They complain because Valve makes wholesale changes to the game *after* it's been purchased. It also wouldn't bother people if they would make these additions *optional* rather than a forced change. They also do annoying things like change weapon names and numbers for no apparant reason.
It's very rare to join a server and see someone using a gun other than the Colt/AK or sniper, because they're so overwhelmingly powerful and still pretty cheap.
It's not because they're cheap; people buy AK's and Colt's because they are more powerful than any of the other assualt rifles or SMG's in the game. They have a good clip size (30 bullets) and are very accurate, assuming you are crouched and burst fire.
These things lead to the assumption that the slickness was NOT the main factor and it was marketting, hype, and NOT wanting to be different (everyone has one, dont be left out) caused the huge sales coupled with the fact that portable compressed music players are new to everyone.
Oh, it couldn't be that they came out with a vastly superior product and have spent years refining it, could it? Nah, must be hype.
Wait a minute, people have been posting a theory on/. for years that Apple has NEVER made money from iTMS since it opened for business.
Never any signifigant profit. The iTMS is not a loss leader, but they don't make enough money off of it to run it as a separate business. This is because the majority of the price of each song gets eaten up by the record industry and the credit card companies.
I think it might be a different story with TV shows, however, because that industry isn't the all-out cartel that the record industry is.
No, it's not. A trojan is completely dependant on tricking a user into executing a specific, separate application. Whereas viruses require little to no user interaction - such as the Outlook virus that infected you if you merely previewed the message. The distinction is important, because while it is possible to build a system virtually immune from viruses, any user with sufficient privliges can compromise a system by running a trojan.
Heck, just look at the definitions of the word on google if you don't believe me.
Sure - old ones. Twenty years ago just about every sort of exploit was lumped under the "virus" label. Most if not all of the early Mac "viruses" are what we now consider to be trojans, though this goes for Windows as well.
No, actually, they don't. Leap.A is a trojan, not a virus, and any system that allows a user control over a system is open to trojans, or social engeneering.
I can see your argument, but the simple fact is that most of the exploits out there on the web were written to generate money, not kudos.
Then they would WANT information from Macs, as millions of PC's are used by businesses and government and wont have any personal information, and the credit card information from a purchaser of a $2,000 iMac or Macbook Pro is going to be a lot more valuable than the buyer of a $400 Dell POS.
And most of the traffic-stopping Windows viruses were *not* written to generate money, but "because they could". What's going to get a script kiddie more kudos: writting the thousandth virus that crashes Windows networks, or writting the first-ever virus to crash Macs?
The idea that Macs have been safe and Windows vunerable because of marketshare is a myth. Windows has been a clusterfuck because of Microsoft's design decisions, not because of marketshare.
Return on Investment: Where is the benefit in gaining access to a machine only one out of every 100 people (roughly) uses and which is even more uncommon in business environments ?
False positives: millions of machines are used by government and by businesses, which will A) not have personal and credit card info to steal and B) will be wiped and restored far sooner than a consumer machine. And what is going to be more valuable information: the credit card number of a consumer plunking down two grand on a Macbook Pro or large screen iMac, or the buyer of one of those $400 Dell systems?
Infection rates: Any "virus" infection is going to spread far, far more slowly on Macs than PCs. Heck, there's a pretty good chance it wouldn't even hit critical mass, because of Macs' relative scarcity, and never make it outside the initial infection zone.
Nonsense. There are more Macs out there today than Windows machines when the first PC viruses started going around. It wouldn't crash corporate networks like Code Red did, but that's because most corporate networks are made up entirely of Wintel PC's.
No, Windows has been a cesspool security wise because of Microsoft's piss poor design decisions, not because of marketshare. If Apple had Active X, Internet Explorer, Outlook, auto-installing internet applications, and left ports and services open all over the place, they too would have a rotten record on security. If Microsoft had decent privledge separation, started using a firewall with Windows 98 and had some decent security models for their web apps, they would have a much better record on security. And the big traffic-stopping-billion-dollar-costing viruses have not been written to collect data, but for kudos or "because they could." And what is going to get a script kiddie more kudos: writting the thousandth network crashing Windows virus, or write the first ever Mac crashing virus?
"Sure we know the levees are in rough shape, but who knows if we actually need to improve them? Why don't we just wait and see what happens if a hurricane hits".
