Except that, if my RTM build of Windows 8 courtesy of the MS VLSC is any indication...it's not filled with much of anything. No Netflix. No Pandora (though there is Slacker). No FTP clients. No IRC clients. None of the Angry Birds games (though there is Cut the Rope, and it's free). No other applications that seem to take advantage of a desktop being more powerful than a last-gen Lumia. Really, it's a pretty experience that has little of actual value. If they want to be first in...basically any category, they need to get programming themselves because no Microsoft titles are there, either.
Now you can analyze your girlfriend's* DNA and see if she's only acting happy and would become miserable after marriage!
*Yeah this is Slashdot but the theory is sound
I think Slashdot users are more likely to hit the powerball than gain the ability to test this theory.
I'd postulate that a Slashdot user hitting the powerball would find themselves quite capable of testing this theory. Also, I'm willing to be my own test subject.
Already posted in this discussion so manually modding you +1 Insightful.
People used general purpose computers when the only thing that did the handful of tasks they needed to do WERE general purpose computers. The unfortunate reality is that for the majority of people, an iPad and a decent keyboard is the kind of computer that does everything they need and very little they don't. Yes, a lot of people will keep a desktop in the house for those odd tasks - printing is still weird on an iPad, and I've used several apps designed to help, all of which "mostly work"; data backup is largely done in the cloud for iPads and their ilk, but local backups are quicker to restore from; etc. For the most part though, a seven year old desktop does the job and does it well enough to pick up the slack for which their iPad has its shortcomings.
Obligatory car analogy: My car is an automatic. A manual transmission gives me better gas mileage and better control over the acceleration of my car. The lack of a transmission takes a generally expensive part out from underneath the hood of my car, making the insides more accessible with a socket wrench, and frequently the car stereos are double-DIN instead of integrated in ways that kills my ability to get an aftermarket stereo in any meaningful sense. However, I'd then have to learn to drive a stickshift car, which is something I've never learned to do. It's in my interest to learn it, but I simply never have. It costs me dearly, but as my last five very-used car purchases will demonstrate, it's not something I esteem above my convenience to warrant being a condition of sale.
Even if HP/Dell/etc. have departments or divisions which specialize, they can't compete because of the corporate overhead. See: Alienware's ultimate mediocre standing.
Better example: VoodooPC. VoodooPC vs. Alienware was the Mac/PC \ vi/emacs \ iOS/Android feud of the high end gaming market. Dell bought Alienware. Not to be outdone, HP bought VoodooPC. A month after Alienware was bought by Dell, they were still 90% Alienware. You could buy an actual Alienware unit and still get the specs and service for which they were known. That percentage eroded over time to the point where it's basically a Dell computer with an extremely expensive logo and little else, and that birthed OriginPC. HP bought VoodooPC, and you couldn't find squat from them for months. Then, they silently released the Blackbird and some thin-and-powerful laptop. Both of which had utterly forgettable specs but still kept the VoodooPC logo and the outrageous prices. HP left them to rot, literally letting the VoodooPC website advertise the Blackbird and the laptop shipping with Vista Business for months after the commercial release of Windows 7. A few of the Envy laptops bear a vague resemblance to the lovechild of a VoodooPC and a Mac, but if you want to talk about corporate overhead, Alienware has fared significantly better than VoodooPC ever had.
Completely off-topic, but love the sig - Brent Spiner is an *excellent* addition to Warehouse 13 this season. They've written him particularly well in that it's still rough to tell whether he's a tyrant attempting to cling to power, or genuinely concerned about the fate of the world. A friend and I were discussing it, and of all the Star Trek actors of all the different series, we concluded that just about the only regular character who could have done a similarly convincing job was Chief O'Brien.
What's that going to do? Whether you download it or boycott it, the effect is almost exactly the same (except that in one scenario, you have a game). It's not as if they lose money they already possess if you download their game, so you might as well have just continued boycotting them.
True, and in fairness their fancy Excel spreadsheets and quarterly earnings reports are unlikely to show a major difference one way or the other. The difference, however, is in principle.
If you truly boycott a game, you are doing without. If I do not desire a product, I do without it. If I do not wish to support a company, I do without their products or services.
If you "boycott but pirate", citing that they get no money either way, you're sending a very different message. The message you are sending is that "This game is worth something to me, but I choose not to provide value to you, the developer/publisher". Sure, you may be but one number in a raw stat of downloads on TPB, but every drop of rain water raises sea level.
Pirating whilst boycotting sends the message that the game is worth enough to you that, should piracy be rendered impossible, you'd have purchased a copy. Even if you wouldn't have, a nontrivial part of the seeders on your torrent would. This is the stance Ubisoft has taken, and from an extremely high level view, it's rough to fault them for it. Now, don't mistake me as a sympathizer with Ubisoft as their implementations have been repulsive and anti-customer and I fully feel that everyone who contributed a line of code to their DRM scheme ought to be ashamed of themselves, but when the top brass sees tens of thousands of people getting their product for free, the only natural course of action is "plug the leaks".
Completely doing without sends the message that their product isn't worth your time or money. They may not truly know whether it's due to the game not being one desirable to you, an issue with their DRM mechanisms, a problemw with pricing, an aversion to day 1 DLC policies, or because you don't like their official corporate stance on some controversial political topic. Ideally, a handwritten letter sent via postal mail will help clear that up. Whatever the reasoning though, not showing up in either the piracy stats column or the raw sales column is the best way to protest and show that you're actually committed to the cause instead of simply being cheap.
In the case of ME3, I will give them certain levels of fairness in this regard for 4 reasons:
1.) The "day 1 DLC" came for free with Collector's Edition copies, and the cost of a standard copy + DLC didn't exceed the cost of the collector's edition. 2.) Nearly all of the DLC after that was free. 3.) The revamped ending (which I'll admit still could have been better, but wasn't as craptastic as the first go-around) was also provided for free. 4.) Multiplayer weapon DLC is frequently provided for free.
So while I'm not saying that EA was right in the whole ordeal with ME3, I will at least credit them by giving away a lot more of it than they've charged for.
Pardon my use of hyperbole to prove a point. Whether it requires half a dozen hops and tools of that level of sophistication is largely orthogonal. The point is that using a proxy or VPN or portable Ubuntu or whatever clearly expresses intent. Whether the system requires that quantity of hoops isn't the point, but the point that "trivial" is an extremely relative term and whether trivial or determined, it shows sufficient amounts of determination by the student and due diligence on behalf of the IT department. As long as both of those can be shown, Timmy's mom won't have much of a leg to stand on.
If I bypassed that point before I apologize, but here's the thing: filtration and making responsibility known are NOT mutually exclusive solutions. Filtration helps prevent accidents. Thus, if someone goes off-script by accident, there's no harm, no foul. If it's intentional and the student is unfamiliar with the system or insufficiently determined, they will likely be slowed down enough to be caught by the teachers. If they are intentional and smart and motivated...filters are indeed useless except to PROVE that the students are intentional and smart and motivated. That's where the policy and education come in. They are responsible for proper use of the school's resources. They should be made aware and taught how to use the internet responsibly. It is NOT impossible to do this without some level of filtration happening. A parent can absolutely opt out of letting their child use the internet despite there being filters in place. Parents can absolutely be given resources to educate their children about the shady side of the internet. None of what you are saying indicates that nontechnical rules and nontechnical punishments are useless because filters are in place. Heck, if a lesson needs to be taught about the shady side of the internet, then fine - disable the filters for that lab for that lesson, but the internet isn't exactly the best place for 'trial by fire' regarding elementary school students and the internet.
Mommy can throw a tantrum all she wants about Timmy seeing a boob online. The question of whether the situation is able to escalate beyond that is where filters come into place.
