Please stop talking about "cloud" computing -- it is one of the dumbest buzzwords I have ever heard in my entire life -- not to mention the fact that it is a totally meaningless term.
Ultimately, society works on a common, shared morality, which is why the moral issue of homosexual marriage is relevant. Without morality, politics is merely a contest of power.
It is true that society needs a common, shared morality, but it is certainly not the government's place to mandate it. These issues need to be figured out by individuals and communities, they don't need to be mandated! I can't understand the mindset of a person who would honestly suggest that another human being ought to have their rights stripped away to avoid "feeling icky". If you don't like gay marriage THEN DON'T HAVE ONE. America was specifically designed to be a secular nation, and was specifically designed as a Republic (rather than a true democracy) to avoid the tyranny of the majority sort of shit we see today.
I think a lot of these problems could be solved by asking one question before a law is passed outlawing any certain behavior -- Will this behavior harm anyone? If so, will it harm anyone other than the person undertaking it, and/or other informed and willing participants? If the answer is no, it is none of the government's business. Gay marriage fails even the first test -- there is not one shred of evidence to even begin to suggest that gay marriage will cause even the slightest harm to ANYBODY -- regardless of what that homophobic demagogue James Dobson has to say about that "sanctity of marriage" bullshit (just watch "The Bachelor if you need clarification as to how stupid this idea is).
Please also note that as I say this -- I completed and 100% support the rights of the anti-gay marriage people to speak out against it, in the same manner that I would vocally support Cannibal Corpse, William S. Burroughs, or the Westboro Baptist Church. Some of these things I defend because I like, some of them I certainly would be ecstatic if they forever disappeared from the face of the Earth -- but it doesn't matter what I think of what they say, they all have a right to say it, just like I have the right to ignore them and/or ridicule them. In the case of the anti-gay marriage folks, I obviously prefer ridicule. We also must remember that freedom of speech means only that the government cannot mandate speech -- it does not free you from other repercussions, like being ruthlessly mocked for your attempts to bring idiotic, Bronze Age morality from one the worst pieces of fiction I have ever read into the main stage political arena in the 21st century. Oh and as for this little gem:
If you don't believe you should force your version of morality on anyone, alas, you might have someone else attempt force their version on you.
Let them try. I will fight them all the way to the Supreme Court, because the law is irrevocably on my side.
I definitely agree that not all video games need to have a definite narrative -- but I would go one step further and question the need for movies and books to have one as such -- there are some excellent books and movies out there that don't have a definite narrative, at least in the classical sense of the word. Go read Naked Lunch and get back to me as to whether a book needs a "story" to be a great work of literature.
People who are opposed to same-sex marriage don't necessarily "hate on gays." They're just... opposed to same-sex marriage. In fact, it's this broad-stroke-painted stereotype of everyone who opposes gay marriage as no-necked, knuckle-dragging, fag-bashing, Republican-voting, Judy-Garland-hating neanderthals that the peeps who voted for this in Washington state are trying to avoid getting tarred with. Their opposition has done a real good job of perpetuating that stereotype, and it's no more valid than the one of gays as all being lisping, limp-wristed nancy boys.
This is a good point, and an important distinction. However, we do need to be clear about the fact that these people (anti-gay marriage advocates) are looking to have legislation passed to limit the rights of a whole sector of society, and they need to be taken to task for it. That is like saying that Strom Thurmond didn't "hate on blacks" He was just... in support of segregation. Like I said, your point is well taken, and the distinction certainly needs to be taken into account, but there comes a point where we need to draw a line in the sand as to what we will and will not consider to be acceptable behavior in a free society.
Why would we want to keep petition signatures private? The whole point of a petition is to publicly show your support for a given cause! This is not even to mention the questions that will be raised over the legitimacy of such petitions if the names are not public record.
We have freedom of speech in America, but this does not mean that your opinions are free from criticism. For instance, you have the legal right to participate in a KKK rally, but your freedom of speech will not stop your boss from firing you when he sees you on the news wearing a white robe. To take this further -- if you don't want to be judged negatively in the public eye for holding an unpopular opinion -- DON'T VOICE IT PUBLICLY. These people who signed a petition to put gay marriage to a vote (ostensibly to ban it) need to be able to stand up to harsh criticism, which, from TFA, sounds like just about the worst any of these people are going to have to put up with. (As a side note, I find it ironic that a group of people trying to push forward legislation telling others how to live their lives would complain about their freedoms being oppressed, but I digress.)
