The problem with your analogy, is that farting is natural, unharmful, and cannot be helped.
Lying, cheating, and treating people like shit? Even if you want to claim it's natural in a competitive, it sure as fuck is harmful and it sure as fuck can be stopped.
And when you bought it full MSRP without subsidy, there was little to no savings per carrier on your monthly bill.
Horse shit. I bought it through Google because I have an unlimited data plan with AT&T that costs $10 per month. If I had gone through AT&T to get a new phone (Nexus One or not), then I would have been forced to "upgrade" my contract and pay at least $20 more per month.
"Just don't look" isn't an option. This shit is being shoved down my throat more and more.
I want the ability to turn them off completely. I'll never get that ability.
I can't even message a friend on the PS3 without a terrible delay while it syncs our trophies. I don't have a 360, so I can't compare, but the on the PS3 it's atrocious shit that interferes with what I want to do. Steam's implementation continues to get more obnoxious as well.
I don't want a chore list. I don't want notifications popping up whenever I do something (note that on the 360 you can turn them off, but not on the PS3 or in Steam). I don't want my online games to be filled with people who are standing near the spawn point shooting each other in the foot 5000 times. I don't want to see 54ad0w5n1p3r's ePeen achievement list. I don't want people looking at my achievement list and knowing that I play Super Faggot Noob Game 2. I don't want developers adding meaningless tasks and grinding in lieu of content. I don't want some "score" attached to me that's simply a measure of how much time I've wasted. I have a clock, thank you.
Achievements are shitty. But at least they're not as shitty as the other things to happen (or become far more prevalent) this generation:
$60 standard price Paid Additional Content ("DLC") Shitty PAC that is an unlock key for content already in the game PAC that should have been included with the main game, but intentionally (time, money or both) wasn't Retailer-exclusive content Games shipping with unlock codes in the box to kill off used sales Game saves locked to individual systems Ship now, patch later mentality Overpriced accessories (I'm looking at you, 360 wifi adapter and hard drives) No transfer model for downloaded games (I'm looking at you, Nintendo) Removing features people paid for, or patching ads into games that people already paid for (I'm looking at you, Sony) Paying for multiplayer (I'm looking at you, Microsoft) Getting free multiplayer but having it be a piece of shit (I'm looking at you, Nintendo) The ruthless "Fund, Hype, Whip, Release, Cull" development cycle for AAA games (I'm looking at you, Activision)
All in all, we may have fancier graphics and new control schemes (fuck you, shitty developers who use them in shitty ways), but the basic "playing games" thing? It's much shittier.
Air is a gas, and it takes up a hell of a lot of volume. Air is also a HUGE and extremely important part of our environment, as is the ground underneath our feet.
Running around them? So fucking what? Is running around an area now equivalent to altering the environment?
How fast can you go through google images with safe search off and pick out the NSFW images for a search of "teens"?
What about a 5x4 grid where all you have to do is flag whether or not the page contains any NSFW images?
Any pages that you've flagged get stored and sent to someone else to verify / mark the specific offending images. You're job is simply to hit the spacebar or the enter key for flag or pass, respectively.
(That's also why psychologists have long suspected that many of the most successful CEO types have Asperger's to some degree. They're capable of looking at the company's situation in a purely logical manner, and doing mass layoffs without hesitation, if they determine that's the most economically beneficial course of action -- without hesitating because of personal guilt about it.)
And that's why psychology will never be respected as a real science, despite the actual science done and progress made by many psychologists.
Psychologists, as individuals, are all too happy to make up bullshit to get attention. Patients are the same fucking way. While ADD and Asperger's and any other trendy conditions are real, the vast majority of people who claim to have them are liars and idiots.
But hey - if historians can write a book detailing the evidence they found showing Hitler was retarded, gay, and black, why can't psychologists write books about the trendy conditions and baselessly apply them to entire swaths of people?
And sorry, but the "real world" does not involve frequent beheadings. Being unable to see another human being brutally murdered without being disturbed isn't a result of living "sheltered".
So when an owl catches a mouse, the mouse says "Ah, you've got me! Okay, let me spill my entrails and pop my own head off for you."?
People are sheltered and weak. You wouldn't last a day anywhere outside of your densely populated urban center.
Wrong. I've been to the edge of the internet and back, and I'm no sociopath.
