Name a bug in Office that has been there more than a decade which affects your usage of the product.
None?
That's why people who type "M$" are criticized. Because it shows they're speaking purely out of spiteful bias and simply like to parrot things "they've heard" on the interwebs. This commonly occurred for example, with Windows Vista, where the product was hugely, widely bashed by people who had never used it. In fact, it's still bashed by people who've never used it. And the faults they describe largely either didn't exist, or only affected a small number of users.
"M$" simply demonstrates a mind-set of pre-determination by the writer, and suggests they're not going to be rational in any of the arguments they make.
That's not true, really. There is a simultaneous "now" in relativity. It's merely that the information takes time to propagate. If you wanted to get really pedantic about it, our brain takes several microseconds for stimulus to reach our cognitive processing centres, so in fact we never experience "now", we are always experiencing events that happened in the past. But like the information transfer delay of space, that doesn't mean "now" isn't occuring simultaneously.
Events are occurring simultaneously here and 40 million light years away. The fact the information of those events will take at least 40 million years to reach the opposite location, doesn't have any effect on the reality of the events. Contrary to your statement, we are percieving it now ONLY because it happened before. But everything that we percieve has happened in the past. Even those that occur in front of our face. The concept *is* simple.
They don't need to do any such thing. Under international law, any craft (boat, plane, balloon, etc) at sea in international waters falls under the legal jurisdiction of its port of origin. Taking drones out to sea and launching them is legally no different to flying them over Stockholm.
That's largely what I've been doing recently. I avoid any business and rejects any offers which would take me through the US. Any country which mandates non-optional sexual assault simply to do businesss within its borders, is on its way out.
I understand your point completely, and its why I always try to warn people to avoid statistics in virtually any decision making, especially where scale is important. I was merely pointing out the thing to argue with him over is not the statistics, as statistics can be used to prove or disprove, anything. Like in your example, where there's a 1:2 probability of me seeing a dinosaur in my backyard. Of course if you expand this, the probability of one being found in each ADDITIONAL backyard tested reduces to almost zero. But at that stage both you at the start and the second individual at the end, are statistically correct.
Although, your dinosaur method could be shown to be fundamentally flawed as you need a baseline from which to start, One I like to throw around because it shows the importance of scale and parameters is "For each person you see today, they are more likely to be asian than any other race," and "If you see twenty people today, the probability that none of them are Asian is less than 1%". Yet of course, in many places and countries around the world you can go weeks and not see a single Asian. (BTW, I'm not commenting on Asians, just on how localization affects statistics).
What I was trying to say was don't argue the statistics - it's fighting a losing battle if you're speaking to anyone who doesn't understand probability but knows how to quote numbers. Instead, attack the methedology of their conclusions. The key sentence in his post to attack would be "Blacks are much more likely to be violent and criminal." This is a correlation != causation example.:)
I'm not sure you're arguing against the correct aspect of his post. He's stating the facts of the statistics - he even mentions himself that those are the statistics. It *is* a fact that for a random robbery, it's 8 times more likely to have been committed by a black than a white. (And likewise, the individual mentioned is more *likely* to be black than white purely on a statistical basis). What's wrong with his post is that he doesn't take into account causation, and the causation is not that they're black, but other socio-economic factors, of which race is merely a correlation. That's not to say each individual isn't responsible for his crimes, but that race isn't the determining factor of why the crime occurrs.
For about a year at one point, I lived in a small island chain populated almost entirely by blacks - around 60,000 to 200 whites. However, the only murder in the last 20 years, had been committed by a white. Is it because he was white? No. And the statistics OP used to make his case are equally flawed simply in that respect.
And that still is the consensus, unfortunately W2K didn't move with the times and was largely unsupported by most developers. We had to wait 8 years for Windows 7 to come out and give us a decent OS again. XP was always horrible, but it was largely a necessity for almost a decade if you actually wanted your games to work. For the first few years of XP when 98SE and W2K were still being supported by developers, I largely kept using those. Once I was forced to, I used XP for about 2-3 years and then once Vista beta came out I switched and never looked back. (Actually, I liked Vista and didn't have any of the problems that seemed to plague many, although Win7 is vastly superior).
