All true, except they started going downhill even before the merger. They did this to themselves. Activision may have accelerated it, but Blizzard certainly started their own downfall.
You realize that according to the list you just posted, the only good game Blizzard has released in 9 years is Starcraft 2.. right?
And from what I've read, most SC2 players would agree that it's not as good as the first one. Most veteran WoW players would agree that WoW's done nothing but get worse since Vanilla or TBC at the latest.
It's not a good track record for Blizzard in recent history, and their latest "milestone" has been one of their worst.
Yes, the late 90's were quite good. It's the last 5-10 years that have been awful. I can't name a single movie from the last 5 years that I'll still be talking about 15 years from now, like I do any of the ones you just listed.
No they're not. They're about at the same level of quality as they were 25 years ago. You just remember the really good ones, you forget the stinkers that came out to the theaters every weekend. Good movies stuck around longer too, these days a movie has a month or two to earn almost everything, but 25 years ago a good movie could stick around for 6+ months. So they were more "present."
I get your point, rose-collored glasses, etc. But I disagree. What really woke me up to how badly new movies have been sucking overall the last 5-8 years was rewatching the last two movies of the Matrix trilogy. I distinctly recall thinking them utter garbage the first time I watched them, about 10 years ago. Recently though when I rewatched them, they actually seemed pretty good. Then I realized that's because almost everything new I've seen recently is so awful. I can't think of a single new movie from the last 5 years that will stand the test of time like classic movies do.
I'd like to live like that too. Reality is, it's not possible for everyone to make a living doing exactly what they love. I, for example, love playing video games and tabletop games. As do hundreds of millions of other people on the earth. It may be possible for a very small percentage of us to make money by playing video games and/or tabletop games. For the rest of us, we actually have to get a job doing something we may not necessarily love. That's life. You don't get a free pass just because you work in entertainment.
You're assuming that the artist knocks out a few tunes over the weekend, and have no other costs.
Whether he's assuming that or not is completely irrelevant.
The correct assumption to make is that music artists are making music because they like to make music, not primarily to make money. Art is something that almost always suffers when money is the primary motivating factor. Not to mention the fact that music really is a pretty basic and easy art, (well, at least the stuff that's currently popular) and there's guaranteed to be a never-ending new supply for the foreseeable future.
We all have things that we spend a lot of time on because we like to do them, and I'm sure we'd all like to keep making *any* amount of money for posterity for the time invested. But that's not how reality works.
So GP is right. They're making as much as $5,000 a year for the simple act of uploading their music to Spotify. They should be pretty happy with that.
Mostly music takes a lot more effort, time and money to produce than that -- the stuff you want to listen to at least.
It takes exactly as much time, effort, and money as you want to put into it. And putting more of any of those things into it doesn't necessarily make it better. Most of the expensive contemporary pop music sounds like shit, and is easily surpassed by thousands of tracks indie artists give away for free.
When you're trying to force your way as a supplier into an industry where supply already vastly exceeds demand, you should expect that to happen.
As a poster above indicated, if you could wipe all contemporary professional musicians and their music off the face of the earth, we'd still have more new music tomorrow. People make music because they love to make music, and that will always be the case. You actually don't have to have paid professionals to supply it. Much of the stuff produced by the paid professionals isn't even that good, and gets surpassed in quality by no-name indie bands a thousand times every week.
This, exactly. This is precisely what pisses me off about the entertainment industry in general. The vast majority of entertainment "artists" who are primarily in it for money seem to think they are entitled to get paid just because they're entertainment artists, and that they should get a free pass on reality.
And if someone at the school had a gun, no one there would have gotten hurt at all. In fact, if the assailant had known about such a gun he may not have attacked at all. We can play the "if" game all day.
Fact is, lots of mass murders happen without firearms being involved.
I think it's fair to say the problem is the mix of dangerous people and guns.
Wrong. The problem has never been guns, to any extent. Bad people have been killing good people since the dawn of the human race.
I can tell you in 5 seconds what my plan is for removing guns from the equation. Banning them all, preventing their manufacture, and sending anyone carrying one to jail before they even get the chance to fire it at innocent people.
Fortunately no one on earth has the capability to do something that fucking stupid.
I'd still pay HBO a reasonable amount of money to watch their shows online. But I can't. First, I have to buy cable TV ($60/mo), then I also have to buy a special package that includes HBO ($30/mo), and then I still have to pay extra for HBOGO. So over $100/mo to watch a couple good shows. Yeah, I'll just keep using torrents. Even though it's still a huge ripoff compared to other services like Netflix and Hulu, I'd pay $10-15 per month just for HBO online. Let me know when you're serious about wanting my money, HBO.
Nope, still apples to oranges. A gun can work just fine without an RFID bracelet. Why would you want your gun to require yet another unnecessary piece that you might forget?
Or how about this guy who killd another man with a basebal bat. Too bad the 62-year-old didn't have a gun to aid him when he was trying to defend the woman.
Kind of, but not exactly. With so many points of failure that already exist with firearms, why would you want to add more completely unnecessary ones? Also, forgetting the ammo is a user error, which you can control. Malfunctioning electronics is not.
