>His goverment has taken almost 100% private media (of seven networks, five were owned by the banking cartel) and divided the airspace into 33% PRIVATE OWNED, 33% run by community groups governed and run by local communities/university/cultural - i.e. not run by the party in power - verified by UNESCO, remaining 33% state owned media. A far cry from your "nationalize [all] the press" assertion.
You don't need to nationalize all the press. Taking you at your word, currently there are 7 media outlets, 5 of which are owned by someone hostile to Correa. Afterward, you will have.33 * 7 = two private outlets - which ones do you think Correa will shut down?
And then he'll replace those with "community voices" (read: socialist) and government run media outlets.
>Ecuador's President Attacks US Over Press Freedom Critique
This is a very accurate title.
When the US criticized him over freedom of the press, he didn't argue about that point at all. He just did a typical Marxist move and attacked the US over its wars, Guantanamo, and drone strikes, never addressing the issue at all.
Obviously they are trying to be a shining beacon of free speech like their good friends in Venezuela.:p
Correa is a smart guy, but he's also a socialist and has the socialist disdain for freedom of the press. While you may be absolutely right that the press represents corporate interests over the people's interests, passing laws to make it illegal to criticize the president does *not* make him a hero of free speech. He's trying to ban the opposition from speaking and putting party-controlled voices in their place.
Unless you loved Pravda and want to see more of the same, this is not a good thing.
Eh, what competition? The same reason that I quit WoW (due to being dumbed down) has been copied by its competitors, which makes me utterly uninterested in playing them. I sometimes long for someone to do something along the lines of the original vision for Ultima Online. (Not how UO turned out, but the original vision.)
The only MMORPG I've enjoyed recently is The Secret World, which allows for a much more interesting customization of characters, and no monthlies.
>>(In my case, it was pretty cool -- I came up to the ticket counter, and a rather attractive blonde woman started chatting me up. We were about 3-4 minutes into the conversation before I realized i was being profiled. She wasn't wearing a uniform or anything).
And the worst part is they promote something heavily and then turn around and drop it later, leading to people not wanting to learn their new tech, since it'll probably go away soon enough. Like watching Fox TV shows.
Microsoft Research is actually doing a lot of really interesting, really cutting edge stuff. The trouble is, none of that stuff seems to be making it into their commercial offerings.
>99.9% of copies are sold on new PCs or as part of bulk licences in businesses
They (used to) sell large numbers of upgrade copies of their OS. Win7 sold 100 million copies in six months, which was much faster than Win8 adoption due to the upgrade copies being sold.
I'd buy Win8 in a heartbeat if it wasn't a piece of shit.
>Stardock isn't a digital distribution platform. You're thinking of (*shudder*) Gamestop.
Same thing. Stardock sold Impulse to Gamestop.
My point is that I place value in having one centralized location for my digital games. As long as Steam doesn't charge more for their games than the other digital download venues, I will continue to buy everything through them. I hate having multiple clients and multiple friends lists, etc., open at once.
>I think you fail to realize that there should be more options available to you as a consumer. On one side we have publishers like EA becoming distributors,
Actually, I'm kind of pissed off about Origin. If EA sold its games on both Origin and on Steam, I wouldn't have a problem - between all the different digital distribution platforms (Stardock, etc.) you can often find sales for games you want to play. But Origin just fractures my games library into two different places, two different sets of friends lists that can send invites when I'm in some other game because they don't know I'm busy doing something else, and so forth.
I bought ME3 just to finish the trilogy, but have not bought a single other game on Origin and am happy with keeping it that way.
Steam used to be a lot worse, too. IIRC, it had some memory leaks that (rightfully) gave it a bad reputation. Right now, it's sitting in the background taking up 16MB of RAM, which, yes, used to be a ton of memory but now is an insignificant fraction that will not impact my performance in the slightest.