The fact that business adopted XP, and still having to work with it on-sites, is painful. > The sooner we can get them off it, the better. Alas, stupid corporate CEOs will see Windows 8 with its metro interface colors and apps and think "oooh, we have to switch everyone from XP to Windows 8 to keep up with the times!". Realize, most CEOs can't tell any visual difference between Windows95 and Windows7. It takes an interface change like we're seeing in Windows 8 to trigger their interest. Ugh.
The myths section you're reading from explains that mouthwash doesn't help REDUCE blood alcohol content readings. It never says mouthwash doesn't affect readings, just that it doesn't reduce them.
The following section then goes on to show that mouthwash in fact increases the readings due to the presence of alcohol. Unfortunately you're on the wrong side of this myth - it's quite proven that Listerine (and other mouthwashes) increase readings taken by breathalyzers. If you've just had some within a few minutes before you were stopped, it's important to let the officer know (if the reading is over). By the time you get to the station it will have significantly reduced, or you can opt to take a blood test instead which will show naught but trace amounts of alcohol.
I can't imagine how you have VLC set incorrectly so that it "washes out" color - a default install will reproduce video per-file. I can see no difference between a default install of MPC and a default install of VLC in terms of color.
It sounds like they're using different overlay/buffers and on your system your video has separate settings for each - this is especially common on ATI video cards. It will detect overlay video as "video" and apply its video "enchancements", but then not detect the video for any program which does its own rendering and - naturally, not apply any "enchancements". The same is possible on nVidia, however as a difference, nVidia drivers default to no video enhancement, unlike ATI.
Almost all media programs try to steal all file associations on install. You can simply tell it you don't want to, easy enough. However, this is the norm. Nothing special going on here.
HOWEVER, to answer your question - yes, it seems there are many improvements in VLC, and in my limited testing it's much better at handling very large, very high resolution video with no lag or banding which sometimes appeared in 1.x.
Your comments pretty much prove exactly why Reddit calls it a "slippery slope". You talk of a "six-year acceptance of child porn on its site", with the example given being "underage photos submitted by creepy Facebook stalkers."
The issue is the two are not the same, yet many people like to treat them as such. The slippery slope is that sooner or later nobody (not even parents) will be able to post pictures of their own children on the internet. At many public events parents are banned from taking photographs of their _own_ children. With posting, the problem that arises is "what constitutes a sexual picture of a child?"
To some, perhaps even yourself, merely the context of the individual posting the pictures deems the pictures to be "child porn". They believe if someone's posting in alt.preteen.hotties (not a real newsgroup), then its child porn, no matter the content.
Does any aspect of nudity make a picture pornographic, in which case are pictures of your kids playing in the pool topless, child porn? Or the many millions of parents who've taken pictures of their childs first bath - are they porn producers? If it's not porn, then someone gets that picture and posts it on alt.preteen.hotties, is it NOW porn all of a sudden?
Is it the pose? In which case, if a girl is posing on her back with her undergarments exposed, it's pornographic, but if there's a photo of a girl whos fallen over backwards and her undergarments are exposed, is it also pornographic?
As I explained before - the slippery slope is that soon nobody will be able to post any photo of a child on the internet, because of fear-mongering by think-of-the-children bleeding hearts who don't even understand their own position.
You can reformat and change your hardware every fucking week if you want.
Alas, this isn't the case as much as people think. I do monthly reinstalls, usually from Clonezilla images. Every few months I'll do a complete reinstall from scratch and create a new Clonezilla image for the coming reinstalls. Sometimes (depending on my workload in a particular month) I'll reinstall multiple times in a single month. Around the 15th reinstall (from scratch, not from images), Windows 7 stopped activating. I rang the Microsoft line and automated phone activation didn't work, so I had to speak to an operator. I explained to him that I was reinstalling on the same system I'd started with and that no hardware had changed, and he gave me a reactivtion code.
