The focus on flowerpots, while a little misguided, is still correct. Yoshida explained (or rather, a translator in my ear explained because he was speaking in Japanese) that, because they had such great success with FFXI, they failed to look at where the MMO genre had gone and stuck conservatively to their (cartoonishly large) guns. Undeniably, Square-Enix is a graphics powerhouse. Their games look gorgeous. Correct me if I'm wrong but style is just part of Japanese culture. The systemic problem was that the focus was not where it should have been: player experience. This is a game, after all. He emphasized that the success of FFXI blinded them in the creation of FFXIV and development time was spent in all the wrong places because they believed they were doing a good job without realizing what was going on right under their noses.
There's also the part that the game suffered upwards of 400 crashes per day (I'm assuming across the various servers worldwide), which was just a symptom of the larger problem.
Can we all agree on this one at least? You don't have to socialize something if there's enough healthy competition. In fact, I would recommend against it because the social agency is under no pressure to provide anything better than basic service based on its funding. I wouldn't call the state of internet service in the US "under healthy competition." My particular area is out of the ordinary because we have Verizon, Cablevision and Time Warner Cable. Of course, let's not forget that the apartment complex I live in has a deal with Cablevision so they're the only choice I really have.
There's little competition with cell phone service. Why? The upstart cost is ridiculous because you have to put wires and towers all over the place and all the big companies bought up the little ones to have more coverage.
There's little competition with internet providers. Why? See above. Add on the fact that content delivery companies are merging with internet providers and now you have to compete with a company that has more money, more lawyers and more weight.
There's little competition with content delivery companies. Actually that's a lie but as ISPs merge with content companies and become bigger, they'll have more weight to push out content delivery startups. I can see Netflix being forced to buy up an ISP like Time Warner if the Comcast deal fails. TimeFlix Warner? (Comflixcast?)
In both the cell service and ISP cases, the trouble I see is lack of regulation and conflict of interest with the companies involved. One company should be the one to lay lines down and build towers for cell companies. AT&T should not be responsible for laying its lines down. Or else, Google could come to areas with Verizon and lease their fiber lines. Line-laying companies would be in competition with one another and want the business of the ISPs and cell companies. Also, I agree that content companies should not be able to merge with internet providers.
Split up line companies from delivery companies and you'll see costs go down because you only have to lease from a company that will have others leasing as well. Split up content companies from ISPs and you'll see Comcast playing nice with Netflix because it'll be one of many content companies its customers will demand access to -- or switch ISPs because they'll have a choice. You take out choice and you take out the only card customers have in determining what fails and what succeeds. If the company holds the cards, they only get bigger, which, as we can see, ultimately leads to regulatory capture. People are greedy and want money. I'm not against the fact that companies exist to make money but when they stop serving the public interests and only their stockholders' because they can then something has to change. If a company doesn't have to compete with anyone else for customers, then they're going to do all they can to raise prices and lower costs without losing too many customers to their non-existent competition.
Case in point: T-Mobile disrupting the cell industry, Apple disrupting the tablet industry and then Microsoft, and Google Fiber disrupting ISPs. (Time Warner increasing speeds to 300 Mbps near Google Fiber not because of Google but because customers [i]there[/i] are demanding higher speeds? Bullshit. I was talking to my ISP once for service and somehow Google Fiber came up. told the tech if they came here I would drop them so fast. He laughed.)
I would argue that the first troll in the world didn't know what they were doing. The behavior probably evolved as a form of blowing off steam, people who can't keep tangents to themselves or someone who is just stupid and doesn't know how to argue a point and just spouts nonsense in return. Ever since it was given a name and definition, it's certainly become a lot more deliberate.
Truth be told I remember hearing on the radio that the qualities we admire in leaders are the same exact qualities that make someone one step closer to being what we might normally call a horrible human begin. As such: quick thinkers (rash decisions?); can make emotionless decisions or separate the people from the process (lack of empathy: "people are just resources" and "I can lay them off because they are just employees"); and self-confident (egotistical).
Think of someone you know at work or elsewhere who you would consider a great leader. Now, realize that they very likely have the above qualities. Think of the kind of people who are made to helm company mergers, the people who have to decide who stays and who goes. Now, remember that those kinds of psychotic, unhealthy people are running major corporations as well as countries.
Is that guy apathetic towards you; can he make quick decisions, no matter how horrible; and is he very confident in what he says? Sure! Hire that fucker or vote him in as president! The most dangerous has to be self-confidence. Trolls sure as hell aren't humble, but a humble person isn't getting into a leadership position any time soon because empathy, humbleness and indecisiveness is considered weak.
