All of the Nintendo haters need to calm down. I started playing Nintendo at the age of 6 or 7. When I was that age we WERE Nintendos customers. Most importantly we could actually play the games Nintendo was putting out. Now that I'm a father, and stick my son in front of any console on the market that's not a Nintendo and expect them to play a game? It's impossible. In fact, anyone that isn't a 16-35yr old male that's played video games for most of their life is going to have trouble grasping most games these days. Nintendo realized that and hence the WII. My kids can play it. My mom can play it. There's nothing wrong with that. This is what Nintendo always was. They realized that if they kept chasing the other console companies the industry would eventually paint itself into a corner. Is it for the hardcore gamer that plays nothing but FPS all day? No... but that's ok. There's room for what they've done... a lot of room.
What on earth are you talking about? The cheapest smartphones out there are at least $200... unless you get a 2 year contract. There isn't a device on earth that competes with the PI on price... and that's the problem. They need to raise the price and then use that money to improve distribution. You can't buy one now because the price is so low, they can't keep up with demand.
Test it and see... it's not a "maybe" type of thing. If you use Access in a virtualized environment between multiple people, it WILL corrupt. I suspect it's related to clock syncing errors between the various clients.
If I remember correctly, escaping the dictatorial rule of people with your point of view was one of the primary reasons this country was founded. To think that you know the "truth" about religion and everyone that disagrees with you is a moron pretty much makes you worse than most of those you despise. Congratulations on finding a way to use science to help you be as close minded and bigoted as the 18th century Church of England.
I work for a telco and we've virtualized a lot of stuff, including telephone switches. We ran into a lot of problems with things that required reliable clock/syncing. 2 way video, voice, television, etc... using virtualized services on a VM machine doesn't seem to work very well either. So if you're using SAS or other cloud based stuff and your users on a virtual machine you run into all sorts of weird transient issues. Lastly, it may seem silly, but if you're company is anything like mine, you have a lot of people that have built their own little tools using Microsoft Access. We didn't realize just how many MS Access tools were out there and how important they were to some departments until we put them on virtual machines and found out that the MS Jet database is a file system based database and definitely does not work well with virtualization... so bad in fact that in many cases it corrupted the database beyond repair. We even tried moving some of the more important ones over to Oracle backends (because frankly, if they're important they should've been all along) but even MS Accesses front end couldn't deal with the virtualization... even though it was an improvement. We finally ended up having all these micro-projects where we had to put all these custom made tools, many of them made by people that didn't know what they were doing and didn't even work for us anymore intro real DBs with real web-based frontends. Reverse engineering some of those was a nightmare. It's a can of worms we likely wouldn't have opened if we had the foresight. I'd personally like to see MS Access treated just like Visual Studio in that only IS is allowed access to it... but I don't make the rules so... whatever.
If the mayor is really worried about our health, we'd better ban athletics before we ban soda:
More than 3.5 million children ages 14 and under receive medical treatment for sports injuries each year. Injuries associated with participation in sports and recreational activities account for 21 percent of all traumatic brain injuries among children in the United States. Overuse injury, which occurs over time from repeated motion, is responsible for nearly half of all sports injuries to middle-and high-school students. Immature bones, insufficient rest after an injury and poor training or conditioning contribute to overuse injuries among children. Most organized sports related injuries (62 percent) occur during practices rather than games. Despite this fact, a third of parents often do not take the same safety precautions during their child's practices as they would for a game. A recent survey found that among athletes ages 5 to 14, 15 percent of basketball players, 28 percent of football players, 22 percent of soccer players, 25 percent of baseball players and 12 percent of softball players have been injured while playing their respective sports. Children ages 5 to 14 account for nearly 40 percent of all sports-related injuries treated in hospital emergency departments. The rate and severity of sports-related injury increases with a child's age.
In 2001, the number of sport-related injuries for each sport are as follows:
Not if they change the patent slightly. Since they own the patent they can create a new device/process/whatever based on the original and basically renew the patent. Drug companies are famous for this. Look at CFC free albuterol inhalers.
