Buy ten OLPCs if it assuages your guilt, says Dvorak, but 'I'll donate my money to hunger relief.' Buy a man a fish, he eats for a day.
Teach a child to use a computer, he gets to work in a call center for a lifetime.
Seriously though, food aid achieves...? It pretty much ensures poor kids live long enough to breed and make even more poorer kids. You pat yourself on the back for having saved a kid today and create five that starve tomorrow.
Given the choice, I'd rather give those kids a chance at an education so they can raise their standard of life and start trying to ensure their kids, grandkids and every generation afterwards is lifted out of a situation where they need food aid year after year to support too large numbers on poorly cultivated land.
Call me mercenary but, tough as it is, I'd rather a million kids starve while the million that survive improve their quality of life and for the generations to come than save both million now and have ten million starving within a couple of generations.
In this case, Dvorak's self congratulating his short term compassion while creating a far worse long term problem and knocking those who're trying to do the opposite.
If the person who wrote the title actually knew what they were talking about it would read:...
I think the the fact that Gold subscribers getting things EARLY as a perk being twisted into pessimism is rather ridiculous.
So, your perspective is:
Silver members get demos just when they always would have - when the demo's ready. Gold members get an "enhanced" service where demo makers rush out a demo a week before it's ready yet miraculously manage it in such a bug free state that their new, rush product is so good they don't need to modify it to match what they used to deliver a week later and now do for Silver users?
Wow. Game makers are getting really good.
Alternatively, a year ago, Microsoft imposed an arbitrary delay on Silver users getting demos - demos that system buyers had been led to believe they got when they were ready as part of their basic purchase - in order to create a false sense of value for Gold users. Rather than face the pretty reasonable outrage of the community at the time, they hid what they did, not reminding Silver users about how they'd just had what they'd already bought from Microsoft ganked. Now, a year later, figuring a lot of people have forgotten they paid for a system with a service that promised Silver users getting demos when they were ready, they figure there won't be such a backlash. Now it's more profitable for them to say, "Hey, you're missing out. [Please don't remember we manufactured that missing out]. Buy the expensive version! [Please don't remember that you did buy that but we, uh, stripped it and gave it to a more expensive version.]"
The summary was incorrect. It should have read:
XBox Live figures less backlash, now tells Silver users how they screwed them a year ago to encourage upgrading now.
The sad thing is the number of sheep who don't get that taking something away from one service, only to make another seem better, really is a degredation of the original and not an enhancement of the newer one.
They successfully teach Microsoft:
Hey, in a year's time, why don't you release "XBox Live Platinum - With advance access to Halo 4 demos that Gold users don't get, all for $19.99/month"?
The sheep will then see Platinum as an "upgrade" despite the fact they bought a system with Silver that was meant to have demos when they arrive, then upgraded to Gold to get them, and now have to upgrade yet again to Platinum.
I have a 360 and the free Silver membership which, as far as I can tell, is worth exactly what I pay for it. There's not a lot left for Microsoft to strip from it. They can't remove store access - it just means they sell less. They can't remove their current poor demo access - it just means less sales. Take any more and they just cost themselves money.
If anything, they've already gone too far. They've hobbled so many of their games as to make them almost unplayable without a Gold account (Test Drive Unlimited requires your gamerscore to unlock the game and then ties the easy methods for doing it to the auction system that again requires Gold membership). Knowing I'll inevitably find my play experience degraded as punishment for not giving Microsoft more money each month, I buy less 360 games and more on the PC where makers like Valve manage to offer all of the services without "needing" enhanced and expensive levels of service. They create a system where I'm punished for not spending, what, half a dozen bucks a month? In exchange, I buy $20-30 less in games each month for the system because I know it's artificially hobbled. The point has already come where trying to grab money now has had a knock on effect on how much money they get overall.
The challenge is, companies like Microsoft have some numbers they can predict and see easily and some they can't.
They know: Hey, since stripping features from Silver, we're up 1m Gold accounts from our previous predictions. We make $6m a month more, high fives all
Agreed. I've found that it's easier to design to Firefox and then test every browser thereafter and IE6 is always last because it's the worst. From experience, Internet Explorer has a relatively finite set of issues that you really have to worry about (Position Is Everything keeps a list of anything major and they've capped out at 20).
Figuring out which of 20 bugs is causing an issue is a relatively minor inconvenience if you see it as soon as it comes up. You know what you just changed so you know pretty much exactly where it must be coming from.
On the other hand, if you only find out about the issue when you've got a dozen nested elements in hundreds of lines of code and multiple CSS files, potentially with multiple bugs clashing in different ways, you're looking at hours spent tracking down a single issue.
Plus, fixing a single bug at a time really reinforces your realization there are only a small set of real issues (yes, I know people can point out thousands of minor quirks). Only fixing an issue when it has complex interactions makes each bug seem totally unique and yet another flaw. Thus your perception of the number of bugs increases.
I develop primarily in Firefox (Firebug is a godsend for helping me figure out the things that I was an idiot with). However, every time I finish a small block of code, I quickly load it up in IE (IE Tab for Firebug makes this even quicker but loses you the (admittedly small) benefit of the Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar).
By regularly checking in with IE, it's exceptionally rare that any of IE's bugs takes more than a couple of minutes to fix. My experience is that it's nowhere near as painful as many others seem to find it.
Similarly, because I see each bug on its own, they quickly fall in to a small set of unique issues rather than seeming like each one is yet another issue. As a result, not only do I not find it as painful, I also don't see it as being as bug riddled - just flawed with 20 or so big ones.
It may be that your perception of IE's bugs is, in part, because you develop for Firefox first and then only check IE at the end, dramatically increasing the pain you experience with each issue. You may find that, if you swap to regular itterative testing, your perception of how buggy IE is and how painful it is decreases dramatically.
I'd really make the suggestion you try checking IE regularly throughout development, fixing issues as they arise, rather than just at the end. You may find your experience is transformed.
Don't get me wrong - I'm not saying IE doesn't have bugs. It has a whole bunch of really annoying ones (about 20). What I am saying is that you can avoid the issue and have them make life hell or you can approach things differently and discover that, whilst an issue, it's nothing that can't easily and relatively painlessly be overcome.
1. Please explain how detaining people not connected to those crimes helps fighting the criminals. We British tried this one with awesome effect during internment in Northern Ireland. It works like this:
Arrest and abuse everyone, regardless of evidence.
Turn the hearts and minds of the people utterly against you.