I don't for one second believe seeing something on the internet, no matter how bad, could compare to actually doing those things or having them done to you.
There's this thing called war. Sure, some people can't handle what goes on, what happens to them, or what they have to do. But most people can. For them, there's no sociopathy involved. There's no emotional deadening.
There's just the simple realization that the world isn't a fucking fairy tale, that crying about it won't make it any better, and that you've got a fucking job to do.
Maintaining composure in the face of any sort of disgusting, terrifying, etc. thing is not sociopathy, nor is it indicative of any other psychological problem. What IS indicative of various psychological problems is letting a gang rape, beheading, torture, whatever video on the internet affect you for more than a few minutes of thinking "damn, that's horrible".
Are people so egotistical and self-centered today that they can't see a video from across the globe without psychologically framing it as if it involved them personally?
It's one thing to have an emotional reaction to such content. (I get upset whenever there's one of those damned starving kids or abused pets commercials on TV.) But it's an entirely different thing to see a video and then go beat your husband/wife, cut yourself, whatever.
Saying "the bad internet videos gave me psychological problems" is about as valid as saying "Violent video games made me shoot up my school". The bad internet videos / violent games simply exposed / played to an existing problem.
This is a huge opportunity. People developing green forms of power generation, better recycling methods and more efficient devices stand to make a fortune selling them to the rest of the world. It also saves us money on petrol and waste disposal services (i.e. local taxes).
Horse. Shit.
"Green" power is actually terrible for the environment. Your hybrids and your solar cells do more harm when they're manufactured than they'll ever make up for over their lifetime. Wind turbines require constant maintenance (i.e., OILING) and provide very little power, and do so very unreliably. We need to be using hydroelectric and nuclear power. But the "environmentalists" hate these. They're safe, they provide massive amounts of power cheaply, they generate no pollution, they can run for years without maintenance, completely autonomously, etc.
Better recycling methods? Seems to me there's a ton of places for me to recycle aluminum cans, but zero places for me to recycle something useful, like steel. Whenever I take my recycling in, soup cans, cans for compressed air or air fresheners, etc. get tossed in the trash. "We don't take those." "Who does?" "No one."
Certain types of glass aren't accepted. Certain types of plastics aren't accepted. And no, they don't take paper.
Not only are the recycling programs available to the consumer today worse than they were decades ago, the methods of recycling have gotten less efficient. They're staffed by overpaid, underqualified peons who painstakingly separate garbage from garbage, only to throw both piles into the dump.
What was an efficient system run by private companies who wanted your valuable materials has been taken over by the government and, as usual, turned into a inefficient joke.
There's no place anywhere near me to recycle used cooking oil or batteries or whatnot. If I want to get rid of my mattress I have to post it on craigslist and hope, or pay someone to haul it away. I've got a couple of quarts of cooking oil sitting in a tupperware container on top of my fridge. I fried some chicken, and I'd have to pay someone to take that oil from me. I'll probably wrap the thing in a plastic bag and just toss it in the dumpster one day.
Sure, we may be recycling things more fully, and using more recycled materials, but it's overall a net loss, especially when the taxpayers end up funding everything, instead of the cheaper materials bringing down manufacturing costs, as promised. In the early 90s I would have been able to drop anything short of a dead body off at a local recycling plant, and get paid a decent amount. Hell, I could have waited til a specific day of the month and just put anything I wanted out on the curb and it would be gone by the next day.
If you want to talk about saving money, then you don't want to talk about recycling. In areas that do have robust recycling programs, they have 4 or 5 different trash cans, and 4 or 5 different pickup schedules and trucks. Surely local taxes don't pay for those.
Recycling was profitable decades ago before the government felt the need to step in. Now it's extremely profitable for the politicians that hold the reigns of those programs. They get kick backs from the companies they sell the contracts to, they get votes from the morons who will happily keep a "used toilet paper" trash can in their bathroom, and it's all paid for by taxes.
So basically, fuck you. "Green" isn't a "huge opportunity" for anyone except the dirty, lying fucks who are already in charge.
More generally, rich people are generally much better isolated from any environmental changes, and also in a much better position to exploit them.
Uh, you're an idiot. Rich people have expensive property. Properties on islands, or on the coast.
If the sea level rises to any meaningful degree, it is the rich people who will be fucked over.