Scenario 1: Mommy: "Timmy saw pr0n at school! the IT department is incompetent and needs to pay me *raises pinky to mouth* one MILLION dollars!" IT Dept witness: "Your honor, the school has had content and proxy filtering on their network for years. This is the filtering system that the Board of Education has chosen for us to be using, configured using industry standard practices, and being appended weekly with additional 'creative' ways the students have found to bypass these filters. Here are the log files in the traffic, indicating that the student performed an end-run around the filter by using multiple VPN endpoints, SSL traffic, and a virtualized operating system running executable files explicitly designed to evade our application whitelist, and did so using a batch script as to prevent the teacher from catching him doing it."
Scenario 2: Mommy: "Timmy saw pr0n at school! the IT department is incompetent and needs to pay me *raises pinky to mouth* one MILLION dollars!" IT Dept witness: "Since web filters are mostly ineffective anyway, we felt that it was a waste of tax dollars to even try. If he were dedicated he'd get through them anyway." Mommy: "All he did was go to bigtits.com and it let him!" IT Dept witness: "He has the right to not be censored!" Mommy: "He's twelve!"
You'll never avoid a tantrum from a psychotic parent trying to sidestep their responsibility to actually be a parent. What you *will* avoid, however, is those kinds of allegations actually sticking, unless you have a set of like-minded psychos two and three tiers above you on the corporate org chart who are too technologically inept to realize that there is a chasm of difference between "filters unable to stop extremely determined, skilled, and clever students clearly violating the acceptable use policy and leaving traces of their actions" and "no filter at all". If that's what you have, then I propose the same thing - the issue is not technological and cannot be solved technologically, but will append it to say that the issue isn't with the students and the issues seen in the students are a reflection, not a cause.
Yes, there's going to be a group of kids who are more determined and resourceful than the person asking. In a nontrivial number of cases, they're called "future sysadmins". That's not to say that they'll all do so or that it should be a motivation for whether things get filtered at all, but it is a byproduct worth mentioning.
That said, you raise an argument of questionable logic. Essentially, you've stated that because he CAN'T block EVERYTHING that he SHOULDN'T block ANYTHING. That's not really the way things work in K-12 education. See, if it takes a proxy, a VPN, and a memorized IP address to get to content deemed inappropriate by the powers that be, then anyone who has gotten to it has shown clear determination to do so. Thus, it's significantly easier for the IT staff to say "We have had filters in place from the get-go that block this content. This student used an incredibly elaborate method to get around these filters, and this method no longer works as we've updated our filters to accommodate it" and thus place blame squarely on the student for determination and intent. Using your method of leaving the floodgates of the internet opened means that answering to those same people when a student accidentally stumbles upon objectionable content will sound like, "we don't have any filters because they don't work 100% of the time". Reference-free job hunting starts in the morning.
If a student wants to get into the building after-hours and orders his own RFID card off the internet and programs it to minic another card to unlock the door, it's going to be much tougher for the school to sue the security company than if the security company left the doors open 24/7 because there are 20-foot high windows.
Sure, students will bring in their issues of Penthouse or USB sticks with the contents of the latest pr0n torrent if they're determined to do so, but once again, it's how and where. A student walking into school with Penthouse in his backpack didn't get it from the school, therefore the school can't be held liable for the actions of the student. If the student downloaded an issue of Penthouse on a school computer, by contrast, now the school has made possible something that (for the sake of argument) the parents find objectionable and it's easy to point the finger at the IT admins since even a basic content filter would have mitigated the issue - or at the very least raised the barrier to entry significantly such that the IT staff can once again say "we can't block everything, but the filters do block all but the most determined attempts to get where he got" and absolve themselves from responsibility.
Yes, supervision absolutely needs to happen. The original post explicitly asks how to make supervision easier for that very reason. The question being asked isn't how to replace adult supervision with a technological solution, it's how to assist the teachers and try to fill in the gaps for the moments when the teacher is focusing on student #1 who happens to be seated at an inconvenient angle to observe student #2 doing the same thing.
So, my point is while Apple has a lovely display resolution that will probably soon be matched by others. Other laptop manufacturers (eg. HP) produce machines with 2 GB of Video RAM, which is unlikely to be matched by Apple (none of their latops have more than 1 GB of RAM, Apple don't seem to be interested in trely powerful users of laptops - I guess that's what they have the Mac Pro for - but it doesn't help folks like me).
In most cases, higher quantities of VRAM tend to be a part of beefier graphic chipsets. In basically every one of *those* cases, beefier GPUs sit on the same motherboard as beefier CPUs. In every one of *those* units, you end up with extra runs of copper and beefier fan motors to keep them cool. Add all of that together, and you end up with a laptop that is powerful, but is large, heavy, and lacks battery life. There's definitely a market for this; Alienware, Origin, and Falcon Northwest all pay their bills based on catering to that market. HP has a wide enough product line that they can throw enough Jell-O at basically any wall and some of it will ultimately stick.
Apple, on the other hand, seems to have no desire to cater to people who are alright with a laptop that has only an hour of battery life and weighs 7 pounds. My best guess is that they feel that even having a monster-sized performance laptop would be impossible to make appear sexy, but I'm certain the Apple folk are aware of the Alienware/Origin market and have chosen not to attempt to cater to them. I've yet to meet a Macbook user who expressed unhappiness with their older graphics chipset, or one who was sufficiently unhappy as to express willingness to sacrifice half of their 2.5-hour battery life for the added performance. Ratcheting back the resolution and easing the antialiasing to 2X will get acceptable performance from most games Mac users are likely to play. After Effects comps of any consequence are generally rendered overnight, when the difference between 4 hour render times and 6 hour render times are effectively meaningless. Now granted, I have an Origin monster of a laptop that gets less than an hour of battery life and I'm okay with that, but getting acceptable performance by bumping down graphics detail is a lot easier to do than squeaking out extra battery life when you have a CPU/GPU that eats through it very quickly.
In four years of college, there were only two that were of any actual use to me. One was Cisco (CCNA 1-4), because not sucking at TCP/IP and router configs is a rather integral part of my job. The other was a critical thinking course from a ZERO-BS professor that actually placed value in teaching my classmates and me how to actually think critically.
There was one particular lesson I remember. In the textbook, there was a court case whereby a mother, through neglect and (if memory serves) a lot of alcohol, and a sizeable amount of miscommunication caused the death of her very young (infant-toddler age?) child. We were all unanimous that she should be punished, but to a certain level torn as to whether it was a capital offense (lifetime imprisonment in a maximum security prison without the chance of parole was the alternative for those principally opposed to the death penalty). The room was roughly split 50/50 on it, so we divided the room into two halves - those who believed in death penalty/lifetime imprisonment, and those who believed in less severe prison time + rehab + community service. We then had a debate on the topic, having to defend the viewpoint opposite the one we held.
When forced to find reasons to align with the opposing view in order to win the argument, a nontrivial quantity of people started to seriously reconsider their own viewpoints. It was an eye opening experience for many and (in my opinion) really should be required for everyone to get a diploma.
Not that I disagree with your sentiment, but my point was that since the first round of Anonymous attacks didn't make a dent in how Sony operates, that actions less severe aren't going to hurry along any changes by Sony, either.
Thanking Anonymous for stealing my credit card info to demonstrate Sony's/Stratfor's/whatever's poor IT practices is akin to thanking an arsonist for burning down my house to demonstrate that it's flammable.
Poor analogy. The better analogy is that you are renting that house, and the landlord is obligated as a condition of your rental agreement to ensure that your house is properly flameproofed to prevent it from burning. An arsonist informs your landlord that your house is not properly flameproofed and can indeed burn.The landlord does nothing. The arsonist *then* burns your front door as a means of publicly demonstrating that none of the other houses your landlord owns are properly flameproofed, either.
This analogy still fails because there were no irreplaceable objects stored in a PSN account, no one was made homeless because of the attack, and credit card number replacements were very quickly taken care of by issuing bodies.
I'm not saying that Anonymous is completely in the right here. What I am saying is that I've never seen anything to indicate that anything short of what Anonymous did (and apparently, not even that) will get the message across to Sony.
