...that RAH is a lot more polite in that letter than I would have expected from his books.
I found the letter insulting and sarcastic, and calculated to hurt everyone who received one. A simpler, more polite response would be to have each of the checkboxed items by itself on its own page; form letters still, but one that doesn't beat the recipient over the head with "Your letter is completely unimportant to me."
Heinlein was very intolerant of anyone who challenged certain of his political views, even driving away life-long friends over very minor issues.
He ended his friendship with Arthur C. Clarke because Clarke had the audacity to express his opinion of SDI.
You can read Spider Robinson's biography and literary reviews of Heinleins work for the sordid details, if you care about that sort of thing.
Also Asimov had a section on Heinlein's vicious streak in his biography I, Asimov.
Don't mistake the author for his protagonists.
Eh. I know nothing annoys a Heinlein fan more than the theory that Heinlein wrote Lazarus Long as a wish fulfillment fantasy, but I think it has a grain of truth in it. And while not all the political views of his characters line up with his (especially since his changed as he aged), I think enough did to suggest that Heinlein liked to write versions of himself into stories.
Webkit, which was adopted by Apple and Google for use in the Safari and Chrome browsers. I have been using Chrome on my work PC and find many of its features compelling, and wonder how soon we will see its best innovations in Firefox. Why is Gecko worth keeping if it is outdated and bloated?
It's like one of those stories where a sane traveller finds himself in a bizarre realm where everyone is crazy. Like something from the Twilight Zone.
Chrome's rendering engine is so ridiculously slow that I stopped using it after a few minutes. Hasn't anyone else noticed? Or is everyone too polite to point out that Google did a poor job? A quick google search shows that at least this guy agrees with me. What about the rest of you? Did you notice that Chrome takes like 3 times as long as Mozilla to render a page? Do you think maybe that's why Mozilla shouldn't adopt Chrome's rendering engine? Is Rod Serling going to suddenly appear in my living room and do a monologue?
Ah, Palin has managed a budget as an executive much larger than Obama ever has. She's balanced a budget, she's actually gotten more money from "big oil"... she's cut checks to everyone in Alaska out of a surplus that she created... So, when Obama manages anything that has nearly 20 billion a year in revenue, you let me know. The fact of the matter is, she has more experience than -anyone- else on the ticket as an executive. If Obama had picked a VP governor from any state - even New Jersey... he'd be totally immune to this criticism. But, tsk, tsk, he picked another Senator and opened himself up on this front.
Only that does not contradict my statement about her being an extremist. I think you need to educate yourself on her history, and not just fall for republican spin. While mayor of Wasilla she injected national politics into a small town, removing democratic officials purely because they were democrats.
And you honestly think she "created" the surplus? It's purely a result of Alaska's oil and has nothing to do with any management skills on her part. Do you think managing a state of 670k people for only 2 years, where the federal government owns and manages 65% of the territory, somehow qualifies her as more able than Obama is ludicrous.
You can believe MoveOn.org and DailyKos as much as some people believe in NationalReview, but, at the end of the day, most people see it for the mud slinging as it is, unless you come up with something really good, like Swift Boats.
Mud slinging has been working for 200 years; you're naive if you think people generally see through it. If Obama loses the next democratic candidate (presumably Hillary Clinton) will hopefully go on the offensive.
Au contraire. McCain has always been representative of those of us Republicans that cheered when he condemned the extreme right for intolerance. There's plenty of people who have noticed that McCain voted against the Bush tax cuts and argued to pay off the federal debt instead, argued against expanding medicare when we can't pay for what we already had, argued against NCLB (well intended but ultimately a disaster)... and, of course, McCain made himself even more famous by arguing that the USA needed more troops in Iraq. Most damning of all, Woodward, hardly a fan of Republican politics, has McCain quoted storming out of the white house, saying, "All I get about the war is f--- spin."
As a liberal democrat I always admired McCain, and if the McCain of 8 years ago were running now I'd be a lot less worried about him winning. But seeing him just subordinate himself to the far-right wing of the republican party makes it look like he'll do anything to get elected. I mean letting Karl Rove advise him? After the 2000 campaign? I'd love it if after McCain got elected he'd turn on them but I really think he's just going to let it slide. Which is a shame; Rove needs to be in jail for a wide variety of things he's done, the most egregious probably being the Don Siegelman prosecution.
