The Sony demo, to me, doesn't look like much of an advancement ( over Wii, and even over Adobe Flash demos around the web ), whereas the Microsoft complete lack of controller seems a large step forwards. Even if it's only basic recognition of body movement the possibilities for it seem virtually endless, to me, the magic wand is just a point and a direction vector in 3d space.
I think people are saying that Sony's is more of a tech demo based on the amount of *gloss* applied to the presentation, MS's looks finished, Sony's looks in development. ( I think in reality it's probably the other way around, MS seem to still have latency problems. )
More infos :
This is a link to Johnny Chung Lee's ( the guy who did super interesting things with the Wiimote, they're worth checking out too ) blog discussing the technology, including why light conditions aren't important. He *raves* and he's personally made some of the most impressive spacial/visual/cheap technology I've ever seen. He seems to work for Microsoft now, normal rules apply...
The biggest difference to me is that if both products reach the consumer as advertised ( as if ) then the Sony product is more of the same, and will probably result in similar mini games to the Wii and the MS one is so far ahead of what I thought was possible in real time on consumer hardware ( I work in a similar-ish field ) that it's genuinely exciting.
You should get professional help. Your morbid, misogynistic fantasies seem to have become so commonplace that you're typing them out in detail in a public technical forum about a brand of computer manufacturer disallowing a small piece of software on a mobile phone.
Say someone goes around putting tiny holes in a large amount of gas tanks, ( syphoning a little each time, a very experienced driver may notice ) and then one day runs around using these pre-prepared holes to collecting a large amount of gas and burns a school to the ground, before disappearing almost completely.
You think the car owners should be held responsible ? This seems like attacking the victims( they've had bandwidth and cpu cycles stolen, have no knowledge, no intent ) of a crime because you can't locate the perpetrator ?
Hi, I've got a call from a Mr Kettle ? I can barely hear through all the RAfuckingGE, but I think he's saying something about capital letters at the beginning to sentences ?
America and guns is indecipherable from the outside, that's shockingly cheap for the ability to kill a large number of people very quickly, and I can almost see how if everyone around you is capable of pointing in your direction and killing your entire family that I'd want to be equal to it.
Maybe.
Anyway, you've convinced me, I've cancelled my plans to invade the American midwest, oh, and the Queen asks if we could kindly have her ammunition back.
So, you have experience of being forced out of a country by an oppressive government. Could come in handy when they send the tanks/helicopters to the places that will fight back with shotguns, and the ground troops to the places that won't.
( Sorry, joking, thank you for the clarification )
The above was no dig an Americans in general, just a comment that when someone on the Internet believes that owning a gun is a replacement for any kind of political understanding or process, they tend to be American.
I'm assuming that by last laugh you mean that their destination is superior to the place they were exiled from ? Certainly if they were unhappy with the situation in England then yes, for them in particular. In general I think it's a personal point of view. I have chance go to America to work, but I like Europe very much, more guns than people sounds horrific ( especially when 'let's-recreate-Baghdad-boy' above is allowed more guns than he has hands ).
The Puritans seem to have given America a good base for a new ( to them ) country, but it doesn't seem to have taken very long for the country to devolve into a very similar mess to the one they were exiled from ?
Why would I want to turn the place I live ( London ) into Baghdad ? Why would I want innocent people killed every-fucking-day ? When has the UK waited for the US to liberate ? When has the UK waited for anyone to liberate it ?
The quote is from a time when the UK was burning both ends of it's ( admittedly fading ) empire fighting a seemingly genuine evil. This is not that time, and the quote itself is more than enough to prove England has a *spine*.
It might be a good idea to visit London sometime. You can take special note of how in nearly every row of houses there's one or two which are of a much later date, where the original house was bombed, you can picture the families, you can picture your family huddled in the dark hoping that it won't be your house ? Maybe you can stand on the roof, in the pitch black and shoot the bombs for the whole neighborhood ?