Have vastly more people become terrorists in outrage at the complete disregard for due process that you're demonstrating.
Now you have far more terrorists. Which makes catching them even easier.
See how much easier it is to fight criminals when you ensure there are far more of them to catch? It's like shooting fish in a barrel. One is hard to hit. Pack the barrel to the brim and you're bound to hit something.
It was only under our foolish return to the rule of law and acting with honour again by the late 90's that we had largely stopped outraging the populace. We had far fewer people responding to our behavior and becoming terrorists and found that the population no longer supported the terrorists' actions and no longer offered them safe houses. Do you know how hard it is to catch a terrorist when there are hardly any left?! It was a complete disaster!
3. Please explain why you can mistreat people just because they aren't U.S. citizens. I believe the administration's preferred term is "undermenschen"
I was going to jump in with the inevitable, "Mexican billionaire? So about $34 American?" Then I remembered the peso's worth slightly more than the dollar now. So... uh... yay... Go him!
If you can't actually buy a service and what you can buy is half that speed and three to four times the cost of cable internet, is it really realistic to compare it?
In other news, theoretically, Ma Bell will extend the internet backbone straight to your house, building a complete server room for you. It costs tens of millions and is in no way generally available. OH MY GOD! VERIZON FIOS TO GO THE WAY OF THE DINOSAUR!!11!!1!!
The important thing to note is the original poster is an ASSUMING the worst:
He is automatically assuming the original coder, who's now the lead he's meant to report to, acted with malice.
He has absolutely no proof that the guy deliberately did anything wrong.
He has absolutely no proof that they guy wasn't simply given the code by another coder on the project and has no idea it comes with a license.
He has absolutely no proof that the guy hasn't already attained a license and it's in his desk drawer.
He has absolutely no way of knowing if the original coder actually worked at that company and the code on the web is the derivative.
If he goes with his suggested options of an unapproved recode or reporting the issue to more senior management, without going to the lead first:
He automatically demonstrates he's assumed the worst of his lead without even talking to him.
He has no respect for the reporting structure of the organization.
He's willing to waste senior management's time with things a more junior manager should have looked at first.
He's willing to waste company time doing a recode that may prove to be totally unnecessary and he certainly hasn't checked the facts to find out either way.
The only real option in this situation is to send a brief, tactful email to the lead along the lines of, "Hey, I noted [this code] is similar to [this code]. Just confirming you're aware and have made whatever decision you feel appropriate in terms of licensing?" Then keep the email.
The lead may have a good reason, may not have had a good reason but takes an appropriate response (securing the license, recoding), or may choose to bury it.
ONLY when there's proof the lead's actions are deliberately sketchy does it become appropriate to consider jumping him in the chain and reporting, to ensure more senior management know they're being exposed to a liability.
Pretty much every other option demonstrates the new coder has serious issues with respecting the people he works with. He may or may not be right. If he isn't, he's pretty much destroyed himself in the organization. If he is, he still has to prove malice on the lead's part or he risks the lead saying, "Wow, I never knew. I wish he'd come to me instead of thinking he was above playing with the team."
On XBox Live, if you frag a friend, then a friend of that friend, and so on to the depth of six people... Kevin Bacon eventually calls you "teh gey" whilst sounding like a thirteen year old boy with hormonal issues.
I am about to come in to 100 million dollars from a patent suit that I am sure to win.
If you will send me an advance of only ten thousand dollars, to cover some of my legal fees, I will give you 10% of my final winnings - 10 million dollars.
I very much hope we can work together. Ironically, that's been pretty much exactly how SCO has sold shares and gained investment for the last few years. On top of everything else, they turn out to be variant 419 scammers? Life just doesn't cut them a break.
Why continue to bill in a way that contradicts basic economic reasoning??? To play devil's advocate...
You have the option to not pick up - especially with caller ID coming by default on most cell service.
Ultimately, a call requires the same resources, on your provider's end, whether you make or receive it.
It is arguably more contradictory of basic economic reasoning to try and figure out some consistent rate that receiving service providers get paid by the calling provider being the sole billing party.
Say it is agreed that 10c/min should be split 5c for the calling provider's costs, 5c for the recipient's network.
The calling provider can now never offer free calls after Xpm because they're still responsible for giving 5c to a third party. Even if they are willing to offer their own lines for free after a certain time, they still have to pay out.
Similarly, say the recipient manages to dramatically increase efficiency and it now only costs them 3c. They're never going to agree to only bill 3c while their competitor takes 5c. They'll push for the same 5c and simply drop their own calls to 8c a minute (3c for them, 5c for the competitor) to have more attractive policies. The competitor manages the same efficiency increase and we're stuck with 8c/minute calls both ways instead of the 6c it actually ought to cost.
So, in terms of economic simplicity, it actually makes far more sense that each end charges their customer whatever they want to charge, whether coming or going, and leaves it up to the customer to decide whether or not to call/answer.
Not saying I like that reality (I'm an Englishman living in California and I quite liked not paying to receive calls). However, I can understand it in terms of simplicity.
...with Lowe's, Macys and Victoria's Secret especially hard hit. Black Friday has nothing to do with it. I like to "research" what I would buy a hypothetical girlfriend, should I have one, every Friday. The only difference was that I had all of this Friday free.
Uh, I mean, that's what I imagine some theoretical person might have been doing.
1 cubic meter, assuming the same density as water, weighs 1000 kg.
It can, in turn, process 11 kg - barely 1% of its own mass.
In a year.
To use your figure of 330 Tg of methane, that's 30 petagrams of the damn stuff. That's 30 billion tonnes. Volumewise, that's 1/5th of Lake Erie (150 trillion liters - 150 billion tonnes - of water).
And that's assuming you could get all of the gas in to Lake Erie in the first place.
At 99 cents / song it would cost roughly $5,000 to fill a 20GB iPod (assuming an average of 4MB / song).
The fact that 160GB iPods exist and are selling implies there is demand for them. The last iPod that was solely a music player capped out at 40GB. That was fairly easy to fill with a 600-800 CD collection. I know, I did so.
That's ignoring its convenience as a portable hard drive and the fact that a 40GB iPod has nothing like 40GB free for music.
The 160GB versions also work pretty nicely as video player, particularly when you're stuck on long flights and want options for whatever you're in the mood for at the time. Granted, there's no legal way to get your DVDs on to the thing (DVD Decrypter simply ignores the DMCA) so that's hardly an argument against illegal methods being the only option.