Obama's never really lost and one has to wonder if he will panic when McCain pulls ahead in the polls post convention.
Huh? Obama lost a primary election in 2000 for the house of representatives.
Obama's pick of Biden as a VP was just a disaster. Nobody likes Joe Biden, even in Delaware, but here in the 1st state our GOP is so retarded that Biden always wins. Obama let himself get talked into thinking that he needed a foreign policy wonk added to the ticket and really, that's just stupid. Most people get the sense that foreign policy is really about being fair but firm and Obama already had foreign policy sewn up after his wildly successful European trip.
I like Biden. Has a tendency to say stupid stuff, but he's a smart guy, and it's nice to see someone on the national stage who actually seems to enjoy politics rather than see it purely as a means to an end.
I would say that Sarah Palin's retort on drilling (borrowed from Paris Hilton - we Republicans have no pride), was absolutely devastating.
Palin is a small-town extremist; if Obama was willing to actually go on the offensive more often she'd be an easy target. Unfortunately, with the exception of Bill Clinton, democratic candidates for the past 40 years have shown themselves as horrible campaigners.
I really don't want to get stuck with McCain just because we all sat on our asses and congratulated ourselves on a job well-done, when it hadn't even been done yet.
I'm an Obama supporter and I'm fairly sure McCain is going to win.
The fact that you are on Slashdot says that you are NOT 'the average voter' that the OP was talking about. Hate to break it to you, but the vast majority of people really don't have a clue, or indeed care that they don't.
Funny, I have seen tremendous displays of political ignorance on Slashdot; in fact, a lot of people here take pride in such ignorant statements as "both parties are the same."
It's not, really. Consoles will hit the same problem eventually. Might take a little longer because console gamers tend to be a little less sophisticated than computer gamers.
While I applaud every item on the list, I don't really think those things will "save" PC gaming simply because they're not the reason PC gaming was weakened so much.
The problem with PC gaming is that a lot of the smaller companies were driven out of business, while the bigger companies obsessively followed each other. How many WW2 FPSes have we had to endure over the past decade? How many futuristic and ancient world RTSes? At first that works. If someone loved starcraft, then there's a good chance they'll buy the next two clones, but after a while it just gets tedious.
I mean, look at CRPGs; the neverending AD&D gold box RPGs killed the CRPG market until Baldur's Gate. Doom was a great game, but we had to spend the next several years getting forcefed Doom clones (half of them produced by Id themselves). Starcraft cloned countless futuristic FPSes, and Starcraft itself originally copied off of Dune (via Warcraft maybe). I lost track of all the Age of Empire (itself not an especially original game) clones.
The DMCA takedown provisions do indeed make the issue between the alleged infringer and the CoS, but that deals with whether the material goes back up or not. The claims that the parent were advocating--perjury and free speech violations--don't really hold water, at least in the US. Perjury is not civilly actionable here, and because these are private actors there's no specific free speech violation I can think of.
The people posting the videos do have standing to bring a suit for damages under 17 USC 512(f), but can only recover damages caused by the bad takedown notice. The only way they can do a class action is if enough of them fight it, and incur expenses because of it.
Anybody spot a GLARING, COMPLETELY LUDICROUS issue here?
Don't talk to me about Govt or National Security; He caused NO significant financial loss and caused NO national security issues past what was already there through inept administration.
Sometimes the attempt is punished even though there's no actual damage. Or do you think attempted murder should be a misdemeanor?
I was wondering - but of course, there's no way to prove it without gaining access at the highest echelons - if there is more than one version of Scientology. The "trashy science fiction" version (everything beyond a certain point in the theology) is drip-fed to people who've paid up enough money. The "no scifi rubbish" version (basically, everything except the story of Xenu) is the version that celebrities hear - and they're told "that's all there is to it".
I think it's more along the lines of how much a person can take in the beginning. Even most credulous people would laugh at being introduced to thetans and xenu right away; it takes years of brainwashing to build up the right foundation to be introduced to the scifi aspects.
Everyone who had a video taken down because of this needs to form a class-action suit and counter immediately. You can't have a video taken down in this manner without it (a) violating many nation's free-speech laws; and (b) violating perjury laws. Hit 'em where it hurts.