The patent system is supposed to exist to allow inventors to have time to get their product to market and not have some giant company swoop in with their own development lab and get a copy of their product to market before the inventor even has a chance. In the event the inventor does not have the resources to get it to market, or you have an idea that would incorporate with the inventors idea but wouldn't directly compete with his product, he can license the patent to you so you can make your own product. Or he can out-right sell the patent to you. The patent system was not intended to protect an idea for eternity, being sold from corporation to corporation for centuries so every device ever invented would forever be beholden to some patent clearinghouse that had absolutely nothing to do with inventing anything even remotely relevant to anything modern. Do any of the people that had anything to do with whatever patents technicolor is going to sue for even work there anymore? Are they even alive? How much did the actual talent make for coming up with the patent? $10? The guy that invented the laser used in Blueray got a $100 giftcard and a plaque. (no, I'm not kidding)
Well, at least it's Apple. Fuck them, they deserve it.
well, since the gamma rays are practically pointing directly perpendicular to the rotation of the galaxy, they wont come anywhere near us. Even if it were pointing directly at us, it would take them at least 26,000 years to reach us. Granted, we wouldn't know they were coming until we were fried.
You underestimate what this software is doing. When you go to a website, you see a different website than others that go to you. Adds being tailored to you is dead... that's a 10yr old technology. You are literally surfing a different website than your friends. The prices for things on amazon or newegg are often different for you than for other people.
Lets say telemarketers call your house frequently... you never fall for it. But your wife is gullible and always falls for their gimmicks. Now she's been targeted as main contact in your household. Then you start looking for someone to install some new windows in your house... all these orgs are sharing non-competitive data... so the company that sold her 3 rowing machines and the upside down tomato plant doesn't care if another company trys to sell windows. So they sell the info they have about your email address, phone number, your wife being an easy mark. This information gets sold in a bulk package along with thousands of other peoples info to a clearinghouse that then sells that info to other companies. One being a window manufacturer, that has collected information from various websites that indicates you're interested in new windows. They know what you want, and they know who to call... your wife... Next thing you know your wife is telling you about a free home inspection/estimate that's happening on Wednesday... sorry that's the only day they could come, too bad you'll be out of town. Did I mention they buy info from travel sites as well? Oh yea... they knew you'd be out of town. And no, I'm not making this up. A lot of companies are this sophisticated but a few are and it's growing rapidly.
The default setting for most of these applications is to allow remote content. Specifically I tested with Gmail and it by default was set to allow remote content but then asked if I wanted to download images.
The majority of users are going to be either using Gmail or Outlook... and if they, by default, do not block content, 99.9% of users are not going to change it. Slashdot users might... but the rest of the world?
It's silicon valley. You can't even get a McDonalds employee for under $50k a year. Even if you paid the people minimum wage, the price tag would still be insane to say the least.
How on earth can 2 scientists be so naive as to think there are only 2 political points of view... and then to measure for those 2 points of view? They basically took talking points from our 2 main parties and then measured how often each showed up in an article. I'd argue that the Republican and Democrat points of view are one and the same. They disagree on very minor, but very polarizing points of view that give them something to argue about in an election. Most of the subjects they were surprised to see no slant on, both parties agree on... foreign policy, war, peace... How has our current president acted any different than the last one? Or the last 10 for that matter? Abortion? Does anyone really care other than extreme feminists and extreme Christians?
We have one ruling political party in this country that masquerades as two. They measured bias in those articles... far more than they realize. Bias towards the statuesque and our 1 party system.
Do not underestimate the power of this kind of software. I've seen it in action and the data collection capabilities are astonishing. For example, say you get an email from some advertiser... and you even have your mail viewer set to not download images. If you open that email AT ALL, it's all HTML code. You just opened a page on their site custom designed for you. They know when they sent you the email, when you received it, when you opened it, what you looked at in it... if you followed any of the links in it. They likely have agreements with many of the sites you visit and based on your IP address and other unique identifiers know where you've been irrelevant of if you "logged in" or not. Even if you were in "private mode" in firefox, they can see it all. I even tested it on myself with no-script, adblock, etc... and when I checked what it logged it was amazing.
