>>The coverage of the Tea Party (at least for the first six-nine months, before people figured out they were a bunch of Koch-funded ex-Birchers) was mainly positive in the mainstream media
The Koch support for them came much after the founding of the Tea Party movement.
Even though it causes liberal heads to explode, it really was a grassroots movement at the beginning.
And aside from Fox News, the Tea Party coverages wasn't anywhere in the neighborhood of being "mainly positive".
Contrawise, the OWS coverage has been mainly positive by everyone except Fox News and the Drudge Report, which has been reporting amazingly biased stories against OWS.
I'm not a member of either, but I have plenty of friends in both, and have watched both of them with interest since the beginning.
Eh, sorta. I used to believe the same thing, but a lot of that case of Monsanto vs. the Farmer isn't true, and has become something of a Slashdot Urban Legend.
>>I'm off to the store to buy a couple of boxes of DVDs and blurays and I'm going to start giving them away to people I know and ask them to pass more forward.
You might want to, in addition, follow the link from the EFF and write to your congressmen. I just did.
Electronic freedom is something both Democrats and Republicans should be behind, as long as they're not being paid off by their *IAA overlords.
>>OWS is protesting... the increasing disparity between wage growth between the upper and lower clases.
Which is a fucktarded thing to protest.
If I made an extra $10k this year, but Bill Gates made an extra $1B, I shouldn't be particularly upset about it, as my standard of living just went up.
It's a stupid philosophical point, that verges on simple jealousy.
Which is a framing of the narrative that has become quite pervasive and hideous.
>>How many of you paid a big chunk for a CS degree and are now wondering how you're ever going to pay it off? Still renting? Living with friends? Living at home? Living without health care? Not yet confronted down-the-road looming expenses like kids, a mortgage, your parents' end-of-life care?
None of which I'd ever protest about on Wall Street.
Well, I've complained a fair bit about the government's role in the creation of the housing bubble (which forced me to rent through the 2000s), but I'm not going to blame it on "Wall Street". It's a non-sequitor.
The problem with crony capitalism (which is ultimately what OWS is about) is the fault of corrupt politicians in DC, who listen to the voices of corporations instead of the people.
>>The only time it would be slow is if you're trying to move 10 pages at a time. I don't typically do this when reading- especially not fiction (or non fiction that is intended to be read sequentially)- which is the only thing I use my kindle for.
In textbooks, I do this all the time, and it's really, really annoying on a Kindle. Tablets can be slow, too, if they have to think through and re-render each page, but if they're cached it's pretty fast. PCs, obviously, are the fastest at quickly moving through ebooks/PDFs.
But even the normal page turning for fiction is too slow for me, and I hate the "e-ink flash". It breaks my concentration on the text and makes me focus instead on the device, which is a big UI no-no.
>>why doesn't Microsoft try making products that aren't, like, total shit?
Because rent-seeking has lower overhead. No need to go through all that hassle of "making products" when you can simply charge license fees to products that have absolutely nothing to do with you whatsoever.
They're trying to demand the same license fees to Android makers as they do to Windows Phone makers, because Android has "infringed" (http://www.groklaw.net/pdf3/MSvBN-slides.pdf) on such core Microsoft patents as "placing loading status icon on screen" and "simulating mouse input using non-mouse inputs".
>>What is the point for you then? The point for me is first not having to have a shelf full of books, and second because I can carry around many books - even massive textbooks - in one small form factor.
Sure, same selling point for me. But when a device pisses me off with glacial refresh or page turn times, it's just not very useful for me.
Try flipping on a e-ink Kindle one page at a time through a book, and then try it from inside of a non-eink tablet, and a PC. The difference is pretty damn noticeable.
>>I can't be the only person in the world who it never occurred to that Mario was wearing actual fur, can I?
I'm pretty sure *nobody* ever thought Mario was secretly leaving behind the scarred and mutilated bodies of raccoon dogs every time he put on a costume.
Hell, the game even calls it a costume, and the more common form (not the Tanooki Suit) comes from a *leaf* for crying out loud.
>>PETA used to be run by sane people, but then the crazies came in and scared the sanity away.
Back in the day, they'd break into labs and free lab animals that had various diseases, and which also resulted in most of the animals dying. And they have a long history of killing the vast majority of animals sent into their safe keeping (http://www.petakillsanimals.com/).
They've never been sane. The crazy has just boiled to the surface now.
The bizarre objection to Call of Duty encouraging violence against humans because you can "kill rats" in the game as well as this ridiculous anti-Mario rant makes me think they're the Jack Chick of the modern age.
>>Indeed.. 30fps from a colour e-ink display. I can hardly imagine how strange it would be watching a video on one of these things.
Yeah, that's got to be the most revolutionary bit about it.
