I've dealt with (cablevision and verizon) actually used the move to organize the channels, more so than any time I can remember since 1985. It's nice knowing that if I want the "educational" channels, history, science, discovery, etc, are all lumped between 120 and 132.
China is just trying to protect it's citizens against the terrorist and child porn. Sheesh.
Terrorist Porn? Links or it never happened!
If God had not given us sticky tape, it would have been necessary to invent it.
