Frankly, someone should tell Mr. Stallman to get help with his hair and beard; his message would be much stronger if he didn't look like a poor aging drugee hippie throwback from the 60s, as he does in the photo that accompanies the PC World Australia article.
This I disagree with, it shouldn't matter so much how someone appears, what important is whether they are capable.
While it shouldn't matter so much how someone appears, the real - like it or not - truth is that it very much does matter how someone appears, in many cases. Just because some of us think this should not matter does not mean that RMS isn't hurting his message in some venues by virtue of his appearance.
It sucks (believe me - as a scrawny, glasses-wearing white kid growing up in rural Hawaii, I know all about how bad being judged on appearances can be), but it is what it is. Human nature being the way it is, it will probably always be that way to some extent.
Because many games focus around conflict (if not outright combat, though that's clearly quite popular), and conflict and combat can get messy. Hollywood is less-inclined towards outright violence, but a character-and-dialogue driven drama that can work very well on the big screen (Clerks wouldn't make a very good game without throwing in stuff that wasn't much in the film for obvious gameplay needs, just as one quick off-the-top-of-my-head example).
Of course, there are great games without that level of violence. See most of Nintendo's big sellers (Super Mario Bros, Zelda) and just about any puzzle game ever made.
If you look at movies, most of them that don't have huge budgets go for either lots of dialogue, lots of violence, or trying to startle/scare the audience. The first is difficult (at best) in the games market (and even making allowances for the market, just very difficult to do at all). The second, obviously, is easy. Heck, after Pong and Pac-Man, most people think of games like Defender and Space Invaders and Asteroids which all involve shooting. The last - scaring and startling - is doable, but not easily without getting into M-rated range (see games like System Shock, Bioshock (to a point), and for some people the various 'survival horror' games like Resident Evil.
It's clear that conflict and violence are the easiest ways to make a game interesting to play in a lot of cases.
As another poster mentioned, however, material that would earn a PG-13 rating from the MPAA would often get an 'M' rating from the ESRB - which is an additional reason M-rated games do so well, sometimes: it's just way-easy to end up in that realm.
Clearly, since Islam began in the seven century AD (Anno Domini, Year of our Lord, or just plain 'after Jesus' as opposed to *B*efore *C*hrist), it started before Christianity did.
Seconded and thirded; I've bought multiple copies of books from them - half the time, if I can't find the bok and I thought I bought it, I'll just re-buy it. A few bucks is well worth it to support Baen's endeavors in this realm. They're good like that. And it helps that I like sci-fi and military sci-fi, of course.
I started back some years ago when I bought (geek-purchase, not any real need) a Rocket eBook reader. Baen's authors were ones I'd been reading for a while, but it turns out they supported the format. I've been buying from them ever since.
Not only is there no DRM, but they offer the books in HTML, RTF, Rocket format and... one or two others I can't remember, one of which is a specific format that there's a Palm reader for.
They actually go out of their way to make it easy for the customer to read the books, they do the exact OPPOSITE of what most other eBook publishers and distributors do. And the best of all is that there are dozens of books they offer for free - in their entirety! Try before you buy indeed!
I really liked the middle-ground approach of Descent: Freespace and Freespace 2.
While the player certainly partakes in the lion's share of the important actions (and let's face it - a game where you spent the entire space-war flying crates of socks and replacement spark plugs between depots would be boring), it is always from the perspective of being 'just another pilot'. You get medals and awards, but you're always part of a unit and briefed as if you are nothing particularly extraordinary.
Even though you are clearly meant to BE extraordinary, the game doesn't focus on the player as the Chosen One (and when those games DO focus on me as the Chosen One... why, then, do I have to pay 10 gold to sleep in the Inn or whatever? Wouldn't the Chosen One get some freebies?)
Not to disagree with your point, however in the case of the Halo 3 Multiplayer Beta, it isn't even a matter of a guarantee that things will change before the final product. It was a case of using Halo 2 graphics assets because the models have fewer polygons, and the texture and bump maps are smaller and thus: the whole package is a great deal smaller than it would have been with Halo 3 assets.
The point was for Bungie to collect information about the multiplayer aspect of the game, anyway. So for the people who saw the beta and went 'Wow, that looks almost exactly like Halo 2!', all I can say is: it really *should* look an awful lot like Halo 2 since most of the graphical assets are, in fact, from Halo 2.
I bought a 17" MacBook Pro - no problems. Restore discs (OS and other software alike), documentation, all the rest of it.
I hadn't realized things had gotten so bad; it's been a while since I've bought a commodity PC (been putting my own together for the last 8-10 years), but if they are, I'm distressed. Ugh.
Restore discs seem like the sort of thing I used to take for granted.
Strangely enough, as awesome as the story was, I think it was a lot more awesome when it was in space and called System Shock 2.
