Well Sort of...
The only problem with this argument is that the secure system does work.... China seems to be one of the richest nations and has no signs of relenting in its growth. Sure they may cart a worker or two off and you never see them again but the people at the highest echelons certainly don't mind. We here in america house more prisoners than anywhere in the world and have prisons where you can be put without a lawyer, without a charge, without due process of any kind (just like our love/hate relational brethren the chinese). We run one of the most effective propaganda machines in history and have forged forward into war on a number of ocassions due to lies to the people. So in effect we too are not far behind such terrible words like facist and communist. The people at the top never seem to mind how "bad" government is so long as it's profitable (to them).
Facist, communist, capitalist and just about any other type of governmental theory slowly will go from a great idea to a slave state eventually... especially if the people stay asleep and allow it. The one thing that keeps america different is the bill of rights and the constitution. Unfortunately that too has been eroded (due to a sleeping people and clever politicians) and like communism which started as a great idea has now ended up with the powerful oppressing the weak.
In the end it is all just human nature on a very large scale.
What I find most intriguing in all of this is that "security of their product" is more important than the "security of their customers information". I mean seriously how many millions did SONY spend on securing their music, videos, and other "media". I forget what device it was but I remember my last SONY product was one where the data could only be read by a SONY reader... I think it was a voice recorder I bought for a client. None the less, their products are secured from the user, but the user is not secured at all. Maybe if they spent the money they wasted on DRM on securing their network and innovating like they did in the past they would be a viable company, but i guess that being greedy got in the way of their profits.
Didn't they recently try and jail/sue some kid for modding his PS3? I mean seriously, shame on you SONY. Get your house in order and try to remember that your customers wants and needs dictate your ability to do business. Your profits will soar if you bring back your old ways of being innovative, delivering quality and most importantly delivering what the customers want. Your lawyers and money guys should be the ones jailed for your pathetically weak grip on reality. Forcing people to buy your crap will never equate to growth... instead it will be a slow downward spiral like a dookie in a toilet bowl.
On the topic of DRM also, wasn't it sony who's profits soared through blank cassettes? That was thinking outside the box and winning on both sides of the coin. DRM, suing modders, proprietizing every piece of media (ie: mini-disk, memory stick, etc) is certainly the fastest way to the bottom of the bowl. JMHO
As for HiFi audio, SONY never peaked my interest... I went Denon long ago and ill prolly never go back.
"YOU PEOPLE NEED TO WAKE UP. The type of people the TSA is looking for are NOT the type of people who are above doing what I just described."
No, your all wrong about that. Who the tsa are looking for are not mad bombers, They are looking for you and i to be criminals in some way... mad bomber or not. At one time in history, you could not legally treat a person as a criminal until you proved he was guilty of a crime. but every day we move closer to a point where "we" individually do not matter. This is not about a bomber, it's a way for you to willingly give up your freedoms for convenience and safety. Now "we" can search through "your" stuff, gps track "your" whereabouts, know who "you" have kissed goodnight this week, have access to a million cameras & rifd stations across the us, and turn "your" cell phone on at will to record "your" conversations. For with fear and eager willingness to hype everything up to epic cacophonous proportions, you will give anything you hold true away. It's a basic human instinct turned against the world... time and time again.
"You don't like the time it takes for security, take a train/boat."
Also makes no sense if your follow this out to its conclusion. If this security idea were to work, and i mean to really work... you would have a world where everyone is tracked 24/7. It would start with real criminals and it would end with free thinkers. Once you eliminate the free thinkers you have obedience. then you have safety. At first certain things like pot would be let to slide so as to make the pill a little easier to swallow but eventually anything deemed by societies upper orders would be considered a grave injustice and punishable. It starts with the airplanes. It ends with complete 100% tracking of your every movement, conversation and otherwise. Whats really scarry is there are people willingly submitting themselves already to rfid tracking. No, it would begin with planes but soon trains, then (technically they already do) cars, then your phone, then just put a chip in you at birth. honestly, its not too far off.
