Oh yes, that evil big government Teddy Roosevelt, what with his "Federal Food and Drug Administration" to keep people from eating meat filled with mercury! Remember when he threw out Habeas Corpus? Remember in the last 100 years how we sent people to other countries to be tortured? Oh wait...we didn't.
I was baffled at your reply until I read your sig. Let me guess: libertarian, Ayn Rand reader, Ron Paul voter...that's all I need to know. I am not one for big government but returning us to the Gilded Age is an even worse idea.
The Constitution is only a piece of paper. When the people stop believing that it has power, it doesn't. And then things are going to get really bad.
If you want to know how many people simply don't believe in the Constitution, just take a poll of the President's approval rating. The man wipes his ass with the rule of law, and yet 30 percent of the American population approves of him, or about 90 million people. Why? Some of them are the exact kind of cowards that Ben Franklin spoke of when he said, "He that would trade liberty for security will receive neither." Some of them are Team Republicans, who will support Bush no matter what he does because they view being a Republican like being a sports fan, and you support your "team" no matter what they do. Some of them are Christianists, who believe that we will see the (fictional) Rapture in our life time or that America is a debauched sinful nation who has strayed from it's (fictional) Christian roots and that Bush is a "good man" because he believes in the same God they do. Those are the sorts of people that don't believe in the principles of America or of the Constitution.
And they are facilitated by an uncritical press that is owned by rich white dudes who don't want to rock the boat of the party that traditionally lets them keep more of their money, and also want to keep you interested in watching by manufacturing or highlighting "entertaining" news stories instead of real news. And those 90 million also facilitate each other by sending around emails full of falsehoods and smears in order to keep their ridiculous "America is under siege, watch out!" culture alive and keep themselves in a perpetual frenzy of faux outrage. They are Fox News viewers and anti-intellectuals from all walks of life, who see the world as a fucking comic book where America (or them personally) is the Good Guy regardless of what is done, and that the world works like "24" or "Sodom and Gamorah" or some other simplistic, good guy/bad guy duality.
(Either that or they are rich, rich, rich (or THINK they will be) and just want tax cuts no matter how inappropriate they are, like oh say during a war).
This ended up being an unfun screed and I apologize for that. I just get so depressed thinking about how much damage has been done to the core values of our country in the last 6 years.
That "dumb old lady" was taken to the hospital, where it was determined that she had suffered third-degree burns on six percent of her skin and lesser burns over sixteen percent. She remained in the hospital for eight days while she underwent skin grafting. Two years of treatment followed.
She sought to settle with McDonald's for US $20,000 to cover her medical costs, which were $11,000, but the company offered only $800.
During the case, attorneys discovered that McDonald's required franchises to serve coffee at 180-190 F (that's almost boiling temperature, FYI). At that temperature, the coffee would cause a third-degree burn in two to seven seconds.
Other documents obtained from McDonald's showed that from 1982 to 1992 the company had received more than 700 reports of people burnt by McDonald's coffee to varying degrees of severity, and had settled claims arising from scalding injuries for more than $500,000.
The MILLIONS part of the suite was PUNITIVE; that means: designed to PUNISH McDonald's, not to award the plaintiff. Jurors apparently arrived at this figure from attorney's suggestions to penalize McDonald's for one or two days worth of coffee revenues, which were about $1.35 million per day.
In other words, this case was not as ridiculous as it first appears.
Actually most people don't feel like the current prices for high definition players are an "incredible value". (I certainly don't, and I am one of the biggest HD supporters out there.) Remember that whole supply and demand thing? The demand for thousand-dollar high-def players is tiny. The demand for 500 dollar players is still very small...even if that player is half the price of the thousand dollar player.
Comparing a really expensive player to a ludicrously expensive player and calling it a "value" is fallacious.
Possibly my favorite part of your post: "Yes, the taser hurts like hell. But then it stops. Note that, immediately after his tasering, Meyer is suddenly very compliant to the cop's orders. That's the whole point of it."
So you're saying that the point of tasering him is to produce compliance through physical pain? There's another word for that. It's called "torture".
Everything I've heard about tasers leads me to believe that they are basically like being electrocuted. Which, if you've ever had happen, is like having a full-body smackdown applied to you that doesn't leave a mark.
Honestly if I had a choice between being wacked in the body with a baton a few times or taser'd I would probably choose the baton, at least then people would realize that the police actually hurt me. We've all been hit by something before, but very few of us have been electrocuted (I have, it sucks and hurts real bad).
Also I think the officer would have to consider their use of force more, how many people would have felt bad for Rodney King if he were repeatedly taser'd? Think about that a minute.
Silicon Knights is making a game called Too Human. In order to streamline the development of Two Human, Silicon Knights decides to outsource the programming of the 3d engine. They look around and, based on both it's current and planned feature set, decide to use Epic's UT3 (Unreal Tournament 3) 3d engine. This becomes the "motor" of their game.
At some later point, Silicon Knights runs into problems implementing certain things in the engine and making it work the way they want to. Their suit alleges that Epic did not help them with their problems and did not make good on their initial promises (which were features offered under contract, according to Silicon Knights). Instead, Silicon Knights is accusing Epic of withholding information and support so that Epic's own games would look awesome and use features of their UT3 engine that Silicon Knights did not have access to (or could not use).
This supposed non-help cost Silicon Knights a lot of money because they eventually dropped UT3 and wrote their own engine, a major development expense.
Re:The story is my biggest gripe
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BioShock Review
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· Score: 2, Insightful
This is the worst review I have ever seen anywhere. I mean that. It's not that it's poorly written, but it's poorly thought out by someone who obviously gets no joy from gaming and is trying to fit Bioshock into a tiny, preconceived box. Some things that jumped out at me:
Many of your points directly conflict each other ("not enough story, but the game would be better as DOOM") And of course, ("And yeah, the enemies are already boring. I haven't finished the game, but fighting so far is mostly tedious." and yet "(the game would be better if you) just shoot the baddies and get on with it."