The poor people with shitty land will either have land that is still shitty or they will have land that's been improved. (And the poor people don't actually need to own the land to feel the positive effects from a positive change in their area.) Imagine if the dustbowl started to be less dusty, while the east and west coasts were trimmed off a bit.
Windows' reliability can only be expressed as an imaginary number?
Thanks, that explains a lot!
Better yet, if you have a 2 independent systems running at the same time mirroring eachother, the odds failure is the odds of both of them failing at the same time.
(1 - i)(1 - i) Or 1 -2i + i^2 And the reliability is thus 1 - [1 -2i + i^2]
Which is 1 - 2i.
Get a pair of pairs...
1 - 4i^2 = 5.
Four Windows boxes and you've got a reliability of 500%!
They didn't "tacitly admit" it. IBM "actually shitcanned" PPC.
Apple was the PPC tagnut that IBM had been waiting to drop. IBM made it clear there was nothing left in the pipeline but a few puffs of hot air, yet Apple still clung on tightly. Apple didn't drop off until IBM gave a few good shakes and started wadding up the paper.
Because Apple keeps telling people there is no problem, or that it's a software problem, or that it's AT&T's problem, etc.
And do they do laser engraving in iPhone 4s? Laser engraving is a scam to limit your ability to return the product, and to hurt its resale value on the used market.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with your analogy, is that farting is natural, unharmful, and cannot be helped.
Lying, cheating, and treating people like shit?
Even if you want to claim it's natural in a competitive, it sure as fuck is harmful and it sure as fuck can be stopped.
Horse shit.
I'm sure Google has learned plenty from this experiment.
An experiment is only a failure if you are unable to collect the relevant data.
Form a hypothesis.
Design an experiment.
Run the experiment.
Collect the data.
Apply said data to the hypothesis.
Learn.
That's how these "experiment" things work.
And when you bought it full MSRP without subsidy, there was little to no savings per carrier on your monthly bill.
Horse shit.
I bought it through Google because I have an unlimited data plan with AT&T that costs $10 per month. If I had gone through AT&T to get a new phone (Nexus One or not), then I would have been forced to "upgrade" my contract and pay at least $20 more per month.
"In theory, practice and theory are the same. In practice, they are not."
I hate this quote.
In theory and in practice, theory and practice are separate and different.
"Just don't look" isn't an option.
This shit is being shoved down my throat more and more.
I want the ability to turn them off completely.
I'll never get that ability.
I can't even message a friend on the PS3 without a terrible delay while it syncs our trophies. I don't have a 360, so I can't compare, but the on the PS3 it's atrocious shit that interferes with what I want to do. Steam's implementation continues to get more obnoxious as well.
Or an engineer saying "the antenna around the phone works... just don't touch it there"
Steve Jobs is not an engineer.
There are actually engineers here, you insensitive clod.
Fuck achievements.
They're so fucking shitty.
I don't want a chore list.
I don't want notifications popping up whenever I do something (note that on the 360 you can turn them off, but not on the PS3 or in Steam).
I don't want my online games to be filled with people who are standing near the spawn point shooting each other in the foot 5000 times.
I don't want to see 54ad0w5n1p3r's ePeen achievement list.
I don't want people looking at my achievement list and knowing that I play Super Faggot Noob Game 2.
I don't want developers adding meaningless tasks and grinding in lieu of content.
I don't want some "score" attached to me that's simply a measure of how much time I've wasted. I have a clock, thank you.
Achievements are shitty.
But at least they're not as shitty as the other things to happen (or become far more prevalent) this generation:
$60 standard price
Paid Additional Content ("DLC")
Shitty PAC that is an unlock key for content already in the game
PAC that should have been included with the main game, but intentionally (time, money or both) wasn't
Retailer-exclusive content
Games shipping with unlock codes in the box to kill off used sales
Game saves locked to individual systems
Ship now, patch later mentality
Overpriced accessories (I'm looking at you, 360 wifi adapter and hard drives)
No transfer model for downloaded games (I'm looking at you, Nintendo)
Removing features people paid for, or patching ads into games that people already paid for (I'm looking at you, Sony)
Paying for multiplayer (I'm looking at you, Microsoft)
Getting free multiplayer but having it be a piece of shit (I'm looking at you, Nintendo)
The ruthless "Fund, Hype, Whip, Release, Cull" development cycle for AAA games (I'm looking at you, Activision)
All in all, we may have fancier graphics and new control schemes (fuck you, shitty developers who use them in shitty ways), but the basic "playing games" thing? It's much shittier.