You see, im no criminal by any means, but thats just not a future that sounds good to me. I think the laws in effect pre-911 were substantial enough to secure our country. No new legislation was needed. Only a more aware citizenry, alert officers and armed flight personnel were ever needed. Your personal rights need not apply for the job to catch a mad bomber. So, we were sucker punched with 911 and we are reacting with the most irrational, unjust, unacceptable legislation our country has possibly ever seen. All to defend ourselves from the boogie man who went boom in the night over a decade ago.
I mean, a pat down in a congregation of hundreds of people... why wait till the plane ride, why not just do it at the place where all the people congregate for the security screening. I was in the JFK airport not so long ago... Id say people numbering somewhere in the thousands were online at the first security checkpoint well inside the airport. If terrorists really cared to attack they wouldn't wait to be on the plane where they could only damage one plane and a couple hundred people. Instead they would strike at the heart... in the airport on line waiting for screening. An attack like this and the airport would be closed, revenues would plummet, hundreds of planes would be massively delayed etc. In my opinion the TSA only does one thing. Make an even bigger, fatter, juicier target for a would be bomber (which i believe exist far less commonly than the govt would like us to believe). I just don't buy it. I never did. There are just far too many opportunities that offer much better and far easier targets. If mad bombers really wanted to hurt us they would. Security or not. Of course the war machine would grind to a halt should we actually admit that terrorists are actually quite rare and less deserving of public fear than they have been given. So, Johnny get your gun, cause they are comming to get us and we need all the TSA, NSA, FBI, and CIA help we can get. Bring on the security cameras and point em all at me... i need to be safe. lol.... what a crock of $H17.
the most dangerous force that could possibly exist.
You don't know the power of the dark side.;)
i dunno, i could see (insert your president here) being under the control by a sith lord... maybe we are in the midst of episode 1,2 & 3... In a galaxy not so very far away at all.
not true, WC3 was not. I mean yea clicking is needed, but as far as a pure RTS its the winner. It involves lots of strategies and massing isn't all that wins battles. Hell, ask any good BM player how many wins he gets from just his hero. The key term in Real Time Strategy is "Strategy", without it its a pointless endeavor.
The beauty was that you didnt have to. You could play a BM and harras then mass and invade. You had options a plenty. That the problem with SC2... far fewer options. And that is not my major complaint anyhow. My major complaint is the reduction of choices. SC2 is a mass and fling game combined with paper rock scissor.
Balance is uber important i fully agree... but i'm sorry SC2 missed the boat. People were looking for a continuation with more to offer, not SC1 with better graphics. Given the extraordinarily long time frame for release, they fell horribly short imho. With a little hope maybe WC4 will not make the same mistake. Till then ill still be playing wc3 because SC2 really is a boring, lame duck game. Competitive or not, the strategies are the equivalent of a massive paper rock scissors game. WC3 allowed for massing, hero rush, rushing, creep and counter, siege attacks, tower rushing, and many many other strategies. SC2 offers the exact same SC1 strategies and is cooler looking than SC1 but it's strategies fall miserably short. Little to no finesse on the battlefield required either...
Starcraft 1 was genius, Warcraft 1, 2, and 3 were brilliant, then after much waiting SC2 took a major step back in my opinion. No heros, no real units with auras or other augmentation, no creeps... in my opinion SC2 is one of the more boring rts's out there... e-sport or not. I played the original WC1 when no one ever even heard of blizzard, played WC2 till my eyes bled, then SC1 came out and it was awesome.... only to be trumped by WC3 TFT. They progressed making it more and more complicated. More complicated objectives, more complicated ideas, strategies etc. Then SC2 a graphical wonder-lust but horribly dated game play. Mass units, throw them at the enemy. I dunno, i am really disappointed, I was first on line the day it was out but once done with the single player campaign it was lame. Multiplayer is just so boring. The lack of heros really just sucks. It's like stepping back in time. All in all, i dont understand the article. You make RTS's more fun by adding new techniques in which you must master (ie: creeping for exp was brand new in WC3 among many many others). SC2 in my opinion just fell flat... especially considering how much damn time it took them. I mean seriously the excuse in the article for making a bad game really is pathtetic. They had forever and took another year of two to get it done.... then it comes out and you say "well its not fun because we wanted to make it competitive". What a bunch of crap, i call bs. Truth is more likely... well, we made so much on WOW that we didn't feel SC2 mattered... so we waited till the last minute and then released a crap game. Sorry but at least it's well balanced.