Your criticism are mostly invalid (the "magic" of the game is spelled out as a by-product of genetic modification; the fact that it is basically magic is irrelevant because the game takes great pains to remain in the science fiction genre)
My personal favorite: choose absolutely trivial and bizarre shit to bitch about ("And is there a setting to turn off the wave distortion when you look out a window? You wouldn't see anything like that looking out the window of an actual underwater city unless there were severe temperature gradients flowing past the window."...what the hell? who the fuck honestly cares about this? We're not oceanography nerds, we don't care.)
Your total lack of trying to appreciate anything the game is trying to do ("And the Little Sisters? There was no dilemma. I get more ADAM, you say? Fuck 'em. They're harvested.") Even more hilarious is that there actually is a reason to let them live, but I guess you missed that in your hurry to totally disregard everything about the game that wasn't shooting things.
My advice? Stick with Missile Command, Doom, and Prince of Persia, because this whole "game that tries to do something different and also tells a somewhat interesting story" thing is way beyond your comprehension. Enjoy your tired old tropes and paradigms, you freaking mole-man, because I'd hate for you to get distracted by the wavy water outside your window.
Why exactly should we believe what you say? What evidence is there of this? Without a warrant, no one knows why or who they government is monitoring. No one knows the programs are in place. Millions get poured into the "national security" coffers and we have no idea how and why this money is used.
You could easily say in 1968, "Oh don't worry, this stuff is very complicated, we are only using it to protect America from Moscow." Surprise, surprise, by the middle of the 70s it's been revealed that in fact intelligence has been taken on all kinds of people, from Martin Luther King to Nixon's political enemies, far outside the scope of what most Americans find reasonable. That's why we passed the FISA law in 1978, all it says is that you need to get a warrant from a special court to eavesdrop, and you can do it retroactively. This is simply to keep a record and keep tabs on government surveillance. Since 2002 our president has admitted to openly defying this law, which is a felony. It's really that simple.
Maybe I'll get modded down for this as off-topic...but I wanted to say it anyway.
Most people think that Games Workshop is the only "real" miniatures game in town. But it's not. There is another really good game out there called WARMACHINE (and it's companion product, HORDES).
WARMACHINE (yes, it's spelled in all caps) is much cheaper to get into. A "battle box" of a commander and two to four "warjacks" (basically a walking locomotive with weapons - and no they don't look as dumb as that sounds) is 50 bucks, or 35 dollars online. And it comes with the rules and unit stats included.
Whenever you buy a unit, you get a card with all the unit stats. You don't have to ever buy a rulebook if you don't want to. And the miniatures look really nice. Just search around and see. The fiction (aka the "fluff") for the game is just as good as Warhammer. For example, one of the nations in WARMACHINE is a Russian-style fascist state that discovered hundreds of magical swords in an ancient tomb buried under one of their cities. The swords are powerful, but unfortunately cursed, and anyone who uses them goes berserk. So what do they do? They chain convicts to the swords and point them at the enemy! That's the same sort of grim pragmatic feel you get in Warhammer.
I suggest anyone who is sick of GW and Warhammer (I sunk 500 bucks into the game and got 200 back, there are literally hundreds of ebay auctions selling these units at a loss because the game is simply a grind and NOT FUN to actually play for most people) but wants to play a fun miniature game give WARMACHINE a look. I got into it and am enjoying it way, way more than Warhammer. It's tons cheaper and just as fun.
Glenn Greenwald is a former constitutional lawyer who writes a well-researched "column" for Slate.com. He was a former blogger who wrote excellent and substantial posts every day and who has been picked up by an official publication and given a larger audience. He is proof that if a blogger continually writes insightful and in-depth articles that people will notice them and elevate them.
Frankly I think that mainstream media is just jealous that some 'amateur' reports do a better job then they do. Mainstream journalism has become a joke in recent years - it is nothing but "shocking scandals" without much real substance. When 41 percent of the country still believes a flat-out falsehood (Iraq was partially or fully responsible for 9/11) that helped propel this country into an unpopular and expensive pre-emptive war, the media has absolutely failed us.
You mean Sony isn't completely obsessed with the price of their console, like potential customers are? They don't feel bad about the lack of rumble, like the potential customers do? They have their own strategy that doesn't involve pleasing potential customers?
You seem to think that "the press" has it's own agenda here, but in this case they are bringing up legitimate concerns that the public is putting forward and that Sony is ignoring. I won't go as far as saying "self-destructing", but ever since their E3 price announcement they have steadily been eroding the goodwill of gamers and turning off potential customers. Like myself...I was going to buy a PS3 before the sky-high price and lack of exclusives turned me off to it. Their attitude isn't helping me re-evaluate that decision.
Don't bother with the interview, btw. It's nothing more than PR-flak "we can do no wrong" spiel from a clueless non-gamer executive.
OeLeWaPpErKe has made probably one of the worst posts I have ever seen on Slashdot, ever. The fact that it has a +3 Insightful modifier is incredibly disheartening to me.
"Whatever else the war on Iraq did, it created freedom for the Iraqi people." What a ridiculous statement. We went to Iraq on false intelligence to knock off Saddam so that his non-existent "weapons of mass destruction" would not be a threat to America. That was what the American public was sold on by irresponsible media and duplicious politicians. But, of course there were no weapons. There is substantial evidence that Bush knew this and didn't give a shit anyway; he wanted to make his buddy Dick Cheney's company rich (Halliburton) and get revenge for Saddman's assassination attempt on his father. So we went in, and when there were no weapons it became "spreading peace and democracy to Iraq".
Yeah, the peace to have your nieghbor cut your fucking head off over a 1,000 year old grudge.
Meanwhile, here at home Bush dissasembles our rights. He trashes Habeas Corpus and hold hundreds in a gulag (and yes, GITMO is a fucking Soviet-style GULAG and we would have called it such in the 80s) in Cuba. He systematically destroys an American citizen with torture to the point of incompetancy (Juse Padilla). Oh and he took a huge dump on New Orleans, because they are too black and too poor to get the kind of help that our president gives -- the corporate kind. "Nice Job Brownie!". And yet he remains a "freedom-fighter" to mouth-breathers like you.