Everything you do on most websites is logged, tracked, tied to you... or at least some unique info about you. They may not know who you are, but they don't care... they just need to know what you've looked at in the past, so they can show you things that their studies have shown you're not likely to pass up. Even if you don't fall for it, that's a data point that they'll use to serve up even more stuff to you later.
um, no, you're wrong... well, I suppose that was a VERY early concern, but it hasn't arisen. What's actually happening is your ISP has installed enough equipment to deliver a certain amount of bandwidth to your "neighborhood" for lack of a better layman word. When everyone in the neighborhood gets home and jumps on whatever the latest craze is, lets say netflix, bandwidth spikes. Netflix has no incentive to make their service intelligent in anyway... for example, they could give you a discount if you queue up a movie a couple of days ahead of time and you could download it at off peak times to lower congestion. But, like I was saying, they have no reason to do this. So the ISP is instead, putting a cap on how much data can pass to netflix during peak hours so people who aren't using it can still at least browse the internet. The ISP wants to just flat out charge netflix for hurting their infrastructure. But that will only work for a couple of large ISPs. Netflix will likely ignore anyone that's not ATT or Verizon. So the ISPs want the government to make some kind of law that forces these content providers to incur some kind of cost when they do not do things efficiently.
Now, you may disagree with all of what the ISPs are doing... but those are the facts. I personally think they are being rather short sited. They keep increasing the max speed you can get "30MB DSL to your door!!!" and they are thinking that you'll rarely ever use that. You think you have this blazing fast connection, and as long as you only use it to download files now and then you do. But where I think the world is headed is all customers using all of their bandwidth all of the time. They haven't invent the service yet that does that... netflix does it, but only when you're watching a movie... but someone, somewhere is going to come up with something that does use all of your bandwidth all of the time... and it will be the new in thing... and then what will the ISPs do?
When it comes down to it, we've been paying too little for our internet connections, and we've been lied to by the ISPs in regards to how fast those connections really are. Look at the price of a true 1.5mb T1 line compared to the same speed DSL line and you'll get the idea. We're in for higher prices and lower speeds in the future and that's a fact.
And once again we have an article that seems to suggest that climate change is in doubt... I don't think you could find anyone in the united states that didn't live on an Amish farm, that wouldn't agree the climate is changing. Hell, even the Amish have probably noticed. What people are disputing is the degree to which humans are impacting that climate change. There is VAST scientific dispute over that point. Authors of articles like these tend to relabel the debate to "climate change deniers" and label people that deny climate change as stupid or uneducated. Well, if you disagree with the idea that the climate is fact changing you are stupid. But that is not the argument.
I personally think the climate is changing due to human activity. And what we are doing is having a dramatic impact on the environment. But can I see someones point when scientist constantly recalculate the rate at which the glaciers are melting? Or year after year predict a terrifying hurricane seasons due to global warming, and it never arrives? Can I understand why someone would doubt climatologists that get their predictions so consistently wrong that there's a whole class of humor that revolves around their ineptitude? Of course. Over and over again I hear people on the left complaining that the right creates scientific studies to suite their needs... why wouldn't they when the left does the same exact thing? This being a great example.
>I miss that realistic twist from the old rules, without "feats" or "powers" or other abstract concepts that are more just bootstraps to their specific world.
Then USE the old rules. There are plenty of people that still do. Or better yet, write your own.. I don't think I've ever played with a group of people that used any set of book rules in its entirety.
And if you're not imaginative enough to write your modules, it's incredibly easy to buy a modern module and convert it to any rule set you'd like.
You're entirely wrong. What you're talking about is class warfare. It's the same red hearing that totalitarian governments always throw up. "It's the rich! It's the Jews! It's the capitalists!" How many times have we heard this in history? How many times did we fall for it? Are you going to fall for it again?
They take the rights of the unscrupulous first. Then they change their definition of unscrupulous slightly to include more of the population. Once rights only belong to a limited set of people, that limited set tends to shrink until those rights apply to no one but the ruling class. The beginning of this century is being marked by the same gradual slide into totalitarianism that the last century was. Do you really think the federal government cares about pirated movies? This is about power, and control.