Bury waste in the seabed floor? Thats a solution? Seriously, earthquakes and volcanoes happen underwater too... what makes you think a remote sub sea bed nuclear disposal facility would be any safer, smarter or more cost effective? The proposal is flawed from the word go. The easy question is this... would you want a nuclear disposal facility in your back yard... if the answer is no, then don't support nuclear fuel as a long term solution... Pushing it to someone else's back yard is becoming all too common a trend.
Agree. The fact is that yes you may get a many homes and businesses lit and running per year off one square bit of nuclear fuel but the fact that spent fuel pools and respective facilities need to be built and are overflowing is proof that there is a problem underlying. I mean shy of launching it into outer space towards the sun (hopefully not crashing) i dont see how we can ever make it "safe". The stuff stays highly radioactive for years, very radioactive for decades, and mostly radioactive for centuries. With that sort of lethal timeline, how the hell are you ever going to have enough room to dispose/store it. Adding to the mess is that even after being used up, it still remains hot and requires constant cooling. Even if we have a premiere facility able to hold a hundred years worth of waste, you still have to get it to the location. I can see the headlines... nuclear disaster on I-95, Trucker drives into a ditch and wipes out a town... more at 11. I mean, it can be made safe, i get tired of hearing all the hypothetical bs. Reality, lets start there. Earth quakes happen (we dont ever know how big they will be), tsunamis happen (we never know what the max wave height is), etc. What we really need is to start embracing solar, wind and tidal generators... at least as a kicker to the current energy supply system. If we are actually burning something, its probably not the best way to get energy from it... just the easiest. Nuclear in my opinion is the worst offender... it not clean, it's not safe.
Apparently its also not very efficient... was watching a video where they were boasting about how much energy was produced and that just 10% was converted and it was enough power. That means 90% of the energy from the burn is wasted. Seemingly that is a perfectly poor conversion rate.
T.V. had it's day in the sun. But "television" is a business based on a product. The product of T.V. is aging and dying. The fact it still remains at all shows the power it once had. The fact that you have a computer monitor and t.v. when the monitor is better resolution, crisper, cleaner and has the ability to do everything the t.v. can do and more is absolute proof of redundancy of device. They of course are trying to make bigger screens to enhance the theater feel, but, in the end television was outmoded by the computer and a stringent hold on the market is due to the simplicity of delivery. But that will never outweight their biggest hurdle... watch what i tell you when i tell you. Computers ever become "understood" and simple tasks like flipping a channel for most people is just as easy as clicking... and they allow me to choose what i want when i want. So the device is effectively dead and the business struggles to hold on. What is amazing to me is that television refuses to embrace the internet. They think (maybe because the television industries name is tied to the product) that their product is dead. In fact, i believe it has never been more alive. Look at youTube. It is a pretty poorly built site with quite a bit of room for improvement... most importantly content such as the television industry provides. Should ABC or FOX or whatever other tv company choose they could develop their business in harmony with the internet rather than fighting a tide they will never win for (in my belief) for the reasons stated above. Maybe their investments in infrastructure will pave the way for other inventions and devices. People pay crazy money for DLC nowadays. I mean they spend $1.50 on this, 99 cents on that etc. A well formed tv conglomerate would do well supporting independent "television" products and offer them a good deal on media distribution through a good website where people pay $x.xx per show, season, etc. I'd certainly pay for a season of lost streamed to my computer i dont want to lose that... i just want to not need a television, cable box, supporting audio system, remote controls or any of the other garbae that goes with it. Nor do I need a tv guide so i can plan my day around my shows. TV companies still have the core people to organize better quality shows...
wow, that was a long... sry all.