Grow up, and stop glorifying violence, in my experience the people who do this are the first to go running home to mommy when things get tough. Or, stay at home, and polish your surrogate penis and repeat to yourself again and again, I have a gun, I have balls. I have a gun, I have balls.
( Rocking and looking in the mirror whilst doing so optional. )
Do you honestly believe that your government would allow you the tools to overthrow it easily ?
Oh, I get it, you're confident that a population with a few shotguns here and there are going to overtake the government, the government's police force and the government's armies ? What exactly are you going to do when you can be followed remotely by cctv everywhere, and they have helicopters ? Wave your sports rifle at them ?
I'm guessing you're American, and I believe you've not really thought this through.
I think it's more telling that people would have concerns over wearing a pink item of clothing ? I suppose it may reflect *pink* light into your eyes and you suddenly find boys attractive ? Or maybe a boy will proposition you, mistaking you for a girl, and you'll accidentally acquiesce ?
As discussed *somewhere around here* girls generally like to change their clothes often, and are generally attracted to brighter colours ? Why would anyone assume that they like to see men in boring same-as-the-next-guy business suits, or jeans-black-t-shirt ? What does it say about the wearer ? That they're the same as, and interchangable with the guy standing next to them ? That they're conventional, standard issue potentially boring boyfriends/lovers ?
I might not be the right person to respond ( and this probably isn't the place for it ) as I'm currently wearing a pink sweatshirt and purple nail varnish on one hand ( I love the contradiction of small minds assuming I'm gay, whilst the the truth is the opposite, my gf does it for me, and she's Swedish ( another stereotype ) )
Anyway, enough fashion advice for/. ( : What you wear makes a statement whether you like it or not.
My advice would be to level your creating professions later, it's much easier when gold is more plentiful, and the higher level recipes tend to use ingredients that have timers on them ( lvl. 80 cloths can be made once every four days ) and so are either slow, or expensive to buy in the auction house.
Collecting professions ( mining, herbs ) are best leveled as you go along, as running around a progression of old areas collecting things isn't much fun ( imho ). You can sell these, or bank them for your fast skills upgrade later ( personally I'd sell, the money is worth more to you as you level, 1g at 80 is a taxi ride ).
There's a chance that by the time you approach the end game you'll have changed your ideas about what professions you want, or the next expansion will be out and new professions will be available.
The highest level riding skill ( fast flying mounts ) costs 5000g, as a casual player I've spent a couple of hours every couple of days since christmas saving up.
Shhhh, dude, you're on slashdot, and you obviously have some experience of the 'special hug'. Most people around here think that sex is something you torrent from Sweden.
For what it's worth, I agree entirely with your approach to giving information to children. I had a friend who was told that tampons were for stopping nosebleeds...
A reasonable man adapts himself to his environment. An unreasonable man persists in attempting to adapt his environment to suit himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
Unfortunately as a small developer you're caught in the crossfire. The copyright laws are supposed to be used as you're using them, they enable you monopoly on your product enough to allow society to recompense you for sharing your knowledge, skill and time. This is good for you, is good for society, and is the best way that as a collection of people, we've found to deal with this issue.
The monopoly aspect of the laws don't scale well, when it gets to a corporation size level ( by now probably mostly removed from control of, and recompense to, the original author ) the same group of people who make the laws, are the same group that profits from moving the law slightly in their favour, and so the copyright term gets repeatedly extended, society is paying massive collective recompense, but the ideas are not being shared, and the original author is not benefitting.
The ideas that these people control, and are extending their control of, are the soul of modern western mainstream society, Mickey Mouse(c)(r)(tm) and Coca-Cola(c)(r)(tm) are at least as symbolic of America as the Statue of Liberty to most people, the American people should have control of them, not a collection of unelected individuals with no connection to the original author.
These ideas have been so aggressively proliferated, that they have become the emotional monarchy of the western world, where gossip used to be about courtiers, it's now the romantic liaisons of the few beautiful chosen, and any price of entry to this world is also controlled by these same people.
