So, if you're being followed by a suspicious person, and you want to call for help, you're out of luck because some douchebag like LaHood decided that you're not capable of exercising your own judgement!
What did we do just a few short years ago when no one had cell phones?
People act like cell phones are a "must have", yet generations upon generations actually survived, and dare I say, thrived without having a permanent umbilical cord to Ma Bell. People act like their 10 year old kid MUST HAVE A CELL PHONE, just in case someone abducts them, or some just improbability. Yes, they are nice and convenient, and there are times when you can say "Hey, a cell phone saved their life". I can also point to just as many instances where a cell phone cost a life. The loss of ability to use the phone while driving should be a non-starter, as it is illegal in most states NOW, either under specific laws outlawing cell phone usage and texting, or under general statues that cover "distracted driving".
Everyone wants to freak out on the idea that they wouldn't be able to use their cell phone in their car, when the real issue is the loss of civil liberties. As someone who drives 100 miles per day, all Interstate, I see daily why people would be all for this law. Nothing like watching 18 wheels of terror slide from lane to lane while the driver is texting. Regularly.
You are right in that many people are inadvertently (or apathetically) rude for the purpose of efficiency. "I don't have time to be nice, I'm busy helping sick people, and being nice slows me down." While it makes them efficient and effective at the technical skills (things that CEOs love) it doesn't necessarily make them the best care givers. Outside of actual life and death emergencies (and your ER example would be excempted), how care is given is as important as the care itself, particularly with the very young and the very old, who might be reluctant to seek help in the future if they are always scolded when getting that very care.
You want to see some real, over-the-top rudeness? Go to a forum designed to help Linux newbs.
I've been tooling with Linux for 15 years now, so used to the arrogant "help" found in many forums and groups, but I've had non-Linux friends check some out and were completely amazed at the average level of rudeness in the average "help" reply. It certainly didn't make them want to jump into Linux when that is the average help. For obvious reasons, half the admin-types on Linux forums remind me of the comic book guy in the Simpsons.
Yes, people should know more about the OS, but sometimes they just want to get something to work. Being reminded that "This isn't Windows" and "you should know $x" must feed some ego hunger. Granted, not all are like this. Only half.
NC got screwed by Dell because of the infrastructure (roads etc.) they had to put in. Dell returned all other moneys. With these data centers, the infrastructure is not needed. There are already adequate roads (data centers typically employ less than 100 people), there is already tremendous electrical infrastructure (many dams and a nuke plant nearby) and the state wouldn't have to pay for that anyway. All the state is basically doing is not charging property taxes and other fees that they would not normally get to charge on an empty plot of land only. NC has been fairly smart in this, and going after data centers very specifically. They have made plenty of mistakes in the past, as have other areas, but their method of going after data centers has worked out very well and is very cost effective.
Even without the incentives, this is a pretty good area for data centers as it is somewhat centrally located (not geographically, but by population), has mild winters and moderate summers, very cheap wholesale electricity because a glut of power capability (used to be used by furniture and textiles, which are now in China and India), and overall quality of life is good here. It isn't that hard to get people to move here as it is just a couple hours to the Blue Ridge Parkway (and everything that the mountains has to offer), 4 to 5 hours from the beach (we have nice beaches in NC), you can drive to DC in 5-6 hours, NYC in 8-9, Atlanta in less than 5, Nashville in 8, etc. It isn't perfect, but it doesn't suck and there is an incredible amount of things to do within a short drive from anywhere in the state.
I live just 20 miles south of you in Lexington (HRL actually). The other factor is how cheap wholesale electricity is, due to all the other textile and furniture factories shutting down, plus the dams at HRL, Badin, Tuckertown and Falls, PLUS Buck, McGuire, etc. And yea, NC has made a concerted effort to go after data farms in particular, which don't actually add that much employment, but have other benefits. And as you know, the weather is reasonable, quality of life is good, and while taxes are high, the tax breaks help.