Curious (and too lazy to google)-- At 5.5 trillion K, they aren't going to just stick a thermometer in there. How do they measure how hot the plasma was?
They draw straws. Short straw puts their hand in and makes an educated guess.
Nonsense, Voyager. There is a tenet of law that silence equals consent, and the deafening silence of "good" Christians as concerns those who bomb abortion clinics and wants to round up gays and put them into concentration camps or take away their children in some christian-commie scheme to "protect" the little tykes from mommy and mommy's horrible lifestyle puts the lie to everything you're claiming. Want further proof? The fact that you're claiming Jesus qualified Matthew 7:1, making it more of a "Now don't do that or you'll be punished" kind of thing instead of a direct edict.
So far as I'm concerned, while the screeching of right-wing commie-christians is vile and spits in the face of God, you are the true face of "christian" hypocrisy.
Your last sentence indicates that no matter what I say I'll be wrong simply because I don't share the same beliefs as you, but I'll do my best anyway...
First head-scratch: The foundation of your argument is based on a tenet of the judicial system. So you're depending on the legal system to defend your argument. Does that mean that your argument isn't valid where that tenet does not apply? Alas, I don't live in Somalia or some banana republic so we'll roll with it.
Second head-scratch: You're saying that because I don't spend my time standing on street corners condemning a group of people for their bad things and spending all my time and money begging the press to give me a modicum of airtime to state that I, and many other Christians, disagree with abortion clinic bombings that I'm therefore guilty of ACTUALLY BOMBING AN ABORTION CLINIC? I am a hypocrite for not spending all my waking hours preventing homosexuals from getting put into some sort of concentration camp and thus am guilty for rounding them up? (Citation needed for that, BTW) That's patently absurd.
Third head-scratch: What constitutes "enough noise" to not be silent? Do we beg NBC for airtime? Do we start our own TV station? Do we write a metric ton of blogs on Blogspot? Do we SEO ourselves to the top ten search results for "abortion clinics"? Do we set up funds to help the victims and surviving families of these atrocities? At what point is enough noise made that we make it known that we disagree with these things short of actually committing crimes toward the initial perpetrators?
Fourth head-scratch: Jesus' statement that you'll be judged by the same measuring rod that you judge others with is a "don't do this or you'll be punished"? To me, that's about as fair an edict as you can get. Does that mean that we should alter our legal system to provide no punitive measures for assault, rape, theft, murder, or fraud? If saying "you'll be subjected to your own system" is worse than "you really shouldn't do that because it's not nice", then why punish anything ever? Does justice not fall apart at that point?
Final question: If I'm the true face of Christian hypocrisy, then even if you're right, what does the face of a "genuine Christian" look like? Based on what you've written here, it doesn't seem like there can ever be such a thing.
#2 is the part I've got the most trouble with. It's extremely vague, and varies with every girl. Here are the issues:
1.) The first thing to say is generally pretty simple, because I've yet to meet a girl who didn't want to hear one or more of the following things: "You have a really pretty smile", "You have really pretty eyes", or "That's a really nice outfit/top/shoes". The true issue is what you follow that up with. She now knows that something caught your eye, but more than that is tricky to determine. The problem is finding something to talk about. The answer is different for every girl and every situation.
2.) Not only do you need an actual topic to discuss, but it needs to be a topic she can participate in, and it needs to stay at the correct level. A girl who says "I like playing video games" could possibly mean "I could legit school you on Halo/CoD, and I dare you to challenge me", and "I have all The Sims expansions and I really like playing Angry Birds on my boyfriends' iPad". Mistaking one for the other is disastrous in either direction.
3.) In my experience, girls are generally less tolerant of guys acting awkwardly, especially upon trying to talk to a girl for the first time. I'm sure nearly every guy would be down for learning to have those awkward discussions if there was an easy direction for growth in that area, but while "don't talk about your penis" is easily quantifiable and a safe bet, "Lord of the Rings" may be a perfect discussion with one girl while a complete convo killer with another, with no real way of being able to tell which is which. Suppose a college professor gave exclusively multiple choice tests to all his students over the course of the semester, but chose the answer key at random each test. Getting over test anxiety has nothing to do with avoiding getting a bad grade, since you're almost guaranteed to be studying for the wrong test no matter which one you're given.
3b.) A common reaction to doing something awkward is to profusely apologize or say something that comes out even more awkward. It is uncommon for a bad first impression to actually get better, thus giving even more pressure to make a good first impression.
4.) Having a good conversation can be like a game of volleyball: no matter how epic a save that narrowly avoided a scored point for the other team, the moment they tap the ball back over the net you've got to do it again. Now, that said, I know SOME girls can be very good at helping with this situation and will help steer a conversation a bit with things like "I've never really played $SOME_GAME, have you played $OTHER_GAME? I really enjoyed that one". Others...not so much. However, this goes back to the random answer key example.
Honestly, half the steps you listed are, in fact, common sense. This one, however, does require a little give and take from both sides, and I feel that if ladies in general were a bit more gracious and patient with guys who made an awkward (not overtly offensive, simply awkward or suboptimal) first impression without jumping to "creep" before "shy/insecure", I think it would significantly help the situation overall. Think about it: is a guy who has a positive encounter with a girl (and by "positive" I mean "fun conversation about a mutually enjoyable activity", not "sex") going to refer to her as a 'bitch' thereafter? Or is it starting with assumptions on both sides that perpetuates the trend?
But Microsoft has an history of successfully managing to destroy competition by bundling inferior products (As an example: real-time compression almost died during the Stacker vs. Doublespace saga).
Valve is completely right in attempting to get prepared for the worst.
Counterexamples: Winzip (albeit now an arm of Corel) and RAR Labs still exist and sell compression utilities, despite Windows having bundled ZIP file handling for the last 11 years.
In all honesty, Windows Compressed Folders suck compared to WinZIP and WinRAR. You have zero options, and it tends to fall over when you get to between 700MB and 1GB of data (don't know if they fixed that since say WinXP SP1, but it's probably still a problem).
True, you have zero options...but "extract stuff" and "add stuff" are going to be the most common things people do with ZIP files, and I'm pretty sure that Winzip had no shortage of people who bought Winzip almost exclusively for those things. The entire point of the GP's post was the fact that MS was eating the lunch of companies who made "very good" tools simply by bundling "good enough" tools with the OS.
Corel, Cyberlink, and Adobe's Fisher Price division are still making plenty of money despite the existence of Windows Movie Maker.
And Windows Movie Maker sucks compared to nearly anything else. Also note, that all those companies provide versions for Mac as well.
Neither Cyberlink PowerDirector nor Corel VideoStudio are available on OSX. Premiere Elements is, but it faces the same problem on the Mac platform as it directly competes with the bundled iMovie. Again, the GP's point was that Microsoft's "Good enough" replaces superior tools.
Stardock makes a majority of their money by making programs that change the look of Windows despite Windows having a perfectly functional UI out of the box.
Some people like to customize their desktop look 'n feel. Microsoft does provide some ability to do that, but it can be rather difficult to setup. For example, try changing the colors for the various dialogs in a consistent way - it's a PITA on Windows. Third Party tools make it easier to get all those settings correct, and build themes that are consistent.
Stardock's tools are epic. Fences and ObjectDock are lifesavers. However, while I can concede that Stardock's titles fit less with the others, my point was that there is a workable UI that ships with Windows.
Just because Microsoft bundles something doesn't equate with destroying established inertia.
That depends on their goal. In most cases its the Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish (EEE of Microsoft), and then they do. Sometimes they add something and kind of forget about it - it still affects the competitor - yes WinRAR and WinZIP likely lost some business because of Compressed Folders; but then, most of what they lost was probably just customers using their demo products so it's not much of a loss. (7zip has a deeper impact on them both.)