A few weeks ago, the corporate division I work in decided it wanted the employees to feel more empathy towards our end-customers (I work in a medicinal-label pressing company). It's sort of a sick game of marketing: by increasing our empathy towards the patients whose medicine will be bearing our labels, they believe we will work harder. The plan? Take down the abstract art pictures in the building and put up pictures of patients. I honestly see it as a sort of disgusting: in an effort to get the employees to be more productive, they want us to have more empathy towards our end-customers. To make us feel more empathy, they play with our emotions by putting up pictures of people. The division has been around for 15+ years and they're just thinking of this now?
Business people, especially those who make company decisions based on money, are some of the scummiest people I can think of. It's no wonder society sucks. It's run by a bunch of trolls.
I know you're just AC but please stop with the hyperbole. Lots of areas have stupid laws. There are websites dedicated to finding them. The problem with above-ground wires is trees, birds, wind, snow, rain, cars and big animals.
Case in point: a few years ago a car drove into a pole in my neighborhood. That pole happened to service the entire rest of the development south and since it was the only street leading into the development, it took out at least 60-70 houses (poor planning, but hey, that's what you get for living on the shore). They blocked off access past the downed pole for a few hours, since power was also knocked out and the wire was live for a while.
I also can't tell you how many poles Sandy took out. Other companies contracted out here to help looked at us like we were nuts with all the poles and the trees nestled in the wires.
I understand people need to make money but the monthly cap on that service is ridiculously low. (Caps period make me squeamish.) I blow through 4 GB a month on my phone. Insert rant here about how downloading one application can probably blow your cap.
I'm sorry, I fucking hate caps. At 3 in the morning when your service is probably at 10% utilization, there should be no cap in place. The cap is creating artificial scarcity.
I think it's just upsetting period that a company carrying what arguably is a modern necessity won't invest at all in an area because the profits are too small and the politics surrounding the fact in this country make competition extremely difficult. As a result, people have to suffer with poor service, non-existent service or, as in most areas of the US, insanely high-priced service.
People in other countries must think we're so fucking backwards.
Here's to hoping (wishing) that the FCC says fuck it and just declares ISPs common carriers. So many problems would be solved in one fell swoop.
I used to work for a company that wrote applications that process medical billing. If someone figures out who it was, I don't have anything against them, but this is just how the industry is. I lost more brain cells than I can count (have since grown them back) trying to understand the medical billing process, and EDI made me want to kill babies. Trying to understand medical billing itself, along with all the conditions? Hell no. Having read some of the comments here, the situation is even more egregious than I thought possible.
Every other first-world nation has a single payer system. Why doesn't the US?
(It seems you can do that with a lot of things. "Every other first-world nation has X. Why doesn't the US?")
Frank Gibeau:
"We are very proud of the way EA evolved with consumers. I have not green lit one game to be develped as a single player experience. Today, all of our games include online applications and digital services that make them live 24/7/365." Fire him, too, please.
I would like to point out that I went to Hebrew school, and was summarily bullied by the same people -- and more -- who were bullying me in the public school I also went to.
Basically, you're bullied if you're outside the norm. It doesn't matter who it is doing the bullying, although I might agree that some groups may be more likely to be bullies based on how closely they value tradition or how afraid they are of individualism. Unfortunately for me, I am socially awkward and way outside the norm. Delightfully weird, but outside the norm.
I like to think my personality traits make me a creative thinker but they do me no favors in other situations. Unfortunately, I wasn't aware of the pluses of the things that made me different until late high school.
This article disturbs me because I would do anything I could to encourage people to be different. I wouldn't change. I like different. Different stands out. I like people who stand out. I seek it out. I like creative free thinkers. Homogenization is bad for the species. It's unfortunate because bullies only encourage people to be clones of one another. I hated every last one of the bullies because they wanted to group everyone into one of two groups: the jocks and the skaters. I was neither. If you didn't fit, you had no identity and were game from either group.
This country needs to stop punishing the different and intelligent. Maybe when that happens we'll see a push towards science and people who are less religious. (I went to Hebrew school but it went in one ear and out the other.) The smart (and benevolent) people should be the ones running the country, not the politicians and religious people.
If you are for net neutrality, the FCC can't mandate it and Congress has bigger problems to deal with, where is the net neutrality mandate going to come from? You are against Internet regulations so I assume you are against it as an actual mandate. I assume then that you simply hope ISPs will operate under it. The number of ISPs in the US has already shown that this will not happen naturally. Providers are gobbling up content creators, creating a conflict of interests that goes against net neutrality.
I see where your "I am against the FCC mandating it but I am for it" comes from.