Wouldn't work; the people who uploaded the videos have no standing to bring a suit. The only parties here are the CoS and youtube.
relax regulations on battery technology and allow more nuclear power plants.
In neither case is government regulations the problem. Battery technology hasn't advanced much because the people designing them still haven't figured out how to dramatically increase battery power. And there aren't any new nuclear power plants because it is hideously expensive to make them.
Somehow I doubt that will work with any frequency - you'd think newegg would wise up after the 3rd return with tool marks on it.
I don't think Newegg's profit margins are such that they can absorb that much cost. And I think you'd be surprised how many people see nothing wrong with doing this sort of thing.
But Nintendo is a business, and the Wii is a product released to make money, not meet some fuzzy ideological concept of what a perfect console should be.
And this is slashdot, not business week, where we should focus on quality rather than business plans.
The moment you define your genre as 'graphics-intensive' I get a horrible feeling... is your favorite movie genre 'CGI-intensive'?;)
Haha nooo, I'm actually an old-school gamer (I'm talking 80's; most games I play these days are 90s games on gametap). But I do appreciate graphics in the sense that a great graphics engine + inspired art design can really add to a game. And while this definitely goes against conventional slashdot logic, just because there are pretty graphics don't mean the gameplay automatically sucks. Some of the best console games I've ever played had beautiful graphics that used the console's GPUs fully.
Slashdot Mirror
...that RAH is a lot more polite in that letter than I would have expected from his books.
I found the letter insulting and sarcastic, and calculated to hurt everyone who received one. A simpler, more polite response would be to have each of the checkboxed items by itself on its own page; form letters still, but one that doesn't beat the recipient over the head with "Your letter is completely unimportant to me."
Heinlein was very intolerant of anyone who challenged certain of his political views, even driving away life-long friends over very minor issues.
He ended his friendship with Arthur C. Clarke because Clarke had the audacity to express his opinion of SDI.
You can read Spider Robinson's biography and literary reviews of Heinleins work for the sordid details, if you care about that sort of thing.
Also Asimov had a section on Heinlein's vicious streak in his biography I, Asimov.
Don't mistake the author for his protagonists.
Eh. I know nothing annoys a Heinlein fan more than the theory that Heinlein wrote Lazarus Long as a wish fulfillment fantasy, but I think it has a grain of truth in it. And while not all the political views of his characters line up with his (especially since his changed as he aged), I think enough did to suggest that Heinlein liked to write versions of himself into stories.
Webkit, which was adopted by Apple and Google for use in the Safari and Chrome browsers. I have been using Chrome on my work PC and find many of its features compelling, and wonder how soon we will see its best innovations in Firefox. Why is Gecko worth keeping if it is outdated and bloated?
It's like one of those stories where a sane traveller finds himself in a bizarre realm where everyone is crazy. Like something from the Twilight Zone.
Chrome's rendering engine is so ridiculously slow that I stopped using it after a few minutes. Hasn't anyone else noticed? Or is everyone too polite to point out that Google did a poor job? A quick google search shows that at least this guy agrees with me. What about the rest of you? Did you notice that Chrome takes like 3 times as long as Mozilla to render a page? Do you think maybe that's why Mozilla shouldn't adopt Chrome's rendering engine? Is Rod Serling going to suddenly appear in my living room and do a monologue?
It's not for innovative games -- why do people leave Counter-Strike for Halo?
Because Halo's a better game I think.
Ah, Palin has managed a budget as an executive much larger than Obama ever has. She's balanced a budget, she's actually gotten more money from "big oil"... she's cut checks to everyone in Alaska out of a surplus that she created... So, when Obama manages anything that has nearly 20 billion a year in revenue, you let me know. The fact of the matter is, she has more experience than -anyone- else on the ticket as an executive. If Obama had picked a VP governor from any state - even New Jersey... he'd be totally immune to this criticism. But, tsk, tsk, he picked another Senator and opened himself up on this front.
Only that does not contradict my statement about her being an extremist. I think you need to educate yourself on her history, and not just fall for republican spin. While mayor of Wasilla she injected national politics into a small town, removing democratic officials purely because they were democrats.
And you honestly think she "created" the surplus? It's purely a result of Alaska's oil and has nothing to do with any management skills on her part. Do you think managing a state of 670k people for only 2 years, where the federal government owns and manages 65% of the territory, somehow qualifies her as more able than Obama is ludicrous.