Rarely, if ever, is anyones goal a transparent amplifier. Especially when it comes to actual instrument amplification. Tube amps produce superior sound in almost all situations. A transistor, when clipping, literally squares off the top of the wave. A Tube will still clip but does so gradually, producing a more rounded wave form. Basically when clipping a transistor sounds horrendous... you must always operate a transistor well bellow its clipping threshold (hard to do with analog instruments) where as the tube amp can actually make the tone sound better than it originally was (again, especially in instrument amplification where dynamic range is extremely large and clipping is almost a constant issue)
Their drawbacks are pretty strait forward. They require large voltages for the plate current, and therefor require large transformers... making them heavy and impracticable for small devices like portable radios. They are also a lot more efficient than transistor amps. Compare a 10watt tube amp to a 10watt transistor amp sometime. The tube amp will rattle your windows while the transistor amp will be hard to hear from across the room. This is actually a negative in my opinion. Consumers like to compare numbers so amplifier manufacturers rarely produce anything bellow 10-20 watts, and tube amps sound their best when they are hot (turned all the way up) the result is that it's rare to find a tube amp you can use at full volume. I have a 600watt MesaBoogie guitar amp that literally has shattered windows in my house. It's more appropriate for playing stadiums than bars. It's a great amp but I definitely wish I purchased the lowest wattage model they were selling at the time. Lastly Tubes are expensive, and ware out. Not a problem with transistors.
Because the environment "feels" real. You can run around and see the circuit pathways and actually visually understand how the processor works... as apposed to having some abstract flowchart or diagram.
So wait... the PC is dead and we'll all be browsing the internet on our 4" smartphone screens? That'll make reading anything longer than a sentence rather difficult... and wikipedia... wait, they're full of shit aren't they?
Slashdot Mirror
All of the Nintendo haters need to calm down. I started playing Nintendo at the age of 6 or 7. When I was that age we WERE Nintendos customers. Most importantly we could actually play the games Nintendo was putting out. Now that I'm a father, and stick my son in front of any console on the market that's not a Nintendo and expect them to play a game? It's impossible. In fact, anyone that isn't a 16-35yr old male that's played video games for most of their life is going to have trouble grasping most games these days. Nintendo realized that and hence the WII. My kids can play it. My mom can play it. There's nothing wrong with that. This is what Nintendo always was. They realized that if they kept chasing the other console companies the industry would eventually paint itself into a corner. Is it for the hardcore gamer that plays nothing but FPS all day? No... but that's ok. There's room for what they've done... a lot of room.
What on earth are you talking about? The cheapest smartphones out there are at least $200... unless you get a 2 year contract. There isn't a device on earth that competes with the PI on price... and that's the problem. They need to raise the price and then use that money to improve distribution. You can't buy one now because the price is so low, they can't keep up with demand.
Test it and see... it's not a "maybe" type of thing. If you use Access in a virtualized environment between multiple people, it WILL corrupt. I suspect it's related to clock syncing errors between the various clients.
If I remember correctly, escaping the dictatorial rule of people with your point of view was one of the primary reasons this country was founded. To think that you know the "truth" about religion and everyone that disagrees with you is a moron pretty much makes you worse than most of those you despise. Congratulations on finding a way to use science to help you be as close minded and bigoted as the 18th century Church of England.
I work for a telco and we've virtualized a lot of stuff, including telephone switches. We ran into a lot of problems with things that required reliable clock/syncing. 2 way video, voice, television, etc... using virtualized services on a VM machine doesn't seem to work very well either. So if you're using SAS or other cloud based stuff and your users on a virtual machine you run into all sorts of weird transient issues. Lastly, it may seem silly, but if you're company is anything like mine, you have a lot of people that have built their own little tools using Microsoft Access. We didn't realize just how many MS Access tools were out there and how important they were to some departments until we put them on virtual machines and found out that the MS Jet database is a file system based database and definitely does not work well with virtualization... so bad in fact that in many cases it corrupted the database beyond repair. We even tried moving some of the more important ones over to Oracle backends (because frankly, if they're important they should've been all along) but even MS Accesses front end couldn't deal with the virtualization... even though it was an improvement. We finally ended up having all these micro-projects where we had to put all these custom made tools, many of them made by people that didn't know what they were doing and didn't even work for us anymore intro real DBs with real web-based frontends. Reverse engineering some of those was a nightmare. It's a can of worms we likely wouldn't have opened if we had the foresight. I'd personally like to see MS Access treated just like Visual Studio in that only IS is allowed access to it... but I don't make the rules so... whatever.