I want the Internet to remain (mostly) as it was 10 years ago, before all this garbage with throttling, usage based billing and caps started, which has the net effect of slowly pushing out companies that rely on bandwidth increases. Someone else said throttling and usage-based billing is absurd anyway and that anyone with half a brain knows the technical reason why: because usage-based billing and caps aren't going to force people to stop using bandwidth during peak times, when it's at its rarest, and at which point the provider's lack of capacity is actually a problem. I'll argue usage based billing is also crap: charge people in tiers, like they already do.
A large number of applications are just waiting in the wings to be developed but can't be because bandwidth is not yet where it needs to be for them to work. If the Internet develops speed lanes, and you have to pay your ISP extra for Hulu to work, it will be a sad day. I'm sure some ISP somewhere is already working out the technical aspects to charge tiers, bundling the Internet into websites and declaring Hulu and Netflix to be "premium" websites (and their own streaming video website is standard). How do you think the customers of that ISP are going to react when their $7 subscription to Netflix suddenly stops working? And now they have to pay $10 more per month to their ISP to activate their $10 subscription to Netflix. They're probably going to drop Netflix and use their ISP's service. Netflix just lost customers to strong-arming. ISPs have already talked about this. Comcast is already sort of doing it. It is not enough to hope that they will follow the spirit of net neutrality on their own, because they won't. Someone has to step it in and force it on them.
Federal Communications Commission. I would like to believe the Internet is a form of communication. By all rights it should have jurisdiction to regulate businesses that deal with the Internet in the US. The only people that don't want the FCC do have any authority over the Internet are the ones that are against net neutrality. Congress doesn't care. Thankfully the FCC does.
I think it's easy to see that most internet providers are not gravitating towards net neutrality. ISPs in certain areas of the US marketplace are becoming monopolies. AT&T and Comcast seem to be going the complete opposite direction of net neutrality and are just vultures on their customers as far as I'm concerned, making new policies that are more and more ridiculous. AT&T's shared data plans and Facetime, anyone?
Net neutrality is a negative affect on a provider's bottom line. They won't practice it unless it helps them.
Getting rid of government regulation is just what we need. There was no government regulation involved when the banks fucked up the economy. There was also no government regulation involved when Comcast said we will charge you by the byte but if you use our video service, it doesn't count against your data usage, only if you use Hulu or Netflix.
Remember that regulations were in place to prevent the economic collapse we're experiencing, and that they were taken away. Also remember what happens to Netflix and Hulu when ISPs across the world start charging by the byte and give you their video service for free.
Some regulation is bad. Some regulation is good. It's not wise to regulate everything and it's not wise to have no regulations. I will not argue what causes the prices of things to go up or down in regards to regulations but if profit is involved, you can bet someone will try to fuck you over unless the rules prevent it. US economics is teaching us that lesson over and over.
I think some people are missing the point. A monitor could do tv in from a cable box. Most providers DON'T have the app Cablevision has to view live tv on an iPad. Plus I think a bigger screen would be nice, 32" or something. If your hands are messy, you don't want to have to hold the tablet, or move it from table to counter so you don't have to keep moving to see its tiny print. A giant touchscreen pc could get more uses than a tablet.
OH MY GOD WILL YOU PEOPLE STOP PERPETUATING THE FACT "MOVIES ARE 24 FPS SO THAT'S ALL YOU NEED"
No but seriously, movies and tv are only at 24 fps because of motion blur. If you play a game on a computer where you can control the frame rate (via video options), get an application like Fraps that will show you the frame rate and try to get the game to run at 24 fps, then at 60 fps. You will see a massive difference because the game is showing individual frames with no motion blur.
I take issue with your seemingly contradictory points. At first you say "some 'accents' are simply lazy nonsense" and then you answer yourself by saying "different people hear things in different ways," which mostly boils down to your first language. I'll concede one argument to you and say that, as someone who at least tries to mimic the "accent" of the original language when speaking in tongues, I don't understand the math teacher I had one year in college. He insisted on saying the word "path" as "pass" every single time. As this was a class in graph theory, the word path came up a lot.:(
This whole thing reminds me of a class in linguistics I took. The teacher showed a video of a bunch of Americans in a submarine that was sinking. At the end of the video, the German dude on the other end of the emergency communication channel said, "So... what are you sinking about?" German lacks the "th" sound that English has and to the German speaker, the "th" phoneme translates to the nearest sound, "s," turning the word into "thinking" in his head, but it comes out as "sinking."
Your original language controls very heavily how your perception works. There was another example of a tribe of people somewhere that count up to "many." They had 1, 2, 3 4, 5 or something and many. You show them 10 or 100 and they simply call it "many." Their notion of counting ends at "many."