The backbone companies have made it perfectly clear that they want to blackmail companies like Google into paying them a toll for premium service, even though Google pays for their access just as I do for mine. The only variable here is how greedy the backbone providers will be. Taking a "wait and see" approach when you know exactly what the problem is and exactly what it's going to do to consumers and businesses is...stupid.
The economy may be "hot" with jobs, the problem is that it's not hot with *well paying jobs*. Between the IT bubble bursting, offshoring, the decline of unions, and stagnant minimum wage, it's not exactly the garden of opportunity in the U.S. And before I get some elitist comment like "there are good jobs out there, you just have to get off your lazy butt and look", yes I know there are good jobs, there just aren't many to go around, no matter how good a worker you are.
my proof is the FACT that people have been searching for the last few years to prove your point, and not a single one has been able to come up with a single fact.
Well, other than the FACT that exit polls showed Kerry winning by a landslide, and the FACT that so many polls were off by such a large amount (always benefitting Bush) is statistically impossible.
I have absolutely no problem with that. Both Clinton and Bush should have been impeached.
Nope. The court defined "sexual relations" as intercourse, so he didn't lie under oath as the AC suggests (blow jobs are not intercourse). And secondly, even if he did lie, it's not automatically perjury - the question has to be relevant, and wether or not he got it on with Monica was not relevant to if he harrased Jones. The whole thing was a bullshit witchunt anyway - the GOP was going to investigate and re-investigate Clinton until they found something. Take a look at Harken Energy as a scandal-that-should-have been and an example of GOP hypocracy.
Sorry, but your "debunking" was counter-debunked, on Salon as well. Turns out Manjoo was just using the right-wing's classic tricks of distraction and red herrings.
For that matter, how about JFK's run in 1960? Nixon knew all about the graveyard vote in Chicago, and the ballot-box stuffing in West Virginia, but he decided that calling for a recount would damage the country.
Myth. Nixon didn't challenge it because he didn't think he would win, not because he didn't want to "for the sake of the country".
If Gore had taken the high road in 2000, instead of letting his campaign staff go on a tear of blaming everyone from Katherine Harris to Ralph Nader, he probably could have won in 2004.
1) He did take the legal, high road. Remember that Bush filed the first lawsuit, and that Republicans were getting ready to take to the streets in the event that Gore lost the popular vote but won the electoral vote. 2) Gore won Florida. It's a fact. The press did a full statewide recount (which should have been done under Florida law) and Gore got more votes than Bush. He should have been running for re-election in 2004, not Bush.
Sounds like what Al Gore and the Democrats tried to do in Florida. AlGoreithm, n. (al'-gor-ith'-m) : Any method of calculation performed endlessly until a predetermined desired result is produced.
That was the Republican talking point, but like most Republican talking points, it doesn't have anything to do with reality.
Like the ABC movie "The Path To 9/11"?? Yeah, threatening to revoke a network's broadcast license because you disagree with the content of their programming isn't censorship.
Not when it's a five hour political ad filled with bald-faced lies, it isn't.
And yes, Nixon did actually win the 1960 election, if you don't count all the dead people who voted in Illinois.
And this has been proven...where? Because while we can't know for sure if enough people were disenfranchised in 2004 to throw the election, we do know that Gore got more votes than Bush in Florida in 2000.
I might also point out that our Electoral College, as antiquated as it seems to some, has one great feature that (to me) redeems all of its faults: it tends to limit the scope of fraud (and the motivation to commit fraud) to a small subset of closely contested states.
Not if the staticians are correct, it isn't. Accoring to the exit polls, Kerry won by a landslide.
The only difference was that Nixon refused to demand a recout because it would hurt the country
That's a myth. Nixon didn't challenge it because he didn't think he would win, not because he didn't want to.
Look up what happened in 1960 in Texas and Illinois
What some Democrats did going on 50 years ago does not excuse what Republicans are doing today. And today's fraud and gerrymandering is much worse than that of the last century becuase of the use of comptuers. If you wanted to stuff 10,000 ballots into a race in 1960, you'd have to get 10,000 pieces of paper counted as votes. Whereas now, with these POS Deibold machines, it's a peice of cake to swing votes by the hundreds of thousands if you manage to get access. And gerrymandering has been raised to an artform by software that will automagically draw districts to maximize your parties representation. I don't know if Republicans used that software in Texas or not, but now they have 76% of of the Congressional seats when statewide Republicans only got 56% of the vote.
and the last two don't care how much damage they do!