If the mayor is really worried about our health, we'd better ban athletics before we ban soda:
More than 3.5 million children ages 14 and under receive medical treatment for sports injuries each year. Injuries associated with participation in sports and recreational activities account for 21 percent of all traumatic brain injuries among children in the United States. Overuse injury, which occurs over time from repeated motion, is responsible for nearly half of all sports injuries to middle-and high-school students. Immature bones, insufficient rest after an injury and poor training or conditioning contribute to overuse injuries among children. Most organized sports related injuries (62 percent) occur during practices rather than games. Despite this fact, a third of parents often do not take the same safety precautions during their child's practices as they would for a game. A recent survey found that among athletes ages 5 to 14, 15 percent of basketball players, 28 percent of football players, 22 percent of soccer players, 25 percent of baseball players and 12 percent of softball players have been injured while playing their respective sports. Children ages 5 to 14 account for nearly 40 percent of all sports-related injuries treated in hospital emergency departments. The rate and severity of sports-related injury increases with a child's age.
In 2001, the number of sport-related injuries for each sport are as follows:
Gymnastics - 99,722
Basketball - 680,307
Baseball - 170,902
Softball - 118,354
Football - 413,620
Soccer - 163,003
Volleyball - 55,860
Track & Field - 15,113
Hockey - 63,945
From 1982-2002, the total numbers of direct and indirect fatalities among high school athletes were:
Baseball - 17
Basketball - 88
Cheerleading - 21
Cross Country - 14
Football - 22
Soccer - 31
Track & Field - 47
Wrestling - 16
http://www.sportssafety.org/sports-injury-facts/
Not if they change the patent slightly. Since they own the patent they can create a new device/process/whatever based on the original and basically renew the patent. Drug companies are famous for this. Look at CFC free albuterol inhalers.
Who would pay for all the politicians vacations and parties? I mean, besides everyone else bribing them.
The patent system is supposed to exist to allow inventors to have time to get their product to market and not have some giant company swoop in with their own development lab and get a copy of their product to market before the inventor even has a chance. In the event the inventor does not have the resources to get it to market, or you have an idea that would incorporate with the inventors idea but wouldn't directly compete with his product, he can license the patent to you so you can make your own product. Or he can out-right sell the patent to you. The patent system was not intended to protect an idea for eternity, being sold from corporation to corporation for centuries so every device ever invented would forever be beholden to some patent clearinghouse that had absolutely nothing to do with inventing anything even remotely relevant to anything modern. Do any of the people that had anything to do with whatever patents technicolor is going to sue for even work there anymore? Are they even alive? How much did the actual talent make for coming up with the patent? $10? The guy that invented the laser used in Blueray got a $100 giftcard and a plaque. (no, I'm not kidding)
Well, at least it's Apple. Fuck them, they deserve it.
well, since the gamma rays are practically pointing directly perpendicular to the rotation of the galaxy, they wont come anywhere near us. Even if it were pointing directly at us, it would take them at least 26,000 years to reach us. Granted, we wouldn't know they were coming until we were fried.
You underestimate what this software is doing. When you go to a website, you see a different website than others that go to you. Adds being tailored to you is dead... that's a 10yr old technology. You are literally surfing a different website than your friends. The prices for things on amazon or newegg are often different for you than for other people.
Lets say telemarketers call your house frequently... you never fall for it. But your wife is gullible and always falls for their gimmicks. Now she's been targeted as main contact in your household. Then you start looking for someone to install some new windows in your house... all these orgs are sharing non-competitive data... so the company that sold her 3 rowing machines and the upside down tomato plant doesn't care if another company trys to sell windows. So they sell the info they have about your email address, phone number, your wife being an easy mark. This information gets sold in a bulk package along with thousands of other peoples info to a clearinghouse that then sells that info to other companies. One being a window manufacturer, that has collected information from various websites that indicates you're interested in new windows. They know what you want, and they know who to call... your wife... Next thing you know your wife is telling you about a free home inspection/estimate that's happening on Wednesday... sorry that's the only day they could come, too bad you'll be out of town. Did I mention they buy info from travel sites as well? Oh yea... they knew you'd be out of town. And no, I'm not making this up. A lot of companies are this sophisticated but a few are and it's growing rapidly.