A gun expert can generally field-strip his firearm to inspect parts and test it, and be reasonably certain that nothing is malfunctioning and that it will operate when needed. When you throw electronics in the mix, achieving that is now far more time-consuming and complex, and completely outside the skillset of most gun users.
If there were a lot fewer guns to steal or sell into the black market
And if Superman really existed, we wouldn't have to worry about criminals. Which is just as likely as your "if" at this point. Perhaps if you quit making wildly impossible assumptions you might be able to understand reality.
Would you rather face a belligerent person person carrying a gun or one carrying a knife, all else being equal?
Would you rather face a belligerent person with a gun of your own, or without? Because frankly, all else is never equal. That false assumption is what all the anti-gun paranoids base their arguments on.
Before guns came around, if you were physically weak or infirm you had virtually no chance to defend yourself. Sure, guns give bad people more options, but they do far, far more to equalize the other side of the equation.
Anyone who says different is either lying or delusional.
Yes. All your programs are in the All Apps window... if you want to replicate the tree style menu, just pin the All Programs folder to the desktop. Control panel is accessible by right clicking the start button. Computer and various shortcuts are pre-pinned on the task bar.
Yes, we've all seen you throw out your opinion as fact in many posts. It's still only your opinion, and not the most well-founded one on this issue. And most people disagree.
Whatever shortcomings of the start menu they tried to address, they not only failed at, they changed things for the worse.
Slashdot Mirror
All true, except they started going downhill even before the merger. They did this to themselves. Activision may have accelerated it, but Blizzard certainly started their own downfall.
You realize that according to the list you just posted, the only good game Blizzard has released in 9 years is Starcraft 2.. right?
And from what I've read, most SC2 players would agree that it's not as good as the first one. Most veteran WoW players would agree that WoW's done nothing but get worse since Vanilla or TBC at the latest.
It's not a good track record for Blizzard in recent history, and their latest "milestone" has been one of their worst.
And which name was that?
Nighttime... daytime! Nighttime... daytime!
Completely agree. I'm one of the few people I know of that actually dislikes the LotR movies. I dislike The Hobbit movie even more.
There are reasons the soda may have been sub-par, but I suggest you re-read the GP post. He called the popcorn sub-par, but not the soda.
Yes, the late 90's were quite good. It's the last 5-10 years that have been awful. I can't name a single movie from the last 5 years that I'll still be talking about 15 years from now, like I do any of the ones you just listed.
No they're not. They're about at the same level of quality as they were 25 years ago. You just remember the really good ones, you forget the stinkers that came out to the theaters every weekend. Good movies stuck around longer too, these days a movie has a month or two to earn almost everything, but 25 years ago a good movie could stick around for 6+ months. So they were more "present."
I get your point, rose-collored glasses, etc. But I disagree. What really woke me up to how badly new movies have been sucking overall the last 5-8 years was rewatching the last two movies of the Matrix trilogy. I distinctly recall thinking them utter garbage the first time I watched them, about 10 years ago. Recently though when I rewatched them, they actually seemed pretty good. Then I realized that's because almost everything new I've seen recently is so awful. I can't think of a single new movie from the last 5 years that will stand the test of time like classic movies do.
I'd like to live like that too. Reality is, it's not possible for everyone to make a living doing exactly what they love. I, for example, love playing video games and tabletop games. As do hundreds of millions of other people on the earth. It may be possible for a very small percentage of us to make money by playing video games and/or tabletop games. For the rest of us, we actually have to get a job doing something we may not necessarily love. That's life. You don't get a free pass just because you work in entertainment.
You're assuming that the artist knocks out a few tunes over the weekend, and have no other costs.
Whether he's assuming that or not is completely irrelevant.
The correct assumption to make is that music artists are making music because they like to make music, not primarily to make money. Art is something that almost always suffers when money is the primary motivating factor. Not to mention the fact that music really is a pretty basic and easy art, (well, at least the stuff that's currently popular) and there's guaranteed to be a never-ending new supply for the foreseeable future.
We all have things that we spend a lot of time on because we like to do them, and I'm sure we'd all like to keep making *any* amount of money for posterity for the time invested. But that's not how reality works.
So GP is right. They're making as much as $5,000 a year for the simple act of uploading their music to Spotify. They should be pretty happy with that.
Mostly music takes a lot more effort, time and money to produce than that -- the stuff you want to listen to at least.
It takes exactly as much time, effort, and money as you want to put into it. And putting more of any of those things into it doesn't necessarily make it better. Most of the expensive contemporary pop music sounds like shit, and is easily surpassed by thousands of tracks indie artists give away for free.
When you're trying to force your way as a supplier into an industry where supply already vastly exceeds demand, you should expect that to happen.
As a poster above indicated, if you could wipe all contemporary professional musicians and their music off the face of the earth, we'd still have more new music tomorrow. People make music because they love to make music, and that will always be the case. You actually don't have to have paid professionals to supply it. Much of the stuff produced by the paid professionals isn't even that good, and gets surpassed in quality by no-name indie bands a thousand times every week.
