Except MS has already been held responsible for their actions (from over 10 years ago), and all indications are that the company has changed drastically for the better in the past few years - stability- and security-wise.
No they weren't. If you're talking about the US anti-trust suit, it was dropped after a shake-up in the Justice Department. The penalties were so ridiculously small (calling them "a slap on the wrist" is generous) that the message was clear: crime really does pay. MS totally got away with it.
The other lesson learned from the anti-trust trial is that if you don't lobby the federal government (something Microsoft didn't do much of at the time), then you'll be at a great disadvantage of those who do (Sun and Netscape). MS learned the hard way that you have to pay to play. If they made more campaign contributions to Democrats, I doubt the trial would have gone as far as it had.
Unfortunately for them, they lost key personnel and the company essentially spun its wheels and could not compete with more agile, daring companies during the 00s (Apple and Google).
Basically, historically, we are the worse bastards ever to grace this not-so-peaceful Earth. So we know, deep in our bones, all the horrible mistakes you can make. We've been there. You want an absolute yardstick of what not to do? Look at us. We are that absolute yardstick.
I actually wonder what would have happened in the late 20th century if the Atomic Bomb hadn't been developed. What would Stalin have done? I'm not sure if you -could- have had a Hitler at that time.
By the standards that exist in all other nations on this planet. Republicans are being attacked and losing primaries for being moderates and compromising.
You mean the standards in Western Europe and Canada. Just about all of Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and some of South America would disagree with those drawn lines.
Wow, way to be a dick to someone that was trying to be helpful. If you can't figure out Dosbox then you should probably get back to making a living picking up trash or sweeping floors.
If you start with an insult, expect to get one back.
Remember "just saying what's on my mind" == "Just calling it as I see it" == Being a dick.
The problem is that the game industry has adopted Hollywood's business model -- games have to be bigger and bigger with enormous budgets now, and each has to trump all the competition. Unless you're developing for the mobile market, you just can't make a game with a 5-10 man team anymore. Now games have to have CG cut scenes, voice acting, orchestra soundtracks. Of course there are fewer games, and I don't think piracy is the cause. Piracy has always, always been an issue for the game developers.
Fewer games are developed now? If I'm looking for quality over quantity, then I'm not sure that's a bad thing.
Plus you're ignoring games that keep people around for years and have hundreds of hours of gameplay. For about five years after World of Warcraft came out, my game-buying amount dropped to... well, zero. I was spending $180/year on 'gaming,' but it wasn't buying new (or even used) games. That's the penalty for the subscription model, or even DLC.
I am not the other guy, but maybe I can clarify: It is an online game. That is a fact. You may not like that, you may not have played previous Diablo games online ever, but Diablo III is sever side. It is an online game. That is not an argument, it is a statement of fact.
Diablo 3 is an online game for political reasons only. That is the objection. There's nothing about the game that requires you to play with other people. Does taking a single-player game and moving some game logic to a server make it an 'online game?' I suppose technically it does, but it's a shitty definition of online game.
The whole game was balanced around you being able to buy and sell from the auction house.
Blizzard developers disagree with you. They have said, more than once, that the game is NOT tuned around the auction house, and that they played through in internal testing without the auction house.
You're about to come back to me with some variation of the idea of fiduciary duty, which is simply restating the question. Why would they have a fiduciary duty to the stockholders?
Our entire financial system of corporations is set up with this goal in mind. It's what enabled them to become so successful in the first place.
When you get that answer, apply the principal to private dealings.
No, private dealings and public ones play by different rules. A publicly-traded company gets certain benefits, but one of the costs of that is transparency. We can't have a trustworthy trading system otherwise.
The Family Research Council. Not based in Uganda, but they supported the Ugandan bill. Right now, they are back-pedaling on their earlier statements which intentionally misrepresented what the Ugandan bill did, and they have deleted the evidence of those statements from the Family Research Council website after public backlash. They have changed their tune and now say that they are in favor of the bill with the death penalty for being gay removed. Fortunately, the Wayback machine never forgets:
Paying Chinese workers Western wages would result in rampant inflation in China, as well as the closure of thousands of factories and the onshoring of those jobs back to America. "America for Americans" is a KKK slogan. "American products produced by American citizens for American people" is a Tea Party slogan
Really, so we're just supposed to spend all of our money to raise another country's standard of living until we go broke and everyone here is unemployed? And that's jingoism? KKK slogans? Hey, all these nations -compete- with each other. We all compete for resources, we all compete for our dollars. If I choose to purchase an American product over a Chinese product, I'm more likely to be helping the guy down the street and I'm far more willing to help someone local than someone across the globe. Focusing on your community first -- this is the first time I've heard someone actually trying to frame that as a negative. It's usually one of the few things that people on the left and people on the right can agree on.