Running Steam isn't much of a hassle now. It used to be a bit of a resource hog, but not any more - it's currently using 74MB of RAM. Whoopdie shit. Other than an OCD obsession from the 90s about not having any background apps left open, it doesn't make any significant difference.
Most games on Steam don't have additional DRM, and I don't buy those that do.
And if you don't like Steam, go with GOG.com games. All of 'em are DRM free.
Fortunately our US Attorneys are well-known for their common sense and restraint, and when they *do* go overboard, they get fired and disbarred like Carmen Ortiz.
>And meanwhile, foreign media all but ignore the close to 20 000 dead from the tsunami; that was the real disaster.
Or the Oil Refinery in Chiba City that went up in a giant fireball during the Tohoku Earthquake, killing a bunch of people. Hey, it's not nuclear, so it's not *scary*.
In this case, the TSA was responding to flight attendants who were reportedly up in arms about people being able to carry swiss army knives on planes again.
So put blame where it is due - the TSA was trying to do the right thing here, but got shouted down by the masses.
Slashdot Mirror
>For only $2100. What a steal!
Yeah, for that price I could build a much, much better rig.
>I've created a petition demanding that the administration to hold itself accountable (or that Congress should do so if the administration won't).
That's a https:/// link.
The whitehouse.gov site does not support HTTPS.
I suppose there's something either funny or ironic about that, but I'm too tired to come up with something right now.
I'll read Mother Jones and Glenn Beck on the same topics, to get both sides of a story, so you're sort of preaching to the choir.
Nothing changes the fact that Correa doesn't give a rat's ass about freedom of the press.
>His goverment has taken almost 100% private media (of seven networks, five were owned by the banking cartel) and divided the airspace into 33% PRIVATE OWNED, 33% run by community groups governed and run by local communities/university/cultural - i.e. not run by the party in power - verified by UNESCO, remaining 33% state owned media. A far cry from your "nationalize [all] the press" assertion.
You don't need to nationalize all the press. Taking you at your word, currently there are 7 media outlets, 5 of which are owned by someone hostile to Correa. Afterward, you will have .33 * 7 = two private outlets - which ones do you think Correa will shut down?
And then he'll replace those with "community voices" (read: socialist) and government run media outlets.
>Ecuador's President Attacks US Over Press Freedom Critique
This is a very accurate title.
When the US criticized him over freedom of the press, he didn't argue about that point at all. He just did a typical Marxist move and attacked the US over its wars, Guantanamo, and drone strikes, never addressing the issue at all.
Correa prosecuted his own defamation case, and is trying to nationalize the press.
As I said, he's not a beacon of free speech.
>I see no difference between the US corporate media and (the old) Pravda. Both are merely instruments of pro-government propaganda.
Which is why we never saw anyone in the media critical of Bush, right?
You need to learn the different forms of media bias.
Obviously they are trying to be a shining beacon of free speech like their good friends in Venezuela. :p
Correa is a smart guy, but he's also a socialist and has the socialist disdain for freedom of the press. While you may be absolutely right that the press represents corporate interests over the people's interests, passing laws to make it illegal to criticize the president does *not* make him a hero of free speech. He's trying to ban the opposition from speaking and putting party-controlled voices in their place.
Unless you loved Pravda and want to see more of the same, this is not a good thing.
I tried it. Wasn't especially impressed with the lack of options in building a character. Combat was very repetitive.
Beautiful though.
No, since quitting WoW in 2007, I have played hardly any MMORPGs at all.
It has left a massively bitter taste in my mouth which has ruined the entire genre for me.
All the WoW clones and F2P crap do nothing to try to lure me back.
>It's not so much the game as the competition
Eh, what competition? The same reason that I quit WoW (due to being dumbed down) has been copied by its competitors, which makes me utterly uninterested in playing them. I sometimes long for someone to do something along the lines of the original vision for Ultima Online. (Not how UO turned out, but the original vision.)