Unfortunately, your argument is part of why Canada is saddled with a ridiculous media and hard drive tax. They too assumed there was no legal way to fill all of the media that was getting sold so they decided to simply assume everyone was a criminal and should pay their share of restitution automatically.
Just because you can't think of a way to do something legally, that doesn't mean that many people aren't doing just that.
A mailbox is going to get opened in Delaware and a cell phone registered to that address, while everything else remains exactly where it always way.
Why do you think just about every credit card and predatory lending scheme seems to get mailed to you from Delaware? Because they've figure out it's a great business model to take half the amount of tax on all of everyone else's dubious business whilst not having to support anything more than the name-only corporate HQs.
Why should Sony and Nintendo stop it being released on their consoles?
There are people making the games, there are people that want to play the games, why not just let the rating system rate them and let people choose to play them or not?
Sony and Nintendo are the problem in this scenario. Sony and Nintendo, like all businesses, are anethical... They don't do good, they don't do evil, they do whatever makes them money, regardless of morality. The closest they come is when they figure they can make money by selling the impression of ethics.
So, accepting that they would happily sell "Over 95, with written consent of both parents, this'll make you a serial killer, no really!-Only" games if it meant they'd make money, the question is: What makes them think they wouldn't make money overall?
The answer to that one is depressingly simple: Puritan America.
Even if the game comes with a million warnings about being for adults only, thousands of parents will give it to their kids anyway. Then, in time honored fashion, one of those kids will go on an unrelated shooting spree and a lawyer seeking to make a reputation will sue the game makers and the game system makers.
The system maker will likely defeat the case. But defeating the case is still a loss. Just to show up in court costs them hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars.
Walmart, crazy as it sounds, sells far more games than anyone else. They'll never permit an Ao title. BestBuy, CircuitCity? They won't either. So you get a game that manages meager sales, regardless of its quality. 50,000 sales at $10 each to the platform maker? That's maybe half a million dollars. Far more than that would go out to defending it.
Even a court victory more than wipes out any profits they made from allowing the game to be released on their system. And that's before you factor in negative advertising, let alone the freak case they actually manage to lose.
So, existing in a world purely without ethics, simply about money, the system makers have a simple question to answer: Is it profitable to allow the game's release? With puritan America, its values and the cost of even being in the right in its legal system, it's not.
It's easy to judge Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo for their refusal. At the end of the day, they're businesses. And we're the society that created a place where it doesn't make good business sense to allow Ao titles on consoles.
Stories like your wife's inspire me to tell my wife "If I'm ever in a coma, you better go bankrupt keeping the lights on and me breathing." Coincidentally, a friend's aunt and uncle just faced something very similar:
The aunt was unconcious and unable to breath without aid due to pneumonia. This was after a decade as a quadrapelegic (yeah, I know I almost certainly got that spelling wrong).
The uncle made the call to have the machines turned off. It was time to let her go.
She kept breathing on her own. Evidently she wasn't that incapable of breathing unaided.
When she came around, he had to explain to her why he made the call he did. He explained and she ultimately agreed with him that it was the right choice.
This is something I wrote earlier in the week. It was for a different purpose but it lets me share much of the story quickly. Apologies for anything that's kind of off topic etc.
Ten years ago, Erin was in a massive wreck in Minnesota.
She had rented the car but a friend was driving while she sat in the back seat. They lost control on some ice, bounced off the snow bank, turned sideways, then skidded in to the on coming traffic. Whilst the oncoming traffic managed to stop, they were still doing about 30 as they hit the front of a pick-up, sideways, right where Erin was sitting.
The driver and front seat passenger were OK save for the usual minor stuff. They looked back and Erin was slumped and bleeding, not breathing. A nurse on the scene got her airways open. An ambulance took her to a local hospital who took one look at her, called an air ambulance to get her to a bigger hospital and induced a coma to try getting her there alive. They flew with the paddles out for the whole flight, expecting her heart to stop beating at any point.
Her parents were called and told to get to Minnesota as fast as possible as there may not be much time. They made it and were then told that, if she made it through the night, she had a 50:50 change of survival.
Her list of injuries at the time were: A dying brain stem (this was what they figured would kill her unless it stopped), a collapsed lung, a jaw broken in several places, a shattered left arm, a cracked eye socket, and whatever other brain injuries turned up once it was stable enough to look at.
She survived the night but didn't come out of the coma. Being in a coma, they couldn't anaesthetise and so they couldn't operate on the arm. She was in a full coma for two weeks (completely unresponsive) and in unconscious for a month. Even when she came out, she wasn't really self aware beyond asking for drugs for the pain.
Once they could operate, the surgeons told her parents that the arm was so damaged, and had been left for so long, they would need to amputate. Erin's mother gave them permission, saying simply, "All I'll ask is you do whatever you'd do for your own daughter." The surgeon said he couldn't not try after that. 11 hours later, they'd rebuilt the arm with steel. They had no idea if it'd work but they gave it a shot, figuring they could always amputate later.
The brain injuries were such that her parents were told she'd always fatigue quickly and would probably never walk more than a few paces, unaided, again. They were also told she'd never be able to look after herself again, needing care for the rest of her life. Having won the national merit scholarship before the accident, she was now testing 20 IQ points lower (and still, disgustingly, as a genius - though those 20 points are harsh when you know what you were).
She was flown back to San Diego for long term rehab and was eventually sent home in a wheelchair.
This was about the point where she and I managed to talk again. I'd met her online a couple of years earlier and had actually met her in person, at LAX, a few weeks before the accident when flying out to New Zealand. She was only conscious for a few hours at a time before the drugs knocked her out again but we could at least talk a little then.
She was, as you can imagine, pretty badly beaten up. She wasn't supposed to be able to look after herself again, wasn't supposed to be able to walk more than a few steps again, wasn't supposed to ever be able to return to education or hold down a job again. She was feeling kind of sorry for herself.
Her mother spelled it out for her: Go to bed and wallow for a couple of days. I don't want to deal with you. You can then get up, live your life and be hurt. Or you can stay in bed, feel sorry for yourself, do nothing, and be hurt. The being hurt part doesn't change. All that changes is what you do with it.
She refused to stay in the wheelchair. She got walking again. She got back to working part days at the library. She even mana
My wife was in a massive car accident, a decade ago. She was in a coma for a month, suffered brain injuries, a collapsed lung, shattered arm, cracked eye socket, multiply broken jaw, etc. A national merit scholarship winner before the accident, her parents were told that, if she survived, she'd likely never walk much or be able to look after herself again.