I asked him why it didn't automatically activate considering my hardware hash hadn't changed, and he responded that there was a soft limit to the number of activations allowed and each time I wanted to reinstall from now I would have to call the Microsoft activation line and speak to an operator. The fact that a soft activation limit is coded in at all to a personal copy of Windows purchased retail and only ever activated from a single IP is concerning. I could understand the key being flagged if it was being used from multiple locations, but not from my static IP.
Woah.. don't get ahead of yourself. Did you read the next sentence ahead of what you quoted?
Conversely, I can't think of a SP/MP RPG where the multiplayer isn't simply the single-player game with increased difficulty. Occasionally they add some multiplayer specific components, such as arenas, but what you're describing - "lack of a real single player game" is at best misleading.
I'm very happy to admit (in fact, I kinda pointed out) that there are frequently additions to the base game for multiplayer, but as I allude to repeatedly, there's no separate multiplayer and singleplayer game.
If anything, there's a lack of a separate multiplayer game, but as pointed out, this is the norm for the genre. Torchlight 2 multiplayer is going to be Torchlight 2 singleplayer + more difficulty. It's rare (I can't think of a single example, really) where an RPG developer has produced an entirely separate storyline for SP and MP.
I get it, you're a Diablo 2 fanboy. I love Diablo 2 as well and have been playing it since launch. I just did a complete bnet playthrough with two friends just over a month ago (from scratch, because we're crazy like that). I wasn't dissing Diablo 2. I was merely pointing out that they didn't create a separate game each for single player and multiplayer. They're the same base game. OP was complaining that there simply wasn't a single player game in Diablo 3. There is - in the same fashion there is in Diablo 2. AND, like Diablo 2, there'll be additional multiplayer-only content in Diablo 3.
I'm 48 and was publishing games before you were born (a presumption to be sure, but no worse than yours), but OK, I understand you're extremely angry about.. something. Blizzard I think. But no need to redirect your anger inapproriately.
As far as my reply to OP goes, he may have been intending to say that there's no offline solo play in Diablo 3 (btw, this isn't necessarily true - although certainly if present it would require periodic reconnection as the offline mode in Starcraft 2 does), but that ISN'T WHAT HE SAID.
He said there's no real single player game. By contest, I point out that as far as gameplay goes, there is an identical single player experience to Diablo 2, as compared to multiplayer. There is a single player game - it's the one you play on your own, not with other people. There's no permanent offline mode that there was in Diablo 2 (agreed, which was better), but if that's what OP wanted to elaborate on, he couldn't have chosen a poorer wording.
ps. Apologies, none of these are mods, I mis-read one of the links. These are all examples of some additional content added to the same game for multiplayer.
Right you are, except these aren't examples of games released with completely separate singleplayer and multiplayer storylines. These are simple mods for Diablo 2 multiplayer.
As for Ladder only Runewords, I did explicitly state that sometimes developers add additional multiplayer content to the multiplayer version of the game, but overall - it's the same game.
A 3rd-party multiplayer TC is hardly contravenes anything in my post as it's irrelevant. I can write a GTA3 mod that spawns clowns everywhere only when playing multiplayer with the multiplayer network mod.. but as this isn't how the game was shipped it means jack to any discussion.
Because no Blizzard games ever got released on console?
Oh, except for: RPM Racing The Lost Vikings Rock n' Roll Racing Blackthorne The Death and Return of Superman Justice Leage Taskforce Warcraft 2 Warcraft 2: Beyond the Dark Portal Diablo Lost Vikings 2 Starcraft And the never-finished Starcraft Ghost..
Indeed, and the PC version has no awkward menu scrolling or any other signs of console "taint". The only thing in the beta that appears remniciscent of console games is considerably lower difficulty than par. However this is likely solely due to beta tuning.