The only MMORPG I've enjoyed recently is The Secret World, which allows for a much more interesting customization of characters, and no monthlies.
>And making two devices called "Surface" that run different OS's isn't helping, nice going geniuses.
*Three* devices. They also had a touchscreen table tech demo called the Surface as well...
>They just didn't like the look of my '83 Citation on the road at 2AM.
Nobody likes the look of a Citation.
Source: I used to drive an '81 Citation.
I find it odd that they'd go out of their way to make even less applications able to run on RT.
Ok, well, not "odd". Just blindingly stupid, given how little market share it has.
>>(In my case, it was pretty cool -- I came up to the ticket counter, and a rather attractive blonde woman started chatting me up. We were about 3-4 minutes into the conversation before I realized i was being profiled. She wasn't wearing a uniform or anything).
Something very James Bond about that...
And the worst part is they promote something heavily and then turn around and drop it later, leading to people not wanting to learn their new tech, since it'll probably go away soon enough. Like watching Fox TV shows.
Microsoft Research is actually doing a lot of really interesting, really cutting edge stuff. The trouble is, none of that stuff seems to be making it into their commercial offerings.
>Where's the graphical hint to tell you "You can type in here"?
Yeah, that's exactly what I want when I'm launching the fucking *command line*.
>99.9% of copies are sold on new PCs or as part of bulk licences in businesses
They (used to) sell large numbers of upgrade copies of their OS. Win7 sold 100 million copies in six months, which was much faster than Win8 adoption due to the upgrade copies being sold.
I'd buy Win8 in a heartbeat if it wasn't a piece of shit.
>Stardock isn't a digital distribution platform. You're thinking of (*shudder*) Gamestop.
Same thing. Stardock sold Impulse to Gamestop.
My point is that I place value in having one centralized location for my digital games. As long as Steam doesn't charge more for their games than the other digital download venues, I will continue to buy everything through them. I hate having multiple clients and multiple friends lists, etc., open at once.
>I think you fail to realize that there should be more options available to you as a consumer. On one side we have publishers like EA becoming distributors,
Actually, I'm kind of pissed off about Origin. If EA sold its games on both Origin and on Steam, I wouldn't have a problem - between all the different digital distribution platforms (Stardock, etc.) you can often find sales for games you want to play. But Origin just fractures my games library into two different places, two different sets of friends lists that can send invites when I'm in some other game because they don't know I'm busy doing something else, and so forth.
I bought ME3 just to finish the trilogy, but have not bought a single other game on Origin and am happy with keeping it that way.
Steam used to be a lot worse, too. IIRC, it had some memory leaks that (rightfully) gave it a bad reputation. Right now, it's sitting in the background taking up 16MB of RAM, which, yes, used to be a ton of memory but now is an insignificant fraction that will not impact my performance in the slightest.
Running Steam isn't much of a hassle now. It used to be a bit of a resource hog, but not any more - it's currently using 74MB of RAM. Whoopdie shit. Other than an OCD obsession from the 90s about not having any background apps left open, it doesn't make any significant difference.
Most games on Steam don't have additional DRM, and I don't buy those that do.
And if you don't like Steam, go with GOG.com games. All of 'em are DRM free.
Fortunately our US Attorneys are well-known for their common sense and restraint, and when they *do* go overboard, they get fired and disbarred like Carmen Ortiz.
>It's the story tellers who control the story.
Watching MSNBC defend the President on this has been one of the most ridiculous things I've ever seen on TV.
>And meanwhile, foreign media all but ignore the close to 20 000 dead from the tsunami; that was the real disaster.
Or the Oil Refinery in Chiba City that went up in a giant fireball during the Tohoku Earthquake, killing a bunch of people. Hey, it's not nuclear, so it's not *scary*.
In this case, the TSA was responding to flight attendants who were reportedly up in arms about people being able to carry swiss army knives on planes again.
So put blame where it is due - the TSA was trying to do the right thing here, but got shouted down by the masses.