I'm a little sickened that refusing to exploit poor working conditions in other countries is considered jingoistic. The things we take for granted, like OSHA, disability from workplace accidents, a living wage, those were put into place in the US because we came to consider those things basic human rights. Now, of course, there are people in other countries who don't have human rights, and that sure is convenient for the businessman who finds things like a living wage, sick leave, and safe working conditions quaint and a drain on corporate profits.
Er... Rome and Greece were, arguably, the two most important cultures in Western history... We owe pretty much most of our thought and science, and a lot of our current cultural identity to them. I wouldn't really call them anecdotes, when they support my point that our (America's, not the rest of the Western world's as much) attitude towards sex is the anecdote, not the rule. Attitudes towards sex are subjective, and temporary, and in no way objective.
Best of all, rediscovery and embrace of Rome and Greece spurred the Renaissance and Enlightenment in Western Europe, bringing it out of the Middle Ages. It's interesting to look at the differences in culture, in terms of what that culture considers important, between cultures that went through the Enlightenment and those which did not.
I wouldn't call a 6-digit UID "relatively low". Mine is in the same ballpark, and I don't remember Slashdot ever being without a lot of political flamebait. Heck, didn't it date back before 9/11? Looking at comments in that story, and I don't see any UIDs above 500k.
I would guess that it dates before 9/11, possibly with the hiring of John Katz. Things really started going off the deep end in 1999 and the Columbine High School massacre.
The Microsoft anti-trust trial certainly brought out a lot of trollish people, but at least it fell under the "news for nerds, stuff that matters" moniker.
(I have a low 6-digit uid but lurked without an account for a couple years before registering)
It's that seldom-seen phenomena known as having principles and sticking to them, which, even if practiced imperfectly, is rare enough to stand out when it occurs.
I admire a person who can say "these are my principles, and I'll follow them even if they're not always in my personal or political self-interest." Doing otherwise is trading away your long-term credibility.
I personally don't want to give my money to hate-mongers and bigots. Thats why. And I generally advocate that no one else should support assholes as well.
I'm afraid that if your requirement is "no assholes as CEOs," you're going to be cutting out a pretty big section of the American economy.
Are the recipients of these donations going around beating homosexuals to death in the street? Are they dragging them behind pickup trucks?
Actually, yes, though not in the US, and it's a small amount compared to the total. Some of these donations are going to conservative Christian groups in Uganda who are pushing to make homosexuality a capital crime.
you mean there are/. readers who havent heard of adblock+?
I've heard of it. I consciously choose not to use it.
Ads that you have to have around are the penalty you pay for a free Internet in the age when everything (content, servers, bandwidth) costs money. Or, you could subscribe to Slashdot, paying a small fee for the ads to go away. It's another way to support the site.
adblock+ applied liberally (not just to get around the more aggressive/hostile/exploit ads) makes you a freeloader. I mean, how are places like Slashdot supposed to remain operational?
Oh no the guns were tracked with Bush but thanks for playing....and where the heck are all the supposed gun control laws that are supposed to come out of this conspiracy theory that the obama administration let the guns walk so they could enact gun control laws....nice one zippy.
Four years ago, the story was that Obama was going to enact all the gun laws to take everyone's guns away.
Now the story is that he needed to get re-elected so he had to bide his time. Now, in his second term, he'll REALLY take everyone's guns away.
While I feel like a nuclear power source is definitely the best way to go for probes and landers on other planets, I don't think you can point to Mars landers as a reason why solar plants won't work on Earth. They have totally different sets of circumstances to work with, with Martian dust storms and no opportunity for cleaning and maintenance.
Seriously, building such things is not a "cost" but an investment. Just allocate the whole cost of the past several Middle-Eastern wars to your power bill and see how it goes for ya.
Saying the middle-eastern wars is just about oil is a bit simplistic. Who benefits from those wars? Oil companies, military contractors, people who like Israel, people who want to start shit in the Middle East so that they don't attack the US in their own country, the list goes on.
If we use thorium breeder reactors only for all of our energy needs, I believe the sources I have read have suggested that we have identified only 50,000 years worth of thorium deposits....
Is that all? Well, so much for planning ahead!
We know that the sun will go to red giant stage in a few billion years, we need an energy policy that will last that long.
Slashdot Mirror
Except MS has already been held responsible for their actions (from over 10 years ago), and all indications are that the company has changed drastically for the better in the past few years - stability- and security-wise.
No they weren't. If you're talking about the US anti-trust suit, it was dropped after a shake-up in the Justice Department. The penalties were so ridiculously small (calling them "a slap on the wrist" is generous) that the message was clear: crime really does pay. MS totally got away with it.