The default setting for most of these applications is to allow remote content. Specifically I tested with Gmail and it by default was set to allow remote content but then asked if I wanted to download images.
The majority of users are going to be either using Gmail or Outlook... and if they, by default, do not block content, 99.9% of users are not going to change it. Slashdot users might... but the rest of the world?
It's silicon valley. You can't even get a McDonalds employee for under $50k a year. Even if you paid the people minimum wage, the price tag would still be insane to say the least.
How on earth can 2 scientists be so naive as to think there are only 2 political points of view... and then to measure for those 2 points of view? They basically took talking points from our 2 main parties and then measured how often each showed up in an article. I'd argue that the Republican and Democrat points of view are one and the same. They disagree on very minor, but very polarizing points of view that give them something to argue about in an election. Most of the subjects they were surprised to see no slant on, both parties agree on... foreign policy, war, peace... How has our current president acted any different than the last one? Or the last 10 for that matter? Abortion? Does anyone really care other than extreme feminists and extreme Christians?
We have one ruling political party in this country that masquerades as two. They measured bias in those articles... far more than they realize. Bias towards the statuesque and our 1 party system.
Do not underestimate the power of this kind of software. I've seen it in action and the data collection capabilities are astonishing. For example, say you get an email from some advertiser... and you even have your mail viewer set to not download images. If you open that email AT ALL, it's all HTML code. You just opened a page on their site custom designed for you. They know when they sent you the email, when you received it, when you opened it, what you looked at in it... if you followed any of the links in it. They likely have agreements with many of the sites you visit and based on your IP address and other unique identifiers know where you've been irrelevant of if you "logged in" or not. Even if you were in "private mode" in firefox, they can see it all. I even tested it on myself with no-script, adblock, etc... and when I checked what it logged it was amazing.
Everything you do on most websites is logged, tracked, tied to you... or at least some unique info about you. They may not know who you are, but they don't care... they just need to know what you've looked at in the past, so they can show you things that their studies have shown you're not likely to pass up. Even if you don't fall for it, that's a data point that they'll use to serve up even more stuff to you later.
um, no, you're wrong... well, I suppose that was a VERY early concern, but it hasn't arisen. What's actually happening is your ISP has installed enough equipment to deliver a certain amount of bandwidth to your "neighborhood" for lack of a better layman word. When everyone in the neighborhood gets home and jumps on whatever the latest craze is, lets say netflix, bandwidth spikes. Netflix has no incentive to make their service intelligent in anyway... for example, they could give you a discount if you queue up a movie a couple of days ahead of time and you could download it at off peak times to lower congestion. But, like I was saying, they have no reason to do this. So the ISP is instead, putting a cap on how much data can pass to netflix during peak hours so people who aren't using it can still at least browse the internet. The ISP wants to just flat out charge netflix for hurting their infrastructure. But that will only work for a couple of large ISPs. Netflix will likely ignore anyone that's not ATT or Verizon. So the ISPs want the government to make some kind of law that forces these content providers to incur some kind of cost when they do not do things efficiently.
Now, you may disagree with all of what the ISPs are doing... but those are the facts. I personally think they are being rather short sited. They keep increasing the max speed you can get "30MB DSL to your door!!!" and they are thinking that you'll rarely ever use that. You think you have this blazing fast connection, and as long as you only use it to download files now and then you do. But where I think the world is headed is all customers using all of their bandwidth all of the time. They haven't invent the service yet that does that... netflix does it, but only when you're watching a movie... but someone, somewhere is going to come up with something that does use all of your bandwidth all of the time... and it will be the new in thing... and then what will the ISPs do?