You know, here's something that may surprise you: middle-easterners are people. They love their children. They love their parents. They hurt when they are sad, they have hopes and dreams. They also have unimaginable poverty; over 30 percent of them eat ONE MEAL A DAY or less. They are so hopeless that they blow themselves up for a chance at a better life, not because they are crazy but because their situation sucks and they can't find a way out of it. They are not monsters, they are human beings being manipulated by their clergyman and sold out by their leaders. If anything, we should be dropping books, not bombs, on them. We should take the ONE FUCKING TRILLION DOLLARS that our Fearless Leader's little Iraqi jaunt is going to end up costing us (enough for an 85 dollar check for every man, woman, and child on earth) and invest it in educating the middle east and building up real infrastructure for them. Within a generation we could change the world for the better.
Or we could treat them like you advocate, like savage monsters who need to be imprisoned, tortured, and killed. Or given "enlightment" and "freedom" at the point of a gun, while we steal all their natural resources. It is the "white man's burden" after all. I can recall several other empires trying the same tack; if they were still around we could ask them how that worked out.
Well you expressed the point far more succinctly then I did. Unfortunately it seems that there is some obsessed mod with an axe to grind out there against people stating the plainly obvious -- that the Wii is not built for graphics and should not be expected to look cutting edge or get the latest greatest features for graphics. I say this as someone who is going to buy a Wii; it has strengths that the two other console do not havee (but has a weakness, too). I wrote my original post without an ounce of troll in my body and because some fanboy disagrees I lost karma. My only hope is that the meta-moderating system keeps mod points out of the hands of this jerk in the future.
That's no big deal. The Unreal engines, at their core, are nothing more than flashy-graphic delivery packages. Heck, if they port Unreal Engine 2 to the Wii, who cares? The Wii has been touting gameplay over graphics since it's conception; not having the abolutely cutting-edge and latest bloom/particle/shading techniques shouldn't make a bit of difference to the average Wii owner (and if it does, why don't they own a PS3 or 360?)
$1500 for a TV is ludicrous for 95% of homes. Many slashdotters may spend a lot of money on technology, but the average household in the US does not.
You are flat-out wrong. Read this article about the almost 1 billion on HDTV sales for the 2006 holiday season: here.. Considering that the average American household spends 400 dollars on BACK TO SCHOOL items each year, a 1500 dollar television that the average home user watches 4 hours a night for 10 years or more is a very reasonable value proposition for most buyers. Your associates and friends are not representative of the general public as the article above demonstrates. The fact that your parents still use a black-and-white television should be a HUGE warning flag to anyone reading your post that you do not represent the mainstream. The fact that you consider a 15" television "a decent size" should be a HUGE warning flag to anyone reading your post that your idea of an acceptable picture is not to be taken seriously. Virtually no one is happy with a 15" screen...hell no one even buys 15" monitors anymore if they can help it. The fact that you state that only "a small percentage of people" can see a difference should be a huge warning flag for anyone reading your post because you are WRONG. Every single person I have shown my HD-DVD Batman Begins vs. my DVD Batman Begins has been able to IMMEDIATELY see the gigantic quality difference between the two and wanted an HD-DVD player at once! Dozens of people have felt this way. Cost of the players and having to rebuy the media is the sticking point at this time, not a perception that there is little to no gain in HDTV vs standard def.
I take issue with one of your statements. The first is the assertion that HDTV "won't succeed" until it is affordable by people who are living below the poverty line is a ridiculous one. People below the poverty line will get HDTVs the same way they get furniture, or cars, or anything else: used. They will not get new HDTVs or anything else for that matter, because they are IN POVERTY. People in poverty are not neccesary for a product to succeed; Lexus and Gucci were doing just fine last time I looked.
I am glad your old television is working for you. I myself prefer a beautiful, crisp, and clean picture that only HDTV can deliver. Most people can appreciate this; if you are not one of them then save your money and buy an HDTV->Standard Def converter when they are offered. But don't crap on the rest of us and don't pretend that HDTV isn't the future. The picture improvements are measureable and observable by most people. If you had spent any amount of time around one, rather than with a circa 1970 black-and-white television set, you might appreciate where I am coming from.
There's no way in today's retail market to negotiate with the seller on a per-unit basis. If there was, you can bet that they WOULD do exactly that - negotiate with each person for what they are willing to pay. And they already do. In the business community, they call this person an "account manager" and you can call them up, get quotes, negotiate, and generally get a much more flexible system then our traditional retail system. Of course, these are big customers with big needs and big accounts; they aren't going to do this over a DVD.
I am not saying that people pirating a movie because it costs too much are correct in doing so; I am saying that there are three alternatives: pay whatever the media company wants to charge you, do nothing, or get it for free. There's no fourth option, and that contributes to piracy. I am not endorsing that behavior, simply noting it.
First of all, the thing that bums me out about articles like this is that there's always a couple of different crowds that pop into this discussion EVERY TIME. The first are the naysayers who predict the demise of both formats and the non-adoption of HD-TV in general. I think that's a patently ridiculous assertion from people who have absolutely no idea what they are talking about. The original television standard is now over 60 years old; it is showing it's age. A properly calibrated HD-TV looks great and delivers a measurably higher-quality experience; I wonder if any of the people poo-pooing HD have actually SEEN a system that delivers the full potential of the medium. And the price is not as ludicrous as people say. You can get a very nice 1080p 42" television for around 1500 dollars, which will work great in 95% of homes. Considering the amount of coin that most slashdotters (and the iPod-buying public in general) drop on technology, this is certainly not an outrageous amount of money. Since HDTV media is able to be broadcast over the air or downloaded, it is not tied to the success of Blu-Ray or HD-DVD. It is here to stay and will become more and more of a factor as the general public is made aware of the large jump in quality.