There is a single-player game in exactly the same format as Diablo 2. That is, the single player and multiplayer are the same game, but with multiplayer the difficulty is increased with each additional player. I guess it's a matter of perspective, the fact that there isn't a separate game for single-player and multiplayer, as in SC2. But with an RTS, the multiplayer component always focuses on player v player battles whereas the single player focuses on story missions - eg, the entirety of the Command and Conquer series, Dune 2000, the Red Alert series, Total Annihilation, Supreme Commander 1 & 2, Warcraft 1, 2 & 3, etc - in all of these games, there's no multiplayer "story", it's just battles.
Conversely, I can't think of a SP/MP RPG where the multiplayer isn't simply the single-player game with increased difficulty. Occasionally they add some multiplayer specific components, such as arenas, but what you're describing - "lack of a real single player game" is at best misleading. If anything, there's a lack of a separate multiplayer game, but as pointed out, this is the norm for the genre. Torchlight 2 multiplayer is going to be Torchlight 2 singleplayer + more difficulty. It's rare (I can't think of a single example, really) where an RPG developer has produced an entirely separate storyline for SP and MP.
You can reinstall on the same hardware as many times as you like.
Alas, I recently hit a cap on my Windows 7 activations on the same hardware at around the 20th reinstall. I now have to call the activation line if I want to reinstall so I'm using my trusty Clonezilla images instead.
Or more specifically, if a voter is at the point where they're downloading an app to get the "latest news and updates" on a specific candidate (over and above the email and sms spam they can already get), then you don't need an app to win that individual's vote. For the fence-sitters who just want to get apps for "every candidate", again it's not going to help either. The only advantage here is to the marketing consultants.
Slashdot Mirror
Name a bug in Office that has been there more than a decade which affects your usage of the product.
None?
That's why people who type "M$" are criticized. Because it shows they're speaking purely out of spiteful bias and simply like to parrot things "they've heard" on the interwebs. This commonly occurred for example, with Windows Vista, where the product was hugely, widely bashed by people who had never used it. In fact, it's still bashed by people who've never used it. And the faults they describe largely either didn't exist, or only affected a small number of users.
"M$" simply demonstrates a mind-set of pre-determination by the writer, and suggests they're not going to be rational in any of the arguments they make.
That's not true, really. There is a simultaneous "now" in relativity. It's merely that the information takes time to propagate. If you wanted to get really pedantic about it, our brain takes several microseconds for stimulus to reach our cognitive processing centres, so in fact we never experience "now", we are always experiencing events that happened in the past. But like the information transfer delay of space, that doesn't mean "now" isn't occuring simultaneously.
Events are occurring simultaneously here and 40 million light years away. The fact the information of those events will take at least 40 million years to reach the opposite location, doesn't have any effect on the reality of the events. Contrary to your statement, we are percieving it now ONLY because it happened before. But everything that we percieve has happened in the past. Even those that occur in front of our face. The concept *is* simple.
They don't need to do any such thing. Under international law, any craft (boat, plane, balloon, etc) at sea in international waters falls under the legal jurisdiction of its port of origin. Taking drones out to sea and launching them is legally no different to flying them over Stockholm.
That's largely what I've been doing recently. I avoid any business and rejects any offers which would take me through the US. Any country which mandates non-optional sexual assault simply to do businesss within its borders, is on its way out.
I understand your point completely, and its why I always try to warn people to avoid statistics in virtually any decision making, especially where scale is important. I was merely pointing out the thing to argue with him over is not the statistics, as statistics can be used to prove or disprove, anything. Like in your example, where there's a 1:2 probability of me seeing a dinosaur in my backyard. Of course if you expand this, the probability of one being found in each ADDITIONAL backyard tested reduces to almost zero. But at that stage both you at the start and the second individual at the end, are statistically correct.