The only "damage" being done was by the Bush team talking the country into a recession. Florida law provided for recounts, and there was already precident with Hawaii for being a delay in a states electoral votes being certified. The only date that matters is when Congress meets for the swearing in the new president.
Now you can argue that it was Bush that took it there if you like and that might be fair IIRC the Bush team did ask the court to shortcut the appeals process and hear directly after it left circuit court but I don't think Gore's people resisted.
State elections for President are state business, in the Constitution. The Florida Supreme Court should have had the final say in the matter.
If anyone cared to fix most of the problems they would pass laws that allowed only people with valid photo ID's to vote. This would not fix everything, but it would help alot.
Not really. The big problem right now is not with ballot stuffing, but with voter disenfranchisement. Being picky on ID's is the new reading test for minorities and the poor, who frequently don't have drivers licenses. Some states make a compromise by allowing ID-less voters to sign an affidavit, but that doesn't always help - some election workers in South Dakota broke the law by refusing to let Indians vote without an ID in the last election.
Clinton's socialized healthcare plan was to nationalize 1/7th of the US economy.
It wouldn't be 1/7th of the economy if we nationalized health care and brought the costs down. But in any case, I will see you socialized medicine, and raise you free trade, telecom deregulation, welfare reform, a balanced budget, defining marraige as between a man and a woman...beyach. Clinton==center right.
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They complain because Valve makes wholesale changes to the game *after* it's been purchased. It also wouldn't bother people if they would make these additions *optional* rather than a forced change. They also do annoying things like change weapon names and numbers for no apparant reason.
It's very rare to join a server and see someone using a gun other than the Colt/AK or sniper, because they're so overwhelmingly powerful and still pretty cheap.
It's not because they're cheap; people buy AK's and Colt's because they are more powerful than any of the other assualt rifles or SMG's in the game. They have a good clip size (30 bullets) and are very accurate, assuming you are crouched and burst fire.
These things lead to the assumption that the slickness was NOT the main factor and it was marketting, hype, and NOT wanting to be different (everyone has one, dont be left out) caused the huge sales coupled with the fact that portable compressed music players are new to everyone.
/. for years that Apple has NEVER made money from iTMS since it opened for business.
Oh, it couldn't be that they came out with a vastly superior product and have spent years refining it, could it? Nah, must be hype.
Wait a minute, people have been posting a theory on
Never any signifigant profit. The iTMS is not a loss leader, but they don't make enough money off of it to run it as a separate business. This is because the majority of the price of each song gets eaten up by the record industry and the credit card companies.
I think it might be a different story with TV shows, however, because that industry isn't the all-out cartel that the record industry is.
Wii. Wiimote. Lucas Arts. Jedi. Lightsaber. Game.
That's what I've been telling people for months. People who keep expecting Sony to repeat the success they had with the PS2 are idiots.
A Trojan is a type of virus
No, it's not. A trojan is completely dependant on tricking a user into executing a specific, separate application. Whereas viruses require little to no user interaction - such as the Outlook virus that infected you if you merely previewed the message. The distinction is important, because while it is possible to build a system virtually immune from viruses, any user with sufficient privliges can compromise a system by running a trojan.
Heck, just look at the definitions of the word on google if you don't believe me.
Sure - old ones. Twenty years ago just about every sort of exploit was lumped under the "virus" label. Most if not all of the early Mac "viruses" are what we now consider to be trojans, though this goes for Windows as well.
Bullshit. I just went to both sites and created a top of the line workstation myself. I even laborously cut and pasted the specs.
Too bad you didn't take a second during your laborious cutting pasting to notice that the Mac has 64 bit Xeons while the Dell has 32 bit Xeons.
Basically as close to the same setup as possible:
Not really; the Mac has 64 bit processors while your Dell has 32 bit Xeons. Use the same processors and your results will probably match the parents'.
Will these do?
No, actually, they don't. Leap.A is a trojan, not a virus, and any system that allows a user control over a system is open to trojans, or social engeneering.