Don't get me wrong; I enjoyed Bioshock plenty when I played through it. But it left me feeling the same way I felt after watching the Star Wars prequels:
It had been amazing and fascinating and exciting and fully of pretty images and neat fights and all that stuff... but as soon as I thought about it after no longer being 'in the moment', I realized how much it really was 'System Shock 2' with a new skin.
A very pretty new skin, (and a really lame 'hacking' minigame replacing the fairly quick and un-intrusive minigame in SS2), but every element in SS2 was present in Bioshock, gameplay wise. Most of the major plot points are 're-written' but otherwise pretty much the same.
And, in my opinion, the 'moral dilemma' the player is faced with is nothing of the sort. Predictably enough, I was being good, and rescuing the girls. I was being evil the second run through (to see what happens) and very little of the story changes at all, for all practical purposes only the epilogue. And your benefit for being evil is only short-term; in the medium term you're rewarded very nearly as well for rescuing them as for being evil. The game could have stood to make the rewards for evil greater so that there was a 'cost' to being good, as was implied.
Criticisms aside, however: Bioshock is a good game. It's engaging, enjoyable, fun, and has more atmosphere than every game currently available for the PS3 and every other game available for the 360 combined. I enjoyed it - but I'd just like to be a voice going against the trend here and voicing the opinion that it's not the best game ever: it's just way better than anything else that's come out in the last year or so.
If he could figure this out, so could someone else.
It follows that someone who has an interest in potential exploits and (one presumes) protecting users-at-large from them (like, say, the author of a tool like NoScript) would be likely to discover such a thing.
It also seems to me that, having figured it out, it would make sense to make people aware of it.
Once he makes them aware of it, making them aware of possible countermeasures also makes sense - in this case, NoScript.
That's a far, far cry from McAfee releasing a virus that only their product can stop (which wouldn't be possible anyway, let's be honest - someone else would find a way to stop it in short order, just to 'stick it to the man'). As far as IE exploits and for-pay patches, I wouldn't be surprised if a subscription model for licensing doesn't come along from MS one of these days, where only active subscribers can get patches...
But neither of those is the same thing as what's going on here (in my own, personal opinion, of course).
We have lots of rights. That doesn't mean there's any shortage of laws to abridge, limit, restrict, or outright deny us those rights from time to time. 'Due process' has become a good deal hazier lately.
Also, in some jurisdictions, you can have your property seized with alarming ease, and have virtually no shot at getting it back.
(That said, while I despise folks who drive while drunk, and think it is both a general evil to the public at large as well as fairly stupid - I don't want nannying devices in my car. There are enough moving parts and electronic devices in my existing car - that's plenty enough potential points of failure; adding in more potential points of failure that could make the car completely useless and undrivable (much less do real damage - imagine the seatbelt getting tightened too much, too hard, too fast, as just the wrong time) is just silly.)
All police use 'profiling'. It's often called 'racial profiling', but except in the most sensational and egregious of cases, that isn't really what it is.
A white guy and a black guy sitting in a car with Maryland plates on a street in Arlington will often cause a patrolling officer in the area (especially if he's been there for a while) to check things out, and see what's going on. It could be perfectly innocent. It probably is a drug deal.
Likewise, a group of young black men standing around in a parking lot, basketball court, or even a park is liable to get the police passing by to stop and talk and ask a few questions. It could well be perfectly innocent, but in that area (Arlington) it's quite possibly an open-air drug market of sorts.
(These are actual examples cited to me by a friend who worked as a police officer in Arlington - and for the record, he's black (the term he prefers to 'African-American'))
Now, certainly, stopping every person of X ethnic origin because they're that ethnicity is bad and is a waste of energy on the part of the police, and is harassment. On the other hand, if you know that people who are X ethnicity *and* are likely to be violating Y law, then maybe it's 'racial profiling' to stop them on the street and talk to them. More likely it's just good police work and exactly the kind of thing most police do every day.
(I'm not even going to get into the logic or illogic of using profiling as part of airport security...)
I don't know; brown worked quite well for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. For the first couple of days my roommate was playing the game, I wondered if our television hadn't broken and become unable to display vivid colors.
But the game sold quite well: perhaps it is some phenomenon that doesn't affect me but will still help the Zune?
Maybe Microsoft is just at the 'What the hell, it can't really HURT sales, can it?' stage.
And just how eager are you to risk the 'occasional death'. I mean- just to judge by how you've described it there, it's no big deal and certainly won't be any more than a minor inconvenience to the family, right?
There are violations of procedure and violations of 'good sense' by the police. We have MILLIONS of police officers in this country. If there are 50 of them who kill someone they shouldn't in a given year, out of 5 million cops... well, that's a 0.01% rate which is better than most professions end up with for 'big oops' moments. Most of the time you get police approaching a vehicle as described (multiple officers, weapons ready and/or drawn), you'll find it's in a location with a lot of violent crime. The cops are behaving that way because they have no way of knowing that the person who's been pulled over will decide that they don't want a $10 fix-it ticket for a busted tail-light and decide to open fire.