The point is, freedom is a two way street. You have the freedom to say what you want, but everyone else is free to judge you negatively on it if they don't like what you have to say. The most important distinction here is that freedom of speech protects you from government prosecution, it does not give you license to spout nonsense in a public forum without consequence.
How did this get modded up? Both Quake 2 and 3 had dedicated servers. This is the REASON that we were able to set up clan servers and the REASON that online play got so fierce and competitive! We were able to set up our own servers, with whatever rules we so desired.
I am sure that there will eventually be support for private servers, but this will almost certainly require the DRM to be cracked, which, as we all know, is a violation of the DMCA. This leaves you open to prosecution from the bastards at IW, which is hardly a reasonable solution. Not only that, but making these options illegitimate ensures that there will be no unified community like we saw with Quake 2, nor will we see that richness of user generated maps and mods. I was planning on buying this game on the release date, but this omission has led me to decide that I don't need to play MW2 that badly -- I will simply take my gaming dollars elsewhere.
Wow, do you even know how to read? The guy is saying that he is going to play a different game instead, and MAYBE buy MW2 when the price drops significantly. I don't see anything there where he is admitting to piracy or saying that he is going to pirate MW2. You fail.
I still have the track, but unfortunately I can't share it -- the band imploded and the lead guitarist destroyed all online traces of them ever having existed when he decided he liked Jeebus more than metal...
Through the '80's, people bought stereo components and understood good sound. Starting in the '90's people went for packaged systems that didn't have the ability to produce accurate sound. Now the majority is used to crappy headphones and earbuds that have more peaks and valleys than the Himalayas, and people are used to overequalized processing. I'll bet you that real stereophiles can tell the difference, but they're a dying breed.
A big part of the problem these days (aside from apathy) is the grotesquely inflated price of stereo equipment. Most people just do not have it in their budgets to spend thousands of dollars on high quality amps and speakers -- the only reason I have the killer system I have is that I was able to wrangle up some nice vintage speakers for next to nothing (I had a coworker at my last job who had a drug problem -- 'nuff said), making it worth it for me to bite the bullet and buy a nice receiver and sub. If it wasn't for this, I would likely still be using the speakers in my TV, or a set of crappy bookshelf speakers connected to a cheap, shitty amp, just to avoid the obscene cost of admission into the hi-fi club.
CDs are encoded at 44.1 kHz, 16-bit stereo. If you do a little math, this comes out to 1.4 Mbps, meaning that to get you audio down to such a low bit rate you need to eliminate 29 out of every 30 bits. If anybody out there is incapable of hearing the difference, they need to go get a hearing test right away, as that level of compression is EXTREMELY destructive to the quality of the audio.
No. This would only be true if the speaker masked the exact same frequencies as the MP3. In this case, you are losing frequency content at the source (lossy MP3 file) and are AGAIN losing frequencies at the speakers. I have found, at least in my experience, that low bitrate stuff is even more unbearable on low end gear than on better systems.
I have actually used that on a metal track before -- I dumped the guitar track out of ProTools, converted it to 32 kbps MP3, then brought it back in on top of the nice crystal clear drums and bass for a song intro -- it made for a pretty cool effect (think phaser>bitcruncher as inserts) but certainly not one that I would use often.
I am confused as to how it would make anything sound more "crunchy" or "crisp", though. Lossy compression tends to soften things pretty severely for the most part (chopping out whole frequency ranges tends to do that!). I see the poster below me has stated that dynamics compression is independent of data compression, but I would like to submit that most (probably all, but I am not familiar with every lossy codec) lossy codecs will compress the dynamics as part of the data compression scheme (along with aggressive filtering, chopping out whole frequency ranges, and summing high and low frequencies to mono).
I think it is understood in the reading that the iPhone is the smartphone to beat, it was very clear to me that they were referring to the promises made by Palm to unseat the iPhone from its iThrone around its release, and musing as to whether or not the Storm 2 has what it takes.