On a worldwide corporate scale, recently ( in 10s of years ) entertainment has been a market that has it's scarcity, and therefore price, controlled and has proved to be very very profitable, this is a blip in human terms, artists are traditionally starving. Entertainment has gone from something which you pay to see directly ( a wandering minstrel, a variety show ), to something you pay to see remotely ( cinema - tv - vhs/dvd ), and is headed back towards something you pay for to see directly, recorded media is too ubiquitous, and too easy to copy that it's lost nearly all it's perceived value.
The Pirate Bay are certainly not heroic, they're profiting from the sharing of these ideas without recompense to the original artist, however at the moment, enabling a new distribution method is them sharing their ideas with society, and they are being recompensed for it, they're operating outside the copyright laws, but a lot of people agree with the stance that media should be easily distributable.
The situation now is that a growing proportion of society ( younger people especially ) are willfully breaking the law, which should result in a rethink of the law, and a working towards a new way of recompensing the original artist. The rule makers, or the people who influence them have a vested interest in not letting that happen, so there is a large difference of ideas between the people who ( believe they ) control society, and society itself. Four Swedish men are now going to jail for a year for this idea.
In it's desire to control it's product ( and now untenable position ), the rich entertainment industry is proving to have no qualms about destroying random members of society's lives to protect the ideas many believe it should not now be allowed to wholly own, so opinions on both sides are heated. The freedom of the internet also seems caught in this crossfire, and so the problem becomes intertwined with free speech, which the more thoughtful members of society very rightly do not want in the power of an elite unchosen few.
The answer is copyright law reform, in light of the Internet. What people will pay for digital content is nearly nothing, but the audience is the biggest the world has ever seen, it's not an unsolvable problem, it's slowly being proved that people will pay for service, so what's needed is a way to connect the small amounts that people will pay, and get as much as is possible ( and given the distribution
* Laughs at anonymous posting saying that using the internet anonymously means you're a pedophile.
You're using anonymity to communicate an idea that you're afraid of reprisals from, which nullifies your argument absolutely.
Please think before spreading the latest reds/gays/drugs/pedophiles-under-the-beds hysteria, if you can't understand the concepts being discussed ( and it unfortunately seems you can't ) really, just STFU. Coward.
You realise that the whole 'McDonald's supports the IRA' is an urban myth ? Probably brought about by McDonalds having an IRA deductions box on their payslips ( Individual Retirement Account in the US ? )
You may like to have a look at Defense Grid : The Awakening ( http://defensegrid.hiddenpath.com/ ) which though a slightly different style of game ( with many less Dark Mistresses ), has a similar mechanic, defend defend defend.
No affiliation, just plenty of hours lost to it, and it *feels* similar to me.
He also had a choice, he's probably not short of room, so he could have just kept it, he could have got a minion to ebay it, he could have just trashed it, yet he shipped it to nother person, if it took him one second, and someone else benefitted from it then the word you're looking for is kindness.
Like he could have not just given away the source to a product that's still making him money. ( Thank you. )
If you fancy posting a list of the stuff you've got at home and don't really need, we'll divy it up somehow, and you'll mail it out, right ?
Ah, ok, thank you, I've not listened to chart/hit music for a long time ( now there's a sign of middle age ). The point I was trying to make was that I'm more in love with music now than I ever was, new bands that I've discovered recently make me believe that I've never really heard good music, in particular good lyrics before.
Also that it's so much easier to find, and in a lot of cases buy directly from the artist, or at least their label.
I've not noticed the loudness war in most things, but I suspect a lot of the things that I listen to are produced by the band, someone close to them, or under the control of the band.
Maybe we should have a depression or something to bring back the blues.
I've been fanatically buying music for the past twenty years, and I now have access to much much more quality new music than ever before.