I've never bought a Kindle or any other e-ink device (though I tested plenty) because you can read a book in the time it takes to refresh the screen, which sort of defeats the point.
>>How is "improving traffic safety" not exactly the same excuse as "public security"?
Perhaps the phrase might mean something different in Jolly Old, but unless your passengers are going to be hijacking taxis at gunpoint, having cameras inside of the cabs are not going to improve traffic safety one bit.
>>don't mind me, USA, just being the last free country on Gods greens earth.
LOL. At least we here in the states don't pretend all the cameras are for public security - they're for monetizing red lights. Oops, I mean, "improving traffic safety" (even though they don't).
>>If you're so lucky that you can get a 128 random number duplicated on the first try you really ought to cash out your 401k and buy some lottery tickets.
The optimal strategy for playing slots is to hit the jackpot on the first pull. I once explained this to a friend of mine, tossed in a nickle, and hit a $15 jackpot.
>>Especially when blacks also attend Comic-con as well as gatherings targeted toward blacks.
Seriously. I've been a volunteer and attendee at Comicon since the mid to late 90s, and there's plenty of African-Americans attending. Certainly better represented *in* comics than, say, Hispanics or Asians (outside of technical-stereotype roles), and have more fans and artists, than, say, the Redneck demographic.
My computer science instructor in middle school was black, my first sysadmin was black, and my family has made it something of a mission to teach computer science and American History to kids of all colors in our local ghetto schools.
It'll change over time - everyone is a nerd now, these days, it seems... now that you even have gangbangers glued to their XBoxes all day and night, it's no longer stigmatized quite as much.
The class system, or lack thereof, mainly. Some perk trees are kinda interesting, some are just plain boring. And there's a lot less skills than before, and no stats at all. It might be because I just finished an epic Oblivion run to warm up for Skyrim, but dammit, I *like* being able to have a speed stat of 100 with 100 athletics, and boost them both through the roof with magic, and run around the world at speed. In Skyrim you just feel like you're running through mud, all the time. I hated the leveling system in Oblivion, Skyrim strips the chassis off along with the wheels.
Other stuff, too -
There's not only waypoints for your quests, like in Oblivion, but you can cast a spell that will pathfind you right to it. (Except it seems broken more than half the time. Hey, Bethsoft game.) Dumb as rocks companions that very helpfully try to get you killed (they'll run in to block a corridor behind you, even if you ordered them to stay put).
Some of the streamlining makes sense (alchemy no longer gives you nonstackable potions), but especially after having come off a long week of Oblivion, it feels like Skyrim is missing a whole lot.
Go to the books menu with a lot of books in your inventory. Use the up and down keys to select books, no problem. Now try clicking on another book when one is selected. Half the time, it will open the original book instead of the one you actually clicked on. Some dialogue boxes have the same problem.
This is the problem with Consolitis - they fucking broke MICE for the PC version.
>>all have community patches that literally fix hundreds of bugs
Thousands. In just one game alone.... the Unofficial Oblivion Patch fixes 2,200 bugs when the authors stopped working on it. So people then other took up the banner and kept working on it, because, you know, there were still more bugs to fix.:p
That said, I'm enjoying Skyrim. It has only been crashing about once every 4 hours, which is on the positive end of the bell curve for Bethesda games - Redguard would crash for people with non-Intel processors *off the boat*. You know, the one you start on.
The only in-game bug that bothers me is the fact that NPCs will teleport around some time. You'll be talking to this one dude, and then suddenly another dude is next to him. And then he'll flicker away.
I think a bigger problem is that the game really has been dumbed down from Oblivion... it's a sad trend that we've seen across the board in the RPG industry these days (ME2, DA2, WoW, I'm looking at you...).
>>These privacy laws define constitutional rights in Germany, so the interests of the corporations to maximize profit are lower ranked (as they are not on constitutional level).
To be fair, privacy is a constitutional right in America, too, even though it's not, you know, actually written down in the Constitution.
Contrary to popular opinion, this right was not invented for Roe vs Wade.
Slashdot Mirror
>>* Your link points to household income, not minimum earning per hour.
Right, because median wage is what matters, not minimum wage, and the most important metric of them all is median household income in PPP.
>>Don't worry, the next contest will involve a $75,000 prize to reverse entropy
I hear students from UCSD have already summoned a demon to solve this puzzle.
Name's Maxwell, something like that...
>>Let me guess: You *didn't* make an extra $10k this year?
I'd have to check my tax records for sure, but yeah, it was a bit upwards of $10k more I made this year.
Must be all that crony capitalism I benefit from, from being in the 1%.
>>Except that the real wage minimum wage hasn't gone up at all in the last 50 years while the real gdp per capita has gone up by 170%.