Secondly, there is the "too much" crowd. As in, "I have terrible eyesight, or would be happy with a postage-stamp-sized square of video" people, and HD is "too much" for them. Which is fine, but this group needs to realize that the vast majority of people don't feel this way. To take this to the extreme, I even saw a ludicrous comment in this very discussion along the lines of "Why do people even need 16:9, 4:3 cropped is fine...". No you luddite, the reason that 4:3 cropped movies are not "fine" is because they infringe on, and in some cases destroy*, the coherence of the visual scene that the director is trying to construct. It's absolutely myopic to think that because your vision is poor or your depth of field narrow that television technology should stay firmly mired in the 4:3 aspect ratio. (Which, by the way, was chosen because it was the cinematic aspect ratio of the 40s and 50s! 16:9 and greater were used by directors starting predominately in the 60s, and was popular enough with viewers to become the de facto cinema screen ratio.) Of course there's no helping some people: I have a friend who has a 22" Zenith television from the 70s with color so bad that Friends looks more like Amigos and they are happy with it; I have another friend with a blurry big-screen that looks like absolute shit that he is happy with it(the "quantity over quality" mentality in action). But I have built out 4 media centers for my friends on a pretty reasonable budget and without fail all of these systems have been regarded very highly by guests, relatives, etc. Virtually no one has said that the system is "too much" or that they wouldn't want one if they had the option. So to all of those that say that HDTV is "too much" for them: I am sorry that you are going to have to pay for features you won't be able to appreciate, but then again I am sure color-blind people bitched about it when black-and-white televisions went out of favor. You'll live.
Having said all this, I myself believe that HD-DVD and Blu-Ray might still fail. The number one thing that will kill both these formats is the price of the discs. No one wants to pay 25 dollars (HD-DVD) to 30 dollars (Blu-Ray) for a movie; that is just too much and is a major barrier to the success of the formats. And in many cases these are movies that the potential audience already owns on DVD. Is a better picture quality, and ONLY better picture quality**, worth it? I suspect that the answer will be no. This will change as more HD discs of new releases are released "day and date" with their DVD counterparts. The second issue is that the players are WAY too expensive. I myself own an xbox360 (that I wanted anyway, seperate from HD-DVD) and bought the reasonably-priced HD-DVD add on for it. Keep in mind that I am 100% co
What makes you think we are doing the "right" thing in Iraq?
99% of the people in Iraq want America gone. Period. That was in a poll done by a major media outlet, although the name is escaping me. More than 50% thought life was better under Saddam. That's how bad we are bungling this.
Not to mention that it is costing us THOUSANDS of American lives. Not to mention this war is costing TENS OF THOUSANDS of Iraqi lives. Not to mention that this war is costing us BILLIONS upon BILLION of dollars. Not to mention it reduces our standing in the global community. Not to mention that Saddam was one of 45 dictators in the world and was nothing special. Not to mention it is making us LESS safe, not more safe, and that's the CIA and military's analysis. Not to mention that the escalation (not the "surge") of 21,000 troops is not enough, a joint editorial in all 5 Armed Services newspapers talked at length about this. To turn this situation around we would need hundreds of thousands of troops (a.k.a. a draft), 21,000 is "just enough to lose".
Please, please explain to me why a dusty nation in the middle of an unstable region is worth all of this, because I can't logically figure it out.
You would rather leave your friends to die or be horribly injured in a hostile foreign land rather than bring them home? For one of the worst policy debacles in American history? Either those friends of yours are ficticious or you are literally human garbage.
I guess it's easy to "stay the course" with other people's lives.
After the HD-DVD crack, I realized that things where "unbalanced" by having just one format cracked, so I did Blu-Ray too.
Bless you, muslix. Now the two formats can compete as true equals where it counts: in the ease of supplementing your legitimate media collection with illegal copies of things that you "kind of like".
Let's not pretend that there is one type of pirate. There are many levels of pirate, and by far the most common type (at least in my experience) is the "pirate" who buys plenty of legitimate media, but occasionally supplements their colleciton with an illegal copy of something that they don't care enough about to pay full price for. You can see the popularity of this line of thinking by watching people paw through the "bargain bin" at any major retailer. These are the movies that no one liked enough to pay full price for, but still maange to sell. This is more of a problem, as I see it, with the uniform pricing structure of DVDs. Let's not pretend that "Batman Begins" and "Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants" are worth the same amount of money to most people. They are simply not, and should be priced differently from the get-go. Sadly the media companies instead try to rake in bucks from the "gotta have it now" super-fans crowd by artificially inflating the price; the side-effect is piracy. I would wager that the media companies gain more money then they lose by this process; the convenience of the consumer does not enter into the equation (these companies have demonstrated, repeatedly and without a doubt, that the convenience of the consumer is a very, VERY low priority to them).
Of course I am deliberately discounting bring up That Guy. You know That Guy. He is the guy with the huge collection of pirated movies for the sake of having them. To be fair, unless That Guy has a lot of friends (and usually they do not) they are no real threat to media companies. That Guy would not have purchased the movies anyway, and his collection is (to put it bluntly) a dick-measuring contest to make himself feel better anyway. Every That Guy that I have ever met has had movies of laughably bad quality in their collection; their love is not for the cinema but rather, like a dragon, they hoard the wealth for it's own sake rather than an appreciation for it. And that might be the dorkiest thing I have ever written.
An erudite response, my friend, but sadly derived from a mistaken premise. It was NOT bloggers who were targetted by this but rather lobbyists PRETENDING to be bloggers; these would be retained political shills pretending to be a man (or woman) of the people while collecting a check for pushing the agenda of their corporate masters. So please read some of the other responses that spell this out explicitly, as well as an article at http://www.stephenbainbridge.com/2007/01/blogger_r egistr.html.
Oh, I see, so you are called a nazi on an internet message board, but not in real life, and that is the fault of "liberals". I hope you realize how head-spinningly stupid this is.
BTW, if you believe in full capatalism I have a question: do you also believe in labor unions? If the answer is no, then you do not believe in full capitalism, you are just another free market fundie drone.
Slashdot Mirror
Could you please explain what you're trying to say here, because I honestly have no idea.