As it happened, she was sufficiently beaten up at the time that she had no concept of how bad her injuries were. She got out of the wheelchair simply because it frustrated her. She went back to working part time simply because she didn't realize she wasn't supposed to be able to. By the time she comprehended what had happened, she'd improved enough that setting impossible goals like "become a personal trainer" weren't quite so impossible. We taught her to read again (yes, even that got messed up) and even managed to get her back in to school - initially only able to pull a 2.0 average but improved each semester.
In her case, she had an amazing recovery. Yet she, herself, says, "If I'm ever like that again, turn me off." She didn't realize how hurt she was and got lucky with recovering before she did. Understanding now, she has absolutely no desire to try that fight again. She'd rather just call it a day.
So, sadly, there's a real likelihood that his first words, upon realizing he can finally communicate, after years of being unable to and stuck in a totally paralyzed body, will be, "Kill me." Probably not ideal to have the family in the room for.
And yes, that entire story was just so I could "drop" that I have a wife in a slashdot post. Cunning, huh?
PC Gamer may have dropped from 300,000 to 210,000 but their cunning plan to cut from the previous, heady 6 pages of actual content, to a leaner 4, along with increasing from 60 to 90 pages of advertising ensures they still make the same revenue targets.
I joke but it's really not that untrue. I subscribe but am left wondering why. The magazine is virtually unreadable with a couple of pages of letters, half a dozen pages of previews, maybe ten pages of reviews (with half given over to one or two games and the rest being shorter than the average web review), a brief hardware section that can't compete with Anandtech or whoever, and a couple of one page columns at the back. All of this scattered through so many pages of ads, fold out ads and inserts that it's just about unreadable. What I can find amongst the ads is so brief (accepting no one's in to every genre) that it's become a half hour read and you're done for your five bucks.
Their challenge isn't that the market's no longer viable (there are plenty of design sites yet dozens of design magazines, there are plenty of digital photography sites and yet endless magazines). The problem is they've made so many commercial decisions, they've designed straight past anything for their readers to actually enjoy.
Bulk the tech section out to a five machines from a given price point multi review, a section on performance tuning, one on things like in game voice, one on graphics cards and you've suddenly got a valid section. Change the three brief columns at the back in to half a dozen that really cover a niche and build their own reason for being there. If you're going to preview games, write something rather than a full page graphic and 30 words. If you're going to review, review everything that comes out rather than two key games and a couple of embarrassed half page pieces that tell people nothing.
Reclaim the magazine for the readers and it might be worth reading. Keep seeing it purely as a vehicle for ads and there's no point in readers picking it up. With no readers, you can't sell any ads.
If George Lucas taught us anything, it's that these things should make a whum, whum noise as they're moved around plus a kind of white noise crackling whenever they hit things.
If you go around determined to see the virgin Mary's face, you'll start seeing something kind of like it in every tree bark, every mildew, every piece of burned toast, every birthmark.
If you're determined to find hidden messages and keep trying different numerical values, you can pull spooky phrases out of the bible... or indeed the script for Animal House.
People have long been "composing" music from random number generators and fractals. If a random number generator can be forced in to a musical composition, by definition, any series of values can be.
I personally enjoy the following algorhythm: Break the image up in to inch squares. For any given inch if the dominant color is red, note the word "this", if it's green, note the word "is", and if it's blue, note the word "stupid". Amazingly, Da Vinci left a message encoded that appears to describe his views on musical analysis of his work.
'First of all, it wants to put Google search on a phone. It wants to do this because it is obvious to the folks at Google that people need to do Web searches from their phone, so they can, uh, get directions to the restaurant? Of course, they can simply use the phone itself to call the restaurant and ask! I've actually used various phones with Web capability. They never work right. They take forever to navigate. It's hard to read the screens... I also hope that people note the fact that the public has not been flocking to smartphones of any sort.' Rephrased for the 1400's: First of all, Johannes (a Goldsmith) wants to use an engraving process to make books. Gutenberg wants to do this because it is obvious to him that people need to use engraving skills to make books so they can, uh, mass produce books? Of course, they can simply go to a monastary and ask a monk! I've actually used various books that had been "printed" with engraved plates. They never work right. They have inky smudges. The quality's not as good as hand caligraphy. The illustrations suck... I also hope that people not the fact that the public has not been flocking to books of any sort.
Just because existing implementations have been all hype and little substance, that doesn't make an idea inherrently flawed. In the 1400s, very few people could read, books were for the rich and they were made by monks. Fortunately, Gutenberg didn't listen to the Dvoraks of his time who dismissed the existing print techniques and took engraving plates and advanced it to movable type. In doing so, he massively advanced printing and set in motion events that let to the literate world we live in today and all of society's advancements that likely would never have happened without a literate population with access to affordable reading material and a means to record their ideas.
gPhone may or may not be the breakthrough to finally make smartphones a reality. On the other hand, saying something can't be done - or shouldn't be done - simply because it hasn't been done well yet is pretty ignorant.
"Never ascribe to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."
I have been left off several of the credits for games I worked on*.
It sucks at the time. After all credit is just that... being given credit for the work you did. Not being given the credit you earned is kind of a blow.
The thing you really quickly realize is that there's almost never actual malice behind it. A marketing drone or some exec's PA is given the task of gathering the names of everyone involved. When they don't know the dev process well enough to cover a chunk of one department, get the names of the people who're out that day, get the names of people who did the original build but are now on a different project, etc... those people get missed. There's no malice, just a complete lack of awareness from someone who has no notion of what the credit means to the people who sweated over the game.
So, you can get bitter about it and spend energy blaming and hating people... Or you can accept laziness and lack of consideration are unfortunate but they happen.
*Ironically, the MobyGames list misses me from all of the Planetside games - the one place where my ideas actually got directly included in gameplay whereas I'm credited for plenty of games where I only did behind the scenes work.
The parents told deputies their son was playing Halo 3, and it was getting late and he needed to shut it off. When the son refused to turn off the game, the parents reportedly took the air card out of his machine so he couldn't play anymore.
Reports show the son became enraged, went through the house looking for the air card, and then punched his mother, prompting the parents to call the Sheriff's Office.
After the boy retreated to his bedroom and locked it, the mother knocked on the door and told him he needed to come out and talk to the deputies, the report stated. But the juvenile allegedly responded with profanity.