I can see your argument, but the simple fact is that most of the exploits out there on the web were written to generate money, not kudos.
Then they would WANT information from Macs, as millions of PC's are used by businesses and government and wont have any personal information, and the credit card information from a purchaser of a $2,000 iMac or Macbook Pro is going to be a lot more valuable than the buyer of a $400 Dell POS.
And most of the traffic-stopping Windows viruses were *not* written to generate money, but "because they could". What's going to get a script kiddie more kudos: writting the thousandth virus that crashes Windows networks, or writting the first-ever virus to crash Macs?
The idea that Macs have been safe and Windows vunerable because of marketshare is a myth. Windows has been a clusterfuck because of Microsoft's design decisions, not because of marketshare.
Return on Investment: Where is the benefit in gaining access to a machine only one out of every 100 people (roughly) uses and which is even more uncommon in business environments ?
False positives: millions of machines are used by government and by businesses, which will A) not have personal and credit card info to steal and B) will be wiped and restored far sooner than a consumer machine. And what is going to be more valuable information: the credit card number of a consumer plunking down two grand on a Macbook Pro or large screen iMac, or the buyer of one of those $400 Dell systems?
Infection rates: Any "virus" infection is going to spread far, far more slowly on Macs than PCs. Heck, there's a pretty good chance it wouldn't even hit critical mass, because of Macs' relative scarcity, and never make it outside the initial infection zone.
Nonsense. There are more Macs out there today than Windows machines when the first PC viruses started going around. It wouldn't crash corporate networks like Code Red did, but that's because most corporate networks are made up entirely of Wintel PC's.
No, Windows has been a cesspool security wise because of Microsoft's piss poor design decisions, not because of marketshare. If Apple had Active X, Internet Explorer, Outlook, auto-installing internet applications, and left ports and services open all over the place, they too would have a rotten record on security. If Microsoft had decent privledge separation, started using a firewall with Windows 98 and had some decent security models for their web apps, they would have a much better record on security. And the big traffic-stopping-billion-dollar-costing viruses have not been written to collect data, but for kudos or "because they could." And what is going to get a script kiddie more kudos: writting the thousandth network crashing Windows virus, or write the first ever Mac crashing virus?
"Sure we know the levees are in rough shape, but who knows if we actually need to improve them? Why don't we just wait and see what happens if a hurricane hits".
The backbone companies have made it perfectly clear that they want to blackmail companies like Google into paying them a toll for premium service, even though Google pays for their access just as I do for mine. The only variable here is how greedy the backbone providers will be. Taking a "wait and see" approach when you know exactly what the problem is and exactly what it's going to do to consumers and businesses is...stupid.
The economy may be "hot" with jobs, the problem is that it's not hot with *well paying jobs*. Between the IT bubble bursting, offshoring, the decline of unions, and stagnant minimum wage, it's not exactly the garden of opportunity in the U.S. And before I get some elitist comment like "there are good jobs out there, you just have to get off your lazy butt and look", yes I know there are good jobs, there just aren't many to go around, no matter how good a worker you are.
my proof is the FACT that people have been searching for the last few years to prove your point, and not a single one has been able to come up with a single fact.
Well, other than the FACT that exit polls showed Kerry winning by a landslide, and the FACT that so many polls were off by such a large amount (always benefitting Bush) is statistically impossible.
I have absolutely no problem with that. Both Clinton and Bush should have been impeached.
Nope. The court defined "sexual relations" as intercourse, so he didn't lie under oath as the AC suggests (blow jobs are not intercourse). And secondly, even if he did lie, it's not automatically perjury - the question has to be relevant, and wether or not he got it on with Monica was not relevant to if he harrased Jones. The whole thing was a bullshit witchunt anyway - the GOP was going to investigate and re-investigate Clinton until they found something. Take a look at Harken Energy as a scandal-that-should-have been and an example of GOP hypocracy.
Mod parent up! Informative.
Not really.
Sorry, but your "debunking" was counter-debunked, on Salon as well. Turns out Manjoo was just using the right-wing's classic tricks of distraction and red herrings.
For that matter, how about JFK's run in 1960? Nixon knew all about the graveyard vote in Chicago, and the ballot-box stuffing in West Virginia, but he decided that calling for a recount would damage the country.