Wages for all quintiles have gone up over time. From that conservative bastion, NPR:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/10/26/141716961/why-has-income-gone-up-so-much-for-top-earners
But don't let facts hurt your crack-addled brain.
>>The coverage of the Tea Party (at least for the first six-nine months, before people figured out they were a bunch of Koch-funded ex-Birchers) was mainly positive in the mainstream media
The Koch support for them came much after the founding of the Tea Party movement.
Even though it causes liberal heads to explode, it really was a grassroots movement at the beginning.
And aside from Fox News, the Tea Party coverages wasn't anywhere in the neighborhood of being "mainly positive".
Contrawise, the OWS coverage has been mainly positive by everyone except Fox News and the Drudge Report, which has been reporting amazingly biased stories against OWS.
I'm not a member of either, but I have plenty of friends in both, and have watched both of them with interest since the beginning.
>>According to Monsanto, it's theft.
Eh, sorta. I used to believe the same thing, but a lot of that case of Monsanto vs. the Farmer isn't true, and has become something of a Slashdot Urban Legend.
>>I'm off to the store to buy a couple of boxes of DVDs and blurays and I'm going to start giving them away to people I know and ask them to pass more forward.
You might want to, in addition, follow the link from the EFF and write to your congressmen. I just did.
Electronic freedom is something both Democrats and Republicans should be behind, as long as they're not being paid off by their *IAA overlords.
>>OWS is protesting... the increasing disparity between wage growth between the upper and lower clases.
Which is a fucktarded thing to protest.
If I made an extra $10k this year, but Bill Gates made an extra $1B, I shouldn't be particularly upset about it, as my standard of living just went up.
It's a stupid philosophical point, that verges on simple jealousy.
>>you ARE part of the 99%
Which is a framing of the narrative that has become quite pervasive and hideous.
>>How many of you paid a big chunk for a CS degree and are now wondering how you're ever going to pay it off? Still renting? Living with friends? Living at home? Living without health care? Not yet confronted down-the-road looming expenses like kids, a mortgage, your parents' end-of-life care?
None of which I'd ever protest about on Wall Street.
Well, I've complained a fair bit about the government's role in the creation of the housing bubble (which forced me to rent through the 2000s), but I'm not going to blame it on "Wall Street". It's a non-sequitor.
The problem with crony capitalism (which is ultimately what OWS is about) is the fault of corrupt politicians in DC, who listen to the voices of corporations instead of the people.
>>The only time it would be slow is if you're trying to move 10 pages at a time. I don't typically do this when reading- especially not fiction (or non fiction that is intended to be read sequentially)- which is the only thing I use my kindle for.
In textbooks, I do this all the time, and it's really, really annoying on a Kindle. Tablets can be slow, too, if they have to think through and re-render each page, but if they're cached it's pretty fast. PCs, obviously, are the fastest at quickly moving through ebooks/PDFs.
But even the normal page turning for fiction is too slow for me, and I hate the "e-ink flash". It breaks my concentration on the text and makes me focus instead on the device, which is a big UI no-no.
>>why doesn't Microsoft try making products that aren't, like, total shit?
Because rent-seeking has lower overhead. No need to go through all that hassle of "making products" when you can simply charge license fees to products that have absolutely nothing to do with you whatsoever.
They're trying to demand the same license fees to Android makers as they do to Windows Phone makers, because Android has "infringed" (http://www.groklaw.net/pdf3/MSvBN-slides.pdf) on such core Microsoft patents as "placing loading status icon on screen" and "simulating mouse input using non-mouse inputs".
>>What is the point for you then? The point for me is first not having to have a shelf full of books, and second because I can carry around many books - even massive textbooks - in one small form factor.
Sure, same selling point for me. But when a device pisses me off with glacial refresh or page turn times, it's just not very useful for me.
Try flipping on a e-ink Kindle one page at a time through a book, and then try it from inside of a non-eink tablet, and a PC. The difference is pretty damn noticeable.
>>I can't be the only person in the world who it never occurred to that Mario was wearing actual fur, can I?
I'm pretty sure *nobody* ever thought Mario was secretly leaving behind the scarred and mutilated bodies of raccoon dogs every time he put on a costume.
Hell, the game even calls it a costume, and the more common form (not the Tanooki Suit) comes from a *leaf* for crying out loud.
>>PETA used to be run by sane people, but then the crazies came in and scared the sanity away.
Back in the day, they'd break into labs and free lab animals that had various diseases, and which also resulted in most of the animals dying. And they have a long history of killing the vast majority of animals sent into their safe keeping (http://www.petakillsanimals.com/).
They've never been sane. The crazy has just boiled to the surface now.
The bizarre objection to Call of Duty encouraging violence against humans because you can "kill rats" in the game as well as this ridiculous anti-Mario rant makes me think they're the Jack Chick of the modern age.