What a goob.
Liquid air?
Air is a gas, and it takes up a hell of a lot of volume. Air is also a HUGE and extremely important part of our environment, as is the ground underneath our feet.
Running around them? So fucking what? Is running around an area now equivalent to altering the environment?
You are a fucking moron.
How the fuck did you come to that conclusion?
Are wars fought by crying?
Here's a little nugget of truth for you:
Nearly every major conflict in history has been solved through violence.
How fast can you go through google images with safe search off and pick out the NSFW images for a search of "teens"?
What about a 5x4 grid where all you have to do is flag whether or not the page contains any NSFW images?
Any pages that you've flagged get stored and sent to someone else to verify / mark the specific offending images. You're job is simply to hit the spacebar or the enter key for flag or pass, respectively.
The mere descriptions of the photos also took *us* years to get over.
Try me.
Post the pics or descriptions.
(That's also why psychologists have long suspected that many of the most successful CEO types have Asperger's to some degree. They're capable of looking at the company's situation in a purely logical manner, and doing mass layoffs without hesitation, if they determine that's the most economically beneficial course of action -- without hesitating because of personal guilt about it.)
And that's why psychology will never be respected as a real science, despite the actual science done and progress made by many psychologists.
Psychologists, as individuals, are all too happy to make up bullshit to get attention. Patients are the same fucking way. While ADD and Asperger's and any other trendy conditions are real, the vast majority of people who claim to have them are liars and idiots.
But hey - if historians can write a book detailing the evidence they found showing Hitler was retarded, gay, and black, why can't psychologists write books about the trendy conditions and baselessly apply them to entire swaths of people?
And sorry, but the "real world" does not involve frequent beheadings. Being unable to see another human being brutally murdered without being disturbed isn't a result of living "sheltered".
So when an owl catches a mouse, the mouse says "Ah, you've got me! Okay, let me spill my entrails and pop my own head off for you."?
People are sheltered and weak.
You wouldn't last a day anywhere outside of your densely populated urban center.
Wrong. I've been to the edge of the internet and back, and I'm no sociopath.
I don't for one second believe seeing something on the internet, no matter how bad, could compare to actually doing those things or having them done to you.
There's this thing called war. Sure, some people can't handle what goes on, what happens to them, or what they have to do. But most people can. For them, there's no sociopathy involved. There's no emotional deadening.
There's just the simple realization that the world isn't a fucking fairy tale, that crying about it won't make it any better, and that you've got a fucking job to do.
Maintaining composure in the face of any sort of disgusting, terrifying, etc. thing is not sociopathy, nor is it indicative of any other psychological problem. What IS indicative of various psychological problems is letting a gang rape, beheading, torture, whatever video on the internet affect you for more than a few minutes of thinking "damn, that's horrible".
Are people so egotistical and self-centered today that they can't see a video from across the globe without psychologically framing it as if it involved them personally?
It's one thing to have an emotional reaction to such content. (I get upset whenever there's one of those damned starving kids or abused pets commercials on TV.) But it's an entirely different thing to see a video and then go beat your husband/wife, cut yourself, whatever.
Saying "the bad internet videos gave me psychological problems" is about as valid as saying "Violent video games made me shoot up my school". The bad internet videos / violent games simply exposed / played to an existing problem.
You're thinking of Biodome, squirly.
When an umbrella is used to block the sun, we call it a parasol. It is "para" (for) "sol" (the sun).
Whoever modded this down is a liar, thief, and RACIST.
Hey! I'm a racist, you insensitive clod!
Either that or a lying thief!
LOL.
Really?
The Earth is three-dimensional, dude.
There's a lot of ground under those 13.7 football fields, and a hell of a lot of air above them.
This is a huge opportunity. People developing green forms of power generation, better recycling methods and more efficient devices stand to make a fortune selling them to the rest of the world. It also saves us money on petrol and waste disposal services (i.e. local taxes).
Horse.
Shit.
"Green" power is actually terrible for the environment. Your hybrids and your solar cells do more harm when they're manufactured than they'll ever make up for over their lifetime.