You can believe MoveOn.org and DailyKos as much as some people believe in NationalReview, but, at the end of the day, most people see it for the mud slinging as it is, unless you come up with something really good, like Swift Boats.
Mud slinging has been working for 200 years; you're naive if you think people generally see through it. If Obama loses the next democratic candidate (presumably Hillary Clinton) will hopefully go on the offensive.
Au contraire. McCain has always been representative of those of us Republicans that cheered when he condemned the extreme right for intolerance. There's plenty of people who have noticed that McCain voted against the Bush tax cuts and argued to pay off the federal debt instead, argued against expanding medicare when we can't pay for what we already had, argued against NCLB (well intended but ultimately a disaster)... and, of course, McCain made himself even more famous by arguing that the USA needed more troops in Iraq. Most damning of all, Woodward, hardly a fan of Republican politics, has McCain quoted storming out of the white house, saying, "All I get about the war is f--- spin."
As a liberal democrat I always admired McCain, and if the McCain of 8 years ago were running now I'd be a lot less worried about him winning. But seeing him just subordinate himself to the far-right wing of the republican party makes it look like he'll do anything to get elected. I mean letting Karl Rove advise him? After the 2000 campaign? I'd love it if after McCain got elected he'd turn on them but I really think he's just going to let it slide. Which is a shame; Rove needs to be in jail for a wide variety of things he's done, the most egregious probably being the Don Siegelman prosecution.
Obama's never really lost and one has to wonder if he will panic when McCain pulls ahead in the polls post convention.
Huh? Obama lost a primary election in 2000 for the house of representatives.
Obama's pick of Biden as a VP was just a disaster. Nobody likes Joe Biden, even in Delaware, but here in the 1st state our GOP is so retarded that Biden always wins. Obama let himself get talked into thinking that he needed a foreign policy wonk added to the ticket and really, that's just stupid. Most people get the sense that foreign policy is really about being fair but firm and Obama already had foreign policy sewn up after his wildly successful European trip.
I like Biden. Has a tendency to say stupid stuff, but he's a smart guy, and it's nice to see someone on the national stage who actually seems to enjoy politics rather than see it purely as a means to an end.
I would say that Sarah Palin's retort on drilling (borrowed from Paris Hilton - we Republicans have no pride), was absolutely devastating.
Palin is a small-town extremist; if Obama was willing to actually go on the offensive more often she'd be an easy target. Unfortunately, with the exception of Bill Clinton, democratic candidates for the past 40 years have shown themselves as horrible campaigners.
I really don't want to get stuck with McCain just because we all sat on our asses and congratulated ourselves on a job well-done, when it hadn't even been done yet.
I'm an Obama supporter and I'm fairly sure McCain is going to win.
The fact that you are on Slashdot says that you are NOT 'the average voter' that the OP was talking about. Hate to break it to you, but the vast majority of people really don't have a clue, or indeed care that they don't.
Funny, I have seen tremendous displays of political ignorance on Slashdot; in fact, a lot of people here take pride in such ignorant statements as "both parties are the same."
And this is different than consoles, how?
It's not, really. Consoles will hit the same problem eventually. Might take a little longer because console gamers tend to be a little less sophisticated than computer gamers.
While I applaud every item on the list, I don't really think those things will "save" PC gaming simply because they're not the reason PC gaming was weakened so much.
The problem with PC gaming is that a lot of the smaller companies were driven out of business, while the bigger companies obsessively followed each other. How many WW2 FPSes have we had to endure over the past decade? How many futuristic and ancient world RTSes? At first that works. If someone loved starcraft, then there's a good chance they'll buy the next two clones, but after a while it just gets tedious.
I mean, look at CRPGs; the neverending AD&D gold box RPGs killed the CRPG market until Baldur's Gate. Doom was a great game, but we had to spend the next several years getting forcefed Doom clones (half of them produced by Id themselves). Starcraft cloned countless futuristic FPSes, and Starcraft itself originally copied off of Dune (via Warcraft maybe). I lost track of all the Age of Empire (itself not an especially original game) clones.
And I correctly determined that 100% of diseases are caused by some combination of only 117 atomic elements. Give me my Nobel.