The other lesson learned from the anti-trust trial is that if you don't lobby the federal government (something Microsoft didn't do much of at the time), then you'll be at a great disadvantage of those who do (Sun and Netscape). MS learned the hard way that you have to pay to play. If they made more campaign contributions to Democrats, I doubt the trial would have gone as far as it had.
Unfortunately for them, they lost key personnel and the company essentially spun its wheels and could not compete with more agile, daring companies during the 00s (Apple and Google).
Wrong buddy. My God is better than your God because my God has Nexus. In Google We Trust! Don't be Tempted by the Apple.
Are you implying that Google has Nexus, but Apple has Nukes?
It's not a good time to live in Silicon Valley.
She was hated by the left, but actually energized some of the right
Only at the very beginning. It was an exciting time, but once that excitement wore off, so did Palin's political fortunes.
Basically, historically, we are the worse bastards ever to grace this not-so-peaceful Earth. So we know, deep in our bones, all the horrible mistakes you can make. We've been there. You want an absolute yardstick of what not to do? Look at us. We are that absolute yardstick.
I actually wonder what would have happened in the late 20th century if the Atomic Bomb hadn't been developed. What would Stalin have done? I'm not sure if you -could- have had a Hitler at that time.
By the standards that exist in all other nations on this planet. Republicans are being attacked and losing primaries for being moderates and compromising.
You mean the standards in Western Europe and Canada. Just about all of Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and some of South America would disagree with those drawn lines.
We may yet conclude, although it would be embarrassing for us as a society to admit, that the the conclusions we assumed on AGW were wrong all along
Hey, I'd love to find out you're right, I really would. But at the moment we have no reason to think you are and every reason to believe you aren't.
Wow, way to be a dick to someone that was trying to be helpful. If you can't figure out Dosbox then you should probably get back to making a living picking up trash or sweeping floors.
If you start with an insult, expect to get one back.
Remember "just saying what's on my mind" == "Just calling it as I see it" == Being a dick.
The fact that far fewer games are produced
The problem is that the game industry has adopted Hollywood's business model -- games have to be bigger and bigger with enormous budgets now, and each has to trump all the competition. Unless you're developing for the mobile market, you just can't make a game with a 5-10 man team anymore. Now games have to have CG cut scenes, voice acting, orchestra soundtracks. Of course there are fewer games, and I don't think piracy is the cause. Piracy has always, always been an issue for the game developers.
Fewer games are developed now? If I'm looking for quality over quantity, then I'm not sure that's a bad thing.
Plus you're ignoring games that keep people around for years and have hundreds of hours of gameplay. For about five years after World of Warcraft came out, my game-buying amount dropped to... well, zero. I was spending $180/year on 'gaming,' but it wasn't buying new (or even used) games. That's the penalty for the subscription model, or even DLC.
I am not the other guy, but maybe I can clarify: It is an online game. That is a fact. You may not like that, you may not have played previous Diablo games online ever, but Diablo III is sever side. It is an online game. That is not an argument, it is a statement of fact.
Diablo 3 is an online game for political reasons only. That is the objection. There's nothing about the game that requires you to play with other people. Does taking a single-player game and moving some game logic to a server make it an 'online game?' I suppose technically it does, but it's a shitty definition of online game.
The whole game was balanced around you being able to buy and sell from the auction house.
Blizzard developers disagree with you. They have said, more than once, that the game is NOT tuned around the auction house, and that they played through in internal testing without the auction house.
You're about to come back to me with some variation of the idea of fiduciary duty, which is simply restating the question. Why would they have a fiduciary duty to the stockholders?
Our entire financial system of corporations is set up with this goal in mind. It's what enabled them to become so successful in the first place.
When you get that answer, apply the principal to private dealings.
No, private dealings and public ones play by different rules. A publicly-traded company gets certain benefits, but one of the costs of that is transparency. We can't have a trustworthy trading system otherwise.
[Citation needed]
The Family Research Council. Not based in Uganda, but they supported the Ugandan bill. Right now, they are back-pedaling on their earlier statements which intentionally misrepresented what the Ugandan bill did, and they have deleted the evidence of those statements from the Family Research Council website after public backlash. They have changed their tune and now say that they are in favor of the bill with the death penalty for being gay removed. Fortunately, the Wayback machine never forgets:
http://www.frc.org/get.cfm?i=CM10B11
Paying Chinese workers Western wages would result in rampant inflation in China, as well as the closure of thousands of factories and the onshoring of those jobs back to America. "America for Americans" is a KKK slogan. "American products produced by American citizens for American people" is a Tea Party slogan
Really, so we're just supposed to spend all of our money to raise another country's standard of living until we go broke and everyone here is unemployed? And that's jingoism? KKK slogans? Hey, all these nations -compete- with each other. We all compete for resources, we all compete for our dollars. If I choose to purchase an American product over a Chinese product, I'm more likely to be helping the guy down the street and I'm far more willing to help someone local than someone across the globe. Focusing on your community first -- this is the first time I've heard someone actually trying to frame that as a negative. It's usually one of the few things that people on the left and people on the right can agree on.