It sucks hugely when the police kill an innocent bystander. They really shouldn't. But put yourself in the police officer's shoes. You're told an armed robbery suspect has gone down an alley. You head for that alley. You don't know it's a dead-end alley and that he's going to be coming back, but you've got your weapon in hand and are trying to find and arrest the guy. It's dark. You can't see shit. You're doing what you can, and there's a sound and a blur. Do you (not 'do you, the officer of the peace, who should be prepared to die for the greater good of a society that largely hates you', but do YOU) wait two seconds to see if you get shot or if a piece of rebar hits you in the head?
You probably should. You probably wouldn't.
I'm not saying it's right, but your blithe statement that they should be "risking the occasional death" is just as out of line as suggesting it's okay for them to gun down nuns and orphans and grandmothers on the way to church.
The idea of an 'unreloadable by the owner' gun is ludicrous. For one thing, how on earth are you going to expect the owner of this 'wonderful' piece of technology to be able to get enough practice to be able to reasonably hit what he needs to? After all, he's only got ten shots before he has to go back to town!
That and, if it's only reloadable by a factory/technician/expensive-and-heavy machine... how do you unload it to render it safe, perhaps for storage? If you're going in to town because you used it to shoot a fox that went into your hen-house, and you fired two rounds, do you just blow off the other 8 (yay, practice!) before driving to town with it?
While guns can indisputably make killing people easier, they are, in the end, merely tools. It's much easier to kill someone with an AMC Gremlin than it is with your bare hands. Sort of. Crazy people are the problem, and a lack of education and control. Many violent firearms-related crimes are committed with weapons that are obtained illegally - you don't think that the gang-bangers pick up their AKs at Wal-Mart after a 10-day waiting period, do you?
Everyone and their brother having access to guns isn't the problem as much as everyone and their brother having access to guns without any education about or respect for them. Belt-fed, 40mm grenade launchers? No, I can't really see any logical reason to have one of these unless you're, you know - the military. Nevermind the fact that I can only imagine the cost of shooting the thing. But it seems to me that there are as many arguments against 'gun control' (say more clearly, gun restriction - because illegal weapons are still every bit as available and out of control) legislation as there are for it. Statistics from both sides can be brought to bear with alarming facility.
But there's one thing we all ought to be able to agree upon: crazy, disturbed individuals are more dangerous than any 'assault weapon'. I can't find a citation at the moment, but a guy in the UK went into a church and killed a bunch of people with a SWORD. Guess he really meant to get all 'old school', but it certainly proves that if you're disturbed, you don't need a gun to commit multiple murder.
Let's ban crazy people! Just don't worry too much about who gets to define what 'crazy' is. Is disagreeing with the current administration's position on the 'war on terror' crazy?
Ooor... if you have USB accessories (if you have old parallel/serial printers, etc, you might have trouble even with a PC), you could just install your copy of linux or windows on your Mac, and also have OSX as an option?
Of course, if you are building your own low-end to mid-range box, it's almost always better to do that than to buy from Apple unless you specifically *WANT* a box that runs OSX. For laptops, it's a bit different, but you can sometimes get no-name (ish) notebooks that are much cheaper than Apple's hardware for a given price, but rarely will they match the quality, either.
Don't 'just buy Apple' because that's retarded. But certainly, as is mentioned, don't dismiss Apple without at least seeing if what they're selling meets your needs.
They may have something in mind like this - the widescreen/WiFi/touchscreen iPod rumors have been churning like chum in the fanboy-infested waters for quite some time. Either way, I'm sure the iPhone will be a success. The ability to develop 3rd party apps and connect up with corporate email systems (as many others have pointed out before me) are the things that are likely to decide if the iPhone is a success or something that blows the competition out of the water.
I know some folks at Motorola who went home and were found the next morning rocking back and forth while curled up in the fetal position around a now-empty bottle of Jack Daniels, the night after the MacWorld keynote announcing the iPhone, so it's at least scary-in-concept to some of the existing players.
The way online filesharing works and has been handled has *definitely* had an impact on music sales. A negative one. I'm a prime example.
In the late 90s I (estimate) that I purchased about 60-70 CDs each year. A couple times a month, I'd go to a local music store and pick up 2-3 CDs. These days, I buy perhaps 1-2 CDs a year. If that. Mostly when particular artists that I happen to *REALLY* like release something new.
'Back in the day' (late 90s, certainly), I used Napster a fair bit. Grab a whole lot of this'n that. See what's around try different things, all that good stuff. Now, not so much. As a direct result of being unable to listen to most/all of an album before blowing 15-20 dollars buying it, I'm far, far less likely to pick things up.
I don't do filesharing all that much anymore - too much of a pain, most of the clients do unfriendly things to my 'net connection, I don't want to end up defending myself against a potential RIAA lawsuit, and so on.
Now, there's a difference between then and now on a lot of levels. I have access to a lot more bandwidth, and a lot (A LOT!) more storage for a lot less money ('big' 20GB drive? Pff...), and I honestly can't say how this would change my habits if the 'old' Napster were still around.