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Well Sort of... The only problem with this argument is that the secure system does work.... China seems to be one of the richest nations and has no signs of relenting in its growth. Sure they may cart a worker or two off and you never see them again but the people at the highest echelons certainly don't mind. We here in america house more prisoners than anywhere in the world and have prisons where you can be put without a lawyer, without a charge, without due process of any kind (just like our love/hate relational brethren the chinese). We run one of the most effective propaganda machines in history and have forged forward into war on a number of ocassions due to lies to the people. So in effect we too are not far behind such terrible words like facist and communist. The people at the top never seem to mind how "bad" government is so long as it's profitable (to them). Facist, communist, capitalist and just about any other type of governmental theory slowly will go from a great idea to a slave state eventually... especially if the people stay asleep and allow it. The one thing that keeps america different is the bill of rights and the constitution. Unfortunately that too has been eroded (due to a sleeping people and clever politicians) and like communism which started as a great idea has now ended up with the powerful oppressing the weak. In the end it is all just human nature on a very large scale.
What I find most intriguing in all of this is that "security of their product" is more important than the "security of their customers information". I mean seriously how many millions did SONY spend on securing their music, videos, and other "media". I forget what device it was but I remember my last SONY product was one where the data could only be read by a SONY reader... I think it was a voice recorder I bought for a client. None the less, their products are secured from the user, but the user is not secured at all. Maybe if they spent the money they wasted on DRM on securing their network and innovating like they did in the past they would be a viable company, but i guess that being greedy got in the way of their profits. Didn't they recently try and jail/sue some kid for modding his PS3? I mean seriously, shame on you SONY. Get your house in order and try to remember that your customers wants and needs dictate your ability to do business. Your profits will soar if you bring back your old ways of being innovative, delivering quality and most importantly delivering what the customers want. Your lawyers and money guys should be the ones jailed for your pathetically weak grip on reality. Forcing people to buy your crap will never equate to growth... instead it will be a slow downward spiral like a dookie in a toilet bowl. On the topic of DRM also, wasn't it sony who's profits soared through blank cassettes? That was thinking outside the box and winning on both sides of the coin. DRM, suing modders, proprietizing every piece of media (ie: mini-disk, memory stick, etc) is certainly the fastest way to the bottom of the bowl. JMHO As for HiFi audio, SONY never peaked my interest... I went Denon long ago and ill prolly never go back.
"YOU PEOPLE NEED TO WAKE UP. The type of people the TSA is looking for are NOT the type of people who are above doing what I just described." No, your all wrong about that. Who the tsa are looking for are not mad bombers, They are looking for you and i to be criminals in some way... mad bomber or not. At one time in history, you could not legally treat a person as a criminal until you proved he was guilty of a crime. but every day we move closer to a point where "we" individually do not matter. This is not about a bomber, it's a way for you to willingly give up your freedoms for convenience and safety. Now "we" can search through "your" stuff, gps track "your" whereabouts, know who "you" have kissed goodnight this week, have access to a million cameras & rifd stations across the us, and turn "your" cell phone on at will to record "your" conversations. For with fear and eager willingness to hype everything up to epic cacophonous proportions, you will give anything you hold true away. It's a basic human instinct turned against the world... time and time again. "You don't like the time it takes for security, take a train/boat." Also makes no sense if your follow this out to its conclusion. If this security idea were to work, and i mean to really work... you would have a world where everyone is tracked 24/7. It would start with real criminals and it would end with free thinkers. Once you eliminate the free thinkers you have obedience. then you have safety. At first certain things like pot would be let to slide so as to make the pill a little easier to swallow but eventually anything deemed by societies upper orders would be considered a grave injustice and punishable. It starts with the airplanes. It ends with complete 100% tracking of your every movement, conversation and otherwise. Whats really scarry is there are people willingly submitting themselves already to rfid tracking. No, it would begin with planes but soon trains, then (technically they already do) cars, then your phone, then just put a chip in you at birth. honestly, its not too far off. You see, im no criminal by any means, but thats just not a future that sounds good to me. I think the laws in effect pre-911 were substantial enough to secure our country. No new legislation was needed. Only a more aware citizenry, alert officers and armed flight personnel were ever needed. Your personal rights need not apply for the job to catch a mad bomber. So, we were sucker punched with 911 and we are reacting with the most irrational, unjust, unacceptable legislation our country has possibly ever seen. All to defend ourselves from the boogie man who went boom in the night over a decade ago.