I'm a little sickened that refusing to exploit poor working conditions in other countries is considered jingoistic. The things we take for granted, like OSHA, disability from workplace accidents, a living wage, those were put into place in the US because we came to consider those things basic human rights. Now, of course, there are people in other countries who don't have human rights, and that sure is convenient for the businessman who finds things like a living wage, sick leave, and safe working conditions quaint and a drain on corporate profits.
Er... Rome and Greece were, arguably, the two most important cultures in Western history... We owe pretty much most of our thought and science, and a lot of our current cultural identity to them. I wouldn't really call them anecdotes, when they support my point that our (America's, not the rest of the Western world's as much) attitude towards sex is the anecdote, not the rule. Attitudes towards sex are subjective, and temporary, and in no way objective.
Best of all, rediscovery and embrace of Rome and Greece spurred the Renaissance and Enlightenment in Western Europe, bringing it out of the Middle Ages. It's interesting to look at the differences in culture, in terms of what that culture considers important, between cultures that went through the Enlightenment and those which did not.
I wouldn't call a 6-digit UID "relatively low". Mine is in the same ballpark, and I don't remember Slashdot ever being without a lot of political flamebait. Heck, didn't it date back before 9/11? Looking at comments in that story, and I don't see any UIDs above 500k.
I would guess that it dates before 9/11, possibly with the hiring of John Katz. Things really started going off the deep end in 1999 and the Columbine High School massacre.
The Microsoft anti-trust trial certainly brought out a lot of trollish people, but at least it fell under the "news for nerds, stuff that matters" moniker.
(I have a low 6-digit uid but lurked without an account for a couple years before registering)
It's that seldom-seen phenomena known as having principles and sticking to them, which, even if practiced imperfectly, is rare enough to stand out when it occurs.
I admire a person who can say "these are my principles, and I'll follow them even if they're not always in my personal or political self-interest." Doing otherwise is trading away your long-term credibility.
I personally don't want to give my money to hate-mongers and bigots. Thats why. And I generally advocate that no one else should support assholes as well.
I'm afraid that if your requirement is "no assholes as CEOs," you're going to be cutting out a pretty big section of the American economy.
Are the recipients of these donations going around beating homosexuals to death in the street? Are they dragging them behind pickup trucks?
Actually, yes, though not in the US, and it's a small amount compared to the total.
Some of these donations are going to conservative Christian groups in Uganda who are pushing to make homosexuality a capital crime.
Refusing to serve someone is not a speech or idea.
But doesn't that fall under the "freedom of association" category?
you mean there are /. readers who havent heard of adblock+?
I've heard of it. I consciously choose not to use it.
Ads that you have to have around are the penalty you pay for a free Internet in the age when everything (content, servers, bandwidth) costs money. Or, you could subscribe to Slashdot, paying a small fee for the ads to go away. It's another way to support the site.
adblock+ applied liberally (not just to get around the more aggressive/hostile/exploit ads) makes you a freeloader. I mean, how are places like Slashdot supposed to remain operational?
I'm in a trolling mood today, apparently.
Oh no the guns were tracked with Bush but thanks for playing....and where the heck are all the supposed gun control laws that are supposed to come out of this conspiracy theory that the obama administration let the guns walk so they could enact gun control laws....nice one zippy.
Four years ago, the story was that Obama was going to enact all the gun laws to take everyone's guns away.
Now the story is that he needed to get re-elected so he had to bide his time. Now, in his second term, he'll REALLY take everyone's guns away.
While I feel like a nuclear power source is definitely the best way to go for probes and landers on other planets, I don't think you can point to Mars landers as a reason why solar plants won't work on Earth. They have totally different sets of circumstances to work with, with Martian dust storms and no opportunity for cleaning and maintenance.
Seriously, building such things is not a "cost" but an investment. Just allocate the whole cost of the past several Middle-Eastern wars to your power bill and see how it goes for ya.
Saying the middle-eastern wars is just about oil is a bit simplistic. Who benefits from those wars? Oil companies, military contractors, people who like Israel, people who want to start shit in the Middle East so that they don't attack the US in their own country, the list goes on.
GM would have gone bankrupt without the bailout, does that mean that all car companies are failures?
If we use thorium breeder reactors only for all of our energy needs, I believe the sources I have read have suggested that we have identified only 50,000 years worth of thorium deposits....
Is that all? Well, so much for planning ahead!
We know that the sun will go to red giant stage in a few billion years, we need an energy policy that will last that long.