I'm not trying to be rude, but stopping buying/finding new music seems to generally be a function of age ( I'm 36 ). Music which soundtracked your most hormonal years seems to sink in deeper ( playing things on the radio enough that it hits a *special* moment for people seems to be a large part of how the music industry works/worked. )
Listening to music from their earlier years seems to be conforting for people, but to say that the quality of music and musicianship has declined is just another 'the kids these days are shit' statement. Your position and emotional needs have probably changed, but it's still true that your all-time favourite band you havn't heard yet, and right now they're probably about 3-4 clicks from where you're sitting.
Sign of for Last.fm, or Pandora, or whatever. People who've grown up around the music you love are now making music themselves.
There are many things I don't understand about the universe, wikipedia notwithstanding, and whilst I see a great deal that humankind has to learn, none of it for me points to an omnipresent entity. The page you link to cites several possible reasons for a Fine-tuned Universe, and questions whether such a thing exists.
It would seem very simply logical that any universe that we are part of would appear fine-tuned to our survival just by us being a part of it. A universe could be wildly different to our own, and if there were intelligent beings there to observe it, then it would seem fine-tuned to them.
Also, please stop often asking Atheists about it. You realise this forum has a strong anti-Christian bias, Intelligent Design seems to be generally regarded here as a large step backwards in thought ( I personally agree with this ), and a Fine-tuned Universe is off-topic at this point in the conversation.
I have mod points, and I didn't mod you troll, even though it seems that's exactly what you're doing.
Slashdot Mirror
The Sony demo, to me, doesn't look like much of an advancement ( over Wii, and even over Adobe Flash demos around the web ), whereas the Microsoft complete lack of controller seems a large step forwards. Even if it's only basic recognition of body movement the possibilities for it seem virtually endless, to me, the magic wand is just a point and a direction vector in 3d space.
I think people are saying that Sony's is more of a tech demo based on the amount of *gloss* applied to the presentation, MS's looks finished, Sony's looks in development. ( I think in reality it's probably the other way around, MS seem to still have latency problems. )
More infos :
This is a link to Johnny Chung Lee's ( the guy who did super interesting things with the Wiimote, they're worth checking out too ) blog discussing the technology, including why light conditions aren't important. He *raves* and he's personally made some of the most impressive spacial/visual/cheap technology I've ever seen. He seems to work for Microsoft now, normal rules apply...
http://procrastineering.blogspot.com/
The biggest difference to me is that if both products reach the consumer as advertised ( as if ) then the Sony product is more of the same, and will probably result in similar mini games to the Wii and the MS one is so far ahead of what I thought was possible in real time on consumer hardware ( I work in a similar-ish field ) that it's genuinely exciting.
Also, the mom in the MS video is hot. ( :
They're also competing against Microsoft, who's technology easily looks the most impressive ( even with my I'll-believe-it-when-I-see-it glasses on. )
http://www.xbox.com/en-US/live/projectnatal/
You should get professional help. Your morbid, misogynistic fantasies seem to have become so commonplace that you're typing them out in detail in a public technical forum about a brand of computer manufacturer disallowing a small piece of software on a mobile phone.
Let's have a car analogy !
Say someone goes around putting tiny holes in a large amount of gas tanks, ( syphoning a little each time, a very experienced driver may notice ) and then one day runs around using these pre-prepared holes to collecting a large amount of gas and burns a school to the ground, before disappearing almost completely.
You think the car owners should be held responsible ? This seems like attacking the victims( they've had bandwidth and cpu cycles stolen, have no knowledge, no intent ) of a crime because you can't locate the perpetrator ?
Hi, I've got a call from a Mr Kettle ? I can barely hear through all the RAfuckingGE, but I think he's saying something about capital letters at the beginning to sentences ?
Exactly, 'He's a genius and I don't agree with his course of action.'
Viewed objectively, this means that you ( who presumably, distribution of genius Etc., aren't ) should reconsider your opinion ?
Haha, ok, thank you.