Actually, I'm just not naive, and I've managed IT for almost two decades. You obviously are not aware of how fast your info is being pushed to 3rd parties +. Facebook has already admitted that 3rd parties were gaining access by apps passing the info along, they have blocked those apps. Zynga has their own privacy problems. I'm on Facebook daily, just smart enough to not put anything valuable on there. If you want to believe that Facebook will "do no evil", just like google, fine, but I have tested enough to know better. They are sloppy, they are not focused on security, and they let shit slide to make money, like many businesses.
But it is what it is, and it wouldn't take much for you to test that system yourself. Why don't you stfu and do that, instead of being a fanboy?
Ah, thanks for the info. Not something I have run into, and I have had some very poorly acting applications, sometimes of my own design, but not usually mem hogs, just cpu or i/o hogs. I have intentionally pegged out the ram, for simple testing, but now typically run 24GB or more of RAM, which makes it a bit harder to do, so it isn't something I have tried lately.
When Linux runs out of memory, it kills random processes until it can continue.
Kills random processes? As in kill -term? I've never seen that. I've seen Linux thrash and shove everything into swap drive prematurely, and the load jump to 40 or so, but nothing got killed or zombied even, just insanely slow. I even recently had NFS "gone wild" problems push the load over 100 to where a manual kill command took over an hour and still hadn't been scheduled, but the operating system itself didn't kill any process. Not memory related, but again, never seen Linux commit infanticide with its processes on is own, and I've pushed it pretty hard, sometimes on purpose, sometimes by sheer stupidity.
No, office drone, you do not need administrator rights. No, pointy-haired-boss, I'm not installing an unsigned driver for the shitty business-card scanner you got as a gift. No, family, I will not hunt down a hacked driver for your 15 year old printer so you can use it on Windows 7 64-bit.
So you are pretty much alienated from your family and unemployed for being a dick now?
Its the fastest way to insure that all your private data isn't private anymore. Why you would have private data on Facebook is beyond me, but playing the games (ie: allowing them access to your data) is the fastest way to insure that privacy is no longer a concern.
The president of one of my previous companies fondly compared it to an alien that attaches to your face and you can't get it off.
If an alien attaches to my face, quite frankly, I am not hoping it will "get off". However, that would be a good analogy for what Oracle is doing to their Solaris customers.
People making over 373k pay at into the 35% bracket. People who make 50k pay into the 25% bracket.
All these fancy "loopholes" are generally not available to people making less than a million a year. ie, moving assets offshore, etc. And once you start making over $150k, you start actually LOSING deductions. You are also subject to the Alternative Minimum Tax, so you can have to pay more than you really should as your legitimate deductions are voided.
It helps if you actually know wtf you are talking about before you go and make claims. More and more lately, those with less seem to want to blame those who work their asses off to have more. Rather sickening, actually.
I don't get it. No one making $250k to $500k has 20 Mercedes, or 20 Buicks for that matter. I know plenty of people in that income bracket, it isn't rich. It is certainly comfortable, but most people who make that money do so by being self employed and taking risks. This might mean you make $450k for 5 years in a row, and the next 3 years (say, 2008, 2009, 2010) you make less than $100k. This is in addition to having everything you own as collateral for bank financing of inventory, etc.
It is amazing how many people don't understand what it means to make $250k a year, which is likely why they never will achieve it. It isn't inherited (those people aren't earning money), it is earned, and usually by working one hell of a lot more than 40 hours per week. When I was earning at my peak, I was working over 80 hours per week, drove a 12 year old Caddy I had bought used, the wife drove a 10 year old minivan, we lived in a 1700 sq foot house. Not exactly "high living". When 9/11 hit, guess what? I made less than zero. My employees however, received their same salaries and I didn't cut back their hours. It took two years, living on less than zero, to recover. Had I not had good years prior, I would have gone out of business and my employees would have been unemployed.
Not everyone who makes $250k a year is a cocksucker, and from my experience, the vast majority are pretty decent people who are willing to make sacrifices to keep from laying people off. Most self employed people do not get to this level of success by being assholes to their employees, it just doesn't work that way. You NEED good employees to be this successful. People simply don't understand how expensive it is to be "rich", when you are paying $10000 a month just in interest to keep inventory on the shelves, when your payroll is the same on good months as it is when you are losing your ass.