Wind turbines require constant maintenance (i.e., OILING) and provide very little power, and do so very unreliably.
We need to be using hydroelectric and nuclear power. But the "environmentalists" hate these. They're safe, they provide massive amounts of power cheaply, they generate no pollution, they can run for years without maintenance, completely autonomously, etc.
Better recycling methods? Seems to me there's a ton of places for me to recycle aluminum cans, but zero places for me to recycle something useful, like steel. Whenever I take my recycling in, soup cans, cans for compressed air or air fresheners, etc. get tossed in the trash.
"We don't take those."
"Who does?"
"No one."
Certain types of glass aren't accepted. Certain types of plastics aren't accepted. And no, they don't take paper.
Not only are the recycling programs available to the consumer today worse than they were decades ago, the methods of recycling have gotten less efficient. They're staffed by overpaid, underqualified peons who painstakingly separate garbage from garbage, only to throw both piles into the dump.
What was an efficient system run by private companies who wanted your valuable materials has been taken over by the government and, as usual, turned into a inefficient joke.
There's no place anywhere near me to recycle used cooking oil or batteries or whatnot. If I want to get rid of my mattress I have to post it on craigslist and hope, or pay someone to haul it away. I've got a couple of quarts of cooking oil sitting in a tupperware container on top of my fridge. I fried some chicken, and I'd have to pay someone to take that oil from me. I'll probably wrap the thing in a plastic bag and just toss it in the dumpster one day.
Sure, we may be recycling things more fully, and using more recycled materials, but it's overall a net loss, especially when the taxpayers end up funding everything, instead of the cheaper materials bringing down manufacturing costs, as promised. In the early 90s I would have been able to drop anything short of a dead body off at a local recycling plant, and get paid a decent amount. Hell, I could have waited til a specific day of the month and just put anything I wanted out on the curb and it would be gone by the next day.
If you want to talk about saving money, then you don't want to talk about recycling. In areas that do have robust recycling programs, they have 4 or 5 different trash cans, and 4 or 5 different pickup schedules and trucks. Surely local taxes don't pay for those.
Recycling was profitable decades ago before the government felt the need to step in.
Now it's extremely profitable for the politicians that hold the reigns of those programs. They get kick backs from the companies they sell the contracts to, they get votes from the morons who will happily keep a "used toilet paper" trash can in their bathroom, and it's all paid for by taxes.
So basically, fuck you.
"Green" isn't a "huge opportunity" for anyone except the dirty, lying fucks who are already in charge.
More generally, rich people are generally much better isolated from any environmental changes, and also in a much better position to exploit them.
Uh, you're an idiot.
Rich people have expensive property.
Properties on islands, or on the coast.
If the sea level rises to any meaningful degree, it is the rich people who will be fucked over.
The poor people with shitty land will either have land that is still shitty or they will have land that's been improved. (And the poor people don't actually need to own the land to feel the positive effects from a positive change in their area.) Imagine if the dustbowl started to be less dusty, while the east and west coasts were trimmed off a bit.
My Optics! The goggles to nothing!
Windows' reliability can only be expressed as an imaginary number?
Thanks, that explains a lot!
Better yet, if you have a 2 independent systems running at the same time mirroring eachother, the odds failure is the odds of both of them failing at the same time.
(1 - i)(1 - i)
Or 1 -2i + i^2
And the reliability is thus
1 - [1 -2i + i^2]
Which is 1 - 2i.
Get a pair of pairs...
1 - 4i^2 = 5.
Four Windows boxes and you've got a reliability of 500%!
They didn't "tacitly admit" it.
IBM "actually shitcanned" PPC.
Apple was the PPC tagnut that IBM had been waiting to drop. IBM made it clear there was nothing left in the pipeline but a few puffs of hot air, yet Apple still clung on tightly. Apple didn't drop off until IBM gave a few good shakes and started wadding up the paper.
Because Apple keeps telling people there is no problem, or that it's a software problem, or that it's AT&T's problem, etc.
And do they do laser engraving in iPhone 4s?
Laser engraving is a scam to limit your ability to return the product, and to hurt its resale value on the used market.
And if I'm wrong, I'll gladly accept some egg on my face, and those in disagreement all get to say "I told you so."
And if you're right, then, as usual, the Apple fans will gladly accept some sperm on their face while Steve Jobs says "take it, take it bitch!".