Aside from the obvious absurdity of someone trying to record a movie with their laptop -- how much of a problem are off-screen recordings for the movie industry? I may be naive -- but I really have a hard time imagining someone saying -- "I was gonna go see this movie in the theater, but I have a copy that someone recorded with a video camera in the theater! This is just as good! Now I don't need to go see it!"
Am I missing something here, or are these anti-piracy groups really that dense?
I think the fact that they are breaking the law here means that we need to look at changing the law, rather than charging these guys with a crime. As a society, when we see people being prosecuted for things which cause literally no harm, we need to stand up and do something about it, as we can never have our liberty and justice that way. You can whine all you want about how they broke the law, but that does not change the fact that the actions undertaken here are completely, 100% harmless. Again, this leads any reasonable, rational person to say that perhaps the law ought to change.
Yeah, I got completely bored with Oblivion because of the same thing. I think that they should have made the world completely open, but have various areas that you simply will not survive in and enemies you simply cannot defeat until you get to a high enough level -- this would give you a real feeling of accomplishment, and let you stomp all over lower level enemies as well as giving you places to go if you want to be challenged -- which leaves it entirely up to you.
Are you dense? Did you even read what I wrote? I specifically covered serious abuse and neglect as situations in which the government needs to step in. Both of the incidents you mentioned SHOULD have been taken care of by the systems currently in place, and the tragedy was caused by a string of failures by individuals. Tweaking the system to make it work more efficiently and to more accurately diagnose abuse and neglect = good. Expanding the breadth of influence the gov't has over what decisions you can and cannot make in raising your child = bad. Can you see the difference?
Libertoons who try to defend the indefensible in the name of "freedom" and "individual liberty" annoy the hell out of me. They're every bit as bad as Marxists, religious crazies and animal rights extremists.
I am a bit confused by this comment -- what are you calling indefensible -- giving children candy? I agree, bad parenting is bad news, but how are we going to go about solving that? A child will be much better off in the end with jack-off, irresponsible parents than if you rip them out of the home and into foster care. We need to educate people to make the right choices. And yes, I will defend the rights of parents to give their children candy, just because the last thing we need is more government intervention into our lives, not because I agree with the behavior but because government intervention into our personal lives almost always makes things worse. We need to save that sort of thing for the big issues, such as abuse and neglect.
This is not even to mention that all of the data are entirely anecdotal -- and we are talking about children recalling childhood. The accuracy of adult memory has shown to be extremely suspect, never mind trying to remember what you used to eat when you were 7. Did I eat candy every day when I was 7? I have no frickin' clue! That is way too long ago for me to accurately remember. This is just bogus, bogus, bogus research all around.
I'm sorry to say it Matt, but Canazza has a point, in this particular example it really doesn't seem to be proven that this correlation does indeed = causation. How do we know that this is not a case of genetics -- impulsive, violence-prone parents pass the genes for their impulsive behavior down to their child. The child, by their genetic information, is already more likely to be impulsive and violent. The parents, being impulsive, are going to be more likely to reward their child gratuitously often. By this reasoning, children of impulsive parents would get more candy, and then grow up to be more violent than members of society as a whole, but those two facts would be two symptoms of a root cause, rather than one being an effect of the other. I'm not saying that the conclusions drawn by the study are wrong and mine is right, but I also see no control present in the study to rule out this equally plausible hypothesis, which, in my mind, would suggest that they ought to go back to the drawing board before spouting shit like this in public.
No. This has not been shown. I read an article a while ago by a fanboy attempting to demonstrate this who actually factored in the cost of Norton, Photoshop, and a couple other programs to get the price up. As for avoiding the "Click here to try AOL", you can save even more and build your own system, or get a system built from any number of local shops in your area. It is simply no longer reasonable to argue that Macs are comparable in price to PCs -- if you think that OSX is worth it, then go for a Mac. I personally don't think it's worth it, but it is simply a matter of opinion.
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Please stop talking about "cloud" computing -- it is one of the dumbest buzzwords I have ever heard in my entire life -- not to mention the fact that it is a totally meaningless term.