Either way, I find myself more inclined to grab tracks a la carte for $0.99 from iTunes (which may be the antichrist as far as some are concerned, but hey - it's easy and effective, and their DRM doesn't bother me since I *have* an iPod and don't need to listen to my music any other way (not that I can't just burn to an audio CD and rip to MP3 via whatever application I like if I *need* to, anyhow).
Basically, I'm rambling - what it boils down to is that (as most of us believe), the RIAA companies need to adjust to the modern world - join the 21st century, as it were - in how they do business. It's wrong to pirate movies and music - say what you will about all the other issues involved, it's illegal and the copyright holders *DO NOT* get compensated for their investment, and the artists certainly never see a penny of what they might if you bought it, but if the record companies embraced new models, it's entirely possible they'd make more money and have less piracy.
On the other hand - there will ALWAYS be some level of piracy. That's unavoidable, and been the case since the means to record and share music first went into the hands of the public at large. Trying to stop it completely is futile, much like trying to stop REAL piracy completely (the capture of ships and/or their cargo at sea) is futile. There will always be folks who feel the rewards outweigh the risks. They just need to make the alternative (paying for it, getting it legally) easy enough that 'most' average folks go for it. I believe that that, in and of itself, is a significant portion of the success of the iTunes model (helped along, handily, by the iPod, of course).
How many cellular companies have signed up for the iPhone? Damned few. So I stand by my assertion: the iPhone is not selling. Uhm. How about one: Cingular. Which has a contract that says no other company CAN buy (or, more importantly, sell) the iPhone. If they could, you'd better believe that Verizon, T-Mobile and Sprint would probably fall all over themselves to carry it. (My own personal supposition/opinion, I have no proof of this statement.) Your assertion that you're standing by is pretty baseless, however, since no other companies are allowed to 'sign up for the iPhone'. Watch where you're standing in the future.
I think that if this manages to trip through it'll be the RIAA moving away from shooting themselves in the foot. Maybe to a knee or something now.
I don't have any statistics except what lurks in the demented swamp I call a forebrain, but it seems to me that if this happens, the first and most obvious effect will be that smaller, local stations take a hit. Kiss KCDX good-bye! (At http://www.kcdx.com/ for those who care) and other less-unusual stations.
This will leave us with radio stations in three broad categories. Talk/news radio, ClearChannel (and Cirrus and such), and the college stations (and other stations that play 'off the map' music). You'll get the current 'corporate pop', you'll get the fringe stuff, but I suspect there'll be quite a decline in the availability of anything ELSE on terrestrial radio.
And then, of course, this will cause the RIAA to lose money on stations that close (though they weren't getting royalties before, so it'll still be a net gain), but the far, far bigger impact will come when there's less impetus for any new music sales other than the big stuff (Kelly Clarkson and others like her) that the corporate labels want to push. Declining revenues will push the RIAA to install monitor chips in everyone's brainstem, to debit your account every time you hear, sing, hum, or read the lyrics to something they have the rights to.
In addition, their lack of a really impressive, robust, high-end part is probably due to the same thing that kept nVidia out of the game for a while a few years back:
They spent a fair amount of focus on developing a GPU for the Xbox 360 - and that R&D did not bring direct translation to their GPU offerings here.
It remains to be seen if it'll make that much difference in the long run, but at the moment, it looks like ATi hasn't got a whole lot to offer - of course, until we see some DX10 games and comparisons, who knows? It's possible that the X2000-series cards will destroy the NV80 parts in that realm. Until there are DX10 games (and DX10 games that consumers care about) that's sort of a moot point, however.
As it happens, they did more than this. You can look at what they did as a poor revamping/remaking of the original series... but that's your choice. It's subjective.
For my money (and I'll point out that I watched the original and bought the boxed set on DVD), it's a very different and in many ways far better re-imagining of the core concept. Face facts: the original Battlestar Galactica series wasn't nearly dire enough for what amounts to starting with the near extinction of the human race.
On the other hand 4 seaons is about it; between the heavy frontloading of 'punch' episodes in season 3 and the changes in scheduling (Sunday? WTF? Trying to compete with Desperate Housewives or something?), it's no surprise that the viewership has waned. With SG-1 ending and no BSG on Fridays, I'm curious as to what's going to happen to SciFi in general.
As others have said - let us hope that the final season doesn't throw out the 'filler' (because lots of 'filler' episodes are important anyway; explaining character motivations can be very important, especially if you want the audience to appreciate the character's growth and changes.
Anyway - I like the new series (though not as much as I used to, true) and I liked the original. They're different, but they're both interesting storytelling and based on the same things... but heavily colored by society of their times.
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Frankly, someone should tell Mr. Stallman to get help with his hair and beard; his message would be much stronger if he didn't look like a poor aging drugee hippie throwback from the 60s, as he does in the photo that accompanies the PC World Australia article.