America and guns is indecipherable from the outside, that's shockingly cheap for the ability to kill a large number of people very quickly, and I can almost see how if everyone around you is capable of pointing in your direction and killing your entire family that I'd want to be equal to it.
Maybe.
Anyway, you've convinced me, I've cancelled my plans to invade the American midwest, oh, and the Queen asks if we could kindly have her ammunition back.
So, you have experience of being forced out of a country by an oppressive government. Could come in handy when they send the tanks/helicopters to the places that will fight back with shotguns, and the ground troops to the places that won't.
( Sorry, joking, thank you for the clarification )
The above was no dig an Americans in general, just a comment that when someone on the Internet believes that owning a gun is a replacement for any kind of political understanding or process, they tend to be American.
I'm assuming that by last laugh you mean that their destination is superior to the place they were exiled from ? Certainly if they were unhappy with the situation in England then yes, for them in particular. In general I think it's a personal point of view. I have chance go to America to work, but I like Europe very much, more guns than people sounds horrific ( especially when 'let's-recreate-Baghdad-boy' above is allowed more guns than he has hands ).
The Puritans seem to have given America a good base for a new ( to them ) country, but it doesn't seem to have taken very long for the country to devolve into a very similar mess to the one they were exiled from ?
Why would I want to turn the place I live ( London ) into Baghdad ? Why would I want innocent people killed every-fucking-day ? When has the UK waited for the US to liberate ? When has the UK waited for anyone to liberate it ?
The quote is from a time when the UK was burning both ends of it's ( admittedly fading ) empire fighting a seemingly genuine evil. This is not that time, and the quote itself is more than enough to prove England has a *spine*.
It might be a good idea to visit London sometime. You can take special note of how in nearly every row of houses there's one or two which are of a much later date, where the original house was bombed, you can picture the families, you can picture your family huddled in the dark hoping that it won't be your house ? Maybe you can stand on the roof, in the pitch black and shoot the bombs for the whole neighborhood ?
Grow up, and stop glorifying violence, in my experience the people who do this are the first to go running home to mommy when things get tough. Or, stay at home, and polish your surrogate penis and repeat to yourself again and again, I have a gun, I have balls. I have a gun, I have balls.
( Rocking and looking in the mirror whilst doing so optional. )
Do you honestly believe that your government would allow you the tools to overthrow it easily ?
Hands ?
Oh, I get it, you're confident that a population with a few shotguns here and there are going to overtake the government, the government's police force and the government's armies ? What exactly are you going to do when you can be followed remotely by cctv everywhere, and they have helicopters ? Wave your sports rifle at them ?
I'm guessing you're American, and I believe you've not really thought this through.
* Yawn. Did you mean to come across like you've read about girls and boys in a magazine and are still trying to decide which one you are ?
Apologies if you have learning difficulties.
I think it's more telling that people would have concerns over wearing a pink item of clothing ? I suppose it may reflect *pink* light into your eyes and you suddenly find boys attractive ? Or maybe a boy will proposition you, mistaking you for a girl, and you'll accidentally acquiesce ?
/. ( : What you wear makes a statement whether you like it or not.
As discussed *somewhere around here* girls generally like to change their clothes often, and are generally attracted to brighter colours ? Why would anyone assume that they like to see men in boring same-as-the-next-guy business suits, or jeans-black-t-shirt ? What does it say about the wearer ? That they're the same as, and interchangable with the guy standing next to them ? That they're conventional, standard issue potentially boring boyfriends/lovers ?
I might not be the right person to respond ( and this probably isn't the place for it ) as I'm currently wearing a pink sweatshirt and purple nail varnish on one hand ( I love the contradiction of small minds assuming I'm gay, whilst the the truth is the opposite, my gf does it for me, and she's Swedish ( another stereotype ) )
Anyway, enough fashion advice for
My advice would be to level your creating professions later, it's much easier when gold is more plentiful, and the higher level recipes tend to use ingredients that have timers on them ( lvl. 80 cloths can be made once every four days ) and so are either slow, or expensive to buy in the auction house.