>>Indeed.. 30fps from a colour e-ink display. I can hardly imagine how strange it would be watching a video on one of these things.
Yeah, that's got to be the most revolutionary bit about it.
I've never bought a Kindle or any other e-ink device (though I tested plenty) because you can read a book in the time it takes to refresh the screen, which sort of defeats the point.
>>How is "improving traffic safety" not exactly the same excuse as "public security"?
Perhaps the phrase might mean something different in Jolly Old, but unless your passengers are going to be hijacking taxis at gunpoint, having cameras inside of the cabs are not going to improve traffic safety one bit.
>>Speaking of names, how about Bing? What kind of a name is that?
There was talk for a while inside of Microsoft of naming it Koomuk. (Cumook? Cumik? Something like that.)
Compared to that, "Bing" is fucking brilliant.
>>don't mind me, USA, just being the last free country on Gods greens earth.
LOL. At least we here in the states don't pretend all the cameras are for public security - they're for monetizing red lights. Oops, I mean, "improving traffic safety" (even though they don't).
>>If you're so lucky that you can get a 128 random number duplicated on the first try you really ought to cash out your 401k and buy some lottery tickets.
The optimal strategy for playing slots is to hit the jackpot on the first pull. I once explained this to a friend of mine, tossed in a nickle, and hit a $15 jackpot.
He was blown away.
>>Depends on what type of comics. Anime Expo, Otakon, and AnimeCentral are predominately Asian.
Sorry, should have qualified that by saying Western Comics.
Obviously, there's plenty of Asians in manga. :p
>>Especially when blacks also attend Comic-con as well as gatherings targeted toward blacks.
Seriously. I've been a volunteer and attendee at Comicon since the mid to late 90s, and there's plenty of African-Americans attending. Certainly better represented *in* comics than, say, Hispanics or Asians (outside of technical-stereotype roles), and have more fans and artists, than, say, the Redneck demographic.
My computer science instructor in middle school was black, my first sysadmin was black, and my family has made it something of a mission to teach computer science and American History to kids of all colors in our local ghetto schools.
It'll change over time - everyone is a nerd now, these days, it seems... now that you even have gangbangers glued to their XBoxes all day and night, it's no longer stigmatized quite as much.
>>What do you mean by "dumbed down".
The class system, or lack thereof, mainly. Some perk trees are kinda interesting, some are just plain boring. And there's a lot less skills than before, and no stats at all. It might be because I just finished an epic Oblivion run to warm up for Skyrim, but dammit, I *like* being able to have a speed stat of 100 with 100 athletics, and boost them both through the roof with magic, and run around the world at speed. In Skyrim you just feel like you're running through mud, all the time. I hated the leveling system in Oblivion, Skyrim strips the chassis off along with the wheels.
Other stuff, too -
There's not only waypoints for your quests, like in Oblivion, but you can cast a spell that will pathfind you right to it. (Except it seems broken more than half the time. Hey, Bethsoft game.)
Dumb as rocks companions that very helpfully try to get you killed (they'll run in to block a corridor behind you, even if you ordered them to stay put).
Some of the streamlining makes sense (alchemy no longer gives you nonstackable potions), but especially after having come off a long week of Oblivion, it feels like Skyrim is missing a whole lot.
>>What's wrong with the UI and menus exactly..?
Go to the books menu with a lot of books in your inventory. Use the up and down keys to select books, no problem. Now try clicking on another book when one is selected. Half the time, it will open the original book instead of the one you actually clicked on. Some dialogue boxes have the same problem.
This is the problem with Consolitis - they fucking broke MICE for the PC version.
>>all have community patches that literally fix hundreds of bugs
Thousands. In just one game alone.... the Unofficial Oblivion Patch fixes 2,200 bugs when the authors stopped working on it. So people then other took up the banner and kept working on it, because, you know, there were still more bugs to fix. :p
That said, I'm enjoying Skyrim. It has only been crashing about once every 4 hours, which is on the positive end of the bell curve for Bethesda games - Redguard would crash for people with non-Intel processors *off the boat*. You know, the one you start on.
The only in-game bug that bothers me is the fact that NPCs will teleport around some time. You'll be talking to this one dude, and then suddenly another dude is next to him. And then he'll flicker away.
I think a bigger problem is that the game really has been dumbed down from Oblivion... it's a sad trend that we've seen across the board in the RPG industry these days (ME2, DA2, WoW, I'm looking at you...).
>>These privacy laws define constitutional rights in Germany, so the interests of the corporations to maximize profit are lower ranked (as they are not on constitutional level).
To be fair, privacy is a constitutional right in America, too, even though it's not, you know, actually written down in the Constitution.
Contrary to popular opinion, this right was not invented for Roe vs Wade.