This I disagree with, it shouldn't matter so much how someone appears, what important is whether they are capable.
While it shouldn't matter so much how someone appears, the real - like it or not - truth is that it very much does matter how someone appears, in many cases. Just because some of us think this should not matter does not mean that RMS isn't hurting his message in some venues by virtue of his appearance.It sucks (believe me - as a scrawny, glasses-wearing white kid growing up in rural Hawaii, I know all about how bad being judged on appearances can be), but it is what it is. Human nature being the way it is, it will probably always be that way to some extent.
Because many games focus around conflict (if not outright combat, though that's clearly quite popular), and conflict and combat can get messy. Hollywood is less-inclined towards outright violence, but a character-and-dialogue driven drama that can work very well on the big screen (Clerks wouldn't make a very good game without throwing in stuff that wasn't much in the film for obvious gameplay needs, just as one quick off-the-top-of-my-head example).
Of course, there are great games without that level of violence. See most of Nintendo's big sellers (Super Mario Bros, Zelda) and just about any puzzle game ever made.
If you look at movies, most of them that don't have huge budgets go for either lots of dialogue, lots of violence, or trying to startle/scare the audience. The first is difficult (at best) in the games market (and even making allowances for the market, just very difficult to do at all). The second, obviously, is easy. Heck, after Pong and Pac-Man, most people think of games like Defender and Space Invaders and Asteroids which all involve shooting. The last - scaring and startling - is doable, but not easily without getting into M-rated range (see games like System Shock, Bioshock (to a point), and for some people the various 'survival horror' games like Resident Evil.
It's clear that conflict and violence are the easiest ways to make a game interesting to play in a lot of cases.
As another poster mentioned, however, material that would earn a PG-13 rating from the MPAA would often get an 'M' rating from the ESRB - which is an additional reason M-rated games do so well, sometimes: it's just way-easy to end up in that realm.
God, I'm stupid (and an atheist, so why am I calling out God?). I won't post at 0430 anymore, promise. Ignore the retard with a 'submit' button.
Clearly, since Islam began in the seven century AD (Anno Domini, Year of our Lord, or just plain 'after Jesus' as opposed to *B*efore *C*hrist), it started before Christianity did.
Seconded and thirded; I've bought multiple copies of books from them - half the time, if I can't find the bok and I thought I bought it, I'll just re-buy it. A few bucks is well worth it to support Baen's endeavors in this realm. They're good like that. And it helps that I like sci-fi and military sci-fi, of course.
... one or two others I can't remember, one of which is a specific format that there's a Palm reader for.
I started back some years ago when I bought (geek-purchase, not any real need) a Rocket eBook reader. Baen's authors were ones I'd been reading for a while, but it turns out they supported the format. I've been buying from them ever since.
Not only is there no DRM, but they offer the books in HTML, RTF, Rocket format and
They actually go out of their way to make it easy for the customer to read the books, they do the exact OPPOSITE of what most other eBook publishers and distributors do. And the best of all is that there are dozens of books they offer for free - in their entirety! Try before you buy indeed!
I really liked the middle-ground approach of Descent: Freespace and Freespace 2.
While the player certainly partakes in the lion's share of the important actions (and let's face it - a game where you spent the entire space-war flying crates of socks and replacement spark plugs between depots would be boring), it is always from the perspective of being 'just another pilot'. You get medals and awards, but you're always part of a unit and briefed as if you are nothing particularly extraordinary.
Even though you are clearly meant to BE extraordinary, the game doesn't focus on the player as the Chosen One (and when those games DO focus on me as the Chosen One... why, then, do I have to pay 10 gold to sleep in the Inn or whatever? Wouldn't the Chosen One get some freebies?)
Not to disagree with your point, however in the case of the Halo 3 Multiplayer Beta, it isn't even a matter of a guarantee that things will change before the final product. It was a case of using Halo 2 graphics assets because the models have fewer polygons, and the texture and bump maps are smaller and thus: the whole package is a great deal smaller than it would have been with Halo 3 assets.
The point was for Bungie to collect information about the multiplayer aspect of the game, anyway. So for the people who saw the beta and went 'Wow, that looks almost exactly like Halo 2!', all I can say is: it really *should* look an awful lot like Halo 2 since most of the graphical assets are, in fact, from Halo 2.
I bought a 17" MacBook Pro - no problems. Restore discs (OS and other software alike), documentation, all the rest of it.
I hadn't realized things had gotten so bad; it's been a while since I've bought a commodity PC (been putting my own together for the last 8-10 years), but if they are, I'm distressed. Ugh.
Restore discs seem like the sort of thing I used to take for granted.
Strangely enough, as awesome as the story was, I think it was a lot more awesome when it was in space and called System Shock 2.
... but as soon as I thought about it after no longer being 'in the moment', I realized how much it really was 'System Shock 2' with a new skin.