Collecting professions ( mining, herbs ) are best leveled as you go along, as running around a progression of old areas collecting things isn't much fun ( imho ). You can sell these, or bank them for your fast skills upgrade later ( personally I'd sell, the money is worth more to you as you level, 1g at 80 is a taxi ride ).
There's a chance that by the time you approach the end game you'll have changed your ideas about what professions you want, or the next expansion will be out and new professions will be available.
The highest level riding skill ( fast flying mounts ) costs 5000g, as a casual player I've spent a couple of hours every couple of days since christmas saving up.
HTHs
Shhhh, dude, you're on slashdot, and you obviously have some experience of the 'special hug'. Most people around here think that sex is something you torrent from Sweden.
For what it's worth, I agree entirely with your approach to giving information to children. I had a friend who was told that tampons were for stopping nosebleeds...
You don't get an ass that big from being super active, now do you ?
We have a word here ( London, England ) for people who work 40 hour weeks. It's 'lazy'
A reasonable man adapts himself to his environment. An unreasonable man persists in attempting to adapt his environment to suit himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
-- George Bernard Shaw
Unfortunately as a small developer you're caught in the crossfire. The copyright laws are supposed to be used as you're using them, they enable you monopoly on your product enough to allow society to recompense you for sharing your knowledge, skill and time. This is good for you, is good for society, and is the best way that as a collection of people, we've found to deal with this issue.
The monopoly aspect of the laws don't scale well, when it gets to a corporation size level ( by now probably mostly removed from control of, and recompense to, the original author ) the same group of people who make the laws, are the same group that profits from moving the law slightly in their favour, and so the copyright term gets repeatedly extended, society is paying massive collective recompense, but the ideas are not being shared, and the original author is not benefitting.
The ideas that these people control, and are extending their control of, are the soul of modern western mainstream society, Mickey Mouse(c)(r)(tm) and Coca-Cola(c)(r)(tm) are at least as symbolic of America as the Statue of Liberty to most people, the American people should have control of them, not a collection of unelected individuals with no connection to the original author.
These ideas have been so aggressively proliferated, that they have become the emotional monarchy of the western world, where gossip used to be about courtiers, it's now the romantic liaisons of the few beautiful chosen, and any price of entry to this world is also controlled by these same people.
On a worldwide corporate scale, recently ( in 10s of years ) entertainment has been a market that has it's scarcity, and therefore price, controlled and has proved to be very very profitable, this is a blip in human terms, artists are traditionally starving. Entertainment has gone from something which you pay to see directly ( a wandering minstrel, a variety show ), to something you pay to see remotely ( cinema - tv - vhs/dvd ), and is headed back towards something you pay for to see directly, recorded media is too ubiquitous, and too easy to copy that it's lost nearly all it's perceived value.
The Pirate Bay are certainly not heroic, they're profiting from the sharing of these ideas without recompense to the original artist, however at the moment, enabling a new distribution method is them sharing their ideas with society, and they are being recompensed for it, they're operating outside the copyright laws, but a lot of people agree with the stance that media should be easily distributable.
The situation now is that a growing proportion of society ( younger people especially ) are willfully breaking the law, which should result in a rethink of the law, and a working towards a new way of recompensing the original artist. The rule makers, or the people who influence them have a vested interest in not letting that happen, so there is a large difference of ideas between the people who ( believe they ) control society, and society itself. Four Swedish men are now going to jail for a year for this idea.
In it's desire to control it's product ( and now untenable position ), the rich entertainment industry is proving to have no qualms about destroying random members of society's lives to protect the ideas many believe it should not now be allowed to wholly own, so opinions on both sides are heated. The freedom of the internet also seems caught in this crossfire, and so the problem becomes intertwined with free speech, which the more thoughtful members of society very rightly do not want in the power of an elite unchosen few.