Although, your dinosaur method could be shown to be fundamentally flawed as you need a baseline from which to start, One I like to throw around because it shows the importance of scale and parameters is "For each person you see today, they are more likely to be asian than any other race," and "If you see twenty people today, the probability that none of them are Asian is less than 1%". Yet of course, in many places and countries around the world you can go weeks and not see a single Asian. (BTW, I'm not commenting on Asians, just on how localization affects statistics).
What I was trying to say was don't argue the statistics - it's fighting a losing battle if you're speaking to anyone who doesn't understand probability but knows how to quote numbers. Instead, attack the methedology of their conclusions. The key sentence in his post to attack would be "Blacks are much more likely to be violent and criminal." This is a correlation != causation example. :)
I'm not sure you're arguing against the correct aspect of his post. He's stating the facts of the statistics - he even mentions himself that those are the statistics. It *is* a fact that for a random robbery, it's 8 times more likely to have been committed by a black than a white. (And likewise, the individual mentioned is more *likely* to be black than white purely on a statistical basis). What's wrong with his post is that he doesn't take into account causation, and the causation is not that they're black, but other socio-economic factors, of which race is merely a correlation. That's not to say each individual isn't responsible for his crimes, but that race isn't the determining factor of why the crime occurrs.
For about a year at one point, I lived in a small island chain populated almost entirely by blacks - around 60,000 to 200 whites. However, the only murder in the last 20 years, had been committed by a white. Is it because he was white? No. And the statistics OP used to make his case are equally flawed simply in that respect.
I wish I had more +Insighful's. I wish MS read Slashdot, sometimes. >
And that still is the consensus, unfortunately W2K didn't move with the times and was largely unsupported by most developers. We had to wait 8 years for Windows 7 to come out and give us a decent OS again. XP was always horrible, but it was largely a necessity for almost a decade if you actually wanted your games to work. For the first few years of XP when 98SE and W2K were still being supported by developers, I largely kept using those. Once I was forced to, I used XP for about 2-3 years and then once Vista beta came out I switched and never looked back. (Actually, I liked Vista and didn't have any of the problems that seemed to plague many, although Win7 is vastly superior).
The fact that business adopted XP, and still having to work with it on-sites, is painful. > The sooner we can get them off it, the better. Alas, stupid corporate CEOs will see Windows 8 with its metro interface colors and apps and think "oooh, we have to switch everyone from XP to Windows 8 to keep up with the times!". Realize, most CEOs can't tell any visual difference between Windows95 and Windows7. It takes an interface change like we're seeing in Windows 8 to trigger their interest. Ugh.
The myths section you're reading from explains that mouthwash doesn't help REDUCE blood alcohol content readings. It never says mouthwash doesn't affect readings, just that it doesn't reduce them.
The following section then goes on to show that mouthwash in fact increases the readings due to the presence of alcohol. Unfortunately you're on the wrong side of this myth - it's quite proven that Listerine (and other mouthwashes) increase readings taken by breathalyzers. If you've just had some within a few minutes before you were stopped, it's important to let the officer know (if the reading is over). By the time you get to the station it will have significantly reduced, or you can opt to take a blood test instead which will show naught but trace amounts of alcohol.
Your response to someone speaking words that you don't like is to kill them? No, you give the species a bad name.
I can't imagine how you have VLC set incorrectly so that it "washes out" color - a default install will reproduce video per-file. I can see no difference between a default install of MPC and a default install of VLC in terms of color.
It sounds like they're using different overlay/buffers and on your system your video has separate settings for each - this is especially common on ATI video cards. It will detect overlay video as "video" and apply its video "enchancements", but then not detect the video for any program which does its own rendering and - naturally, not apply any "enchancements". The same is possible on nVidia, however as a difference, nVidia drivers default to no video enhancement, unlike ATI.
Almost all media programs try to steal all file associations on install. You can simply tell it you don't want to, easy enough. However, this is the norm. Nothing special going on here.
HOWEVER, to answer your question - yes, it seems there are many improvements in VLC, and in my limited testing it's much better at handling very large, very high resolution video with no lag or banding which sometimes appeared in 1.x.