Ultimately, society works on a common, shared morality, which is why the moral issue of homosexual marriage is relevant. Without morality, politics is merely a contest of power.
It is true that society needs a common, shared morality, but it is certainly not the government's place to mandate it. These issues need to be figured out by individuals and communities, they don't need to be mandated! I can't understand the mindset of a person who would honestly suggest that another human being ought to have their rights stripped away to avoid "feeling icky". If you don't like gay marriage THEN DON'T HAVE ONE. America was specifically designed to be a secular nation, and was specifically designed as a Republic (rather than a true democracy) to avoid the tyranny of the majority sort of shit we see today.
I think a lot of these problems could be solved by asking one question before a law is passed outlawing any certain behavior -- Will this behavior harm anyone? If so, will it harm anyone other than the person undertaking it, and/or other informed and willing participants? If the answer is no, it is none of the government's business. Gay marriage fails even the first test -- there is not one shred of evidence to even begin to suggest that gay marriage will cause even the slightest harm to ANYBODY -- regardless of what that homophobic demagogue James Dobson has to say about that "sanctity of marriage" bullshit (just watch "The Bachelor if you need clarification as to how stupid this idea is).
Please also note that as I say this -- I completed and 100% support the rights of the anti-gay marriage people to speak out against it, in the same manner that I would vocally support Cannibal Corpse, William S. Burroughs, or the Westboro Baptist Church. Some of these things I defend because I like, some of them I certainly would be ecstatic if they forever disappeared from the face of the Earth -- but it doesn't matter what I think of what they say, they all have a right to say it, just like I have the right to ignore them and/or ridicule them. In the case of the anti-gay marriage folks, I obviously prefer ridicule. We also must remember that freedom of speech means only that the government cannot mandate speech -- it does not free you from other repercussions, like being ruthlessly mocked for your attempts to bring idiotic, Bronze Age morality from one the worst pieces of fiction I have ever read into the main stage political arena in the 21st century. Oh and as for this little gem:
If you don't believe you should force your version of morality on anyone, alas, you might have someone else attempt force their version on you.
Let them try. I will fight them all the way to the Supreme Court, because the law is irrevocably on my side.
I definitely agree that not all video games need to have a definite narrative -- but I would go one step further and question the need for movies and books to have one as such -- there are some excellent books and movies out there that don't have a definite narrative, at least in the classical sense of the word. Go read Naked Lunch and get back to me as to whether a book needs a "story" to be a great work of literature.
WHHOOOOOSHHHH!!!!!!
People who are opposed to same-sex marriage don't necessarily "hate on gays." They're just... opposed to same-sex marriage. In fact, it's this broad-stroke-painted stereotype of everyone who opposes gay marriage as no-necked, knuckle-dragging, fag-bashing, Republican-voting, Judy-Garland-hating neanderthals that the peeps who voted for this in Washington state are trying to avoid getting tarred with. Their opposition has done a real good job of perpetuating that stereotype, and it's no more valid than the one of gays as all being lisping, limp-wristed nancy boys.
This is a good point, and an important distinction. However, we do need to be clear about the fact that these people (anti-gay marriage advocates) are looking to have legislation passed to limit the rights of a whole sector of society, and they need to be taken to task for it. That is like saying that Strom Thurmond didn't "hate on blacks" He was just... in support of segregation. Like I said, your point is well taken, and the distinction certainly needs to be taken into account, but there comes a point where we need to draw a line in the sand as to what we will and will not consider to be acceptable behavior in a free society.
Why would we want to keep petition signatures private? The whole point of a petition is to publicly show your support for a given cause! This is not even to mention the questions that will be raised over the legitimacy of such petitions if the names are not public record.
We have freedom of speech in America, but this does not mean that your opinions are free from criticism. For instance, you have the legal right to participate in a KKK rally, but your freedom of speech will not stop your boss from firing you when he sees you on the news wearing a white robe. To take this further -- if you don't want to be judged negatively in the public eye for holding an unpopular opinion -- DON'T VOICE IT PUBLICLY. These people who signed a petition to put gay marriage to a vote (ostensibly to ban it) need to be able to stand up to harsh criticism, which, from TFA, sounds like just about the worst any of these people are going to have to put up with. (As a side note, I find it ironic that a group of people trying to push forward legislation telling others how to live their lives would complain about their freedoms being oppressed, but I digress.)