Myth. Nixon didn't challenge it because he didn't think he would win, not because he didn't want to "for the sake of the country".
If Gore had taken the high road in 2000, instead of letting his campaign staff go on a tear of blaming everyone from Katherine Harris to Ralph Nader, he probably could have won in 2004.
1) He did take the legal, high road. Remember that Bush filed the first lawsuit, and that Republicans were getting ready to take to the streets in the event that Gore lost the popular vote but won the electoral vote. 2) Gore won Florida. It's a fact. The press did a full statewide recount (which should have been done under Florida law) and Gore got more votes than Bush. He should have been running for re-election in 2004, not Bush.
Yes.
Must be nice to be lucky, or rich.
Sounds like what Al Gore and the Democrats tried to do in Florida. AlGoreithm, n. (al'-gor-ith'-m) : Any method of calculation performed endlessly until a predetermined desired result is produced.
That was the Republican talking point, but like most Republican talking points, it doesn't have anything to do with reality.
Like the ABC movie "The Path To 9/11"?? Yeah, threatening to revoke a network's broadcast license because you disagree with the content of their programming isn't censorship.
Not when it's a five hour political ad filled with bald-faced lies, it isn't.
And yes, Nixon did actually win the 1960 election, if you don't count all the dead people who voted in Illinois.
And this has been proven...where? Because while we can't know for sure if enough people were disenfranchised in 2004 to throw the election, we do know that Gore got more votes than Bush in Florida in 2000.
I might also point out that our Electoral College, as antiquated as it seems to some, has one great feature that (to me) redeems all of its faults: it tends to limit the scope of fraud (and the motivation to commit fraud) to a small subset of closely contested states.
Not if the staticians are correct, it isn't. Accoring to the exit polls, Kerry won by a landslide.
The only difference was that Nixon refused to demand a recout because it would hurt the country
That's a myth. Nixon didn't challenge it because he didn't think he would win, not because he didn't want to.
Look up what happened in 1960 in Texas and Illinois
What some Democrats did going on 50 years ago does not excuse what Republicans are doing today. And today's fraud and gerrymandering is much worse than that of the last century becuase of the use of comptuers. If you wanted to stuff 10,000 ballots into a race in 1960, you'd have to get 10,000 pieces of paper counted as votes. Whereas now, with these POS Deibold machines, it's a peice of cake to swing votes by the hundreds of thousands if you manage to get access. And gerrymandering has been raised to an artform by software that will automagically draw districts to maximize your parties representation. I don't know if Republicans used that software in Texas or not, but now they have 76% of of the Congressional seats when statewide Republicans only got 56% of the vote.
and the last two don't care how much damage they do!
The only "damage" being done was by the Bush team talking the country into a recession. Florida law provided for recounts, and there was already precident with Hawaii for being a delay in a states electoral votes being certified. The only date that matters is when Congress meets for the swearing in the new president.
Now you can argue that it was Bush that took it there if you like and that might be fair IIRC the Bush team did ask the court to shortcut the appeals process and hear directly after it left circuit court but I don't think Gore's people resisted.
State elections for President are state business, in the Constitution. The Florida Supreme Court should have had the final say in the matter.
If anyone cared to fix most of the problems they would pass laws that allowed only people with valid photo ID's to vote. This would not fix everything, but it would help alot.
Not really. The big problem right now is not with ballot stuffing, but with voter disenfranchisement. Being picky on ID's is the new reading test for minorities and the poor, who frequently don't have drivers licenses. Some states make a compromise by allowing ID-less voters to sign an affidavit, but that doesn't always help - some election workers in South Dakota broke the law by refusing to let Indians vote without an ID in the last election.
Clinton's socialized healthcare plan was to nationalize 1/7th of the US economy.
It wouldn't be 1/7th of the economy if we nationalized health care and brought the costs down. But in any case, I will see you socialized medicine, and raise you free trade, telecom deregulation, welfare reform, a balanced budget, defining marraige as between a man and a woman...beyach. Clinton==center right.
Too bad Slashdot, in its ridiculous slanting, removed the final word of Salon's headline: "No." Even Mother Jones and NPR repudiated Kennedy's claims.
Too bad you missed the rebuttal supporting Kennedy and showing that the naysayers are the ones who are full of it.