Your comments pretty much prove exactly why Reddit calls it a "slippery slope". You talk of a "six-year acceptance of child porn on its site", with the example given being "underage photos submitted by creepy Facebook stalkers."
The issue is the two are not the same, yet many people like to treat them as such. The slippery slope is that sooner or later nobody (not even parents) will be able to post pictures of their own children on the internet. At many public events parents are banned from taking photographs of their _own_ children. With posting, the problem that arises is "what constitutes a sexual picture of a child?"
To some, perhaps even yourself, merely the context of the individual posting the pictures deems the pictures to be "child porn". They believe if someone's posting in alt.preteen.hotties (not a real newsgroup), then its child porn, no matter the content.
Does any aspect of nudity make a picture pornographic, in which case are pictures of your kids playing in the pool topless, child porn? Or the many millions of parents who've taken pictures of their childs first bath - are they porn producers? If it's not porn, then someone gets that picture and posts it on alt.preteen.hotties, is it NOW porn all of a sudden?
Is it the pose? In which case, if a girl is posing on her back with her undergarments exposed, it's pornographic, but if there's a photo of a girl whos fallen over backwards and her undergarments are exposed, is it also pornographic?
As I explained before - the slippery slope is that soon nobody will be able to post any photo of a child on the internet, because of fear-mongering by think-of-the-children bleeding hearts who don't even understand their own position.
Absolutely, indeed - when I reinstall from the images I don't have to reactivate. It's just those times when I do a fresh install.
Indeed. I started my Ubisoft boycott after some always-on DRM measures a couple of years ago.
You can reformat and change your hardware every fucking week if you want.
Alas, this isn't the case as much as people think. I do monthly reinstalls, usually from Clonezilla images. Every few months I'll do a complete reinstall from scratch and create a new Clonezilla image for the coming reinstalls. Sometimes (depending on my workload in a particular month) I'll reinstall multiple times in a single month. Around the 15th reinstall (from scratch, not from images), Windows 7 stopped activating. I rang the Microsoft line and automated phone activation didn't work, so I had to speak to an operator. I explained to him that I was reinstalling on the same system I'd started with and that no hardware had changed, and he gave me a reactivtion code.
I asked him why it didn't automatically activate considering my hardware hash hadn't changed, and he responded that there was a soft limit to the number of activations allowed and each time I wanted to reinstall from now I would have to call the Microsoft activation line and speak to an operator. The fact that a soft activation limit is coded in at all to a personal copy of Windows purchased retail and only ever activated from a single IP is concerning. I could understand the key being flagged if it was being used from multiple locations, but not from my static IP.
Woah.. don't get ahead of yourself. Did you read the next sentence ahead of what you quoted?
Conversely, I can't think of a SP/MP RPG where the multiplayer isn't simply the single-player game with increased difficulty. Occasionally they add some multiplayer specific components, such as arenas, but what you're describing - "lack of a real single player game" is at best misleading.
I'm very happy to admit (in fact, I kinda pointed out) that there are frequently additions to the base game for multiplayer, but as I allude to repeatedly, there's no separate multiplayer and singleplayer game.
If anything, there's a lack of a separate multiplayer game, but as pointed out, this is the norm for the genre. Torchlight 2 multiplayer is going to be Torchlight 2 singleplayer + more difficulty. It's rare (I can't think of a single example, really) where an RPG developer has produced an entirely separate storyline for SP and MP.
I get it, you're a Diablo 2 fanboy. I love Diablo 2 as well and have been playing it since launch. I just did a complete bnet playthrough with two friends just over a month ago (from scratch, because we're crazy like that). I wasn't dissing Diablo 2. I was merely pointing out that they didn't create a separate game each for single player and multiplayer. They're the same base game. OP was complaining that there simply wasn't a single player game in Diablo 3. There is - in the same fashion there is in Diablo 2. AND, like Diablo 2, there'll be additional multiplayer-only content in Diablo 3.