Harnage and another deputy entered the room using a key from the parents to arrest the son, according to the report. The son fought the deputies - at one time punching Harnage on the lip - until they handcuffed him. www.sun-sentinel.com
The ironic thing is that any parent that's self-excusing enough to want to use parental controls rather than take responsibility for what Junior can and can't do will be just as likely to consider it Microsoft's fault that they got punched in the face by their own child for activating one of Microsoft's features. Rather than take the blame for raising a brat, why not just sue? It's the American way.
Now you want truly un-American thinking? Release a treadmill or other exercise equipment that can be set to automatically give the little tubs o' lard more game time in exchange for actually exercising.
In my day, we had to run ten miles up hill before we were allowed to call the other kids "teh gey" on Halo. And we were grateful!
...and fried mayonnaise. If you're ever in San Diego, try the Tlaquepaque at Jimmy Carter's (least Mexican named Mexican restaurant ever).
If you can get over the notion that it's basically a hot mayonnaise and jalapeno sauce, it's actually just the right amount of sweet, creamy and spicy that combines brilliantly with the rice.
Slashdot Mirror
Teach a child to use a computer, he gets to work in a call center for a lifetime.
Seriously though, food aid achieves...? It pretty much ensures poor kids live long enough to breed and make even more poorer kids. You pat yourself on the back for having saved a kid today and create five that starve tomorrow.
Given the choice, I'd rather give those kids a chance at an education so they can raise their standard of life and start trying to ensure their kids, grandkids and every generation afterwards is lifted out of a situation where they need food aid year after year to support too large numbers on poorly cultivated land.
Call me mercenary but, tough as it is, I'd rather a million kids starve while the million that survive improve their quality of life and for the generations to come than save both million now and have ten million starving within a couple of generations.
In this case, Dvorak's self congratulating his short term compassion while creating a far worse long term problem and knocking those who're trying to do the opposite.
If the person who wrote the title actually knew what they were talking about it would read:...
I think the the fact that Gold subscribers getting things EARLY as a perk being twisted into pessimism is rather ridiculous.
So, your perspective is:
Silver members get demos just when they always would have - when the demo's ready. Gold members get an "enhanced" service where demo makers rush out a demo a week before it's ready yet miraculously manage it in such a bug free state that their new, rush product is so good they don't need to modify it to match what they used to deliver a week later and now do for Silver users?
Wow. Game makers are getting really good.
Alternatively, a year ago, Microsoft imposed an arbitrary delay on Silver users getting demos - demos that system buyers had been led to believe they got when they were ready as part of their basic purchase - in order to create a false sense of value for Gold users. Rather than face the pretty reasonable outrage of the community at the time, they hid what they did, not reminding Silver users about how they'd just had what they'd already bought from Microsoft ganked. Now, a year later, figuring a lot of people have forgotten they paid for a system with a service that promised Silver users getting demos when they were ready, they figure there won't be such a backlash. Now it's more profitable for them to say, "Hey, you're missing out. [Please don't remember we manufactured that missing out]. Buy the expensive version! [Please don't remember that you did buy that but we, uh, stripped it and gave it to a more expensive version.]"
The summary was incorrect. It should have read:
XBox Live figures less backlash, now tells Silver users how they screwed them a year ago to encourage upgrading now.
The sad thing is the number of sheep who don't get that taking something away from one service, only to make another seem better, really is a degredation of the original and not an enhancement of the newer one.
They successfully teach Microsoft:
Hey, in a year's time, why don't you release "XBox Live Platinum - With advance access to Halo 4 demos that Gold users don't get, all for $19.99/month"?
The sheep will then see Platinum as an "upgrade" despite the fact they bought a system with Silver that was meant to have demos when they arrive, then upgraded to Gold to get them, and now have to upgrade yet again to Platinum.
I have a 360 and the free Silver membership which, as far as I can tell, is worth exactly what I pay for it. There's not a lot left for Microsoft to strip from it. They can't remove store access - it just means they sell less. They can't remove their current poor demo access - it just means less sales. Take any more and they just cost themselves money.
If anything, they've already gone too far. They've hobbled so many of their games as to make them almost unplayable without a Gold account (Test Drive Unlimited requires your gamerscore to unlock the game and then ties the easy methods for doing it to the auction system that again requires Gold membership). Knowing I'll inevitably find my play experience degraded as punishment for not giving Microsoft more money each month, I buy less 360 games and more on the PC where makers like Valve manage to offer all of the services without "needing" enhanced and expensive levels of service. They create a system where I'm punished for not spending, what, half a dozen bucks a month? In exchange, I buy $20-30 less in games each month for the system because I know it's artificially hobbled. The point has already come where trying to grab money now has had a knock on effect on how much money they get overall.
The challenge is, companies like Microsoft have some numbers they can predict and see easily and some they can't.
They know: Hey, since stripping features from Silver, we're up 1m Gold accounts from our previous predictions. We make $6m a month more, high fives all
Figuring out which of 20 bugs is causing an issue is a relatively minor inconvenience if you see it as soon as it comes up. You know what you just changed so you know pretty much exactly where it must be coming from.
On the other hand, if you only find out about the issue when you've got a dozen nested elements in hundreds of lines of code and multiple CSS files, potentially with multiple bugs clashing in different ways, you're looking at hours spent tracking down a single issue.
Plus, fixing a single bug at a time really reinforces your realization there are only a small set of real issues (yes, I know people can point out thousands of minor quirks). Only fixing an issue when it has complex interactions makes each bug seem totally unique and yet another flaw. Thus your perception of the number of bugs increases.
I develop primarily in Firefox (Firebug is a godsend for helping me figure out the things that I was an idiot with). However, every time I finish a small block of code, I quickly load it up in IE (IE Tab for Firebug makes this even quicker but loses you the (admittedly small) benefit of the Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar).
By regularly checking in with IE, it's exceptionally rare that any of IE's bugs takes more than a couple of minutes to fix. My experience is that it's nowhere near as painful as many others seem to find it.
Similarly, because I see each bug on its own, they quickly fall in to a small set of unique issues rather than seeming like each one is yet another issue. As a result, not only do I not find it as painful, I also don't see it as being as bug riddled - just flawed with 20 or so big ones.
It may be that your perception of IE's bugs is, in part, because you develop for Firefox first and then only check IE at the end, dramatically increasing the pain you experience with each issue. You may find that, if you swap to regular itterative testing, your perception of how buggy IE is and how painful it is decreases dramatically.
I'd really make the suggestion you try checking IE regularly throughout development, fixing issues as they arise, rather than just at the end. You may find your experience is transformed.