How much who lost is a question that would require balance sheets. If the Steam Hardware Survey is any indication, WinRAR has fared much better than Winzip; the former having over 44% install base against Steam and the latter is a paltry 4.3%. I concur that 7zip is an excellent alternative to both, with IZArc being much better for those who like the traditional WinZip UI. Presumably, your point is that since Microsoft wasn't gunning for that market, they've been able to survive better than Netscape was.
Again, the question posed by the summary was where Steam fits into this. If Microsoft has their crosshairs on Valve, then by your logic (not an entirely unsound one), they're preparing to avoid being the next Netscape. MS could be gunning for Valve's market the way they went after Netscape, but they will have a coop full of eggs on their face if Valve pulls off a WinRAR instead.
But Microsoft has an history of successfully managing to destroy competition by bundling inferior products (As an example: real-time compression almost died during the Stacker vs. Doublespace saga).
Valve is completely right in attempting to get prepared for the worst.
Counterexamples: Winzip (albeit now an arm of Corel) and RAR Labs still exist and sell compression utilities, despite Windows having bundled ZIP file handling for the last 11 years. Corel, Cyberlink, and Adobe's Fisher Price division are still making plenty of money despite the existence of Windows Movie Maker. Stardock makes a majority of their money by making programs that change the look of Windows despite Windows having a perfectly functional UI out of the box.
Just because Microsoft bundles something doesn't equate with destroying established inertia. Gamers who use Steam and have a decent quantity of games in their account will likely keep them. If for no other reason, games like CoD: Black Ops and Portal 2 ship with what amounts to a Steam backup on a plastic disc. You're using Steam one way or the other with those titles, so it will push its way on. Plus, it remains to be seen if the Microsoft App Store will be running the kind of sales Steam does that have twisted my arm into buying games I otherwise had no intention of buying except that they were $5.
What about focusing on the creationist teaching and scientific demonization? Where are the moderate christians on that? As the GP said, "various referendums around the country definitely indicate that these mythical voiceless moderates dont really represent a significant percentage of christians, much less the general population."
I find it disheartening to be sabotaging our children w/ the level of education and anti-science stance that seems to be coming from the far christian right but I am not seeing (significant percentages of) moderates marginalizing the loonies.
A bit of a strawman here. Teaching Creationism to one's own children does not in itself advocate violence toward abortion clinics or picketing at soldiers' funerals or homosexual marriage ceremonies.
I went to an explicitly religious school. Did I learn about Creationism? yes. Did I learn about evolution and the big bang theory? of course - and I aced the New York State Regents exams on Earth Science and Living Environment ('biology' by any other name), and got a B in chemistry. Despite going to a Christian school, I wasn't taught about Creationism at the expense of Evolution, and few parents (certainly not my own) would have had it any other way. The science departments taught us about chemical reactions and fossil records and DNA replication like every other school in the state - better than 90% of the public school districts in the county based on New York State Regents test scores, in fact.
Seriously, I don't understand where all this "Christians are against teaching science" stuff is coming from. The earth is round and revolved around the sun, cells divide, fossils are found in rock layers (though admittedly the Genesis Flood is considered responsible for this, and yes, that's an explanation I'll personally align myself with), DNA is made of four amino acids, and giraffes with long necks will reproduce more successfully than giraffes with short necks in areas where accessible food is kept in trees high up off the ground.
For those calling for Christians to speak out against individuals who are in favor of violence against abortion clinics, violence against gays, significant discrimination against...basically anyone, or banning science in classrooms (one of these things is not like the other...), I, for one, am explicitly stating these things. Yes, seven levels deep in a Slashdot thread isn't much of a pulpit to stand on, but these things are NOT in line with the Bible I read or the God I serve, and I do NOT endorse these actions.
I have mod points and karma, but I'm down for losing both...
The Bible doesn't say "Thou shalt not judge". In Matthew 7:1-2, Jesus says, "“Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you." For the extent of your post it's merely a point of semantics, but it does go both ways. If the measuring rod I will be judged with is my own, then it makes the most sense for me to assume as little as possible, gather as much information, and attempt to give the other person the benefit of the doubt. After all, that's the measuring rod I'd want to be judged with.
That said, as a Christ follower myself, I do my best to put up with a lot of the general anti-Christianity sentiment on Slashdot. Plenty of it is deserved for a lot of reasons, and I realize that it comes with the territory of the name. I consider it quite possibly the greatest irony of all time that "Christian" was a term first used by nonbelievers to describe those following Christ because of how closely they emulated Him. Today, that same name is nearly synonymous with acting the opposite of Jesus.
The reason I bring this up is this: Yes, Christianity has its issues. Yes, we've got a bad reputation that we've, in many cases, brought upon ourselves. Yes, we could, as a whole, stand to become a lot more loving and a lot less judgmental. We could stand to do a lot more listening and a lot less talking. BUT...having been raised in church - and a fairly stiff, conservative one at that - and having visited several others in my area from many different denominations - I have yet to meet ONE Christian who agrees with abortion clinic bombings or the Westboro Baptist protests. On the contrary, they're generally just as outraged as you are about those issues.
I know it goes against the stereotype, but unfortunately an extremely vocal minority gets a lot more press coverage than the positive groups that help feed homeless people, work to facilitate drug rehabilitation, and just in general try to service their communities. Don't believe it happens? I've personally been involved in these activities numerous times throughout the years, but think about it: the people picketing want attention, and get it. People actually helping, generally don't do it for the publicity, so they don't get any.
No church is perfect, and some are more involved than others. That doesn't mean that churches generally support causing harm or performing acts of vandalism to the staff and buildings of abortion clinics or wish physical harm toward homosexuals.
Incidentally, a "hard drive crash" used to mean a head touched the disk and physically damaged the head and/or the disk.
...and today, "my hard drive crashed" can mean basically anything. I can't count how many times I've heard someone say "my hard drive crashed" only to have their response to my question of "how do you know" sound something like, "well, when I go to 'my documents, Word doesn't load" or some other similar error where the hard disk is clearly not to blame. I tried educating people on the actual meaning of the term, but it seemed a losing battle, so now "my hard drive crashed" generally translates to "something is broken", unless it's a fellow computer tech who I'm certain knows what an actual hard disk crash looks like.
Many, MANY people buy Macs because they believe that they are better/more stable/more secure than the Windows machines they've used for the past decade. Whether they are or are not is an endless Slashdot debate that is completely tangential to my point, because what's at question here is the perception, not the reality.
If people perceive the Mac to be the stable part, software that doesn't work will likely be blamed on the developer, not Apple. To them, a sandbox is a place young children play in, not a computer security model. A developer trying to explain this to someone who truly doesn't understand the security model will make himself look foolish to the customer, not enlighten the customer.
The App Store will still be used by many Mac users in the same way Origin is used by EA customers. Few (if any) EA customers desired Origin, it's just necessary for Battlefield 3, Mass Effect 3, and The Sims. Similarly, even if many Apple developers ditch the App Store, the fact that Final Cut Studio, Logic, and Aperture are available through it will keep a huge demographic begrudgingly using it. Adobe is probably the one company who can likely keep a working trigger finger on Apple preventing conventional software installations, but their pushing their 'Creative Cloud' model may weaken their grip on said trigger. Ableton and Serato may be in a position to help pick up the slack a bit, but they definitely don't have the same level of clout.
Finally, long time Mac incumbents may be wary of the Mac App Store, but newcomers who love their iPhone/iPod/iPad may be more inclined to start at the App Store since that's "where software comes from". It's part of the vertical solution that they feel they bought from Apple. The question will be whether developer A's FOO_APP skiddishness in being included in the App Store will be the golden opportunity for similarly-functioning FRA_APP to eat its lunch. Again, Adobe may be able to keep itself afloat with selling stuff through adobe.com/journeyed/cdw/staples, but searching the App Store through functionality puts developers on much more even levels for those that would be affected by the sandboxing and not having a legal team at their disposal to go RIAA on their posteriors.