I'm 48 and was publishing games before you were born (a presumption to be sure, but no worse than yours), but OK, I understand you're extremely angry about.. something. Blizzard I think. But no need to redirect your anger inapproriately.
As far as my reply to OP goes, he may have been intending to say that there's no offline solo play in Diablo 3 (btw, this isn't necessarily true - although certainly if present it would require periodic reconnection as the offline mode in Starcraft 2 does), but that ISN'T WHAT HE SAID.
He said there's no real single player game. By contest, I point out that as far as gameplay goes, there is an identical single player experience to Diablo 2, as compared to multiplayer. There is a single player game - it's the one you play on your own, not with other people. There's no permanent offline mode that there was in Diablo 2 (agreed, which was better), but if that's what OP wanted to elaborate on, he couldn't have chosen a poorer wording.
ps. Apologies, none of these are mods, I mis-read one of the links. These are all examples of some additional content added to the same game for multiplayer.
Right you are, except these aren't examples of games released with completely separate singleplayer and multiplayer storylines. These are simple mods for Diablo 2 multiplayer.
As for Ladder only Runewords, I did explicitly state that sometimes developers add additional multiplayer content to the multiplayer version of the game, but overall - it's the same game.
A 3rd-party multiplayer TC is hardly contravenes anything in my post as it's irrelevant. I can write a GTA3 mod that spawns clowns everywhere only when playing multiplayer with the multiplayer network mod.. but as this isn't how the game was shipped it means jack to any discussion.
Because no Blizzard games ever got released on console?
Oh, except for:
RPM Racing
The Lost Vikings
Rock n' Roll Racing
Blackthorne
The Death and Return of Superman
Justice Leage Taskforce
Warcraft 2
Warcraft 2: Beyond the Dark Portal
Diablo
Lost Vikings 2
Starcraft
And the never-finished Starcraft Ghost..
Indeed, and the PC version has no awkward menu scrolling or any other signs of console "taint". The only thing in the beta that appears remniciscent of console games is considerably lower difficulty than par. However this is likely solely due to beta tuning.
the lack of a real singleplayer game
There is a single-player game in exactly the same format as Diablo 2. That is, the single player and multiplayer are the same game, but with multiplayer the difficulty is increased with each additional player. I guess it's a matter of perspective, the fact that there isn't a separate game for single-player and multiplayer, as in SC2. But with an RTS, the multiplayer component always focuses on player v player battles whereas the single player focuses on story missions - eg, the entirety of the Command and Conquer series, Dune 2000, the Red Alert series, Total Annihilation, Supreme Commander 1 & 2, Warcraft 1, 2 & 3, etc - in all of these games, there's no multiplayer "story", it's just battles.
Conversely, I can't think of a SP/MP RPG where the multiplayer isn't simply the single-player game with increased difficulty. Occasionally they add some multiplayer specific components, such as arenas, but what you're describing - "lack of a real single player game" is at best misleading. If anything, there's a lack of a separate multiplayer game, but as pointed out, this is the norm for the genre. Torchlight 2 multiplayer is going to be Torchlight 2 singleplayer + more difficulty. It's rare (I can't think of a single example, really) where an RPG developer has produced an entirely separate storyline for SP and MP.
You can reinstall on the same hardware as many times as you like.
Alas, I recently hit a cap on my Windows 7 activations on the same hardware at around the 20th reinstall. I now have to call the activation line if I want to reinstall so I'm using my trusty Clonezilla images instead.
Or more specifically, if a voter is at the point where they're downloading an app to get the "latest news and updates" on a specific candidate (over and above the email and sms spam they can already get), then you don't need an app to win that individual's vote. For the fence-sitters who just want to get apps for "every candidate", again it's not going to help either. The only advantage here is to the marketing consultants.
Is there really a demand for "candidate-specific downloadable mobile apps"? I can't think of anything more horrific spamming up the App Store.