The answer is copyright law reform, in light of the Internet. What people will pay for digital content is nearly nothing, but the audience is the biggest the world has ever seen, it's not an unsolvable problem, it's slowly being proved that people will pay for service, so what's needed is a way to connect the small amounts that people will pay, and get as much as is possible ( and given the distribution
* Laughs at anonymous posting saying that using the internet anonymously means you're a pedophile.
You're using anonymity to communicate an idea that you're afraid of reprisals from, which nullifies your argument absolutely.
Please think before spreading the latest reds/gays/drugs/pedophiles-under-the-beds hysteria, if you can't understand the concepts being discussed ( and it unfortunately seems you can't ) really, just STFU. Coward.
You realise that the whole 'McDonald's supports the IRA' is an urban myth ? Probably brought about by McDonalds having an IRA deductions box on their payslips ( Individual Retirement Account in the US ? )
Apologies if you were joking.
You may like to have a look at Defense Grid : The Awakening ( http://defensegrid.hiddenpath.com/ ) which though a slightly different style of game ( with many less Dark Mistresses ), has a similar mechanic, defend defend defend.
No affiliation, just plenty of hours lost to it, and it *feels* similar to me.
He also had a choice, he's probably not short of room, so he could have just kept it, he could have got a minion to ebay it, he could have just trashed it, yet he shipped it to nother person, if it took him one second, and someone else benefitted from it then the word you're looking for is kindness.
Like he could have not just given away the source to a product that's still making him money. ( Thank you. )
If you fancy posting a list of the stuff you've got at home and don't really need, we'll divy it up somehow, and you'll mail it out, right ?
Ah, ok, thank you, I've not listened to chart/hit music for a long time ( now there's a sign of middle age ). The point I was trying to make was that I'm more in love with music now than I ever was, new bands that I've discovered recently make me believe that I've never really heard good music, in particular good lyrics before.
Also that it's so much easier to find, and in a lot of cases buy directly from the artist, or at least their label.
I've not noticed the loudness war in most things, but I suspect a lot of the things that I listen to are produced by the band, someone close to them, or under the control of the band.
Maybe we should have a depression or something to bring back the blues.
( :
I've been fanatically buying music for the past twenty years, and I now have access to much much more quality new music than ever before.
I'm not trying to be rude, but stopping buying/finding new music seems to generally be a function of age ( I'm 36 ). Music which soundtracked your most hormonal years seems to sink in deeper ( playing things on the radio enough that it hits a *special* moment for people seems to be a large part of how the music industry works/worked. )
Listening to music from their earlier years seems to be conforting for people, but to say that the quality of music and musicianship has declined is just another 'the kids these days are shit' statement. Your position and emotional needs have probably changed, but it's still true that your all-time favourite band you havn't heard yet, and right now they're probably about 3-4 clicks from where you're sitting.
Sign of for Last.fm, or Pandora, or whatever. People who've grown up around the music you love are now making music themselves.
And turn the damn radio off.
There are many things I don't understand about the universe, wikipedia notwithstanding, and whilst I see a great deal that humankind has to learn, none of it for me points to an omnipresent entity. The page you link to cites several possible reasons for a Fine-tuned Universe, and questions whether such a thing exists.
It would seem very simply logical that any universe that we are part of would appear fine-tuned to our survival just by us being a part of it. A universe could be wildly different to our own, and if there were intelligent beings there to observe it, then it would seem fine-tuned to them.
Also, please stop often asking Atheists about it. You realise this forum has a strong anti-Christian bias, Intelligent Design seems to be generally regarded here as a large step backwards in thought ( I personally agree with this ), and a Fine-tuned Universe is off-topic at this point in the conversation.
I have mod points, and I didn't mod you troll, even though it seems that's exactly what you're doing.
You can play with Safari 4 now, it's in beta, but seems pretty stable to me on OSX. YMMV.
http://www.apple.com/safari/download/