Oh yes, that evil big government Teddy Roosevelt, what with his "Federal Food and Drug Administration" to keep people from eating meat filled with mercury! Remember when he threw out Habeas Corpus? Remember in the last 100 years how we sent people to other countries to be tortured? Oh wait...we didn't.
I was baffled at your reply until I read your sig. Let me guess: libertarian, Ayn Rand reader, Ron Paul voter...that's all I need to know. I am not one for big government but returning us to the Gilded Age is an even worse idea.
The Constitution is only a piece of paper. When the people stop believing that it has power, it doesn't. And then things are going to get really bad.
If you want to know how many people simply don't believe in the Constitution, just take a poll of the President's approval rating. The man wipes his ass with the rule of law, and yet 30 percent of the American population approves of him, or about 90 million people. Why? Some of them are the exact kind of cowards that Ben Franklin spoke of when he said, "He that would trade liberty for security will receive neither." Some of them are Team Republicans, who will support Bush no matter what he does because they view being a Republican like being a sports fan, and you support your "team" no matter what they do. Some of them are Christianists, who believe that we will see the (fictional) Rapture in our life time or that America is a debauched sinful nation who has strayed from it's (fictional) Christian roots and that Bush is a "good man" because he believes in the same God they do. Those are the sorts of people that don't believe in the principles of America or of the Constitution.
And they are facilitated by an uncritical press that is owned by rich white dudes who don't want to rock the boat of the party that traditionally lets them keep more of their money, and also want to keep you interested in watching by manufacturing or highlighting "entertaining" news stories instead of real news. And those 90 million also facilitate each other by sending around emails full of falsehoods and smears in order to keep their ridiculous "America is under siege, watch out!" culture alive and keep themselves in a perpetual frenzy of faux outrage. They are Fox News viewers and anti-intellectuals from all walks of life, who see the world as a fucking comic book where America (or them personally) is the Good Guy regardless of what is done, and that the world works like "24" or "Sodom and Gamorah" or some other simplistic, good guy/bad guy duality.
(Either that or they are rich, rich, rich (or THINK they will be) and just want tax cuts no matter how inappropriate they are, like oh say during a war).
This ended up being an unfun screed and I apologize for that. I just get so depressed thinking about how much damage has been done to the core values of our country in the last 6 years.
Actually your famous "dumb lady coffee cup story" is not as ridiculous as it appears at first glance. Perhaps you could check out this link:
...which makes several excellent points.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonald's_coffee_case
Highlights for the lazy:
That "dumb old lady" was taken to the hospital, where it was determined that she had suffered third-degree burns on six percent of her skin and lesser burns over sixteen percent. She remained in the hospital for eight days while she underwent skin grafting. Two years of treatment followed.
She sought to settle with McDonald's for US $20,000 to cover her medical costs, which were $11,000, but the company offered only $800.
During the case, attorneys discovered that McDonald's required franchises to serve coffee at 180-190 F (that's almost boiling temperature, FYI). At that temperature, the coffee would cause a third-degree burn in two to seven seconds.
Other documents obtained from McDonald's showed that from 1982 to 1992 the company had received more than 700 reports of people burnt by McDonald's coffee to varying degrees of severity, and had settled claims arising from scalding injuries for more than $500,000.
The MILLIONS part of the suite was PUNITIVE; that means: designed to PUNISH McDonald's, not to award the plaintiff. Jurors apparently arrived at this figure from attorney's suggestions to penalize McDonald's for one or two days worth of coffee revenues, which were about $1.35 million per day.
In other words, this case was not as ridiculous as it first appears.
Actually most people don't feel like the current prices for high definition players are an "incredible value". (I certainly don't, and I am one of the biggest HD supporters out there.) Remember that whole supply and demand thing? The demand for thousand-dollar high-def players is tiny. The demand for 500 dollar players is still very small...even if that player is half the price of the thousand dollar player.
Comparing a really expensive player to a ludicrously expensive player and calling it a "value" is fallacious.
Possibly my favorite part of your post: "Yes, the taser hurts like hell. But then it stops. Note that, immediately after his tasering, Meyer is suddenly very compliant to the cop's orders. That's the whole point of it."
So you're saying that the point of tasering him is to produce compliance through physical pain? There's another word for that. It's called "torture".
You are right, I misused the word "electrocution" as a synonym for "electric shock", thank you for pointing that out. I should I known better.
Everything I've heard about tasers leads me to believe that they are basically like being electrocuted. Which, if you've ever had happen, is like having a full-body smackdown applied to you that doesn't leave a mark.
Honestly if I had a choice between being wacked in the body with a baton a few times or taser'd I would probably choose the baton, at least then people would realize that the police actually hurt me. We've all been hit by something before, but very few of us have been electrocuted (I have, it sucks and hurts real bad).
Also I think the officer would have to consider their use of force more, how many people would have felt bad for Rodney King if he were repeatedly taser'd? Think about that a minute.
Basically it goes like this:
Silicon Knights is making a game called Too Human. In order to streamline the development of Two Human, Silicon Knights decides to outsource the programming of the 3d engine. They look around and, based on both it's current and planned feature set, decide to use Epic's UT3 (Unreal Tournament 3) 3d engine. This becomes the "motor" of their game.
At some later point, Silicon Knights runs into problems implementing certain things in the engine and making it work the way they want to. Their suit alleges that Epic did not help them with their problems and did not make good on their initial promises (which were features offered under contract, according to Silicon Knights). Instead, Silicon Knights is accusing Epic of withholding information and support so that Epic's own games would look awesome and use features of their UT3 engine that Silicon Knights did not have access to (or could not use).
This supposed non-help cost Silicon Knights a lot of money because they eventually dropped UT3 and wrote their own engine, a major development expense.
This is the worst review I have ever seen anywhere. I mean that. It's not that it's poorly written, but it's poorly thought out by someone who obviously gets no joy from gaming and is trying to fit Bioshock into a tiny, preconceived box. Some things that jumped out at me:
Many of your points directly conflict each other ("not enough story, but the game would be better as DOOM") And of course, ("And yeah, the enemies are already boring. I haven't finished the game, but fighting so far is mostly tedious." and yet "(the game would be better if you) just shoot the baddies and get on with it."