Don't get me wrong - I'm not saying IE doesn't have bugs. It has a whole bunch of really annoying ones (about 20). What I am saying is that you can avoid the issue and have them make life hell or you can approach things differently and discover that, whilst an issue, it's nothing that can't easily and relatively painlessly be overcome.
- Arrest and abuse everyone, regardless of evidence.
- Turn the hearts and minds of the people utterly against you.
- Have vastly more people become terrorists in outrage at the complete disregard for due process that you're demonstrating.
- Now you have far more terrorists. Which makes catching them even easier.
See how much easier it is to fight criminals when you ensure there are far more of them to catch? It's like shooting fish in a barrel. One is hard to hit. Pack the barrel to the brim and you're bound to hit something.It was only under our foolish return to the rule of law and acting with honour again by the late 90's that we had largely stopped outraging the populace. We had far fewer people responding to our behavior and becoming terrorists and found that the population no longer supported the terrorists' actions and no longer offered them safe houses. Do you know how hard it is to catch a terrorist when there are hardly any left?! It was a complete disaster! 3. Please explain why you can mistreat people just because they aren't U.S. citizens. I believe the administration's preferred term is "undermenschen"
I was going to jump in with the inevitable, "Mexican billionaire? So about $34 American?" Then I remembered the peso's worth slightly more than the dollar now. So... uh... yay... Go him!
5Mbps/2Mbps - $39.99/month
15Mbps/2 Mbps - $49.99/month
15Mbps/15Mbps - $64.99/month
30Mbps/15Mbps - $139.95/month
If you can't actually buy a service and what you can buy is half that speed and three to four times the cost of cable internet, is it really realistic to compare it?
In other news, theoretically, Ma Bell will extend the internet backbone straight to your house, building a complete server room for you. It costs tens of millions and is in no way generally available. OH MY GOD! VERIZON FIOS TO GO THE WAY OF THE DINOSAUR!!11!!1!!
- He is automatically assuming the original coder, who's now the lead he's meant to report to, acted with malice.
- He has absolutely no proof that the guy deliberately did anything wrong.
- He has absolutely no proof that they guy wasn't simply given the code by another coder on the project and has no idea it comes with a license.
- He has absolutely no proof that the guy hasn't already attained a license and it's in his desk drawer.
- He has absolutely no way of knowing if the original coder actually worked at that company and the code on the web is the derivative.
If he goes with his suggested options of an unapproved recode or reporting the issue to more senior management, without going to the lead first:- He automatically demonstrates he's assumed the worst of his lead without even talking to him.
- He has no respect for the reporting structure of the organization.
- He's willing to waste senior management's time with things a more junior manager should have looked at first.
- He's willing to waste company time doing a recode that may prove to be totally unnecessary and he certainly hasn't checked the facts to find out either way.
The only real option in this situation is to send a brief, tactful email to the lead along the lines of, "Hey, I noted [this code] is similar to [this code]. Just confirming you're aware and have made whatever decision you feel appropriate in terms of licensing?" Then keep the email.The lead may have a good reason, may not have had a good reason but takes an appropriate response (securing the license, recoding), or may choose to bury it.
ONLY when there's proof the lead's actions are deliberately sketchy does it become appropriate to consider jumping him in the chain and reporting, to ensure more senior management know they're being exposed to a liability.
Pretty much every other option demonstrates the new coder has serious issues with respecting the people he works with. He may or may not be right. If he isn't, he's pretty much destroyed himself in the organization. If he is, he still has to prove malice on the lead's part or he risks the lead saying, "Wow, I never knew. I wish he'd come to me instead of thinking he was above playing with the team."
No, that's only on the PC.
On XBox Live, if you frag a friend, then a friend of that friend, and so on to the depth of six people... Kevin Bacon eventually calls you "teh gey" whilst sounding like a thirteen year old boy with hormonal issues.
I am about to come in to 100 million dollars from a patent suit that I am sure to win.
If you will send me an advance of only ten thousand dollars, to cover some of my legal fees, I will give you 10% of my final winnings - 10 million dollars.
I very much hope we can work together. Ironically, that's been pretty much exactly how SCO has sold shares and gained investment for the last few years. On top of everything else, they turn out to be variant 419 scammers? Life just doesn't cut them a break.
You have the option to not pick up - especially with caller ID coming by default on most cell service.
Ultimately, a call requires the same resources, on your provider's end, whether you make or receive it.
It is arguably more contradictory of basic economic reasoning to try and figure out some consistent rate that receiving service providers get paid by the calling provider being the sole billing party.
Say it is agreed that 10c/min should be split 5c for the calling provider's costs, 5c for the recipient's network.
The calling provider can now never offer free calls after Xpm because they're still responsible for giving 5c to a third party. Even if they are willing to offer their own lines for free after a certain time, they still have to pay out.
Similarly, say the recipient manages to dramatically increase efficiency and it now only costs them 3c. They're never going to agree to only bill 3c while their competitor takes 5c. They'll push for the same 5c and simply drop their own calls to 8c a minute (3c for them, 5c for the competitor) to have more attractive policies. The competitor manages the same efficiency increase and we're stuck with 8c/minute calls both ways instead of the 6c it actually ought to cost.
So, in terms of economic simplicity, it actually makes far more sense that each end charges their customer whatever they want to charge, whether coming or going, and leaves it up to the customer to decide whether or not to call/answer.
Not saying I like that reality (I'm an Englishman living in California and I quite liked not paying to receive calls). However, I can understand it in terms of simplicity.
...with Lowe's, Macys and Victoria's Secret especially hard hit. Black Friday has nothing to do with it. I like to "research" what I would buy a hypothetical girlfriend, should I have one, every Friday. The only difference was that I had all of this Friday free.Uh, I mean, that's what I imagine some theoretical person might have been doing.
Look! A beowulf cluster! *runs*
1 cubic meter, assuming the same density as water, weighs 1000 kg.
It can, in turn, process 11 kg - barely 1% of its own mass.
In a year.
To use your figure of 330 Tg of methane, that's 30 petagrams of the damn stuff. That's 30 billion tonnes. Volumewise, that's 1/5th of Lake Erie (150 trillion liters - 150 billion tonnes - of water).
And that's assuming you could get all of the gas in to Lake Erie in the first place.
The fact that 160GB iPods exist and are selling implies there is demand for them. The last iPod that was solely a music player capped out at 40GB. That was fairly easy to fill with a 600-800 CD collection. I know, I did so.
