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I agree that Dell is certainly not a sexy name for gaming systems, for lots of reasons. But I don't think putting AMD's inside Dell boxes helps them there. The AlienWare acquisition does, but no respectable gamer I can imagine would buy a Dell just because you have very little control over the make of the internal boards, which often end up being refurbished crap. High-end gamers want all new boards, all new memory. An AMD chip isn't going to solve that.

The server market is a more promising opening, but the conventional wisdom of Dell's customer service declining (mostly through off-shoring) is not going to fill an IT manager with warm fuzzies.

Not that I'm super-expert-man on this or anything. It's not like I manage an IT department or anything (though I do help with IT functions at my company), and it's possible that this will really help Dell, but I try to keep current on IT sites like SlashDot and Dell's reputation there is not good and it has nothing to do with their failure to offer AMD.

I dunno, everything I've heard has suggested that Dell's recent fall is a result of degraded customer service, not a failure to offer AMD chips.

I never saw The Wild. "See No Evil" isn't on my list, unfortunately (me and my girlfriend decided to take this summer movie preview article we saw and go to every single one of the 30 movies on it, no matter what, "see no evil" wasn't on there).

So far there's only been one from the list, Poseidon, which wasn't really all that bad, I guess helped along by low expectations a bit.

Yeah, both of them are actually on my list, so I have to see both, but I fully support anyone who wants to avoiding the Da Vinci Code. Honestly I think Over the Hedge is going to be pretty bad too, but I have slightly higher hopes for that.

he's just trying to stir up interest in the movie. he's an old pro, it'll probably work pretty well.

i wish i could not see this movie based on the fact that the book was terrible and bad books = worse movies (see: dreamcatcher), but i made a committment to see 30 summer movies and this is on the list.

snakes on a plane is the highlight of the summer movie season for me.

well, unlike most people who are trying furiously to discredit the research because the conclusions were faulty, i think something interesting could come of this. clearly these children had a lot of things in common environmentally speaking, which makes any conclusions shaky. but if similar studies were carried out with groups in a a) primarily conservative and b) mixed community it could be interesting to see the results. if the results were reversed, this would lead to very different conclusions than what the media is reporting for this story.

(by the way, never trust the media's reporting of conclusions in a scientific paper. they will take a sentence prefaced with 6,000 'maybe's and 'possibly's and giant warning signs saying that this is just speculation and report it as something 'proved' by a piece of research.)

anyways, that's my take on it.

or, another possible conclusion could be that people's political proclivities are set at a very early age, and these children were born conservatives stuck in a liberal environment, and so whined about it, as children do.

interesting point, and something i was wondering about, also, because i know that not all the players on all the teams are natives of the country they're playing for, so i went to worldbaseballclassic.com and looked at the rosters for each team and counted by place of birth how many natives are on each team

china - 29/29, 1 unlisted
taiwan - 4/4, 26 unlisted
japan - 29/29, 1 unlisted
korea - 8/8, 22 unlisted
canada - 28/30
mexico - 29/30
south africa - 2/2, 28 unlisted
usa - 30/30
cuba - 30 unlisted (no kidding)
netherlands - 12/14, 16 unlisted (maybe, this one is strange)
panama - 25/25, 5 unlisted
puerto rico - 26/30
australia - 22/24, 6 unlisted
dominican republic - 28/30
italy - 0/18, 12 unlisted (wow)
venezuela - 30/30

so really the only country that egregiously has a bunch of players that weren't born in that country is italy, at least of those that are listed. i'm kind of assuming that most of the unlisteds are from the countries they play for, except for the italians, i guess.

anyways, i thought that would be interesting to see, and other people might want to see the breakdown.

incidentally, i didn't have much hope for the wbc in general but after seeing how deeply into it latin america is i'm starting to really enjoy it. i wish more games were on tv, though. i'd like to see the koreans and japanese play some of the slugging teams, but it seems most of those games are on at 3 am if they're on at all. oh well, maybe if all the rounds continue to be as popular as the first among latin americans, we'll see more t.v. coverage next time.

1. Yes, they are. My point is that they shouldn't be.

2. If steroids weren't against the league rules, however, there would not be any skew because they would be equally available to all players. From all the evidence that has been released lately, it seems like that's the case anyway.

Absolutely. This was really my point, that there were so many differences between then and now as to make statistical comparisons of individual players isn't worth anything. I could have used the example about other professional sports becoming more popular just as easily as the example I used for the same purpose.

So there is little validity to the argument that steroids are bad because they make such comparisons less valid, because such comparisons are invalid anyways.

Ah, I see, so it's really not much of a line item veto the way I think of it, then. Which I guess is necessary to avoid running head on into the precedent set on the previous try. Ah well, it might be an interesting executive power, but I don't see it being that valuable.

one thing i didn't quite get, maybe someone could answer for me, but when the president marks items for veto and congress then votes on them, do they vote on all line-item vetoes for a bill at once? or do they vote on each line veto individually? it seems like if they have to vote on all of the line-item vetoes at once we'll end up with the same sort of back-scratching we have now.

what tradition? the game of baseball has been constantly changing since it was invented. moving the mound up, moving it back down, changing how the balls are wound, changing rules about bats, re-centering the strike zone. and those are just the small changes.

as a whole, professional baseball has become a whole different entity, where contracts come before quality of play. this is not inherently wrong, this is how every major venue of entertainment is. albums are not rated on their quality but on their sales. movies not by their merits but by their grosses. ballplayers not by their skill but by their salary.

keeping steroids out of the professional league isn't going to change any of this and bring back an older form of the game and make people stop paying to see names instead of games.

hey, steroids are bad for minors, that's not disputed by anyone. so are cigarettes and alcohol. should adults be prohibited from using those, too?

I don't know, I mean, I like watching baseball, I'm trying to follow the WBC and everything, but when I hear people talking about how this is bad because they can't compare the players of yore to guys like A-Rod and Santana, I just kind of turn my ears off, because it's not really a sensible complaint.

There are a million reasons why such comparisons aren't worth a dime, in my opinion, and steroid use is one of the smaller ones. I mean, can I go around saying that Ruth's records shouldn't count because he had it easy not having to play against black players? That he played against an artificially thinned talent pool? Of course I can't. The game was different then. You can say that Ruth was the greatest player of his time, and that's about all you can say. I know that doesn't sell many volumes of the baseball encyclopedias, but that's just the way it is for me.

So given that steriods are being used anyways by most players, that they're not terribly dangerous to adult males, and they players seem, by and large, to be okay with using them, I don't really see a problem with allowing their use.

If this is really what most baseball fans want, then they should pretty much hate MLB right now. It seems like MLB is doing alright for itself, though.

Well, that's why I said let them juice. Let everyone juice if they want to.

Sportsmanship applies only to your teammates and competitors. Collectively, the league. So if all the players decide that they don't anyone using steroids in their league, fine. It seems like a majority of players are okay with it, though.

Lots of things are unhealthy, and a lot more unhealthy than elevating your testosterone. Used responsibly, anabolic steroids are not that dangerous for adult men (they are not at all safe for minors and women, however).

And, assuming that players all agree to just go ahead and use steroids if they want to, where is the bad example?

Absolutely! Let 'em juice their hearts out! Does anyone complain that rock stars' performances are chemically enhanced? Why is it so different in the arena of sport? I honestly don't understand why people are offended by the use of steroids in this entertainment industry when in other forms of professional entertainment it's okay.

eNFp

Software Engineer