Slashdot Mirror
Except that, if my RTM build of Windows 8 courtesy of the MS VLSC is any indication...it's not filled with much of anything. No Netflix. No Pandora (though there is Slacker). No FTP clients. No IRC clients. None of the Angry Birds games (though there is Cut the Rope, and it's free). No other applications that seem to take advantage of a desktop being more powerful than a last-gen Lumia. Really, it's a pretty experience that has little of actual value. If they want to be first in...basically any category, they need to get programming themselves because no Microsoft titles are there, either.
Now you can analyze your girlfriend's* DNA and see if she's only acting happy and would become miserable after marriage!
*Yeah this is Slashdot but the theory is sound
I think Slashdot users are more likely to hit the powerball than gain the ability to test this theory.
I'd postulate that a Slashdot user hitting the powerball would find themselves quite capable of testing this theory. Also, I'm willing to be my own test subject.
Already posted in this discussion so manually modding you +1 Insightful.
People used general purpose computers when the only thing that did the handful of tasks they needed to do WERE general purpose computers. The unfortunate reality is that for the majority of people, an iPad and a decent keyboard is the kind of computer that does everything they need and very little they don't. Yes, a lot of people will keep a desktop in the house for those odd tasks - printing is still weird on an iPad, and I've used several apps designed to help, all of which "mostly work"; data backup is largely done in the cloud for iPads and their ilk, but local backups are quicker to restore from; etc. For the most part though, a seven year old desktop does the job and does it well enough to pick up the slack for which their iPad has its shortcomings.
Obligatory car analogy: My car is an automatic. A manual transmission gives me better gas mileage and better control over the acceleration of my car. The lack of a transmission takes a generally expensive part out from underneath the hood of my car, making the insides more accessible with a socket wrench, and frequently the car stereos are double-DIN instead of integrated in ways that kills my ability to get an aftermarket stereo in any meaningful sense. However, I'd then have to learn to drive a stickshift car, which is something I've never learned to do. It's in my interest to learn it, but I simply never have. It costs me dearly, but as my last five very-used car purchases will demonstrate, it's not something I esteem above my convenience to warrant being a condition of sale.
Even if HP/Dell/etc. have departments or divisions which specialize, they can't compete because of the corporate overhead. See: Alienware's ultimate mediocre standing.
Better example: VoodooPC. VoodooPC vs. Alienware was the Mac/PC \ vi/emacs \ iOS/Android feud of the high end gaming market. Dell bought Alienware. Not to be outdone, HP bought VoodooPC. A month after Alienware was bought by Dell, they were still 90% Alienware. You could buy an actual Alienware unit and still get the specs and service for which they were known. That percentage eroded over time to the point where it's basically a Dell computer with an extremely expensive logo and little else, and that birthed OriginPC. HP bought VoodooPC, and you couldn't find squat from them for months. Then, they silently released the Blackbird and some thin-and-powerful laptop. Both of which had utterly forgettable specs but still kept the VoodooPC logo and the outrageous prices. HP left them to rot, literally letting the VoodooPC website advertise the Blackbird and the laptop shipping with Vista Business for months after the commercial release of Windows 7. A few of the Envy laptops bear a vague resemblance to the lovechild of a VoodooPC and a Mac, but if you want to talk about corporate overhead, Alienware has fared significantly better than VoodooPC ever had.
Completely off-topic, but love the sig - Brent Spiner is an *excellent* addition to Warehouse 13 this season. They've written him particularly well in that it's still rough to tell whether he's a tyrant attempting to cling to power, or genuinely concerned about the fate of the world. A friend and I were discussing it, and of all the Star Trek actors of all the different series, we concluded that just about the only regular character who could have done a similarly convincing job was Chief O'Brien.
What's that going to do? Whether you download it or boycott it, the effect is almost exactly the same (except that in one scenario, you have a game). It's not as if they lose money they already possess if you download their game, so you might as well have just continued boycotting them.
True, and in fairness their fancy Excel spreadsheets and quarterly earnings reports are unlikely to show a major difference one way or the other. The difference, however, is in principle.
If you truly boycott a game, you are doing without. If I do not desire a product, I do without it. If I do not wish to support a company, I do without their products or services.
If you "boycott but pirate", citing that they get no money either way, you're sending a very different message. The message you are sending is that "This game is worth something to me, but I choose not to provide value to you, the developer/publisher". Sure, you may be but one number in a raw stat of downloads on TPB, but every drop of rain water raises sea level.
Pirating whilst boycotting sends the message that the game is worth enough to you that, should piracy be rendered impossible, you'd have purchased a copy. Even if you wouldn't have, a nontrivial part of the seeders on your torrent would. This is the stance Ubisoft has taken, and from an extremely high level view, it's rough to fault them for it. Now, don't mistake me as a sympathizer with Ubisoft as their implementations have been repulsive and anti-customer and I fully feel that everyone who contributed a line of code to their DRM scheme ought to be ashamed of themselves, but when the top brass sees tens of thousands of people getting their product for free, the only natural course of action is "plug the leaks".
Completely doing without sends the message that their product isn't worth your time or money. They may not truly know whether it's due to the game not being one desirable to you, an issue with their DRM mechanisms, a problemw with pricing, an aversion to day 1 DLC policies, or because you don't like their official corporate stance on some controversial political topic. Ideally, a handwritten letter sent via postal mail will help clear that up. Whatever the reasoning though, not showing up in either the piracy stats column or the raw sales column is the best way to protest and show that you're actually committed to the cause instead of simply being cheap.
In the case of ME3, I will give them certain levels of fairness in this regard for 4 reasons:
1.) The "day 1 DLC" came for free with Collector's Edition copies, and the cost of a standard copy + DLC didn't exceed the cost of the collector's edition.
2.) Nearly all of the DLC after that was free.
3.) The revamped ending (which I'll admit still could have been better, but wasn't as craptastic as the first go-around) was also provided for free.
4.) Multiplayer weapon DLC is frequently provided for free.
So while I'm not saying that EA was right in the whole ordeal with ME3, I will at least credit them by giving away a lot more of it than they've charged for.
Pardon my use of hyperbole to prove a point. Whether it requires half a dozen hops and tools of that level of sophistication is largely orthogonal. The point is that using a proxy or VPN or portable Ubuntu or whatever clearly expresses intent. Whether the system requires that quantity of hoops isn't the point, but the point that "trivial" is an extremely relative term and whether trivial or determined, it shows sufficient amounts of determination by the student and due diligence on behalf of the IT department. As long as both of those can be shown, Timmy's mom won't have much of a leg to stand on.
If I bypassed that point before I apologize, but here's the thing: filtration and making responsibility known are NOT mutually exclusive solutions. Filtration helps prevent accidents. Thus, if someone goes off-script by accident, there's no harm, no foul. If it's intentional and the student is unfamiliar with the system or insufficiently determined, they will likely be slowed down enough to be caught by the teachers. If they are intentional and smart and motivated...filters are indeed useless except to PROVE that the students are intentional and smart and motivated. That's where the policy and education come in. They are responsible for proper use of the school's resources. They should be made aware and taught how to use the internet responsibly. It is NOT impossible to do this without some level of filtration happening. A parent can absolutely opt out of letting their child use the internet despite there being filters in place. Parents can absolutely be given resources to educate their children about the shady side of the internet. None of what you are saying indicates that nontechnical rules and nontechnical punishments are useless because filters are in place. Heck, if a lesson needs to be taught about the shady side of the internet, then fine - disable the filters for that lab for that lesson, but the internet isn't exactly the best place for 'trial by fire' regarding elementary school students and the internet.
Mommy can throw a tantrum all she wants about Timmy seeing a boob online. The question of whether the situation is able to escalate beyond that is where filters come into place.
Scenario 1:
Mommy: "Timmy saw pr0n at school! the IT department is incompetent and needs to pay me *raises pinky to mouth* one MILLION dollars!"