As someone who had a hard time in college with some accents, I really don't see this is as wrong when communication is a vital part of the job description, such as teaching or being a call agency of some sort. If you settle on a language, you need to have an accent that at least somewhat resembled the typical speaker. There are horror stories across the US, I'm sure, of colleges with student teachers with accents so thick you might as well not go to class. (And don't get me fucking started on students that ask said teachers in their native language and then receive an answer in that same language, without them ever explaining what the fucking question or answer was.) If you're saying "pass" and you mean "path," maybe it's time to get some accent training.
English has a wide variety of sounds but if someone came up to you and started talking in a language that uses clicks (they do exist), you would have an incredibly difficult time distinguishing one click from another, even though to the native speaker, they are the difference between "path" and "pass."
LTE Advanced is a proposed standard for "Real 4G" for wireless carriers. AT&T will be rolling it out first, I believe.
In any case, that's not what I really care about. I did say 4G is pretty meaningless. They used to be just phone providers but they've already turned into internet service providers and should be treated as such. I want to know what kind of speed I can expect. If you read the article, the drivel from the phone company representative is priceless.
However, a group representing the wireless industry was less enthusiastic, arguing the new rules would oversimplify a complex issue.
“We are concerned that the bill proposes to add a new layer of regulation to a new and exciting set of services, while ignoring the fact that wireless is an inherently complex and dynamic environment in which network speeds can vary depending on a wide variety of factors," said CTIA—The Wireless Association vice president of government affairs Jot Carpenter.
"Congress should resist calls to impose new regulations and instead focus on the real issue, which is making sure that America’s wireless carriers have sufficient spectrum to lead the world in the race to deploy 4G services.”
We're not leading the world in anything when it comes to internet-based services, and surely not 4G when our carriers don't even use the proposed standard for wireless 4G yet.
There is very little competition among the wireless providers aside from the phones they carry and for all intents and purposes that "competition" is completely contrived. The prices are roughly the same, the services offered are roughly the same. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that AT&T and Verizon are colluding with one another given how once AT&T dropped unlimited data plans, Verizon followed suit. And now Verizon is calling 5 GB "unlimited?" And if you use more your usage is considered unacceptable and your contract is terminated?
Wireless carriers should be held to the same (unacceptable) standard that wireline ISPs are held to.
They should be forced to adhere to a standard definition, agreed. But why, then, do all other internet companies always tell you their "up to" speed and wireless carriers never do? Even when all carriers adhere to a standard, much like, say, Time Warner and Cablevision, that doesn't mean they're deploying it exactly the same way.
I would be much happier if they were only allowed to call real 4G as 4G and not 3.14159G as 4G. If the bill included something like they have to give speeds for the phone in, say, the locale you bought it in, that'd at least be somewhat more meaningful than "4G!" by itself -- which is essentially all we get now.
If this goes through, I hope it would be a point of competition because it sure as hell isn't now. I would imagine, for most people, there is very little perceived difference between wireless carriers apart from the phones offered. I'm one of those few lone nerds and I barely know the difference between Verizon and AT&T in my area except for the phones they offer and which one's customer service sucks less.
People who want a cell phone don't have much choice in the US. If you want country-wide coverage, as most of us do, whether we need it or not, your choices are few and the plans for those companies are very similar: bullshit. I admit it, I don't like it, and I don't want to have to deal with the bullshit carriers put on phones so I may stick with my iPhone until that situation changes. Hate Apple but they're in control of the user experience which is good for me. I'd rather deal with a company known for good customer experience than a money-grubbing asshole like AT&T.
Customers keep paying the bills, accept poor customer service and other bullshit because there are no other cell carriers in the US with the phones most of us want (another story). I was the first in my family to get a smartphone and I won't go back to a "dumb phone" because the conveniences and value it grants are (barely) worth the price of having to deal with the bullshit cellphone market.
You'll notice one of the most common words in this post has been: bullshit. I don't like the market situation but I don't see it changing until it gets worse to the point where there's an outright consumer revolt, which I do think will happen. At least in the tech community, people are flocking to phones they can unlock so they can remove the bullshit they don't want. Eventually, carriers will get the hint, and that seems to be happening with some carriers now embracing the ability to unlock your phone. Maybe Google will get the hint sooner and stop carriers from including this bullshit on phones.
I also have a long-standing dislike and I I do remember why. Most of it stems from the fact that there is more ad than content and Tom himself was a bit of an ass back in the day.