When it comes down to it, we've been paying too little for our internet connections, and we've been lied to by the ISPs in regards to how fast those connections really are. Look at the price of a true 1.5mb T1 line compared to the same speed DSL line and you'll get the idea. We're in for higher prices and lower speeds in the future and that's a fact.
And once again we have an article that seems to suggest that climate change is in doubt... I don't think you could find anyone in the united states that didn't live on an Amish farm, that wouldn't agree the climate is changing. Hell, even the Amish have probably noticed. What people are disputing is the degree to which humans are impacting that climate change. There is VAST scientific dispute over that point. Authors of articles like these tend to relabel the debate to "climate change deniers" and label people that deny climate change as stupid or uneducated. Well, if you disagree with the idea that the climate is fact changing you are stupid. But that is not the argument.
I personally think the climate is changing due to human activity. And what we are doing is having a dramatic impact on the environment. But can I see someones point when scientist constantly recalculate the rate at which the glaciers are melting? Or year after year predict a terrifying hurricane seasons due to global warming, and it never arrives? Can I understand why someone would doubt climatologists that get their predictions so consistently wrong that there's a whole class of humor that revolves around their ineptitude? Of course. Over and over again I hear people on the left complaining that the right creates scientific studies to suite their needs... why wouldn't they when the left does the same exact thing? This being a great example.
>I miss that realistic twist from the old rules, without "feats" or "powers" or other abstract concepts that are more just bootstraps to their specific world.
Then USE the old rules. There are plenty of people that still do. Or better yet, write your own.. I don't think I've ever played with a group of people that used any set of book rules in its entirety.
And if you're not imaginative enough to write your modules, it's incredibly easy to buy a modern module and convert it to any rule set you'd like.
You're entirely wrong. What you're talking about is class warfare. It's the same red hearing that totalitarian governments always throw up. "It's the rich! It's the Jews! It's the capitalists!" How many times have we heard this in history? How many times did we fall for it? Are you going to fall for it again?
The game was headed by former SOE staff... the very people that worked on EQ2 disaster. There was only 1 way this was going to end.
They take the rights of the unscrupulous first. Then they change their definition of unscrupulous slightly to include more of the population. Once rights only belong to a limited set of people, that limited set tends to shrink until those rights apply to no one but the ruling class. The beginning of this century is being marked by the same gradual slide into totalitarianism that the last century was. Do you really think the federal government cares about pirated movies? This is about power, and control.
Rarely, if ever, is anyones goal a transparent amplifier. Especially when it comes to actual instrument amplification. Tube amps produce superior sound in almost all situations. A transistor, when clipping, literally squares off the top of the wave. A Tube will still clip but does so gradually, producing a more rounded wave form. Basically when clipping a transistor sounds horrendous... you must always operate a transistor well bellow its clipping threshold (hard to do with analog instruments) where as the tube amp can actually make the tone sound better than it originally was (again, especially in instrument amplification where dynamic range is extremely large and clipping is almost a constant issue)
Their drawbacks are pretty strait forward. They require large voltages for the plate current, and therefor require large transformers... making them heavy and impracticable for small devices like portable radios. They are also a lot more efficient than transistor amps. Compare a 10watt tube amp to a 10watt transistor amp sometime. The tube amp will rattle your windows while the transistor amp will be hard to hear from across the room. This is actually a negative in my opinion. Consumers like to compare numbers so amplifier manufacturers rarely produce anything bellow 10-20 watts, and tube amps sound their best when they are hot (turned all the way up) the result is that it's rare to find a tube amp you can use at full volume. I have a 600watt MesaBoogie guitar amp that literally has shattered windows in my house. It's more appropriate for playing stadiums than bars. It's a great amp but I definitely wish I purchased the lowest wattage model they were selling at the time. Lastly Tubes are expensive, and ware out. Not a problem with transistors.
Because the environment "feels" real. You can run around and see the circuit pathways and actually visually understand how the processor works... as apposed to having some abstract flowchart or diagram.
So wait... the PC is dead and we'll all be browsing the internet on our 4" smartphone screens? That'll make reading anything longer than a sentence rather difficult... and wikipedia... wait, they're full of shit aren't they?
IBM invents new things, clearly something Apples never been interested in. Good call.