Your criticism are mostly invalid (the "magic" of the game is spelled out as a by-product of genetic modification; the fact that it is basically magic is irrelevant because the game takes great pains to remain in the science fiction genre)
My personal favorite: choose absolutely trivial and bizarre shit to bitch about ("And is there a setting to turn off the wave distortion when you look out a window? You wouldn't see anything like that looking out the window of an actual underwater city unless there were severe temperature gradients flowing past the window."...what the hell? who the fuck honestly cares about this? We're not oceanography nerds, we don't care.)
Your total lack of trying to appreciate anything the game is trying to do ("And the Little Sisters? There was no dilemma. I get more ADAM, you say? Fuck 'em. They're harvested.") Even more hilarious is that there actually is a reason to let them live, but I guess you missed that in your hurry to totally disregard everything about the game that wasn't shooting things.
My advice? Stick with Missile Command, Doom, and Prince of Persia, because this whole "game that tries to do something different and also tells a somewhat interesting story" thing is way beyond your comprehension. Enjoy your tired old tropes and paradigms, you freaking mole-man, because I'd hate for you to get distracted by the wavy water outside your window.
Why exactly should we believe what you say? What evidence is there of this? Without a warrant, no one knows why or who they government is monitoring. No one knows the programs are in place. Millions get poured into the "national security" coffers and we have no idea how and why this money is used.
You could easily say in 1968, "Oh don't worry, this stuff is very complicated, we are only using it to protect America from Moscow." Surprise, surprise, by the middle of the 70s it's been revealed that in fact intelligence has been taken on all kinds of people, from Martin Luther King to Nixon's political enemies, far outside the scope of what most Americans find reasonable. That's why we passed the FISA law in 1978, all it says is that you need to get a warrant from a special court to eavesdrop, and you can do it retroactively. This is simply to keep a record and keep tabs on government surveillance. Since 2002 our president has admitted to openly defying this law, which is a felony. It's really that simple.
Maybe I'll get modded down for this as off-topic...but I wanted to say it anyway.
Most people think that Games Workshop is the only "real" miniatures game in town. But it's not. There is another really good game out there called WARMACHINE (and it's companion product, HORDES).
WARMACHINE (yes, it's spelled in all caps) is much cheaper to get into. A "battle box" of a commander and two to four "warjacks" (basically a walking locomotive with weapons - and no they don't look as dumb as that sounds) is 50 bucks, or 35 dollars online. And it comes with the rules and unit stats included.
Whenever you buy a unit, you get a card with all the unit stats. You don't have to ever buy a rulebook if you don't want to. And the miniatures look really nice. Just search around and see. The fiction (aka the "fluff") for the game is just as good as Warhammer. For example, one of the nations in WARMACHINE is a Russian-style fascist state that discovered hundreds of magical swords in an ancient tomb buried under one of their cities. The swords are powerful, but unfortunately cursed, and anyone who uses them goes berserk. So what do they do? They chain convicts to the swords and point them at the enemy! That's the same sort of grim pragmatic feel you get in Warhammer.
I suggest anyone who is sick of GW and Warhammer (I sunk 500 bucks into the game and got 200 back, there are literally hundreds of ebay auctions selling these units at a loss because the game is simply a grind and NOT FUN to actually play for most people) but wants to play a fun miniature game give WARMACHINE a look. I got into it and am enjoying it way, way more than Warhammer. It's tons cheaper and just as fun.
Glenn Greenwald is a former constitutional lawyer who writes a well-researched "column" for Slate.com. He was a former blogger who wrote excellent and substantial posts every day and who has been picked up by an official publication and given a larger audience. He is proof that if a blogger continually writes insightful and in-depth articles that people will notice them and elevate them.
Frankly I think that mainstream media is just jealous that some 'amateur' reports do a better job then they do. Mainstream journalism has become a joke in recent years - it is nothing but "shocking scandals" without much real substance. When 41 percent of the country still believes a flat-out falsehood (Iraq was partially or fully responsible for 9/11) that helped propel this country into an unpopular and expensive pre-emptive war, the media has absolutely failed us.
You mean Sony isn't completely obsessed with the price of their console, like potential customers are? They don't feel bad about the lack of rumble, like the potential customers do? They have their own strategy that doesn't involve pleasing potential customers?
You seem to think that "the press" has it's own agenda here, but in this case they are bringing up legitimate concerns that the public is putting forward and that Sony is ignoring. I won't go as far as saying "self-destructing", but ever since their E3 price announcement they have steadily been eroding the goodwill of gamers and turning off potential customers. Like myself...I was going to buy a PS3 before the sky-high price and lack of exclusives turned me off to it. Their attitude isn't helping me re-evaluate that decision.
Don't bother with the interview, btw. It's nothing more than PR-flak "we can do no wrong" spiel from a clueless non-gamer executive.
OeLeWaPpErKe has made probably one of the worst posts I have ever seen on Slashdot, ever. The fact that it has a +3 Insightful modifier is incredibly disheartening to me.
"Whatever else the war on Iraq did, it created freedom for the Iraqi people." What a ridiculous statement. We went to Iraq on false intelligence to knock off Saddam so that his non-existent "weapons of mass destruction" would not be a threat to America. That was what the American public was sold on by irresponsible media and duplicious politicians. But, of course there were no weapons. There is substantial evidence that Bush knew this and didn't give a shit anyway; he wanted to make his buddy Dick Cheney's company rich (Halliburton) and get revenge for Saddman's assassination attempt on his father. So we went in, and when there were no weapons it became "spreading peace and democracy to Iraq".
Yeah, the peace to have your nieghbor cut your fucking head off over a 1,000 year old grudge.
Meanwhile, here at home Bush dissasembles our rights. He trashes Habeas Corpus and hold hundreds in a gulag (and yes, GITMO is a fucking Soviet-style GULAG and we would have called it such in the 80s) in Cuba. He systematically destroys an American citizen with torture to the point of incompetancy (Juse Padilla). Oh and he took a huge dump on New Orleans, because they are too black and too poor to get the kind of help that our president gives -- the corporate kind. "Nice Job Brownie!". And yet he remains a "freedom-fighter" to mouth-breathers like you.