Don't get me wrong; I enjoyed Bioshock plenty when I played through it. But it left me feeling the same way I felt after watching the Star Wars prequels:
It had been amazing and fascinating and exciting and fully of pretty images and neat fights and all that stuff
A very pretty new skin, (and a really lame 'hacking' minigame replacing the fairly quick and un-intrusive minigame in SS2), but every element in SS2 was present in Bioshock, gameplay wise. Most of the major plot points are 're-written' but otherwise pretty much the same.
And, in my opinion, the 'moral dilemma' the player is faced with is nothing of the sort. Predictably enough, I was being good, and rescuing the girls. I was being evil the second run through (to see what happens) and very little of the story changes at all, for all practical purposes only the epilogue. And your benefit for being evil is only short-term; in the medium term you're rewarded very nearly as well for rescuing them as for being evil. The game could have stood to make the rewards for evil greater so that there was a 'cost' to being good, as was implied.
Criticisms aside, however: Bioshock is a good game. It's engaging, enjoyable, fun, and has more atmosphere than every game currently available for the PS3 and every other game available for the 360 combined. I enjoyed it - but I'd just like to be a voice going against the trend here and voicing the opinion that it's not the best game ever: it's just way better than anything else that's come out in the last year or so.
That would be really funny if (literally!) nearly 90% of the document wasn't redacted.
Since it IS the cast that about 90% of the document is redacted, it is merely very, very sad.
I blame your killbot for this outage.
Clearly, Lotus Notes was the perpetrator.
If he could figure this out, so could someone else.
It follows that someone who has an interest in potential exploits and (one presumes) protecting users-at-large from them (like, say, the author of a tool like NoScript) would be likely to discover such a thing.
It also seems to me that, having figured it out, it would make sense to make people aware of it.
Once he makes them aware of it, making them aware of possible countermeasures also makes sense - in this case, NoScript.
That's a far, far cry from McAfee releasing a virus that only their product can stop (which wouldn't be possible anyway, let's be honest - someone else would find a way to stop it in short order, just to 'stick it to the man'). As far as IE exploits and for-pay patches, I wouldn't be surprised if a subscription model for licensing doesn't come along from MS one of these days, where only active subscribers can get patches...
But neither of those is the same thing as what's going on here (in my own, personal opinion, of course).
We have lots of rights. That doesn't mean there's any shortage of laws to abridge, limit, restrict, or outright deny us those rights from time to time. 'Due process' has become a good deal hazier lately.
Also, in some jurisdictions, you can have your property seized with alarming ease, and have virtually no shot at getting it back.
(That said, while I despise folks who drive while drunk, and think it is both a general evil to the public at large as well as fairly stupid - I don't want nannying devices in my car. There are enough moving parts and electronic devices in my existing car - that's plenty enough potential points of failure; adding in more potential points of failure that could make the car completely useless and undrivable (much less do real damage - imagine the seatbelt getting tightened too much, too hard, too fast, as just the wrong time) is just silly.)
All police use 'profiling'. It's often called 'racial profiling', but except in the most sensational and egregious of cases, that isn't really what it is.
A white guy and a black guy sitting in a car with Maryland plates on a street in Arlington will often cause a patrolling officer in the area (especially if he's been there for a while) to check things out, and see what's going on. It could be perfectly innocent. It probably is a drug deal.
Likewise, a group of young black men standing around in a parking lot, basketball court, or even a park is liable to get the police passing by to stop and talk and ask a few questions. It could well be perfectly innocent, but in that area (Arlington) it's quite possibly an open-air drug market of sorts.
(These are actual examples cited to me by a friend who worked as a police officer in Arlington - and for the record, he's black (the term he prefers to 'African-American'))
Now, certainly, stopping every person of X ethnic origin because they're that ethnicity is bad and is a waste of energy on the part of the police, and is harassment. On the other hand, if you know that people who are X ethnicity *and* are likely to be violating Y law, then maybe it's 'racial profiling' to stop them on the street and talk to them. More likely it's just good police work and exactly the kind of thing most police do every day.
(I'm not even going to get into the logic or illogic of using profiling as part of airport security...)
I don't know; brown worked quite well for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. For the first couple of days my roommate was playing the game, I wondered if our television hadn't broken and become unable to display vivid colors.
But the game sold quite well: perhaps it is some phenomenon that doesn't affect me but will still help the Zune?
Maybe Microsoft is just at the 'What the hell, it can't really HURT sales, can it?' stage.
And just how eager are you to risk the 'occasional death'. I mean- just to judge by how you've described it there, it's no big deal and certainly won't be any more than a minor inconvenience to the family, right?
There are violations of procedure and violations of 'good sense' by the police. We have MILLIONS of police officers in this country. If there are 50 of them who kill someone they shouldn't in a given year, out of 5 million cops... well, that's a 0.01% rate which is better than most professions end up with for 'big oops' moments. Most of the time you get police approaching a vehicle as described (multiple officers, weapons ready and/or drawn), you'll find it's in a location with a lot of violent crime. The cops are behaving that way because they have no way of knowing that the person who's been pulled over will decide that they don't want a $10 fix-it ticket for a busted tail-light and decide to open fire.