Higher taxes? Fine. But bashing someone for being successful is a low form of envy, and telling someone "if you work hard and you are successful, we want 70% of your income" isn't even a remotely logical way to encourage people to create jobs. Remember this: No one making $30k a year creates jobs, only people with money to invest create jobs. Take away that incentive, you take away those jobs. It is one of the reasons I said fuck it and just sold the businesses, and don't work 80 hours a week anymore. It gets to where it simply isn't worth the hassles if you have to give away the lion's share of the reward in taxes after working that hard.
So all the haters can go on hating. (And no, your comments weren't hating, just really misinformed) Slashdot certainly isn't full of self employed business owners, but I really didn't expect so much actual hatred and envy (and I suppose blame). It would appear to be obvious that most people here have never had to make payroll and simply are clueless to what is at stake when you do.
So we should go back to the high taxes on rich folks like we had before Reagan? Yea, the 70s were really productive years for the US.
Perhaps we should find a balance, and understand that most people making $250k to $500k a year actually earn it, and if you overtax people in those brackets, they have no reason to continue to invest in their companies (most of them ARE self employed). So you literally tax away jobs as well when you raise taxes on the "rich" to 70%. Keep in mind that people who make just $159,619 or more are in the top 5% of wage earners, but pay 58% of all income taxes. People who make $380,354 or more (1% of the population) already pay 38% of ALL income taxes earned. The "poor" people, making $33,048 or less may be plentiful, but pay less than 3% of all income taxes collected. I would instead say that we spend entirely too much on military, farm subsidies, and in general, while not investing OUR money in the right places, such as education and the sciences. "Rich bashing" is not nearly as productive as it is popular.
Reagan said it best: "No nation ever taxed itself into prosperity." Paraphrasing Margaret Thacher, you could also say that "the problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money". In other words, you can't just tax rich people more and solve all the world's problems, and over-taxation will certainly cause a whole new set of problems.
I tend to agree with the GP on this one. I think the issue is that this story really isn't remotely technology related, and could be found anywhere that was a general news or political news site. It doesn't really belong on a "news for nerds" website. When I want general news, I just go to news.google.com or similar. I come here to get things that aren't always found on mainstream sites, technology related, and perhaps a bit out of the mainstream media's reach. Nothing wrong with political stories on/. in the least, and they are wanted here, assuming they are at least remotely related to technology as well.
As you point out, Steam isn't a monopoly. They are simply a big player in a new field because they all but invented the field, using their own quality content to start and develop the system with. It would be impossible for them to become a monopoly as long as publishers have the ability to publish using different platforms, including physical box sales.
What Steam has done (and their critics have either missed, or avoided talking about) was bring down the average price of a game, while still making it profitable for the game creators. They have 275 games under $5, 788 games under $10, and always great sales of 25% to 75% off. These are games that you would likely NOT be able to buy elsewhere as the price isn't worth Walmart or Best Buy stocking many of them. This means the game authors are getting sales they wouldn't be able to otherwise. This means that games that are a bit offbeat and have a small audience will still be available to their fans. It literally means more choice and on average, lower prices.
Steam isn't perfect (yes, first sale doctrine is out the window) but they do offer very good service and products for the price. One can always choose to not buy from them if they don't like the minimal DRM or want to resell the games. As for me, I will continue to give them the majority of my dollars because in terms of give and take, they still have the best deal going.
One of the best dentists I have had was a military dentist. One of the worst dentists I have had was also a military dentist. Growing up a brat in the 60s and 70s, I got a good taste of military medicine. Even had emergency oral surgery TWICE with military dentists (had a tooth broke off to at the gum line at 13, and had an impacted wisdom tooth abscess at 19 while in the AF). Those weren't the best experiences. Because of my security clearance, they couldn't get someone in to debrief me, so they couldn't use anything to pull the abscessed tooth. Didn't try novocaine because it was too infected to reach the root. They basically sat a chubby girl on me and spent the next 45 minutes extracting the tooth. I don't recommend it.
That is pretty naive. That is like saying that when Mark David Chapman shot John Lennon, he wasn't trying to murder him, but instead wanted to give him lead poisoning.