Slashdot Mirror
The focus on flowerpots, while a little misguided, is still correct. Yoshida explained (or rather, a translator in my ear explained because he was speaking in Japanese) that, because they had such great success with FFXI, they failed to look at where the MMO genre had gone and stuck conservatively to their (cartoonishly large) guns. Undeniably, Square-Enix is a graphics powerhouse. Their games look gorgeous. Correct me if I'm wrong but style is just part of Japanese culture. The systemic problem was that the focus was not where it should have been: player experience. This is a game, after all. He emphasized that the success of FFXI blinded them in the creation of FFXIV and development time was spent in all the wrong places because they believed they were doing a good job without realizing what was going on right under their noses.
There's also the part that the game suffered upwards of 400 crashes per day (I'm assuming across the various servers worldwide), which was just a symptom of the larger problem.
Can we all agree on this one at least? You don't have to socialize something if there's enough healthy competition. In fact, I would recommend against it because the social agency is under no pressure to provide anything better than basic service based on its funding. I wouldn't call the state of internet service in the US "under healthy competition." My particular area is out of the ordinary because we have Verizon, Cablevision and Time Warner Cable. Of course, let's not forget that the apartment complex I live in has a deal with Cablevision so they're the only choice I really have.
There's little competition with cell phone service. Why? The upstart cost is ridiculous because you have to put wires and towers all over the place and all the big companies bought up the little ones to have more coverage.
There's little competition with internet providers. Why? See above. Add on the fact that content delivery companies are merging with internet providers and now you have to compete with a company that has more money, more lawyers and more weight.
There's little competition with content delivery companies. Actually that's a lie but as ISPs merge with content companies and become bigger, they'll have more weight to push out content delivery startups. I can see Netflix being forced to buy up an ISP like Time Warner if the Comcast deal fails. TimeFlix Warner? (Comflixcast?)
In both the cell service and ISP cases, the trouble I see is lack of regulation and conflict of interest with the companies involved. One company should be the one to lay lines down and build towers for cell companies. AT&T should not be responsible for laying its lines down. Or else, Google could come to areas with Verizon and lease their fiber lines. Line-laying companies would be in competition with one another and want the business of the ISPs and cell companies. Also, I agree that content companies should not be able to merge with internet providers.
Split up line companies from delivery companies and you'll see costs go down because you only have to lease from a company that will have others leasing as well. Split up content companies from ISPs and you'll see Comcast playing nice with Netflix because it'll be one of many content companies its customers will demand access to -- or switch ISPs because they'll have a choice. You take out choice and you take out the only card customers have in determining what fails and what succeeds. If the company holds the cards, they only get bigger, which, as we can see, ultimately leads to regulatory capture. People are greedy and want money. I'm not against the fact that companies exist to make money but when they stop serving the public interests and only their stockholders' because they can then something has to change. If a company doesn't have to compete with anyone else for customers, then they're going to do all they can to raise prices and lower costs without losing too many customers to their non-existent competition.
Case in point: T-Mobile disrupting the cell industry, Apple disrupting the tablet industry and then Microsoft, and Google Fiber disrupting ISPs. (Time Warner increasing speeds to 300 Mbps near Google Fiber not because of Google but because customers [i]there[/i] are demanding higher speeds? Bullshit. I was talking to my ISP once for service and somehow Google Fiber came up. told the tech if they came here I would drop them so fast. He laughed.)
I would argue that the first troll in the world didn't know what they were doing. The behavior probably evolved as a form of blowing off steam, people who can't keep tangents to themselves or someone who is just stupid and doesn't know how to argue a point and just spouts nonsense in return. Ever since it was given a name and definition, it's certainly become a lot more deliberate.
You're id is lower than mine, Teun. Get teh fuck off my lawn. This is my house.
Truth be told I remember hearing on the radio that the qualities we admire in leaders are the same exact qualities that make someone one step closer to being what we might normally call a horrible human begin. As such: quick thinkers (rash decisions?); can make emotionless decisions or separate the people from the process (lack of empathy: "people are just resources" and "I can lay them off because they are just employees"); and self-confident (egotistical).
Think of someone you know at work or elsewhere who you would consider a great leader. Now, realize that they very likely have the above qualities. Think of the kind of people who are made to helm company mergers, the people who have to decide who stays and who goes. Now, remember that those kinds of psychotic, unhealthy people are running major corporations as well as countries.
Is that guy apathetic towards you; can he make quick decisions, no matter how horrible; and is he very confident in what he says? Sure! Hire that fucker or vote him in as president! The most dangerous has to be self-confidence. Trolls sure as hell aren't humble, but a humble person isn't getting into a leadership position any time soon because empathy, humbleness and indecisiveness is considered weak.