It sucks hugely when the police kill an innocent bystander. They really shouldn't. But put yourself in the police officer's shoes. You're told an armed robbery suspect has gone down an alley. You head for that alley. You don't know it's a dead-end alley and that he's going to be coming back, but you've got your weapon in hand and are trying to find and arrest the guy. It's dark. You can't see shit. You're doing what you can, and there's a sound and a blur. Do you (not 'do you, the officer of the peace, who should be prepared to die for the greater good of a society that largely hates you', but do YOU) wait two seconds to see if you get shot or if a piece of rebar hits you in the head?
You probably should. You probably wouldn't.
I'm not saying it's right, but your blithe statement that they should be "risking the occasional death" is just as out of line as suggesting it's okay for them to gun down nuns and orphans and grandmothers on the way to church.
The idea of an 'unreloadable by the owner' gun is ludicrous. For one thing, how on earth are you going to expect the owner of this 'wonderful' piece of technology to be able to get enough practice to be able to reasonably hit what he needs to? After all, he's only got ten shots before he has to go back to town!
That and, if it's only reloadable by a factory/technician/expensive-and-heavy machine... how do you unload it to render it safe, perhaps for storage? If you're going in to town because you used it to shoot a fox that went into your hen-house, and you fired two rounds, do you just blow off the other 8 (yay, practice!) before driving to town with it?
While guns can indisputably make killing people easier, they are, in the end, merely tools. It's much easier to kill someone with an AMC Gremlin than it is with your bare hands. Sort of. Crazy people are the problem, and a lack of education and control. Many violent firearms-related crimes are committed with weapons that are obtained illegally - you don't think that the gang-bangers pick up their AKs at Wal-Mart after a 10-day waiting period, do you?
Everyone and their brother having access to guns isn't the problem as much as everyone and their brother having access to guns without any education about or respect for them. Belt-fed, 40mm grenade launchers? No, I can't really see any logical reason to have one of these unless you're, you know - the military. Nevermind the fact that I can only imagine the cost of shooting the thing. But it seems to me that there are as many arguments against 'gun control' (say more clearly, gun restriction - because illegal weapons are still every bit as available and out of control) legislation as there are for it. Statistics from both sides can be brought to bear with alarming facility.
But there's one thing we all ought to be able to agree upon: crazy, disturbed individuals are more dangerous than any 'assault weapon'. I can't find a citation at the moment, but a guy in the UK went into a church and killed a bunch of people with a SWORD. Guess he really meant to get all 'old school', but it certainly proves that if you're disturbed, you don't need a gun to commit multiple murder.
Let's ban crazy people! Just don't worry too much about who gets to define what 'crazy' is. Is disagreeing with the current administration's position on the 'war on terror' crazy?
Ooor... if you have USB accessories (if you have old parallel/serial printers, etc, you might have trouble even with a PC), you could just install your copy of linux or windows on your Mac, and also have OSX as an option? Of course, if you are building your own low-end to mid-range box, it's almost always better to do that than to buy from Apple unless you specifically *WANT* a box that runs OSX. For laptops, it's a bit different, but you can sometimes get no-name (ish) notebooks that are much cheaper than Apple's hardware for a given price, but rarely will they match the quality, either. Don't 'just buy Apple' because that's retarded. But certainly, as is mentioned, don't dismiss Apple without at least seeing if what they're selling meets your needs.
They may have something in mind like this - the widescreen/WiFi/touchscreen iPod rumors have been churning like chum in the fanboy-infested waters for quite some time. Either way, I'm sure the iPhone will be a success. The ability to develop 3rd party apps and connect up with corporate email systems (as many others have pointed out before me) are the things that are likely to decide if the iPhone is a success or something that blows the competition out of the water.
I know some folks at Motorola who went home and were found the next morning rocking back and forth while curled up in the fetal position around a now-empty bottle of Jack Daniels, the night after the MacWorld keynote announcing the iPhone, so it's at least scary-in-concept to some of the existing players.
The way online filesharing works and has been handled has *definitely* had an impact on music sales. A negative one. I'm a prime example.
In the late 90s I (estimate) that I purchased about 60-70 CDs each year. A couple times a month, I'd go to a local music store and pick up 2-3 CDs. These days, I buy perhaps 1-2 CDs a year. If that. Mostly when particular artists that I happen to *REALLY* like release something new.
'Back in the day' (late 90s, certainly), I used Napster a fair bit. Grab a whole lot of this'n that. See what's around try different things, all that good stuff. Now, not so much. As a direct result of being unable to listen to most/all of an album before blowing 15-20 dollars buying it, I'm far, far less likely to pick things up.
I don't do filesharing all that much anymore - too much of a pain, most of the clients do unfriendly things to my 'net connection, I don't want to end up defending myself against a potential RIAA lawsuit, and so on.