One of the most common scams that are done to honest, older people is the "repair man" scam. They see something wrong on your house, leaking, bricks cracked, or the ever popular "missing single". and "while we are in the neighborhood, we can fix it for just $50" or some such low price. It gets torn into, and suddenly, they "find" a few thousand dollars in other problems, and your house has a gaping hole in tit, so the older person feels compelled to go ahead and let them fix the now $3000 problem, to get the gaping hole fixed. These rarely get reported, as the older person is purely conned, and often if they suspect they are being conned, too embarrassed to report them.
To some of us, the zooming is simply ugly and "appears" slow, even if it isn't. When I want to switch to another window, I simply want that windows to POP, and be in focus, so I can do what it is I wanted to do. Snap / snap / snap. I don't need the old XWindows method where when you mouse over, the new window gets focus (not sure I could get used to that), I just want an OS to feel snappy and responsive. Linux needs work on that when starting apps as well.
China has enough nukes to make the west coast of the usa a mess, killing hundreds of thousands or even several million. The USA has enough nukes to make China the world's largest parking lot, and can activate enough others on standby to make it a solid glass parking lot. They have a few hundred, we have tens of thousands, including some megaton varieties which they don't have. They have enough to prevent nuclear war. We have enough to exterminate the entire humans race. There is a big difference in scale here.
China is already at war with us, but it is an economic war. They wouldn't fuck this up by using their military except to defend themselves, or invade Taiwan. And yes, they are already planning the invasion of Taiwan.
FORTRAN? While scientific computing is no longer the largest sector of computing, it is certainly something that traditionally "matters". And it was here before COBOL.
Slashdot Mirror
So, if you're being followed by a suspicious person, and you want to call for help, you're out of luck because some douchebag like LaHood decided that you're not capable of exercising your own judgement!
What did we do just a few short years ago when no one had cell phones?
People act like cell phones are a "must have", yet generations upon generations actually survived, and dare I say, thrived without having a permanent umbilical cord to Ma Bell. People act like their 10 year old kid MUST HAVE A CELL PHONE, just in case someone abducts them, or some just improbability. Yes, they are nice and convenient, and there are times when you can say "Hey, a cell phone saved their life". I can also point to just as many instances where a cell phone cost a life. The loss of ability to use the phone while driving should be a non-starter, as it is illegal in most states NOW, either under specific laws outlawing cell phone usage and texting, or under general statues that cover "distracted driving".
Everyone wants to freak out on the idea that they wouldn't be able to use their cell phone in their car, when the real issue is the loss of civil liberties. As someone who drives 100 miles per day, all Interstate, I see daily why people would be all for this law. Nothing like watching 18 wheels of terror slide from lane to lane while the driver is texting. Regularly.
Ever seen a 50-year-old ER nurse?
You are right in that many people are inadvertently (or apathetically) rude for the purpose of efficiency. "I don't have time to be nice, I'm busy helping sick people, and being nice slows me down." While it makes them efficient and effective at the technical skills (things that CEOs love) it doesn't necessarily make them the best care givers. Outside of actual life and death emergencies (and your ER example would be excempted), how care is given is as important as the care itself, particularly with the very young and the very old, who might be reluctant to seek help in the future if they are always scolded when getting that very care.
You want to see some real, over-the-top rudeness? Go to a forum designed to help Linux newbs.
I've been tooling with Linux for 15 years now, so used to the arrogant "help" found in many forums and groups, but I've had non-Linux friends check some out and were completely amazed at the average level of rudeness in the average "help" reply. It certainly didn't make them want to jump into Linux when that is the average help. For obvious reasons, half the admin-types on Linux forums remind me of the comic book guy in the Simpsons.
Yes, people should know more about the OS, but sometimes they just want to get something to work. Being reminded that "This isn't Windows" and "you should know $x" must feed some ego hunger. Granted, not all are like this. Only half.
NC got screwed by Dell because of the infrastructure (roads etc.) they had to put in. Dell returned all other moneys. With these data centers, the infrastructure is not needed. There are already adequate roads (data centers typically employ less than 100 people), there is already tremendous electrical infrastructure (many dams and a nuke plant nearby) and the state wouldn't have to pay for that anyway. All the state is basically doing is not charging property taxes and other fees that they would not normally get to charge on an empty plot of land only. NC has been fairly smart in this, and going after data centers very specifically. They have made plenty of mistakes in the past, as have other areas, but their method of going after data centers has worked out very well and is very cost effective.