A few weeks ago, the corporate division I work in decided it wanted the employees to feel more empathy towards our end-customers (I work in a medicinal-label pressing company). It's sort of a sick game of marketing: by increasing our empathy towards the patients whose medicine will be bearing our labels, they believe we will work harder. The plan? Take down the abstract art pictures in the building and put up pictures of patients. I honestly see it as a sort of disgusting: in an effort to get the employees to be more productive, they want us to have more empathy towards our end-customers. To make us feel more empathy, they play with our emotions by putting up pictures of people. The division has been around for 15+ years and they're just thinking of this now?
Business people, especially those who make company decisions based on money, are some of the scummiest people I can think of. It's no wonder society sucks. It's run by a bunch of trolls.
Socialism is bad, mmkay!
I know you're just AC but please stop with the hyperbole. Lots of areas have stupid laws. There are websites dedicated to finding them. The problem with above-ground wires is trees, birds, wind, snow, rain, cars and big animals.
Case in point: a few years ago a car drove into a pole in my neighborhood. That pole happened to service the entire rest of the development south and since it was the only street leading into the development, it took out at least 60-70 houses (poor planning, but hey, that's what you get for living on the shore). They blocked off access past the downed pole for a few hours, since power was also knocked out and the wire was live for a while.
I also can't tell you how many poles Sandy took out. Other companies contracted out here to help looked at us like we were nuts with all the poles and the trees nestled in the wires.
I understand people need to make money but the monthly cap on that service is ridiculously low. (Caps period make me squeamish.) I blow through 4 GB a month on my phone. Insert rant here about how downloading one application can probably blow your cap.
I'm sorry, I fucking hate caps. At 3 in the morning when your service is probably at 10% utilization, there should be no cap in place. The cap is creating artificial scarcity.
I think it's just upsetting period that a company carrying what arguably is a modern necessity won't invest at all in an area because the profits are too small and the politics surrounding the fact in this country make competition extremely difficult. As a result, people have to suffer with poor service, non-existent service or, as in most areas of the US, insanely high-priced service.
People in other countries must think we're so fucking backwards.
Here's to hoping (wishing) that the FCC says fuck it and just declares ISPs common carriers. So many problems would be solved in one fell swoop.
I used to work for a company that wrote applications that process medical billing. If someone figures out who it was, I don't have anything against them, but this is just how the industry is. I lost more brain cells than I can count (have since grown them back) trying to understand the medical billing process, and EDI made me want to kill babies. Trying to understand medical billing itself, along with all the conditions? Hell no. Having read some of the comments here, the situation is even more egregious than I thought possible.
Every other first-world nation has a single payer system. Why doesn't the US?
(It seems you can do that with a lot of things. "Every other first-world nation has X. Why doesn't the US?")
http://www.geek.com/articles/games/ea-wont-green-light-any-single-player-only-games-2012095/
Frank Gibeau:
"We are very proud of the way EA evolved with consumers. I have not green lit one game to be develped as a single player experience. Today, all of our games include online applications and digital services that make them live 24/7/365." Fire him, too, please.
I would like to point out that I went to Hebrew school, and was summarily bullied by the same people -- and more -- who were bullying me in the public school I also went to.
Basically, you're bullied if you're outside the norm. It doesn't matter who it is doing the bullying, although I might agree that some groups may be more likely to be bullies based on how closely they value tradition or how afraid they are of individualism. Unfortunately for me, I am socially awkward and way outside the norm. Delightfully weird, but outside the norm.
I like to think my personality traits make me a creative thinker but they do me no favors in other situations. Unfortunately, I wasn't aware of the pluses of the things that made me different until late high school.
This article disturbs me because I would do anything I could to encourage people to be different. I wouldn't change. I like different. Different stands out. I like people who stand out. I seek it out. I like creative free thinkers. Homogenization is bad for the species. It's unfortunate because bullies only encourage people to be clones of one another. I hated every last one of the bullies because they wanted to group everyone into one of two groups: the jocks and the skaters. I was neither. If you didn't fit, you had no identity and were game from either group.
This country needs to stop punishing the different and intelligent. Maybe when that happens we'll see a push towards science and people who are less religious. (I went to Hebrew school but it went in one ear and out the other.) The smart (and benevolent) people should be the ones running the country, not the politicians and religious people.
Whether they like it or not, cell phone companies are slowly turning into Internet service providers. I'm not sure if this is a good or bad thing.
If you are for net neutrality, the FCC can't mandate it and Congress has bigger problems to deal with, where is the net neutrality mandate going to come from? You are against Internet regulations so I assume you are against it as an actual mandate. I assume then that you simply hope ISPs will operate under it. The number of ISPs in the US has already shown that this will not happen naturally. Providers are gobbling up content creators, creating a conflict of interests that goes against net neutrality.