This, exactly. This is precisely what pisses me off about the entertainment industry in general. The vast majority of entertainment "artists" who are primarily in it for money seem to think they are entitled to get paid just because they're entertainment artists, and that they should get a free pass on reality.
And if someone at the school had a gun, no one there would have gotten hurt at all. In fact, if the assailant had known about such a gun he may not have attacked at all. We can play the "if" game all day.
Fact is, lots of mass murders happen without firearms being involved.
Such as this one, where the assailants were armed only with box-cutters.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11_attacks
Or this one, which was actually linked in my previous link and you chose to ignore.
http://behindthewall.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/09/21/14014789-ax-wielding-man-kills-3-kids-wounds-13-in-china?lite
And here's another.
http://www.biography.com/people/andrew-kehoe-235986
And here's one with a kitchen knife.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osaka_school_massacre
Now go fuck off, troll.
I think it's fair to say the problem is the mix of dangerous people and guns.
Wrong. The problem has never been guns, to any extent. Bad people have been killing good people since the dawn of the human race.
I can tell you in 5 seconds what my plan is for removing guns from the equation. Banning them all, preventing their manufacture, and sending anyone carrying one to jail before they even get the chance to fire it at innocent people.
Fortunately no one on earth has the capability to do something that fucking stupid.
That's what proper gun training is for. What are you, stupid?
I'd still pay HBO a reasonable amount of money to watch their shows online. But I can't. First, I have to buy cable TV ($60/mo), then I also have to buy a special package that includes HBO ($30/mo), and then I still have to pay extra for HBOGO. So over $100/mo to watch a couple good shows. Yeah, I'll just keep using torrents. Even though it's still a huge ripoff compared to other services like Netflix and Hulu, I'd pay $10-15 per month just for HBO online. Let me know when you're serious about wanting my money, HBO.
Nope, still apples to oranges. A gun can work just fine without an RFID bracelet. Why would you want your gun to require yet another unnecessary piece that you might forget?
You know what, how about a few more.
http://www.contracostatimes.com/news/ci_21326939/lathrop-man-accused-killing-wife-screwdriver
Mentally handicapped individual still figured out how to kill with a screwdriver.
Or how about a doctor who killed babies with scissors?
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/philadelphia-abortion-doctor-accused-killing-babies-scissors-charged/story?id=12649868#.UeVhjY2miUQ
Or how about this guy who killd another man with a basebal bat. Too bad the 62-year-old didn't have a gun to aid him when he was trying to defend the woman.
http://www.news10.net/news/article/247702/2/Deputies-Man-coming-to-wifes-aid-killed-in-baseball-bat-attack
And then of course there's this guy, who killed with his bare hands.
http://www.news10.net/news/article/196580/5/Father-beats-man-to-death-with-bare-hands-for-sexually-abusing-daughter
So if we really want to be safe, we need to add to the list of dangerous weapons to be banned:
- Knives
- Screwdrivers
- Scissors
- Baseball bats
- Bare hands
This list could go on for pages.
A rock isn't that much harder to use effectively than a knife.
http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/12/14/15901085-villager-slashes-22-kids-with-knife-at-elementary-school-gates-in-china?lite
Kind of, but not exactly. With so many points of failure that already exist with firearms, why would you want to add more completely unnecessary ones? Also, forgetting the ammo is a user error, which you can control. Malfunctioning electronics is not.
A gun expert can generally field-strip his firearm to inspect parts and test it, and be reasonably certain that nothing is malfunctioning and that it will operate when needed. When you throw electronics in the mix, achieving that is now far more time-consuming and complex, and completely outside the skillset of most gun users.
If there were a lot fewer guns to steal or sell into the black market
And if Superman really existed, we wouldn't have to worry about criminals. Which is just as likely as your "if" at this point. Perhaps if you quit making wildly impossible assumptions you might be able to understand reality.
Would you rather face a belligerent person person carrying a gun or one carrying a knife, all else being equal?
Would you rather face a belligerent person with a gun of your own, or without? Because frankly, all else is never equal. That false assumption is what all the anti-gun paranoids base their arguments on.
Before guns came around, if you were physically weak or infirm you had virtually no chance to defend yourself. Sure, guns give bad people more options, but they do far, far more to equalize the other side of the equation.
Anyone who says different is either lying or delusional.
I'm not sure what a Scottish minister or South African soldier has to do with any of this.
Perhaps you meant William Hewlett?
Yes. All your programs are in the All Apps window... if you want to replicate the tree style menu, just pin the All Programs folder to the desktop. Control panel is accessible by right clicking the start button. Computer and various shortcuts are pre-pinned on the task bar.
No, that's not exactly like Windows 7.
Now quit spouting lies and bullshit.
Yes, we've all seen you throw out your opinion as fact in many posts. It's still only your opinion, and not the most well-founded one on this issue. And most people disagree.
Whatever shortcomings of the start menu they tried to address, they not only failed at, they changed things for the worse.