No. As long as youtube complies with DMCA notices and any counter notices, they are NOT involved anymore, it's between the CoS and the video's uploader. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Copyright_Infringement_Liability_Limitation_Act AKA the DMCA takedown provisions
The DMCA takedown provisions do indeed make the issue between the alleged infringer and the CoS, but that deals with whether the material goes back up or not. The claims that the parent were advocating--perjury and free speech violations--don't really hold water, at least in the US. Perjury is not civilly actionable here, and because these are private actors there's no specific free speech violation I can think of.
The people posting the videos do have standing to bring a suit for damages under 17 USC 512(f), but can only recover damages caused by the bad takedown notice. The only way they can do a class action is if enough of them fight it, and incur expenses because of it.
Anybody spot a GLARING, COMPLETELY LUDICROUS issue here? Don't talk to me about Govt or National Security; He caused NO significant financial loss and caused NO national security issues past what was already there through inept administration.
Sometimes the attempt is punished even though there's no actual damage. Or do you think attempted murder should be a misdemeanor?
After all, those banks rolled their dice and took their chances, right? Where's the incentive for responsibility if we don't let anyone pay the piper?
No no no no...only people who actually suffer when the economy tanks have to pay the piper. If you're already rich the government will rescue you.
I was wondering - but of course, there's no way to prove it without gaining access at the highest echelons - if there is more than one version of Scientology. The "trashy science fiction" version (everything beyond a certain point in the theology) is drip-fed to people who've paid up enough money. The "no scifi rubbish" version (basically, everything except the story of Xenu) is the version that celebrities hear - and they're told "that's all there is to it".
I think it's more along the lines of how much a person can take in the beginning. Even most credulous people would laugh at being introduced to thetans and xenu right away; it takes years of brainwashing to build up the right foundation to be introduced to the scifi aspects.
Everyone who had a video taken down because of this needs to form a class-action suit and counter immediately. You can't have a video taken down in this manner without it (a) violating many nation's free-speech laws; and (b) violating perjury laws. Hit 'em where it hurts.
Wouldn't work; the people who uploaded the videos have no standing to bring a suit. The only parties here are the CoS and youtube.
There are no nuclear power plants because a few people have been able to block the technology and growth since the 1970s.
Wrong. You're getting taken in by anti-environmentalist culture warrior zealots. Financially, building new plants just hasn't been worth it.
relax regulations on battery technology and allow more nuclear power plants.
In neither case is government regulations the problem. Battery technology hasn't advanced much because the people designing them still haven't figured out how to dramatically increase battery power. And there aren't any new nuclear power plants because it is hideously expensive to make them.
Somehow I doubt that will work with any frequency - you'd think newegg would wise up after the 3rd return with tool marks on it.
I don't think Newegg's profit margins are such that they can absorb that much cost. And I think you'd be surprised how many people see nothing wrong with doing this sort of thing.
Yes, it's fast.
FAST?? Are we talking about the same browser?? The only thing Chrome seems to be faster at is javascript; everything else crawls.
I agree - RMA for return for defective items should NOT have a restocking fee.
So in other words if someone wants to RMA a perfectly working piece of equipment, they should just take a hammer to it prior to returning it?
Sure, no problem.
Or maybe Adam simply didn't know what the fuck he was talking about, and like many Slashdotters simply handwaved a tinfoil hat theory into existence.
That's just what the illuminati want you to believe.
even to the point that I don't use chrome solely because google may be watching.
I guess I'm too trusting, I only don't use chrome because it's the slowest renderer ever.
But Nintendo is a business, and the Wii is a product released to make money, not meet some fuzzy ideological concept of what a perfect console should be.
;)
And this is slashdot, not business week, where we should focus on quality rather than business plans.
The moment you define your genre as 'graphics-intensive' I get a horrible feeling... is your favorite movie genre 'CGI-intensive'?
Haha nooo, I'm actually an old-school gamer (I'm talking 80's; most games I play these days are 90s games on gametap). But I do appreciate graphics in the sense that a great graphics engine + inspired art design can really add to a game. And while this definitely goes against conventional slashdot logic, just because there are pretty graphics don't mean the gameplay automatically sucks. Some of the best console games I've ever played had beautiful graphics that used the console's GPUs fully.