I mean, a pat down in a congregation of hundreds of people... why wait till the plane ride, why not just do it at the place where all the people congregate for the security screening. I was in the JFK airport not so long ago... Id say people numbering somewhere in the thousands were online at the first security checkpoint well inside the airport. If terrorists really cared to attack they wouldn't wait to be on the plane where they could only damage one plane and a couple hundred people. Instead they would strike at the heart... in the airport on line waiting for screening. An attack like this and the airport would be closed, revenues would plummet, hundreds of planes would be massively delayed etc. In my opinion the TSA only does one thing. Make an even bigger, fatter, juicier target for a would be bomber (which i believe exist far less commonly than the govt would like us to believe). I just don't buy it. I never did. There are just far too many opportunities that offer much better and far easier targets. If mad bombers really wanted to hurt us they would. Security or not. Of course the war machine would grind to a halt should we actually admit that terrorists are actually quite rare and less deserving of public fear than they have been given. So, Johnny get your gun, cause they are comming to get us and we need all the TSA, NSA, FBI, and CIA help we can get. Bring on the security cameras and point em all at me... i need to be safe. lol.... what a crock of $H17.
Strange how the apple newton and the iphone1 were not mentioned in the PDA section. Oh, it's a microsoft site.
the most dangerous force that could possibly exist.
You don't know the power of the dark side. ;)
i dunno, i could see (insert your president here) being under the control by a sith lord... maybe we are in the midst of episode 1,2 & 3... In a galaxy not so very far away at all.
not true, WC3 was not. I mean yea clicking is needed, but as far as a pure RTS its the winner. It involves lots of strategies and massing isn't all that wins battles. Hell, ask any good BM player how many wins he gets from just his hero. The key term in Real Time Strategy is "Strategy", without it its a pointless endeavor.
The beauty was that you didnt have to. You could play a BM and harras then mass and invade. You had options a plenty. That the problem with SC2... far fewer options. And that is not my major complaint anyhow. My major complaint is the reduction of choices. SC2 is a mass and fling game combined with paper rock scissor.
Balance is uber important i fully agree... but i'm sorry SC2 missed the boat. People were looking for a continuation with more to offer, not SC1 with better graphics. Given the extraordinarily long time frame for release, they fell horribly short imho. With a little hope maybe WC4 will not make the same mistake. Till then ill still be playing wc3 because SC2 really is a boring, lame duck game. Competitive or not, the strategies are the equivalent of a massive paper rock scissors game. WC3 allowed for massing, hero rush, rushing, creep and counter, siege attacks, tower rushing, and many many other strategies. SC2 offers the exact same SC1 strategies and is cooler looking than SC1 but it's strategies fall miserably short. Little to no finesse on the battlefield required either...
Starcraft 1 was genius, Warcraft 1, 2, and 3 were brilliant, then after much waiting SC2 took a major step back in my opinion. No heros, no real units with auras or other augmentation, no creeps... in my opinion SC2 is one of the more boring rts's out there... e-sport or not. I played the original WC1 when no one ever even heard of blizzard, played WC2 till my eyes bled, then SC1 came out and it was awesome.... only to be trumped by WC3 TFT. They progressed making it more and more complicated. More complicated objectives, more complicated ideas, strategies etc. Then SC2 a graphical wonder-lust but horribly dated game play. Mass units, throw them at the enemy. I dunno, i am really disappointed, I was first on line the day it was out but once done with the single player campaign it was lame. Multiplayer is just so boring. The lack of heros really just sucks. It's like stepping back in time. All in all, i dont understand the article. You make RTS's more fun by adding new techniques in which you must master (ie: creeping for exp was brand new in WC3 among many many others). SC2 in my opinion just fell flat... especially considering how much damn time it took them. I mean seriously the excuse in the article for making a bad game really is pathtetic. They had forever and took another year of two to get it done.... then it comes out and you say "well its not fun because we wanted to make it competitive". What a bunch of crap, i call bs. Truth is more likely... well, we made so much on WOW that we didn't feel SC2 mattered... so we waited till the last minute and then released a crap game. Sorry but at least it's well balanced.