IT Dept witness: "Your honor, the school has had content and proxy filtering on their network for years. This is the filtering system that the Board of Education has chosen for us to be using, configured using industry standard practices, and being appended weekly with additional 'creative' ways the students have found to bypass these filters. Here are the log files in the traffic, indicating that the student performed an end-run around the filter by using multiple VPN endpoints, SSL traffic, and a virtualized operating system running executable files explicitly designed to evade our application whitelist, and did so using a batch script as to prevent the teacher from catching him doing it."
Scenario 2:
Mommy: "Timmy saw pr0n at school! the IT department is incompetent and needs to pay me *raises pinky to mouth* one MILLION dollars!"
IT Dept witness: "Since web filters are mostly ineffective anyway, we felt that it was a waste of tax dollars to even try. If he were dedicated he'd get through them anyway."
Mommy: "All he did was go to bigtits.com and it let him!"
IT Dept witness: "He has the right to not be censored!"
Mommy: "He's twelve!"
You'll never avoid a tantrum from a psychotic parent trying to sidestep their responsibility to actually be a parent. What you *will* avoid, however, is those kinds of allegations actually sticking, unless you have a set of like-minded psychos two and three tiers above you on the corporate org chart who are too technologically inept to realize that there is a chasm of difference between "filters unable to stop extremely determined, skilled, and clever students clearly violating the acceptable use policy and leaving traces of their actions" and "no filter at all". If that's what you have, then I propose the same thing - the issue is not technological and cannot be solved technologically, but will append it to say that the issue isn't with the students and the issues seen in the students are a reflection, not a cause.
Yes, there's going to be a group of kids who are more determined and resourceful than the person asking. In a nontrivial number of cases, they're called "future sysadmins". That's not to say that they'll all do so or that it should be a motivation for whether things get filtered at all, but it is a byproduct worth mentioning.
That said, you raise an argument of questionable logic. Essentially, you've stated that because he CAN'T block EVERYTHING that he SHOULDN'T block ANYTHING. That's not really the way things work in K-12 education. See, if it takes a proxy, a VPN, and a memorized IP address to get to content deemed inappropriate by the powers that be, then anyone who has gotten to it has shown clear determination to do so. Thus, it's significantly easier for the IT staff to say "We have had filters in place from the get-go that block this content. This student used an incredibly elaborate method to get around these filters, and this method no longer works as we've updated our filters to accommodate it" and thus place blame squarely on the student for determination and intent. Using your method of leaving the floodgates of the internet opened means that answering to those same people when a student accidentally stumbles upon objectionable content will sound like, "we don't have any filters because they don't work 100% of the time". Reference-free job hunting starts in the morning.
If a student wants to get into the building after-hours and orders his own RFID card off the internet and programs it to minic another card to unlock the door, it's going to be much tougher for the school to sue the security company than if the security company left the doors open 24/7 because there are 20-foot high windows.
Sure, students will bring in their issues of Penthouse or USB sticks with the contents of the latest pr0n torrent if they're determined to do so, but once again, it's how and where. A student walking into school with Penthouse in his backpack didn't get it from the school, therefore the school can't be held liable for the actions of the student. If the student downloaded an issue of Penthouse on a school computer, by contrast, now the school has made possible something that (for the sake of argument) the parents find objectionable and it's easy to point the finger at the IT admins since even a basic content filter would have mitigated the issue - or at the very least raised the barrier to entry significantly such that the IT staff can once again say "we can't block everything, but the filters do block all but the most determined attempts to get where he got" and absolve themselves from responsibility.
Yes, supervision absolutely needs to happen. The original post explicitly asks how to make supervision easier for that very reason. The question being asked isn't how to replace adult supervision with a technological solution, it's how to assist the teachers and try to fill in the gaps for the moments when the teacher is focusing on student #1 who happens to be seated at an inconvenient angle to observe student #2 doing the same thing.
So, my point is while Apple has a lovely display resolution that will probably soon be matched by others. Other laptop manufacturers (eg. HP) produce machines with 2 GB of Video RAM, which is unlikely to be matched by Apple (none of their latops have more than 1 GB of RAM, Apple don't seem to be interested in trely powerful users of laptops - I guess that's what they have the Mac Pro for - but it doesn't help folks like me).
In most cases, higher quantities of VRAM tend to be a part of beefier graphic chipsets. In basically every one of *those* cases, beefier GPUs sit on the same motherboard as beefier CPUs. In every one of *those* units, you end up with extra runs of copper and beefier fan motors to keep them cool. Add all of that together, and you end up with a laptop that is powerful, but is large, heavy, and lacks battery life. There's definitely a market for this; Alienware, Origin, and Falcon Northwest all pay their bills based on catering to that market. HP has a wide enough product line that they can throw enough Jell-O at basically any wall and some of it will ultimately stick.
Apple, on the other hand, seems to have no desire to cater to people who are alright with a laptop that has only an hour of battery life and weighs 7 pounds. My best guess is that they feel that even having a monster-sized performance laptop would be impossible to make appear sexy, but I'm certain the Apple folk are aware of the Alienware/Origin market and have chosen not to attempt to cater to them. I've yet to meet a Macbook user who expressed unhappiness with their older graphics chipset, or one who was sufficiently unhappy as to express willingness to sacrifice half of their 2.5-hour battery life for the added performance. Ratcheting back the resolution and easing the antialiasing to 2X will get acceptable performance from most games Mac users are likely to play. After Effects comps of any consequence are generally rendered overnight, when the difference between 4 hour render times and 6 hour render times are effectively meaningless. Now granted, I have an Origin monster of a laptop that gets less than an hour of battery life and I'm okay with that, but getting acceptable performance by bumping down graphics detail is a lot easier to do than squeaking out extra battery life when you have a CPU/GPU that eats through it very quickly.
In four years of college, there were only two that were of any actual use to me. One was Cisco (CCNA 1-4), because not sucking at TCP/IP and router configs is a rather integral part of my job. The other was a critical thinking course from a ZERO-BS professor that actually placed value in teaching my classmates and me how to actually think critically.
There was one particular lesson I remember. In the textbook, there was a court case whereby a mother, through neglect and (if memory serves) a lot of alcohol, and a sizeable amount of miscommunication caused the death of her very young (infant-toddler age?) child. We were all unanimous that she should be punished, but to a certain level torn as to whether it was a capital offense (lifetime imprisonment in a maximum security prison without the chance of parole was the alternative for those principally opposed to the death penalty). The room was roughly split 50/50 on it, so we divided the room into two halves - those who believed in death penalty/lifetime imprisonment, and those who believed in less severe prison time + rehab + community service. We then had a debate on the topic, having to defend the viewpoint opposite the one we held.
When forced to find reasons to align with the opposing view in order to win the argument, a nontrivial quantity of people started to seriously reconsider their own viewpoints. It was an eye opening experience for many and (in my opinion) really should be required for everyone to get a diploma.
Not that I disagree with your sentiment, but my point was that since the first round of Anonymous attacks didn't make a dent in how Sony operates, that actions less severe aren't going to hurry along any changes by Sony, either.
Thanking Anonymous for stealing my credit card info to demonstrate Sony's/Stratfor's/whatever's poor IT practices is akin to thanking an arsonist for burning down my house to demonstrate that it's flammable.
Poor analogy. The better analogy is that you are renting that house, and the landlord is obligated as a condition of your rental agreement to ensure that your house is properly flameproofed to prevent it from burning. An arsonist informs your landlord that your house is not properly flameproofed and can indeed burn.The landlord does nothing. The arsonist *then* burns your front door as a means of publicly demonstrating that none of the other houses your landlord owns are properly flameproofed, either.
This analogy still fails because there were no irreplaceable objects stored in a PSN account, no one was made homeless because of the attack, and credit card number replacements were very quickly taken care of by issuing bodies.
I'm not saying that Anonymous is completely in the right here. What I am saying is that I've never seen anything to indicate that anything short of what Anonymous did (and apparently, not even that) will get the message across to Sony.