I see where your "I am against the FCC mandating it but I am for it" comes from.
I want the Internet to remain (mostly) as it was 10 years ago, before all this garbage with throttling, usage based billing and caps started, which has the net effect of slowly pushing out companies that rely on bandwidth increases. Someone else said throttling and usage-based billing is absurd anyway and that anyone with half a brain knows the technical reason why: because usage-based billing and caps aren't going to force people to stop using bandwidth during peak times, when it's at its rarest, and at which point the provider's lack of capacity is actually a problem. I'll argue usage based billing is also crap: charge people in tiers, like they already do.
A large number of applications are just waiting in the wings to be developed but can't be because bandwidth is not yet where it needs to be for them to work. If the Internet develops speed lanes, and you have to pay your ISP extra for Hulu to work, it will be a sad day. I'm sure some ISP somewhere is already working out the technical aspects to charge tiers, bundling the Internet into websites and declaring Hulu and Netflix to be "premium" websites (and their own streaming video website is standard). How do you think the customers of that ISP are going to react when their $7 subscription to Netflix suddenly stops working? And now they have to pay $10 more per month to their ISP to activate their $10 subscription to Netflix. They're probably going to drop Netflix and use their ISP's service. Netflix just lost customers to strong-arming. ISPs have already talked about this. Comcast is already sort of doing it. It is not enough to hope that they will follow the spirit of net neutrality on their own, because they won't. Someone has to step it in and force it on them.
Federal Communications Commission. I would like to believe the Internet is a form of communication. By all rights it should have jurisdiction to regulate businesses that deal with the Internet in the US. The only people that don't want the FCC do have any authority over the Internet are the ones that are against net neutrality. Congress doesn't care. Thankfully the FCC does.
I think it's easy to see that most internet providers are not gravitating towards net neutrality. ISPs in certain areas of the US marketplace are becoming monopolies. AT&T and Comcast seem to be going the complete opposite direction of net neutrality and are just vultures on their customers as far as I'm concerned, making new policies that are more and more ridiculous. AT&T's shared data plans and Facetime, anyone?
Net neutrality is a negative affect on a provider's bottom line. They won't practice it unless it helps them.
Getting rid of government regulation is just what we need. There was no government regulation involved when the banks fucked up the economy. There was also no government regulation involved when Comcast said we will charge you by the byte but if you use our video service, it doesn't count against your data usage, only if you use Hulu or Netflix. Remember that regulations were in place to prevent the economic collapse we're experiencing, and that they were taken away. Also remember what happens to Netflix and Hulu when ISPs across the world start charging by the byte and give you their video service for free. Some regulation is bad. Some regulation is good. It's not wise to regulate everything and it's not wise to have no regulations. I will not argue what causes the prices of things to go up or down in regards to regulations but if profit is involved, you can bet someone will try to fuck you over unless the rules prevent it. US economics is teaching us that lesson over and over.
Mass Effect 3. I was depressed for about a week after playing the original ending. (Hey, you never said it had to be good, just depressing.)
I think some people are missing the point. A monitor could do tv in from a cable box. Most providers DON'T have the app Cablevision has to view live tv on an iPad. Plus I think a bigger screen would be nice, 32" or something. If your hands are messy, you don't want to have to hold the tablet, or move it from table to counter so you don't have to keep moving to see its tiny print. A giant touchscreen pc could get more uses than a tablet.
OH MY GOD WILL YOU PEOPLE STOP PERPETUATING THE FACT "MOVIES ARE 24 FPS SO THAT'S ALL YOU NEED"
No but seriously, movies and tv are only at 24 fps because of motion blur. If you play a game on a computer where you can control the frame rate (via video options), get an application like Fraps that will show you the frame rate and try to get the game to run at 24 fps, then at 60 fps. You will see a massive difference because the game is showing individual frames with no motion blur.
This link is very informative on the topic:
http://www.100fps.com/how_many_frames_can_humans_see.htm
I take issue with your seemingly contradictory points. At first you say "some 'accents' are simply lazy nonsense" and then you answer yourself by saying "different people hear things in different ways," which mostly boils down to your first language. I'll concede one argument to you and say that, as someone who at least tries to mimic the "accent" of the original language when speaking in tongues, I don't understand the math teacher I had one year in college. He insisted on saying the word "path" as "pass" every single time. As this was a class in graph theory, the word path came up a lot. :(
This whole thing reminds me of a class in linguistics I took. The teacher showed a video of a bunch of Americans in a submarine that was sinking. At the end of the video, the German dude on the other end of the emergency communication channel said, "So... what are you sinking about?" German lacks the "th" sound that English has and to the German speaker, the "th" phoneme translates to the nearest sound, "s," turning the word into "thinking" in his head, but it comes out as "sinking."