The point is, freedom is a two way street. You have the freedom to say what you want, but everyone else is free to judge you negatively on it if they don't like what you have to say. The most important distinction here is that freedom of speech protects you from government prosecution, it does not give you license to spout nonsense in a public forum without consequence.
How did this get modded up? Both Quake 2 and 3 had dedicated servers. This is the REASON that we were able to set up clan servers and the REASON that online play got so fierce and competitive! We were able to set up our own servers, with whatever rules we so desired.
I am sure that there will eventually be support for private servers, but this will almost certainly require the DRM to be cracked, which, as we all know, is a violation of the DMCA. This leaves you open to prosecution from the bastards at IW, which is hardly a reasonable solution. Not only that, but making these options illegitimate ensures that there will be no unified community like we saw with Quake 2, nor will we see that richness of user generated maps and mods. I was planning on buying this game on the release date, but this omission has led me to decide that I don't need to play MW2 that badly -- I will simply take my gaming dollars elsewhere.
Wow, do you even know how to read? The guy is saying that he is going to play a different game instead, and MAYBE buy MW2 when the price drops significantly. I don't see anything there where he is admitting to piracy or saying that he is going to pirate MW2. You fail.
I still have the track, but unfortunately I can't share it -- the band imploded and the lead guitarist destroyed all online traces of them ever having existed when he decided he liked Jeebus more than metal...
Through the '80's, people bought stereo components and understood good sound. Starting in the '90's people went for packaged systems that didn't have the ability to produce accurate sound. Now the majority is used to crappy headphones and earbuds that have more peaks and valleys than the Himalayas, and people are used to overequalized processing. I'll bet you that real stereophiles can tell the difference, but they're a dying breed.
A big part of the problem these days (aside from apathy) is the grotesquely inflated price of stereo equipment. Most people just do not have it in their budgets to spend thousands of dollars on high quality amps and speakers -- the only reason I have the killer system I have is that I was able to wrangle up some nice vintage speakers for next to nothing (I had a coworker at my last job who had a drug problem -- 'nuff said), making it worth it for me to bite the bullet and buy a nice receiver and sub. If it wasn't for this, I would likely still be using the speakers in my TV, or a set of crappy bookshelf speakers connected to a cheap, shitty amp, just to avoid the obscene cost of admission into the hi-fi club.
CDs are encoded at 44.1 kHz, 16-bit stereo. If you do a little math, this comes out to 1.4 Mbps, meaning that to get you audio down to such a low bit rate you need to eliminate 29 out of every 30 bits. If anybody out there is incapable of hearing the difference, they need to go get a hearing test right away, as that level of compression is EXTREMELY destructive to the quality of the audio.
No. This would only be true if the speaker masked the exact same frequencies as the MP3. In this case, you are losing frequency content at the source (lossy MP3 file) and are AGAIN losing frequencies at the speakers. I have found, at least in my experience, that low bitrate stuff is even more unbearable on low end gear than on better systems.
I have actually used that on a metal track before -- I dumped the guitar track out of ProTools, converted it to 32 kbps MP3, then brought it back in on top of the nice crystal clear drums and bass for a song intro -- it made for a pretty cool effect (think phaser>bitcruncher as inserts) but certainly not one that I would use often.
I am confused as to how it would make anything sound more "crunchy" or "crisp", though. Lossy compression tends to soften things pretty severely for the most part (chopping out whole frequency ranges tends to do that!). I see the poster below me has stated that dynamics compression is independent of data compression, but I would like to submit that most (probably all, but I am not familiar with every lossy codec) lossy codecs will compress the dynamics as part of the data compression scheme (along with aggressive filtering, chopping out whole frequency ranges, and summing high and low frequencies to mono).
Higher speed so you can talk faster.
Or do things you couldn't do before, like transfer large files at high rates of speed or stream HD video.