Curious (and too lazy to google)-- At 5.5 trillion K, they aren't going to just stick a thermometer in there. How do they measure how hot the plasma was?
They draw straws. Short straw puts their hand in and makes an educated guess.
Nonsense, Voyager. There is a tenet of law that silence equals consent, and the deafening silence of "good" Christians as concerns those who bomb abortion clinics and wants to round up gays and put them into concentration camps or take away their children in some christian-commie scheme to "protect" the little tykes from mommy and mommy's horrible lifestyle puts the lie to everything you're claiming. Want further proof? The fact that you're claiming Jesus qualified Matthew 7:1, making it more of a "Now don't do that or you'll be punished" kind of thing instead of a direct edict.
So far as I'm concerned, while the screeching of right-wing commie-christians is vile and spits in the face of God, you are the true face of "christian" hypocrisy.
Your last sentence indicates that no matter what I say I'll be wrong simply because I don't share the same beliefs as you, but I'll do my best anyway...
First head-scratch: The foundation of your argument is based on a tenet of the judicial system. So you're depending on the legal system to defend your argument. Does that mean that your argument isn't valid where that tenet does not apply? Alas, I don't live in Somalia or some banana republic so we'll roll with it.
Second head-scratch: You're saying that because I don't spend my time standing on street corners condemning a group of people for their bad things and spending all my time and money begging the press to give me a modicum of airtime to state that I, and many other Christians, disagree with abortion clinic bombings that I'm therefore guilty of ACTUALLY BOMBING AN ABORTION CLINIC? I am a hypocrite for not spending all my waking hours preventing homosexuals from getting put into some sort of concentration camp and thus am guilty for rounding them up? (Citation needed for that, BTW) That's patently absurd.
Third head-scratch: What constitutes "enough noise" to not be silent? Do we beg NBC for airtime? Do we start our own TV station? Do we write a metric ton of blogs on Blogspot? Do we SEO ourselves to the top ten search results for "abortion clinics"? Do we set up funds to help the victims and surviving families of these atrocities? At what point is enough noise made that we make it known that we disagree with these things short of actually committing crimes toward the initial perpetrators?
Fourth head-scratch: Jesus' statement that you'll be judged by the same measuring rod that you judge others with is a "don't do this or you'll be punished"? To me, that's about as fair an edict as you can get. Does that mean that we should alter our legal system to provide no punitive measures for assault, rape, theft, murder, or fraud? If saying "you'll be subjected to your own system" is worse than "you really shouldn't do that because it's not nice", then why punish anything ever? Does justice not fall apart at that point?
Final question: If I'm the true face of Christian hypocrisy, then even if you're right, what does the face of a "genuine Christian" look like? Based on what you've written here, it doesn't seem like there can ever be such a thing.
#2 is the part I've got the most trouble with. It's extremely vague, and varies with every girl. Here are the issues:
1.) The first thing to say is generally pretty simple, because I've yet to meet a girl who didn't want to hear one or more of the following things: "You have a really pretty smile", "You have really pretty eyes", or "That's a really nice outfit/top/shoes". The true issue is what you follow that up with. She now knows that something caught your eye, but more than that is tricky to determine. The problem is finding something to talk about. The answer is different for every girl and every situation.
2.) Not only do you need an actual topic to discuss, but it needs to be a topic she can participate in, and it needs to stay at the correct level. A girl who says "I like playing video games" could possibly mean "I could legit school you on Halo/CoD, and I dare you to challenge me", and "I have all The Sims expansions and I really like playing Angry Birds on my boyfriends' iPad". Mistaking one for the other is disastrous in either direction.
3.) In my experience, girls are generally less tolerant of guys acting awkwardly, especially upon trying to talk to a girl for the first time. I'm sure nearly every guy would be down for learning to have those awkward discussions if there was an easy direction for growth in that area, but while "don't talk about your penis" is easily quantifiable and a safe bet, "Lord of the Rings" may be a perfect discussion with one girl while a complete convo killer with another, with no real way of being able to tell which is which. Suppose a college professor gave exclusively multiple choice tests to all his students over the course of the semester, but chose the answer key at random each test. Getting over test anxiety has nothing to do with avoiding getting a bad grade, since you're almost guaranteed to be studying for the wrong test no matter which one you're given.
3b.) A common reaction to doing something awkward is to profusely apologize or say something that comes out even more awkward. It is uncommon for a bad first impression to actually get better, thus giving even more pressure to make a good first impression.
4.) Having a good conversation can be like a game of volleyball: no matter how epic a save that narrowly avoided a scored point for the other team, the moment they tap the ball back over the net you've got to do it again. Now, that said, I know SOME girls can be very good at helping with this situation and will help steer a conversation a bit with things like "I've never really played $SOME_GAME, have you played $OTHER_GAME? I really enjoyed that one". Others...not so much. However, this goes back to the random answer key example.
Honestly, half the steps you listed are, in fact, common sense. This one, however, does require a little give and take from both sides, and I feel that if ladies in general were a bit more gracious and patient with guys who made an awkward (not overtly offensive, simply awkward or suboptimal) first impression without jumping to "creep" before "shy/insecure", I think it would significantly help the situation overall. Think about it: is a guy who has a positive encounter with a girl (and by "positive" I mean "fun conversation about a mutually enjoyable activity", not "sex") going to refer to her as a 'bitch' thereafter? Or is it starting with assumptions on both sides that perpetuates the trend?
But Microsoft has an history of successfully managing to destroy competition by bundling inferior products (As an example: real-time compression almost died during the Stacker vs. Doublespace saga).
Valve is completely right in attempting to get prepared for the worst.
Counterexamples: Winzip (albeit now an arm of Corel) and RAR Labs still exist and sell compression utilities, despite Windows having bundled ZIP file handling for the last 11 years.
In all honesty, Windows Compressed Folders suck compared to WinZIP and WinRAR. You have zero options, and it tends to fall over when you get to between 700MB and 1GB of data (don't know if they fixed that since say WinXP SP1, but it's probably still a problem).
True, you have zero options...but "extract stuff" and "add stuff" are going to be the most common things people do with ZIP files, and I'm pretty sure that Winzip had no shortage of people who bought Winzip almost exclusively for those things. The entire point of the GP's post was the fact that MS was eating the lunch of companies who made "very good" tools simply by bundling "good enough" tools with the OS.
Corel, Cyberlink, and Adobe's Fisher Price division are still making plenty of money despite the existence of Windows Movie Maker.
And Windows Movie Maker sucks compared to nearly anything else. Also note, that all those companies provide versions for Mac as well.
Neither Cyberlink PowerDirector nor Corel VideoStudio are available on OSX. Premiere Elements is, but it faces the same problem on the Mac platform as it directly competes with the bundled iMovie. Again, the GP's point was that Microsoft's "Good enough" replaces superior tools.
Stardock makes a majority of their money by making programs that change the look of Windows despite Windows having a perfectly functional UI out of the box.
Some people like to customize their desktop look 'n feel. Microsoft does provide some ability to do that, but it can be rather difficult to setup. For example, try changing the colors for the various dialogs in a consistent way - it's a PITA on Windows. Third Party tools make it easier to get all those settings correct, and build themes that are consistent.
Stardock's tools are epic. Fences and ObjectDock are lifesavers. However, while I can concede that Stardock's titles fit less with the others, my point was that there is a workable UI that ships with Windows.
Just because Microsoft bundles something doesn't equate with destroying established inertia.
That depends on their goal. In most cases its the Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish (EEE of Microsoft), and then they do. Sometimes they add something and kind of forget about it - it still affects the competitor - yes WinRAR and WinZIP likely lost some business because of Compressed Folders; but then, most of what they lost was probably just customers using their demo products so it's not much of a loss. (7zip has a deeper impact on them both.)