That's ignoring its convenience as a portable hard drive and the fact that a 40GB iPod has nothing like 40GB free for music.
The 160GB versions also work pretty nicely as video player, particularly when you're stuck on long flights and want options for whatever you're in the mood for at the time. Granted, there's no legal way to get your DVDs on to the thing (DVD Decrypter simply ignores the DMCA) so that's hardly an argument against illegal methods being the only option.
Unfortunately, your argument is part of why Canada is saddled with a ridiculous media and hard drive tax. They too assumed there was no legal way to fill all of the media that was getting sold so they decided to simply assume everyone was a criminal and should pay their share of restitution automatically.
Just because you can't think of a way to do something legally, that doesn't mean that many people aren't doing just that.
More likely...
A mailbox is going to get opened in Delaware and a cell phone registered to that address, while everything else remains exactly where it always way.
Why do you think just about every credit card and predatory lending scheme seems to get mailed to you from Delaware? Because they've figure out it's a great business model to take half the amount of tax on all of everyone else's dubious business whilst not having to support anything more than the name-only corporate HQs.
There are people making the games, there are people that want to play the games, why not just let the rating system rate them and let people choose to play them or not?
Sony and Nintendo are the problem in this scenario. Sony and Nintendo, like all businesses, are anethical... They don't do good, they don't do evil, they do whatever makes them money, regardless of morality. The closest they come is when they figure they can make money by selling the impression of ethics.
So, accepting that they would happily sell "Over 95, with written consent of both parents, this'll make you a serial killer, no really!-Only" games if it meant they'd make money, the question is: What makes them think they wouldn't make money overall?
The answer to that one is depressingly simple: Puritan America.
Even if the game comes with a million warnings about being for adults only, thousands of parents will give it to their kids anyway. Then, in time honored fashion, one of those kids will go on an unrelated shooting spree and a lawyer seeking to make a reputation will sue the game makers and the game system makers.
The system maker will likely defeat the case. But defeating the case is still a loss. Just to show up in court costs them hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars.
Walmart, crazy as it sounds, sells far more games than anyone else. They'll never permit an Ao title. BestBuy, CircuitCity? They won't either. So you get a game that manages meager sales, regardless of its quality. 50,000 sales at $10 each to the platform maker? That's maybe half a million dollars. Far more than that would go out to defending it.
Even a court victory more than wipes out any profits they made from allowing the game to be released on their system. And that's before you factor in negative advertising, let alone the freak case they actually manage to lose.
So, existing in a world purely without ethics, simply about money, the system makers have a simple question to answer: Is it profitable to allow the game's release? With puritan America, its values and the cost of even being in the right in its legal system, it's not.
It's easy to judge Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo for their refusal. At the end of the day, they're businesses. And we're the society that created a place where it doesn't make good business sense to allow Ao titles on consoles.
The aunt was unconcious and unable to breath without aid due to pneumonia. This was after a decade as a quadrapelegic (yeah, I know I almost certainly got that spelling wrong).
The uncle made the call to have the machines turned off. It was time to let her go.
She kept breathing on her own. Evidently she wasn't that incapable of breathing unaided.
When she came around, he had to explain to her why he made the call he did. He explained and she ultimately agreed with him that it was the right choice.
But, wow, what a guilt trip to face.
Ten years ago, Erin was in a massive wreck in Minnesota.
She had rented the car but a friend was driving while she sat in the back seat. They lost control on some ice, bounced off the snow bank, turned sideways, then skidded in to the on coming traffic. Whilst the oncoming traffic managed to stop, they were still doing about 30 as they hit the front of a pick-up, sideways, right where Erin was sitting.
The driver and front seat passenger were OK save for the usual minor stuff. They looked back and Erin was slumped and bleeding, not breathing. A nurse on the scene got her airways open. An ambulance took her to a local hospital who took one look at her, called an air ambulance to get her to a bigger hospital and induced a coma to try getting her there alive. They flew with the paddles out for the whole flight, expecting her heart to stop beating at any point.
Her parents were called and told to get to Minnesota as fast as possible as there may not be much time. They made it and were then told that, if she made it through the night, she had a 50:50 change of survival.
Her list of injuries at the time were: A dying brain stem (this was what they figured would kill her unless it stopped), a collapsed lung, a jaw broken in several places, a shattered left arm, a cracked eye socket, and whatever other brain injuries turned up once it was stable enough to look at.
She survived the night but didn't come out of the coma. Being in a coma, they couldn't anaesthetise and so they couldn't operate on the arm. She was in a full coma for two weeks (completely unresponsive) and in unconscious for a month. Even when she came out, she wasn't really self aware beyond asking for drugs for the pain.
Once they could operate, the surgeons told her parents that the arm was so damaged, and had been left for so long, they would need to amputate. Erin's mother gave them permission, saying simply, "All I'll ask is you do whatever you'd do for your own daughter." The surgeon said he couldn't not try after that. 11 hours later, they'd rebuilt the arm with steel. They had no idea if it'd work but they gave it a shot, figuring they could always amputate later.
The brain injuries were such that her parents were told she'd always fatigue quickly and would probably never walk more than a few paces, unaided, again. They were also told she'd never be able to look after herself again, needing care for the rest of her life. Having won the national merit scholarship before the accident, she was now testing 20 IQ points lower (and still, disgustingly, as a genius - though those 20 points are harsh when you know what you were).
She was flown back to San Diego for long term rehab and was eventually sent home in a wheelchair.
This was about the point where she and I managed to talk again. I'd met her online a couple of years earlier and had actually met her in person, at LAX, a few weeks before the accident when flying out to New Zealand. She was only conscious for a few hours at a time before the drugs knocked her out again but we could at least talk a little then.
She was, as you can imagine, pretty badly beaten up. She wasn't supposed to be able to look after herself again, wasn't supposed to be able to walk more than a few steps again, wasn't supposed to ever be able to return to education or hold down a job again. She was feeling kind of sorry for herself.
Her mother spelled it out for her: Go to bed and wallow for a couple of days. I don't want to deal with you. You can then get up, live your life and be hurt. Or you can stay in bed, feel sorry for yourself, do nothing, and be hurt. The being hurt part doesn't change. All that changes is what you do with it.
She refused to stay in the wheelchair. She got walking again. She got back to working part days at the library. She even mana
My wife was in a massive car accident, a decade ago. She was in a coma for a month, suffered brain injuries, a collapsed lung, shattered arm, cracked eye socket, multiply broken jaw, etc. A national merit scholarship winner before the accident, her parents were told that, if she survived, she'd likely never walk much or be able to look after herself again.