You know, here's something that may surprise you: middle-easterners are people. They love their children. They love their parents. They hurt when they are sad, they have hopes and dreams. They also have unimaginable poverty; over 30 percent of them eat ONE MEAL A DAY or less. They are so hopeless that they blow themselves up for a chance at a better life, not because they are crazy but because their situation sucks and they can't find a way out of it. They are not monsters, they are human beings being manipulated by their clergyman and sold out by their leaders. If anything, we should be dropping books, not bombs, on them. We should take the ONE FUCKING TRILLION DOLLARS that our Fearless Leader's little Iraqi jaunt is going to end up costing us (enough for an 85 dollar check for every man, woman, and child on earth) and invest it in educating the middle east and building up real infrastructure for them. Within a generation we could change the world for the better.
Or we could treat them like you advocate, like savage monsters who need to be imprisoned, tortured, and killed. Or given "enlightment" and "freedom" at the point of a gun, while we steal all their natural resources. It is the "white man's burden" after all. I can recall several other empires trying the same tack; if they were still around we could ask them how that worked out.
Well you expressed the point far more succinctly then I did. Unfortunately it seems that there is some obsessed mod with an axe to grind out there against people stating the plainly obvious -- that the Wii is not built for graphics and should not be expected to look cutting edge or get the latest greatest features for graphics. I say this as someone who is going to buy a Wii; it has strengths that the two other console do not havee (but has a weakness, too). I wrote my original post without an ounce of troll in my body and because some fanboy disagrees I lost karma. My only hope is that the meta-moderating system keeps mod points out of the hands of this jerk in the future.
That's no big deal. The Unreal engines, at their core, are nothing more than flashy-graphic delivery packages. Heck, if they port Unreal Engine 2 to the Wii, who cares? The Wii has been touting gameplay over graphics since it's conception; not having the abolutely cutting-edge and latest bloom/particle/shading techniques shouldn't make a bit of difference to the average Wii owner (and if it does, why don't they own a PS3 or 360?)
$1500 for a TV is ludicrous for 95% of homes. Many slashdotters may spend a lot of money on technology, but the average household in the US does not.
You are flat-out wrong. Read this article about the almost 1 billion on HDTV sales for the 2006 holiday season: here.. Considering that the average American household spends 400 dollars on BACK TO SCHOOL items each year, a 1500 dollar television that the average home user watches 4 hours a night for 10 years or more is a very reasonable value proposition for most buyers. Your associates and friends are not representative of the general public as the article above demonstrates. The fact that your parents still use a black-and-white television should be a HUGE warning flag to anyone reading your post that you do not represent the mainstream. The fact that you consider a 15" television "a decent size" should be a HUGE warning flag to anyone reading your post that your idea of an acceptable picture is not to be taken seriously. Virtually no one is happy with a 15" screen...hell no one even buys 15" monitors anymore if they can help it. The fact that you state that only "a small percentage of people" can see a difference should be a huge warning flag for anyone reading your post because you are WRONG. Every single person I have shown my HD-DVD Batman Begins vs. my DVD Batman Begins has been able to IMMEDIATELY see the gigantic quality difference between the two and wanted an HD-DVD player at once! Dozens of people have felt this way. Cost of the players and having to rebuy the media is the sticking point at this time, not a perception that there is little to no gain in HDTV vs standard def.
I take issue with one of your statements. The first is the assertion that HDTV "won't succeed" until it is affordable by people who are living below the poverty line is a ridiculous one. People below the poverty line will get HDTVs the same way they get furniture, or cars, or anything else: used. They will not get new HDTVs or anything else for that matter, because they are IN POVERTY. People in poverty are not neccesary for a product to succeed; Lexus and Gucci were doing just fine last time I looked.
I am glad your old television is working for you. I myself prefer a beautiful, crisp, and clean picture that only HDTV can deliver. Most people can appreciate this; if you are not one of them then save your money and buy an HDTV->Standard Def converter when they are offered. But don't crap on the rest of us and don't pretend that HDTV isn't the future. The picture improvements are measureable and observable by most people. If you had spent any amount of time around one, rather than with a circa 1970 black-and-white television set, you might appreciate where I am coming from.
There's no way in today's retail market to negotiate with the seller on a per-unit basis. If there was, you can bet that they WOULD do exactly that - negotiate with each person for what they are willing to pay. And they already do. In the business community, they call this person an "account manager" and you can call them up, get quotes, negotiate, and generally get a much more flexible system then our traditional retail system. Of course, these are big customers with big needs and big accounts; they aren't going to do this over a DVD.
I am not saying that people pirating a movie because it costs too much are correct in doing so; I am saying that there are three alternatives: pay whatever the media company wants to charge you, do nothing, or get it for free. There's no fourth option, and that contributes to piracy. I am not endorsing that behavior, simply noting it.
First of all, the thing that bums me out about articles like this is that there's always a couple of different crowds that pop into this discussion EVERY TIME. The first are the naysayers who predict the demise of both formats and the non-adoption of HD-TV in general. I think that's a patently ridiculous assertion from people who have absolutely no idea what they are talking about. The original television standard is now over 60 years old; it is showing it's age. A properly calibrated HD-TV looks great and delivers a measurably higher-quality experience; I wonder if any of the people poo-pooing HD have actually SEEN a system that delivers the full potential of the medium. And the price is not as ludicrous as people say. You can get a very nice 1080p 42" television for around 1500 dollars, which will work great in 95% of homes. Considering the amount of coin that most slashdotters (and the iPod-buying public in general) drop on technology, this is certainly not an outrageous amount of money. Since HDTV media is able to be broadcast over the air or downloaded, it is not tied to the success of Blu-Ray or HD-DVD. It is here to stay and will become more and more of a factor as the general public is made aware of the large jump in quality.