How much who lost is a question that would require balance sheets. If the Steam Hardware Survey is any indication, WinRAR has fared much better than Winzip; the former having over 44% install base against Steam and the latter is a paltry 4.3%. I concur that 7zip is an excellent alternative to both, with IZArc being much better for those who like the traditional WinZip UI. Presumably, your point is that since Microsoft wasn't gunning for that market, they've been able to survive better than Netscape was.
Again, the question posed by the summary was where Steam fits into this. If Microsoft has their crosshairs on Valve, then by your logic (not an entirely unsound one), they're preparing to avoid being the next Netscape. MS could be gunning for Valve's market the way they went after Netscape, but they will have a coop full of eggs on their face if Valve pulls off a WinRAR instead.
But Microsoft has an history of successfully managing to destroy competition by bundling inferior products (As an example: real-time compression almost died during the Stacker vs. Doublespace saga).
Valve is completely right in attempting to get prepared for the worst.
Counterexamples: Winzip (albeit now an arm of Corel) and RAR Labs still exist and sell compression utilities, despite Windows having bundled ZIP file handling for the last 11 years. Corel, Cyberlink, and Adobe's Fisher Price division are still making plenty of money despite the existence of Windows Movie Maker. Stardock makes a majority of their money by making programs that change the look of Windows despite Windows having a perfectly functional UI out of the box.
Just because Microsoft bundles something doesn't equate with destroying established inertia. Gamers who use Steam and have a decent quantity of games in their account will likely keep them. If for no other reason, games like CoD: Black Ops and Portal 2 ship with what amounts to a Steam backup on a plastic disc. You're using Steam one way or the other with those titles, so it will push its way on. Plus, it remains to be seen if the Microsoft App Store will be running the kind of sales Steam does that have twisted my arm into buying games I otherwise had no intention of buying except that they were $5.
What about focusing on the creationist teaching and scientific demonization? Where are the moderate christians on that? As the GP said, "various referendums around the country definitely indicate that these mythical voiceless moderates dont really represent a significant percentage of christians, much less the general population."
I find it disheartening to be sabotaging our children w/ the level of education and anti-science stance that seems to be coming from the far christian right but I am not seeing (significant percentages of) moderates marginalizing the loonies.
A bit of a strawman here. Teaching Creationism to one's own children does not in itself advocate violence toward abortion clinics or picketing at soldiers' funerals or homosexual marriage ceremonies.
I went to an explicitly religious school. Did I learn about Creationism? yes. Did I learn about evolution and the big bang theory? of course - and I aced the New York State Regents exams on Earth Science and Living Environment ('biology' by any other name), and got a B in chemistry. Despite going to a Christian school, I wasn't taught about Creationism at the expense of Evolution, and few parents (certainly not my own) would have had it any other way. The science departments taught us about chemical reactions and fossil records and DNA replication like every other school in the state - better than 90% of the public school districts in the county based on New York State Regents test scores, in fact.
Seriously, I don't understand where all this "Christians are against teaching science" stuff is coming from. The earth is round and revolved around the sun, cells divide, fossils are found in rock layers (though admittedly the Genesis Flood is considered responsible for this, and yes, that's an explanation I'll personally align myself with), DNA is made of four amino acids, and giraffes with long necks will reproduce more successfully than giraffes with short necks in areas where accessible food is kept in trees high up off the ground.
For those calling for Christians to speak out against individuals who are in favor of violence against abortion clinics, violence against gays, significant discrimination against...basically anyone, or banning science in classrooms (one of these things is not like the other...), I, for one, am explicitly stating these things. Yes, seven levels deep in a Slashdot thread isn't much of a pulpit to stand on, but these things are NOT in line with the Bible I read or the God I serve, and I do NOT endorse these actions.
I have mod points and karma, but I'm down for losing both...
The Bible doesn't say "Thou shalt not judge". In Matthew 7:1-2, Jesus says, "“Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you." For the extent of your post it's merely a point of semantics, but it does go both ways. If the measuring rod I will be judged with is my own, then it makes the most sense for me to assume as little as possible, gather as much information, and attempt to give the other person the benefit of the doubt. After all, that's the measuring rod I'd want to be judged with.
That said, as a Christ follower myself, I do my best to put up with a lot of the general anti-Christianity sentiment on Slashdot. Plenty of it is deserved for a lot of reasons, and I realize that it comes with the territory of the name. I consider it quite possibly the greatest irony of all time that "Christian" was a term first used by nonbelievers to describe those following Christ because of how closely they emulated Him. Today, that same name is nearly synonymous with acting the opposite of Jesus.
The reason I bring this up is this: Yes, Christianity has its issues. Yes, we've got a bad reputation that we've, in many cases, brought upon ourselves. Yes, we could, as a whole, stand to become a lot more loving and a lot less judgmental. We could stand to do a lot more listening and a lot less talking. BUT...having been raised in church - and a fairly stiff, conservative one at that - and having visited several others in my area from many different denominations - I have yet to meet ONE Christian who agrees with abortion clinic bombings or the Westboro Baptist protests. On the contrary, they're generally just as outraged as you are about those issues.
I know it goes against the stereotype, but unfortunately an extremely vocal minority gets a lot more press coverage than the positive groups that help feed homeless people, work to facilitate drug rehabilitation, and just in general try to service their communities. Don't believe it happens? I've personally been involved in these activities numerous times throughout the years, but think about it: the people picketing want attention, and get it. People actually helping, generally don't do it for the publicity, so they don't get any.
No church is perfect, and some are more involved than others. That doesn't mean that churches generally support causing harm or performing acts of vandalism to the staff and buildings of abortion clinics or wish physical harm toward homosexuals.
Netcraft confirmation or it didn't happen.
Incidentally, a "hard drive crash" used to mean a head touched the disk and physically damaged the head and/or the disk.
...and today, "my hard drive crashed" can mean basically anything. I can't count how many times I've heard someone say "my hard drive crashed" only to have their response to my question of "how do you know" sound something like, "well, when I go to 'my documents, Word doesn't load" or some other similar error where the hard disk is clearly not to blame. I tried educating people on the actual meaning of the term, but it seemed a losing battle, so now "my hard drive crashed" generally translates to "something is broken", unless it's a fellow computer tech who I'm certain knows what an actual hard disk crash looks like.
Many, MANY people buy Macs because they believe that they are better/more stable/more secure than the Windows machines they've used for the past decade. Whether they are or are not is an endless Slashdot debate that is completely tangential to my point, because what's at question here is the perception, not the reality.
If people perceive the Mac to be the stable part, software that doesn't work will likely be blamed on the developer, not Apple. To them, a sandbox is a place young children play in, not a computer security model. A developer trying to explain this to someone who truly doesn't understand the security model will make himself look foolish to the customer, not enlighten the customer.
The App Store will still be used by many Mac users in the same way Origin is used by EA customers. Few (if any) EA customers desired Origin, it's just necessary for Battlefield 3, Mass Effect 3, and The Sims. Similarly, even if many Apple developers ditch the App Store, the fact that Final Cut Studio, Logic, and Aperture are available through it will keep a huge demographic begrudgingly using it. Adobe is probably the one company who can likely keep a working trigger finger on Apple preventing conventional software installations, but their pushing their 'Creative Cloud' model may weaken their grip on said trigger. Ableton and Serato may be in a position to help pick up the slack a bit, but they definitely don't have the same level of clout.
Finally, long time Mac incumbents may be wary of the Mac App Store, but newcomers who love their iPhone/iPod/iPad may be more inclined to start at the App Store since that's "where software comes from". It's part of the vertical solution that they feel they bought from Apple. The question will be whether developer A's FOO_APP skiddishness in being included in the App Store will be the golden opportunity for similarly-functioning FRA_APP to eat its lunch. Again, Adobe may be able to keep itself afloat with selling stuff through adobe.com/journeyed/cdw/staples, but searching the App Store through functionality puts developers on much more even levels for those that would be affected by the sandboxing and not having a legal team at their disposal to go RIAA on their posteriors.
And all of that is utterly meaningless until Netcraft confirms it.