Bury waste in the seabed floor? Thats a solution? Seriously, earthquakes and volcanoes happen underwater too... what makes you think a remote sub sea bed nuclear disposal facility would be any safer, smarter or more cost effective? The proposal is flawed from the word go. The easy question is this... would you want a nuclear disposal facility in your back yard... if the answer is no, then don't support nuclear fuel as a long term solution... Pushing it to someone else's back yard is becoming all too common a trend.
Agree. The fact is that yes you may get a many homes and businesses lit and running per year off one square bit of nuclear fuel but the fact that spent fuel pools and respective facilities need to be built and are overflowing is proof that there is a problem underlying. I mean shy of launching it into outer space towards the sun (hopefully not crashing) i dont see how we can ever make it "safe". The stuff stays highly radioactive for years, very radioactive for decades, and mostly radioactive for centuries. With that sort of lethal timeline, how the hell are you ever going to have enough room to dispose/store it. Adding to the mess is that even after being used up, it still remains hot and requires constant cooling. Even if we have a premiere facility able to hold a hundred years worth of waste, you still have to get it to the location. I can see the headlines... nuclear disaster on I-95, Trucker drives into a ditch and wipes out a town... more at 11. I mean, it can be made safe, i get tired of hearing all the hypothetical bs. Reality, lets start there. Earth quakes happen (we dont ever know how big they will be), tsunamis happen (we never know what the max wave height is), etc. What we really need is to start embracing solar, wind and tidal generators... at least as a kicker to the current energy supply system. If we are actually burning something, its probably not the best way to get energy from it... just the easiest. Nuclear in my opinion is the worst offender... it not clean, it's not safe. Apparently its also not very efficient... was watching a video where they were boasting about how much energy was produced and that just 10% was converted and it was enough power. That means 90% of the energy from the burn is wasted. Seemingly that is a perfectly poor conversion rate.
T.V. had it's day in the sun. But "television" is a business based on a product. The product of T.V. is aging and dying. The fact it still remains at all shows the power it once had. The fact that you have a computer monitor and t.v. when the monitor is better resolution, crisper, cleaner and has the ability to do everything the t.v. can do and more is absolute proof of redundancy of device. They of course are trying to make bigger screens to enhance the theater feel, but, in the end television was outmoded by the computer and a stringent hold on the market is due to the simplicity of delivery. But that will never outweight their biggest hurdle... watch what i tell you when i tell you. Computers ever become "understood" and simple tasks like flipping a channel for most people is just as easy as clicking... and they allow me to choose what i want when i want. So the device is effectively dead and the business struggles to hold on. What is amazing to me is that television refuses to embrace the internet. They think (maybe because the television industries name is tied to the product) that their product is dead. In fact, i believe it has never been more alive. Look at youTube. It is a pretty poorly built site with quite a bit of room for improvement... most importantly content such as the television industry provides. Should ABC or FOX or whatever other tv company choose they could develop their business in harmony with the internet rather than fighting a tide they will never win for (in my belief) for the reasons stated above. Maybe their investments in infrastructure will pave the way for other inventions and devices. People pay crazy money for DLC nowadays. I mean they spend $1.50 on this, 99 cents on that etc. A well formed tv conglomerate would do well supporting independent "television" products and offer them a good deal on media distribution through a good website where people pay $x.xx per show, season, etc. I'd certainly pay for a season of lost streamed to my computer i dont want to lose that... i just want to not need a television, cable box, supporting audio system, remote controls or any of the other garbae that goes with it. Nor do I need a tv guide so i can plan my day around my shows. TV companies still have the core people to organize better quality shows... wow, that was a long... sry all.