Even without the incentives, this is a pretty good area for data centers as it is somewhat centrally located (not geographically, but by population), has mild winters and moderate summers, very cheap wholesale electricity because a glut of power capability (used to be used by furniture and textiles, which are now in China and India), and overall quality of life is good here. It isn't that hard to get people to move here as it is just a couple hours to the Blue Ridge Parkway (and everything that the mountains has to offer), 4 to 5 hours from the beach (we have nice beaches in NC), you can drive to DC in 5-6 hours, NYC in 8-9, Atlanta in less than 5, Nashville in 8, etc. It isn't perfect, but it doesn't suck and there is an incredible amount of things to do within a short drive from anywhere in the state.
I live just 20 miles south of you in Lexington (HRL actually). The other factor is how cheap wholesale electricity is, due to all the other textile and furniture factories shutting down, plus the dams at HRL, Badin, Tuckertown and Falls, PLUS Buck, McGuire, etc. And yea, NC has made a concerted effort to go after data farms in particular, which don't actually add that much employment, but have other benefits. And as you know, the weather is reasonable, quality of life is good, and while taxes are high, the tax breaks help.
Actually, I'm just not naive, and I've managed IT for almost two decades. You obviously are not aware of how fast your info is being pushed to 3rd parties +. Facebook has already admitted that 3rd parties were gaining access by apps passing the info along, they have blocked those apps. Zynga has their own privacy problems. I'm on Facebook daily, just smart enough to not put anything valuable on there. If you want to believe that Facebook will "do no evil", just like google, fine, but I have tested enough to know better. They are sloppy, they are not focused on security, and they let shit slide to make money, like many businesses.
But it is what it is, and it wouldn't take much for you to test that system yourself. Why don't you stfu and do that, instead of being a fanboy?
Ah, thanks for the info. Not something I have run into, and I have had some very poorly acting applications, sometimes of my own design, but not usually mem hogs, just cpu or i/o hogs. I have intentionally pegged out the ram, for simple testing, but now typically run 24GB or more of RAM, which makes it a bit harder to do, so it isn't something I have tried lately.
When Linux runs out of memory, it kills random processes until it can continue.
Kills random processes? As in kill -term? I've never seen that. I've seen Linux thrash and shove everything into swap drive prematurely, and the load jump to 40 or so, but nothing got killed or zombied even, just insanely slow. I even recently had NFS "gone wild" problems push the load over 100 to where a manual kill command took over an hour and still hadn't been scheduled, but the operating system itself didn't kill any process. Not memory related, but again, never seen Linux commit infanticide with its processes on is own, and I've pushed it pretty hard, sometimes on purpose, sometimes by sheer stupidity.
No, office drone, you do not need administrator rights.
No, pointy-haired-boss, I'm not installing an unsigned driver for the shitty business-card scanner you got as a gift.
No, family, I will not hunt down a hacked driver for your 15 year old printer so you can use it on Windows 7 64-bit.
So you are pretty much alienated from your family and unemployed for being a dick now?
What's the purpose of FarmVille?
Its the fastest way to insure that all your private data isn't private anymore. Why you would have private data on Facebook is beyond me, but playing the games (ie: allowing them access to your data) is the fastest way to insure that privacy is no longer a concern.
The president of one of my previous companies fondly compared it to an alien that attaches to your face and you can't get it off.
If an alien attaches to my face, quite frankly, I am not hoping it will "get off". However, that would be a good analogy for what Oracle is doing to their Solaris customers.
People making over 373k pay at into the 35% bracket. People who make 50k pay into the 25% bracket.
All these fancy "loopholes" are generally not available to people making less than a million a year. ie, moving assets offshore, etc. And once you start making over $150k, you start actually LOSING deductions. You are also subject to the Alternative Minimum Tax, so you can have to pay more than you really should as your legitimate deductions are voided.
It helps if you actually know wtf you are talking about before you go and make claims. More and more lately, those with less seem to want to blame those who work their asses off to have more. Rather sickening, actually.