Your original language controls very heavily how your perception works. There was another example of a tribe of people somewhere that count up to "many." They had 1, 2, 3 4, 5 or something and many. You show them 10 or 100 and they simply call it "many." Their notion of counting ends at "many."
As someone who had a hard time in college with some accents, I really don't see this is as wrong when communication is a vital part of the job description, such as teaching or being a call agency of some sort. If you settle on a language, you need to have an accent that at least somewhat resembled the typical speaker. There are horror stories across the US, I'm sure, of colleges with student teachers with accents so thick you might as well not go to class. (And don't get me fucking started on students that ask said teachers in their native language and then receive an answer in that same language, without them ever explaining what the fucking question or answer was.) If you're saying "pass" and you mean "path," maybe it's time to get some accent training.
English has a wide variety of sounds but if someone came up to you and started talking in a language that uses clicks (they do exist), you would have an incredibly difficult time distinguishing one click from another, even though to the native speaker, they are the difference between "path" and "pass."
However, a group representing the wireless industry was less enthusiastic, arguing the new rules would oversimplify a complex issue.
“We are concerned that the bill proposes to add a new layer of regulation to a new and exciting set of services, while ignoring the fact that wireless is an inherently complex and dynamic environment in which network speeds can vary depending on a wide variety of factors," said CTIA—The Wireless Association vice president of government affairs Jot Carpenter.
"Congress should resist calls to impose new regulations and instead focus on the real issue, which is making sure that America’s wireless carriers have sufficient spectrum to lead the world in the race to deploy 4G services.”
We're not leading the world in anything when it comes to internet-based services, and surely not 4G when our carriers don't even use the proposed standard for wireless 4G yet.
There is very little competition among the wireless providers aside from the phones they carry and for all intents and purposes that "competition" is completely contrived. The prices are roughly the same, the services offered are roughly the same. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that AT&T and Verizon are colluding with one another given how once AT&T dropped unlimited data plans, Verizon followed suit. And now Verizon is calling 5 GB "unlimited?" And if you use more your usage is considered unacceptable and your contract is terminated?
Wireless carriers should be held to the same (unacceptable) standard that wireline ISPs are held to.
They should be forced to adhere to a standard definition, agreed. But why, then, do all other internet companies always tell you their "up to" speed and wireless carriers never do? Even when all carriers adhere to a standard, much like, say, Time Warner and Cablevision, that doesn't mean they're deploying it exactly the same way.
I would be much happier if they were only allowed to call real 4G as 4G and not 3.14159G as 4G. If the bill included something like they have to give speeds for the phone in, say, the locale you bought it in, that'd at least be somewhat more meaningful than "4G!" by itself -- which is essentially all we get now.
If this goes through, I hope it would be a point of competition because it sure as hell isn't now. I would imagine, for most people, there is very little perceived difference between wireless carriers apart from the phones offered. I'm one of those few lone nerds and I barely know the difference between Verizon and AT&T in my area except for the phones they offer and which one's customer service sucks less.
Irish boobs? (Sorry, had to.)
I reject your reality and substitute my own.
People who want a cell phone don't have much choice in the US. If you want country-wide coverage, as most of us do, whether we need it or not, your choices are few and the plans for those companies are very similar: bullshit. I admit it, I don't like it, and I don't want to have to deal with the bullshit carriers put on phones so I may stick with my iPhone until that situation changes. Hate Apple but they're in control of the user experience which is good for me. I'd rather deal with a company known for good customer experience than a money-grubbing asshole like AT&T.
Customers keep paying the bills, accept poor customer service and other bullshit because there are no other cell carriers in the US with the phones most of us want (another story). I was the first in my family to get a smartphone and I won't go back to a "dumb phone" because the conveniences and value it grants are (barely) worth the price of having to deal with the bullshit cellphone market.
You'll notice one of the most common words in this post has been: bullshit. I don't like the market situation but I don't see it changing until it gets worse to the point where there's an outright consumer revolt, which I do think will happen. At least in the tech community, people are flocking to phones they can unlock so they can remove the bullshit they don't want. Eventually, carriers will get the hint, and that seems to be happening with some carriers now embracing the ability to unlock your phone. Maybe Google will get the hint sooner and stop carriers from including this bullshit on phones.
I also have a long-standing dislike and I I do remember why. Most of it stems from the fact that there is more ad than content and Tom himself was a bit of an ass back in the day.