Secondly, there is the "too much" crowd. As in, "I have terrible eyesight, or would be happy with a postage-stamp-sized square of video" people, and HD is "too much" for them. Which is fine, but this group needs to realize that the vast majority of people don't feel this way. To take this to the extreme, I even saw a ludicrous comment in this very discussion along the lines of "Why do people even need 16:9, 4:3 cropped is fine...". No you luddite, the reason that 4:3 cropped movies are not "fine" is because they infringe on, and in some cases destroy*, the coherence of the visual scene that the director is trying to construct. It's absolutely myopic to think that because your vision is poor or your depth of field narrow that television technology should stay firmly mired in the 4:3 aspect ratio. (Which, by the way, was chosen because it was the cinematic aspect ratio of the 40s and 50s! 16:9 and greater were used by directors starting predominately in the 60s, and was popular enough with viewers to become the de facto cinema screen ratio.) Of course there's no helping some people: I have a friend who has a 22" Zenith television from the 70s with color so bad that Friends looks more like Amigos and they are happy with it; I have another friend with a blurry big-screen that looks like absolute shit that he is happy with it(the "quantity over quality" mentality in action). But I have built out 4 media centers for my friends on a pretty reasonable budget and without fail all of these systems have been regarded very highly by guests, relatives, etc. Virtually no one has said that the system is "too much" or that they wouldn't want one if they had the option. So to all of those that say that HDTV is "too much" for them: I am sorry that you are going to have to pay for features you won't be able to appreciate, but then again I am sure color-blind people bitched about it when black-and-white televisions went out of favor. You'll live.
Having said all this, I myself believe that HD-DVD and Blu-Ray might still fail. The number one thing that will kill both these formats is the price of the discs. No one wants to pay 25 dollars (HD-DVD) to 30 dollars (Blu-Ray) for a movie; that is just too much and is a major barrier to the success of the formats. And in many cases these are movies that the potential audience already owns on DVD. Is a better picture quality, and ONLY better picture quality**, worth it? I suspect that the answer will be no. This will change as more HD discs of new releases are released "day and date" with their DVD counterparts. The second issue is that the players are WAY too expensive. I myself own an xbox360 (that I wanted anyway, seperate from HD-DVD) and bought the reasonably-priced HD-DVD add on for it. Keep in mind that I am 100% co
What makes you think we are doing the "right" thing in Iraq? 99% of the people in Iraq want America gone. Period. That was in a poll done by a major media outlet, although the name is escaping me. More than 50% thought life was better under Saddam. That's how bad we are bungling this. Not to mention that it is costing us THOUSANDS of American lives. Not to mention this war is costing TENS OF THOUSANDS of Iraqi lives. Not to mention that this war is costing us BILLIONS upon BILLION of dollars. Not to mention it reduces our standing in the global community. Not to mention that Saddam was one of 45 dictators in the world and was nothing special. Not to mention it is making us LESS safe, not more safe, and that's the CIA and military's analysis. Not to mention that the escalation (not the "surge") of 21,000 troops is not enough, a joint editorial in all 5 Armed Services newspapers talked at length about this. To turn this situation around we would need hundreds of thousands of troops (a.k.a. a draft), 21,000 is "just enough to lose". Please, please explain to me why a dusty nation in the middle of an unstable region is worth all of this, because I can't logically figure it out.
You would rather leave your friends to die or be horribly injured in a hostile foreign land rather than bring them home? For one of the worst policy debacles in American history? Either those friends of yours are ficticious or you are literally human garbage.
I guess it's easy to "stay the course" with other people's lives.
After the HD-DVD crack, I realized that things where "unbalanced" by having just one format cracked, so I did Blu-Ray too.
Bless you, muslix. Now the two formats can compete as true equals where it counts: in the ease of supplementing your legitimate media collection with illegal copies of things that you "kind of like".
Let's not pretend that there is one type of pirate. There are many levels of pirate, and by far the most common type (at least in my experience) is the "pirate" who buys plenty of legitimate media, but occasionally supplements their colleciton with an illegal copy of something that they don't care enough about to pay full price for. You can see the popularity of this line of thinking by watching people paw through the "bargain bin" at any major retailer. These are the movies that no one liked enough to pay full price for, but still maange to sell. This is more of a problem, as I see it, with the uniform pricing structure of DVDs. Let's not pretend that "Batman Begins" and "Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants" are worth the same amount of money to most people. They are simply not, and should be priced differently from the get-go. Sadly the media companies instead try to rake in bucks from the "gotta have it now" super-fans crowd by artificially inflating the price; the side-effect is piracy. I would wager that the media companies gain more money then they lose by this process; the convenience of the consumer does not enter into the equation (these companies have demonstrated, repeatedly and without a doubt, that the convenience of the consumer is a very, VERY low priority to them).
Of course I am deliberately discounting bring up That Guy. You know That Guy. He is the guy with the huge collection of pirated movies for the sake of having them. To be fair, unless That Guy has a lot of friends (and usually they do not) they are no real threat to media companies. That Guy would not have purchased the movies anyway, and his collection is (to put it bluntly) a dick-measuring contest to make himself feel better anyway. Every That Guy that I have ever met has had movies of laughably bad quality in their collection; their love is not for the cinema but rather, like a dragon, they hoard the wealth for it's own sake rather than an appreciation for it. And that might be the dorkiest thing I have ever written.
An erudite response, my friend, but sadly derived from a mistaken premise. It was NOT bloggers who were targetted by this but rather lobbyists PRETENDING to be bloggers; these would be retained political shills pretending to be a man (or woman) of the people while collecting a check for pushing the agenda of their corporate masters. So please read some of the other responses that spell this out explicitly, as well as an article at http://www.stephenbainbridge.com/2007/01/blogger_r egistr.html.
Oh, I see, so you are called a nazi on an internet message board, but not in real life, and that is the fault of "liberals". I hope you realize how head-spinningly stupid this is.
BTW, if you believe in full capatalism I have a question: do you also believe in labor unions? If the answer is no, then you do not believe in full capitalism, you are just another free market fundie drone.