I think you are correct. But when the only problem you have is a nail, you try to make your tool look like a hammer.
I don't get it. No one making $250k to $500k has 20 Mercedes, or 20 Buicks for that matter. I know plenty of people in that income bracket, it isn't rich. It is certainly comfortable, but most people who make that money do so by being self employed and taking risks. This might mean you make $450k for 5 years in a row, and the next 3 years (say, 2008, 2009, 2010) you make less than $100k. This is in addition to having everything you own as collateral for bank financing of inventory, etc.
It is amazing how many people don't understand what it means to make $250k a year, which is likely why they never will achieve it. It isn't inherited (those people aren't earning money), it is earned, and usually by working one hell of a lot more than 40 hours per week. When I was earning at my peak, I was working over 80 hours per week, drove a 12 year old Caddy I had bought used, the wife drove a 10 year old minivan, we lived in a 1700 sq foot house. Not exactly "high living". When 9/11 hit, guess what? I made less than zero. My employees however, received their same salaries and I didn't cut back their hours. It took two years, living on less than zero, to recover. Had I not had good years prior, I would have gone out of business and my employees would have been unemployed.
Not everyone who makes $250k a year is a cocksucker, and from my experience, the vast majority are pretty decent people who are willing to make sacrifices to keep from laying people off. Most self employed people do not get to this level of success by being assholes to their employees, it just doesn't work that way. You NEED good employees to be this successful. People simply don't understand how expensive it is to be "rich", when you are paying $10000 a month just in interest to keep inventory on the shelves, when your payroll is the same on good months as it is when you are losing your ass.
Higher taxes? Fine. But bashing someone for being successful is a low form of envy, and telling someone "if you work hard and you are successful, we want 70% of your income" isn't even a remotely logical way to encourage people to create jobs. Remember this: No one making $30k a year creates jobs, only people with money to invest create jobs. Take away that incentive, you take away those jobs. It is one of the reasons I said fuck it and just sold the businesses, and don't work 80 hours a week anymore. It gets to where it simply isn't worth the hassles if you have to give away the lion's share of the reward in taxes after working that hard.
So all the haters can go on hating. (And no, your comments weren't hating, just really misinformed) Slashdot certainly isn't full of self employed business owners, but I really didn't expect so much actual hatred and envy (and I suppose blame). It would appear to be obvious that most people here have never had to make payroll and simply are clueless to what is at stake when you do.
So we should go back to the high taxes on rich folks like we had before Reagan? Yea, the 70s were really productive years for the US.
Perhaps we should find a balance, and understand that most people making $250k to $500k a year actually earn it, and if you overtax people in those brackets, they have no reason to continue to invest in their companies (most of them ARE self employed). So you literally tax away jobs as well when you raise taxes on the "rich" to 70%. Keep in mind that people who make just $159,619 or more are in the top 5% of wage earners, but pay 58% of all income taxes. People who make $380,354 or more (1% of the population) already pay 38% of ALL income taxes earned. The "poor" people, making $33,048 or less may be plentiful, but pay less than 3% of all income taxes collected. I would instead say that we spend entirely too much on military, farm subsidies, and in general, while not investing OUR money in the right places, such as education and the sciences. "Rich bashing" is not nearly as productive as it is popular.
http://www.ntu.org/tax-basics/who-pays-income-taxes.html if you are interested.
Reagan said it best: "No nation ever taxed itself into prosperity." Paraphrasing Margaret Thacher, you could also say that "the problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money". In other words, you can't just tax rich people more and solve all the world's problems, and over-taxation will certainly cause a whole new set of problems.
A quick look around shows that this story isnt on Fox, or MSNBC, or CNN, or ABC, or CBS, or igoogle feeds, or Yahoo
USA Today http://content.usatoday.com/communities/greenhouse/post/2010/11/white-house-edited-oil-drilling-report/1
One of many on CNN http://ac360.blogs.cnn.com/2010/11/10/report-white-house-edit-led-to-errant-claim-on-drilling-moratorium/
Wash Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/10/AR2010111007479.html
FOX http://nation.foxnews.com/offshore-oil-drilling/2010/11/10/wh-cheated-sell-its-drilling-ban
ABC http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory?id=12112909
There are literally hundreds of articles on the subject. If you can't find it in the "mainstream press", then you aren't looking.