I think it is understood in the reading that the iPhone is the smartphone to beat, it was very clear to me that they were referring to the promises made by Palm to unseat the iPhone from its iThrone around its release, and musing as to whether or not the Storm 2 has what it takes.
Aside from the obvious absurdity of someone trying to record a movie with their laptop -- how much of a problem are off-screen recordings for the movie industry? I may be naive -- but I really have a hard time imagining someone saying -- "I was gonna go see this movie in the theater, but I have a copy that someone recorded with a video camera in the theater! This is just as good! Now I don't need to go see it!"
Am I missing something here, or are these anti-piracy groups really that dense?
I think the fact that they are breaking the law here means that we need to look at changing the law, rather than charging these guys with a crime. As a society, when we see people being prosecuted for things which cause literally no harm, we need to stand up and do something about it, as we can never have our liberty and justice that way. You can whine all you want about how they broke the law, but that does not change the fact that the actions undertaken here are completely, 100% harmless. Again, this leads any reasonable, rational person to say that perhaps the law ought to change.
...that children are able to have real human contact in games?! Oh, the horror!!!
Yeah, I got completely bored with Oblivion because of the same thing. I think that they should have made the world completely open, but have various areas that you simply will not survive in and enemies you simply cannot defeat until you get to a high enough level -- this would give you a real feeling of accomplishment, and let you stomp all over lower level enemies as well as giving you places to go if you want to be challenged -- which leaves it entirely up to you.
Are you dense? Did you even read what I wrote? I specifically covered serious abuse and neglect as situations in which the government needs to step in. Both of the incidents you mentioned SHOULD have been taken care of by the systems currently in place, and the tragedy was caused by a string of failures by individuals. Tweaking the system to make it work more efficiently and to more accurately diagnose abuse and neglect = good. Expanding the breadth of influence the gov't has over what decisions you can and cannot make in raising your child = bad. Can you see the difference?
Libertoons who try to defend the indefensible in the name of "freedom" and "individual liberty" annoy the hell out of me. They're every bit as bad as Marxists, religious crazies and animal rights extremists.
I am a bit confused by this comment -- what are you calling indefensible -- giving children candy? I agree, bad parenting is bad news, but how are we going to go about solving that? A child will be much better off in the end with jack-off, irresponsible parents than if you rip them out of the home and into foster care. We need to educate people to make the right choices. And yes, I will defend the rights of parents to give their children candy, just because the last thing we need is more government intervention into our lives, not because I agree with the behavior but because government intervention into our personal lives almost always makes things worse. We need to save that sort of thing for the big issues, such as abuse and neglect.
This is not even to mention that all of the data are entirely anecdotal -- and we are talking about children recalling childhood. The accuracy of adult memory has shown to be extremely suspect, never mind trying to remember what you used to eat when you were 7. Did I eat candy every day when I was 7? I have no frickin' clue! That is way too long ago for me to accurately remember. This is just bogus, bogus, bogus research all around.
I'm sorry to say it Matt, but Canazza has a point, in this particular example it really doesn't seem to be proven that this correlation does indeed = causation. How do we know that this is not a case of genetics -- impulsive, violence-prone parents pass the genes for their impulsive behavior down to their child. The child, by their genetic information, is already more likely to be impulsive and violent. The parents, being impulsive, are going to be more likely to reward their child gratuitously often. By this reasoning, children of impulsive parents would get more candy, and then grow up to be more violent than members of society as a whole, but those two facts would be two symptoms of a root cause, rather than one being an effect of the other. I'm not saying that the conclusions drawn by the study are wrong and mine is right, but I also see no control present in the study to rule out this equally plausible hypothesis, which, in my mind, would suggest that they ought to go back to the drawing board before spouting shit like this in public.
Ever hear of dual booting?
No. This has not been shown. I read an article a while ago by a fanboy attempting to demonstrate this who actually factored in the cost of Norton, Photoshop, and a couple other programs to get the price up. As for avoiding the "Click here to try AOL", you can save even more and build your own system, or get a system built from any number of local shops in your area. It is simply no longer reasonable to argue that Macs are comparable in price to PCs -- if you think that OSX is worth it, then go for a Mac. I personally don't think it's worth it, but it is simply a matter of opinion.