Now, there's a difference between then and now on a lot of levels. I have access to a lot more bandwidth, and a lot (A LOT!) more storage for a lot less money ('big' 20GB drive? Pff...), and I honestly can't say how this would change my habits if the 'old' Napster were still around.
Either way, I find myself more inclined to grab tracks a la carte for $0.99 from iTunes (which may be the antichrist as far as some are concerned, but hey - it's easy and effective, and their DRM doesn't bother me since I *have* an iPod and don't need to listen to my music any other way (not that I can't just burn to an audio CD and rip to MP3 via whatever application I like if I *need* to, anyhow).
Basically, I'm rambling - what it boils down to is that (as most of us believe), the RIAA companies need to adjust to the modern world - join the 21st century, as it were - in how they do business. It's wrong to pirate movies and music - say what you will about all the other issues involved, it's illegal and the copyright holders *DO NOT* get compensated for their investment, and the artists certainly never see a penny of what they might if you bought it, but if the record companies embraced new models, it's entirely possible they'd make more money and have less piracy.
On the other hand - there will ALWAYS be some level of piracy. That's unavoidable, and been the case since the means to record and share music first went into the hands of the public at large. Trying to stop it completely is futile, much like trying to stop REAL piracy completely (the capture of ships and/or their cargo at sea) is futile. There will always be folks who feel the rewards outweigh the risks. They just need to make the alternative (paying for it, getting it legally) easy enough that 'most' average folks go for it. I believe that that, in and of itself, is a significant portion of the success of the iTunes model (helped along, handily, by the iPod, of course).
I believe that the FCC has informed us that the proper spelling is 'F@ck', actually.
Uhm. How about one: Cingular. Which has a contract that says no other company CAN buy (or, more importantly, sell) the iPhone. If they could, you'd better believe that Verizon, T-Mobile and Sprint would probably fall all over themselves to carry it. (My own personal supposition/opinion, I have no proof of this statement.) Your assertion that you're standing by is pretty baseless, however, since no other companies are allowed to 'sign up for the iPhone'. Watch where you're standing in the future.
I think that if this manages to trip through it'll be the RIAA moving away from shooting themselves in the foot. Maybe to a knee or something now.
I don't have any statistics except what lurks in the demented swamp I call a forebrain, but it seems to me that if this happens, the first and most obvious effect will be that smaller, local stations take a hit. Kiss KCDX good-bye! (At http://www.kcdx.com/ for those who care) and other less-unusual stations.
This will leave us with radio stations in three broad categories. Talk/news radio, ClearChannel (and Cirrus and such), and the college stations (and other stations that play 'off the map' music). You'll get the current 'corporate pop', you'll get the fringe stuff, but I suspect there'll be quite a decline in the availability of anything ELSE on terrestrial radio.
And then, of course, this will cause the RIAA to lose money on stations that close (though they weren't getting royalties before, so it'll still be a net gain), but the far, far bigger impact will come when there's less impetus for any new music sales other than the big stuff (Kelly Clarkson and others like her) that the corporate labels want to push. Declining revenues will push the RIAA to install monitor chips in everyone's brainstem, to debit your account every time you hear, sing, hum, or read the lyrics to something they have the rights to.
In addition, their lack of a really impressive, robust, high-end part is probably due to the same thing that kept nVidia out of the game for a while a few years back:
They spent a fair amount of focus on developing a GPU for the Xbox 360 - and that R&D did not bring direct translation to their GPU offerings here.
It remains to be seen if it'll make that much difference in the long run, but at the moment, it looks like ATi hasn't got a whole lot to offer - of course, until we see some DX10 games and comparisons, who knows? It's possible that the X2000-series cards will destroy the NV80 parts in that realm. Until there are DX10 games (and DX10 games that consumers care about) that's sort of a moot point, however.
As it happens, they did more than this. You can look at what they did as a poor revamping/remaking of the original series... but that's your choice. It's subjective.
For my money (and I'll point out that I watched the original and bought the boxed set on DVD), it's a very different and in many ways far better re-imagining of the core concept. Face facts: the original Battlestar Galactica series wasn't nearly dire enough for what amounts to starting with the near extinction of the human race.
On the other hand 4 seaons is about it; between the heavy frontloading of 'punch' episodes in season 3 and the changes in scheduling (Sunday? WTF? Trying to compete with Desperate Housewives or something?), it's no surprise that the viewership has waned. With SG-1 ending and no BSG on Fridays, I'm curious as to what's going to happen to SciFi in general.
As others have said - let us hope that the final season doesn't throw out the 'filler' (because lots of 'filler' episodes are important anyway; explaining character motivations can be very important, especially if you want the audience to appreciate the character's growth and changes.
Anyway - I like the new series (though not as much as I used to, true) and I liked the original. They're different, but they're both interesting storytelling and based on the same things... but heavily colored by society of their times.