As it happened, she was sufficiently beaten up at the time that she had no concept of how bad her injuries were. She got out of the wheelchair simply because it frustrated her. She went back to working part time simply because she didn't realize she wasn't supposed to be able to. By the time she comprehended what had happened, she'd improved enough that setting impossible goals like "become a personal trainer" weren't quite so impossible. We taught her to read again (yes, even that got messed up) and even managed to get her back in to school - initially only able to pull a 2.0 average but improved each semester.
In her case, she had an amazing recovery. Yet she, herself, says, "If I'm ever like that again, turn me off." She didn't realize how hurt she was and got lucky with recovering before she did. Understanding now, she has absolutely no desire to try that fight again. She'd rather just call it a day.
So, sadly, there's a real likelihood that his first words, upon realizing he can finally communicate, after years of being unable to and stuck in a totally paralyzed body, will be, "Kill me." Probably not ideal to have the family in the room for.
And yes, that entire story was just so I could "drop" that I have a wife in a slashdot post. Cunning, huh?
PC Gamer may have dropped from 300,000 to 210,000 but their cunning plan to cut from the previous, heady 6 pages of actual content, to a leaner 4, along with increasing from 60 to 90 pages of advertising ensures they still make the same revenue targets.
I joke but it's really not that untrue. I subscribe but am left wondering why. The magazine is virtually unreadable with a couple of pages of letters, half a dozen pages of previews, maybe ten pages of reviews (with half given over to one or two games and the rest being shorter than the average web review), a brief hardware section that can't compete with Anandtech or whoever, and a couple of one page columns at the back. All of this scattered through so many pages of ads, fold out ads and inserts that it's just about unreadable. What I can find amongst the ads is so brief (accepting no one's in to every genre) that it's become a half hour read and you're done for your five bucks.
Their challenge isn't that the market's no longer viable (there are plenty of design sites yet dozens of design magazines, there are plenty of digital photography sites and yet endless magazines). The problem is they've made so many commercial decisions, they've designed straight past anything for their readers to actually enjoy.
Bulk the tech section out to a five machines from a given price point multi review, a section on performance tuning, one on things like in game voice, one on graphics cards and you've suddenly got a valid section. Change the three brief columns at the back in to half a dozen that really cover a niche and build their own reason for being there. If you're going to preview games, write something rather than a full page graphic and 30 words. If you're going to review, review everything that comes out rather than two key games and a couple of embarrassed half page pieces that tell people nothing.
Reclaim the magazine for the readers and it might be worth reading. Keep seeing it purely as a vehicle for ads and there's no point in readers picking it up. With no readers, you can't sell any ads.
If George Lucas taught us anything, it's that these things should make a whum, whum noise as they're moved around plus a kind of white noise crackling whenever they hit things.
That's hardly unobtrusive in a crowd.
If you go around determined to see the virgin Mary's face, you'll start seeing something kind of like it in every tree bark, every mildew, every piece of burned toast, every birthmark.
If you're determined to find hidden messages and keep trying different numerical values, you can pull spooky phrases out of the bible... or indeed the script for Animal House.
People have long been "composing" music from random number generators and fractals. If a random number generator can be forced in to a musical composition, by definition, any series of values can be.
I personally enjoy the following algorhythm: Break the image up in to inch squares. For any given inch if the dominant color is red, note the word "this", if it's green, note the word "is", and if it's blue, note the word "stupid". Amazingly, Da Vinci left a message encoded that appears to describe his views on musical analysis of his work.
Just because existing implementations have been all hype and little substance, that doesn't make an idea inherrently flawed. In the 1400s, very few people could read, books were for the rich and they were made by monks. Fortunately, Gutenberg didn't listen to the Dvoraks of his time who dismissed the existing print techniques and took engraving plates and advanced it to movable type. In doing so, he massively advanced printing and set in motion events that let to the literate world we live in today and all of society's advancements that likely would never have happened without a literate population with access to affordable reading material and a means to record their ideas.
gPhone may or may not be the breakthrough to finally make smartphones a reality. On the other hand, saying something can't be done - or shouldn't be done - simply because it hasn't been done well yet is pretty ignorant.
"Never ascribe to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."
I have been left off several of the credits for games I worked on*.
It sucks at the time. After all credit is just that... being given credit for the work you did. Not being given the credit you earned is kind of a blow.
The thing you really quickly realize is that there's almost never actual malice behind it. A marketing drone or some exec's PA is given the task of gathering the names of everyone involved. When they don't know the dev process well enough to cover a chunk of one department, get the names of the people who're out that day, get the names of people who did the original build but are now on a different project, etc... those people get missed. There's no malice, just a complete lack of awareness from someone who has no notion of what the credit means to the people who sweated over the game.
So, you can get bitter about it and spend energy blaming and hating people... Or you can accept laziness and lack of consideration are unfortunate but they happen.
*Ironically, the MobyGames list misses me from all of the Planetside games - the one place where my ideas actually got directly included in gameplay whereas I'm credited for plenty of games where I only did behind the scenes work.
Reports show the son became enraged, went through the house looking for the air card, and then punched his mother, prompting the parents to call the Sheriff's Office.
After the boy retreated to his bedroom and locked it, the mother knocked on the door and told him he needed to come out and talk to the deputies, the report stated. But the juvenile allegedly responded with profanity.
Harnage and another deputy entered the room using a key from the parents to arrest the son, according to the report. The son fought the deputies - at one time punching Harnage on the lip - until they handcuffed him. www.sun-sentinel.com
The ironic thing is that any parent that's self-excusing enough to want to use parental controls rather than take responsibility for what Junior can and can't do will be just as likely to consider it Microsoft's fault that they got punched in the face by their own child for activating one of Microsoft's features. Rather than take the blame for raising a brat, why not just sue? It's the American way.
Now you want truly un-American thinking? Release a treadmill or other exercise equipment that can be set to automatically give the little tubs o' lard more game time in exchange for actually exercising.
In my day, we had to run ten miles up hill before we were allowed to call the other kids "teh gey" on Halo. And we were grateful!
...and fried mayonnaise. If you're ever in San Diego, try the Tlaquepaque at Jimmy Carter's (least Mexican named Mexican restaurant ever).If you can get over the notion that it's basically a hot mayonnaise and jalapeno sauce, it's actually just the right amount of sweet, creamy and spicy that combines brilliantly with the rice.