I tend to agree with the GP on this one. I think the issue is that this story really isn't remotely technology related, and could be found anywhere that was a general news or political news site. It doesn't really belong on a "news for nerds" website. When I want general news, I just go to news.google.com or similar. I come here to get things that aren't always found on mainstream sites, technology related, and perhaps a bit out of the mainstream media's reach. Nothing wrong with political stories on /. in the least, and they are wanted here, assuming they are at least remotely related to technology as well.
As you point out, Steam isn't a monopoly. They are simply a big player in a new field because they all but invented the field, using their own quality content to start and develop the system with. It would be impossible for them to become a monopoly as long as publishers have the ability to publish using different platforms, including physical box sales.
What Steam has done (and their critics have either missed, or avoided talking about) was bring down the average price of a game, while still making it profitable for the game creators. They have 275 games under $5, 788 games under $10, and always great sales of 25% to 75% off. These are games that you would likely NOT be able to buy elsewhere as the price isn't worth Walmart or Best Buy stocking many of them. This means the game authors are getting sales they wouldn't be able to otherwise. This means that games that are a bit offbeat and have a small audience will still be available to their fans. It literally means more choice and on average, lower prices.
Steam isn't perfect (yes, first sale doctrine is out the window) but they do offer very good service and products for the price. One can always choose to not buy from them if they don't like the minimal DRM or want to resell the games. As for me, I will continue to give them the majority of my dollars because in terms of give and take, they still have the best deal going.
One of the best dentists I have had was a military dentist. One of the worst dentists I have had was also a military dentist. Growing up a brat in the 60s and 70s, I got a good taste of military medicine. Even had emergency oral surgery TWICE with military dentists (had a tooth broke off to at the gum line at 13, and had an impacted wisdom tooth abscess at 19 while in the AF). Those weren't the best experiences. Because of my security clearance, they couldn't get someone in to debrief me, so they couldn't use anything to pull the abscessed tooth. Didn't try novocaine because it was too infected to reach the root. They basically sat a chubby girl on me and spent the next 45 minutes extracting the tooth. I don't recommend it.
That is pretty naive. That is like saying that when Mark David Chapman shot John Lennon, he wasn't trying to murder him, but instead wanted to give him lead poisoning.
You could have googled it pretty easy if you were actually interested in knowing. http://www.fas.org/programs/ssp/nukes/nuclearweapons/nukestatus.html which doesn't show mothballed warheads, just active.
One of the most common scams that are done to honest, older people is the "repair man" scam. They see something wrong on your house, leaking, bricks cracked, or the ever popular "missing single". and "while we are in the neighborhood, we can fix it for just $50" or some such low price. It gets torn into, and suddenly, they "find" a few thousand dollars in other problems, and your house has a gaping hole in tit, so the older person feels compelled to go ahead and let them fix the now $3000 problem, to get the gaping hole fixed. These rarely get reported, as the older person is purely conned, and often if they suspect they are being conned, too embarrassed to report them.
To some of us, the zooming is simply ugly and "appears" slow, even if it isn't. When I want to switch to another window, I simply want that windows to POP, and be in focus, so I can do what it is I wanted to do. Snap / snap / snap. I don't need the old XWindows method where when you mouse over, the new window gets focus (not sure I could get used to that), I just want an OS to feel snappy and responsive. Linux needs work on that when starting apps as well.
China has enough nukes to make the west coast of the usa a mess, killing hundreds of thousands or even several million. The USA has enough nukes to make China the world's largest parking lot, and can activate enough others on standby to make it a solid glass parking lot. They have a few hundred, we have tens of thousands, including some megaton varieties which they don't have. They have enough to prevent nuclear war. We have enough to exterminate the entire humans race. There is a big difference in scale here.
China is already at war with us, but it is an economic war. They wouldn't fuck this up by using their military except to defend themselves, or invade Taiwan. And yes, they are already planning the invasion of Taiwan.
FORTRAN? While scientific computing is no longer the largest sector of computing, it is certainly something that traditionally "matters". And it was here before COBOL.