Really, this gets modded up?
How do you confuse a real iPod with one that costs 1/4 of the price? Who's the actual cheap-ass, the guy making the ripoffs or the guy who buys them?
If the Chinese take something apart, make a cheap copy of it, and then sell it back for cheap, what's the problem? They're filling the demand for a part of the market that wants to buy things cheap. If quality is a concern to you, all you have to do is not buy the cheap imitation. That would be true regardless of where it's being made. If the German economy is somehow suffering because of low-end Chinese imports, the question is, why aren't you making stuff to serve the low-end market also? If you're simply refusing to compete on the low end because you feel entitled to higher profit margins, then your economy deserves to get steamrolled by the Chinese or whoever else that cares to do real business.
Isn't it ironic that in a truly free market, China dominates? It's only in markets that are protected by draconian IP laws that the "free" economies of these nations seem able to sustain themselves. Everyone does realize that the good, real iPods are made in China too, right?
that enemies wishing to do harm to the US would do so at a *military* base. It's much better to keep info about *military* targets to be sealed up, so that terrorists and other assorted bad guys will be forced to look at high-profile civilian structures instead. How is this *any* better than Saddam's use of "human shields", aside from the inconvenience of having a tank parked in your garage? At the end of the day the bombs are still pointed at your head. If anything, I would say the most logical and reasonable thing to do is put as much information as possible about these bases out into the public. Anyone who could use this information to really damage national security already knows that info anyway.
Why does there have to be One True Rendering System? As long as a company as big as Intel is backing raytracing, chances are good that it will eventually turn up in de facto APIs like OpenGL and Direct3D. And then if it picks up developer support, it will become a necessary bullet point feature to sell new graphics cards (or not, if Intel's plan for pushing this with multicore CPUs works). Game developers will have the choice of using one type of rendering system or the other, or some mixture of both, as necessitated by their game design. I see a duality happening, and it is win-win for everyone except NVIDIA, who has a vested interest in the status quo, is just afraid of losing their market share to CPU cores. And unlike with AGEIA, they won't have the funds to buy up Intel anytime soon. In fact, this avenue may be one of the few chances for AMD to redeem the ATI merger. "Check out our parallel raytracing/rastering chip!"
Hey, I agree 100% with the point about language. A black guy is a black guy. If you find something offensive about that, maybe you're the racist.
But extrapolating this to mean that everything is now equal is a load of horse crap. So what if Obama is a successful, prominent black guy? What about Frederick Douglass? For every Martin Luther King Jr. there are 10,000 Nigger Jims. That there happens to be a handful of black people who have made it (and I don't mean in a Flavor Flav kind of way) in this country doesn't mean squat. Put another way, if you didn't know Obama was black, would you have figured him for a black guy? Truth is, Obama is a white guy, who happens to be dark skinned. It's called assimilation. It's the most disingenuous form of multiculturalism. See the San Francisco Bay Area for a larger scale example. It's not white society's tolerance or appreciation for other cultures; it's other cultures' tolerance and appreciation for white society. Real multiculturalism is when everyone does their own thing; doesn't feel bad or stupid for doing it; and has proper respect for what other people do. That's when you have an honest-to-god melting pot. I will believe that things are equal when a black guy with a ghetto accent makes it as far as Obama. If guys with Texan drawls can get away with it, so should everyone else.
Come on. These sponsored girl gamer groups are nothing more than models posing next to products. There are some real girl gamers out there, good ones, but they're almost invariably the kind of girls you'd prefer to keep behind your monitor.
Although, that isn't to say that these gamer models don't actually enjoy what they do. Any girl with a half-decent appearance has a very easy time attracting male attention in gamer communities. Get a paycheck and feel like a supermodel, not a bad gig really if you consider that some of these girls wouldn't really stand a chance in mainstream media.
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Really, this gets modded up? How do you confuse a real iPod with one that costs 1/4 of the price? Who's the actual cheap-ass, the guy making the ripoffs or the guy who buys them? If the Chinese take something apart, make a cheap copy of it, and then sell it back for cheap, what's the problem? They're filling the demand for a part of the market that wants to buy things cheap. If quality is a concern to you, all you have to do is not buy the cheap imitation. That would be true regardless of where it's being made. If the German economy is somehow suffering because of low-end Chinese imports, the question is, why aren't you making stuff to serve the low-end market also? If you're simply refusing to compete on the low end because you feel entitled to higher profit margins, then your economy deserves to get steamrolled by the Chinese or whoever else that cares to do real business. Isn't it ironic that in a truly free market, China dominates? It's only in markets that are protected by draconian IP laws that the "free" economies of these nations seem able to sustain themselves. Everyone does realize that the good, real iPods are made in China too, right?
that enemies wishing to do harm to the US would do so at a *military* base. It's much better to keep info about *military* targets to be sealed up, so that terrorists and other assorted bad guys will be forced to look at high-profile civilian structures instead. How is this *any* better than Saddam's use of "human shields", aside from the inconvenience of having a tank parked in your garage? At the end of the day the bombs are still pointed at your head. If anything, I would say the most logical and reasonable thing to do is put as much information as possible about these bases out into the public. Anyone who could use this information to really damage national security already knows that info anyway.
Why does there have to be One True Rendering System? As long as a company as big as Intel is backing raytracing, chances are good that it will eventually turn up in de facto APIs like OpenGL and Direct3D. And then if it picks up developer support, it will become a necessary bullet point feature to sell new graphics cards (or not, if Intel's plan for pushing this with multicore CPUs works). Game developers will have the choice of using one type of rendering system or the other, or some mixture of both, as necessitated by their game design. I see a duality happening, and it is win-win for everyone except NVIDIA, who has a vested interest in the status quo, is just afraid of losing their market share to CPU cores. And unlike with AGEIA, they won't have the funds to buy up Intel anytime soon. In fact, this avenue may be one of the few chances for AMD to redeem the ATI merger. "Check out our parallel raytracing/rastering chip!"
Hey, I agree 100% with the point about language. A black guy is a black guy. If you find something offensive about that, maybe you're the racist. But extrapolating this to mean that everything is now equal is a load of horse crap. So what if Obama is a successful, prominent black guy? What about Frederick Douglass? For every Martin Luther King Jr. there are 10,000 Nigger Jims. That there happens to be a handful of black people who have made it (and I don't mean in a Flavor Flav kind of way) in this country doesn't mean squat. Put another way, if you didn't know Obama was black, would you have figured him for a black guy? Truth is, Obama is a white guy, who happens to be dark skinned. It's called assimilation. It's the most disingenuous form of multiculturalism. See the San Francisco Bay Area for a larger scale example. It's not white society's tolerance or appreciation for other cultures; it's other cultures' tolerance and appreciation for white society. Real multiculturalism is when everyone does their own thing; doesn't feel bad or stupid for doing it; and has proper respect for what other people do. That's when you have an honest-to-god melting pot. I will believe that things are equal when a black guy with a ghetto accent makes it as far as Obama. If guys with Texan drawls can get away with it, so should everyone else.
Come on. These sponsored girl gamer groups are nothing more than models posing next to products. There are some real girl gamers out there, good ones, but they're almost invariably the kind of girls you'd prefer to keep behind your monitor. Although, that isn't to say that these gamer models don't actually enjoy what they do. Any girl with a half-decent appearance has a very easy time attracting male attention in gamer communities. Get a paycheck and feel like a supermodel, not a bad gig really if you consider that some of these girls wouldn't really stand a chance in mainstream media.