Hey, you've convinced me. Microsoft is a company and it will sell customers what they want them to buy no matter what. You don't want Vista? We're Microsoft and you'll damn well buy it or else.
There are two many problems with Vista for many people to want it. Few people care about the flashy new interface when it full of bugs.
People don't like to have their network traffic throttled because they're playing music. People don't like operating systems that crash. People don't like having their arm twisted into installing a new operating system or buying a new computer just to play the latest game.
And while Microsoft will eventually be able to force most people to "upgrade" to Vista, why didn't they learn from XP. People liked XP, it was more stable than Windows 95, 98 and ME. Well, the reason they didn't learn is they're still working the long term game plan which is basically "put everyone's balls in a vice and then squeeze them until the money falls out". They keep forgetting that people don't actually like to be on the receiving end of that gameplan.
Of course, the old testament could also be a book of Jewish myths, with no attempt made to be historically accurate and that might be why there's a guy who married his rib in it among other bizarre mythological events.
No, I think it really is about $150 million dollars to delay Blu-ray disks for 18 months since it seems to me $150 million is much, much larger than the profit they can expect to make on sales of both HD formats, they really do have a duty to their shareholders to take the offer.
Of course you're talking about the rights people should have versus the rights they are actually accorded in law.
That's really what "natural rights" are, the basic rights that everyone should have. I just have a problem with that particular way of expressing the idea I suppose. It seems meaningless to say someone has a "natural right" if no one else respects that right. You can only have rights if other people respect them. No respect for the rights of others means no rights at all. It's the simple reason anarchism is never a tolerable form of government, without any rights life is nasty, brutish and short.
Now on the other hand, property rights are actually a government granted right to monopolize physical objects. Especially since you could, in theory, have a state where no property rights exist at all. For instance you could in theory have a state where only the items you are currently using are protected from the use of others. It a difficult concept to fully imagine and I doubt it would be workable in practice, except maybe in a post-scarcity world.
I personally, don't think that you can accord property rights as anything more than a necessary right for our society to function and prosper. As such, it stands a bit below the absolute rights to life, liberty and security of your person that everyone should have.
That's not entirely true. The ESRB is caving in to government pressure and kissing politicians asses to try and keep the U.S. government from creating a ratings board. Much of the asshatery that is going on can be traced back to the influence of Jack Thompson who, as a snake-bellied moral grandstander, has cozied up to a number of politicians who should know better and fired them up over the hot coffee scandal.
This is the fall out, the ESRB is scared that it will be replaced with a real censor board, and so now they're ending up being stooges for the government even though they're supposed to the be the industries stooges.
It's not believers or non-believers who are the problem, it's the ignorant people who are sure they know the answer, even if those people are agnostic. I already said it can't be proven or disproven absolutely, but then again that's not a really a barrier to making a rational decision based on the evidence. You can't prove that slashdot isn't just your personal delusion, does that mean you should spend the rest of your life questioning whether it really exists or not?
Of course not, you look at the evidence and make your decision.
Of course, there is no emperical proof that God doesn't exist. There is NEVER any emperical proof that anything doesn't exist. You can only prove that something doesn't exist by enumerating everything within your set and showing what you say doesn't exist there isn't among those pieces. Since we're theoretically talking about something which may not even be in our universe, we will never be able to prove that God doesn't exist.
Choosing the Christian God for the example we can, on the other hand we can show certain things: 1) The Bible is not literally true. Jesus said he'd return before those before him died. They died 2000 years ago and still no return. 2) The Bible is often mistaken. The world was not created in 7 days. 3) God doesn't intervene in our world like the Bible indicates he should. 4) Prayer doesn't accomplish anything (It's been tested, mortality rates for people who were "prayed for" were slightly higher than those that were "not prayed for" but well within the area of statistical insignificance. 5) Humans aren't very well designed so "Intelligent design" seems unlikely. I mean really, if you could design anything you wanted and make it human, why put the brains in the head and put it at the end of fragile neck? 6) Evolutionary theory favours the idea that we create supernatural forces as beings behind events we don't understand. As early primates it was evolutionarily advantageous to assign a motive to the shaking bush because sometimes there really was a predator there. 7) Socialogy favours the idea that as our knowledge of the world expanded we would naturally gravitate to monotheistic religions with their far-removed God who can't be proven to not exist. Because one you really prove that a God doesn't exist people stop believing in it. It's the pretty simply concept behind memetic evolution. 8) God is conforting all-father who never dies, never leaves and always cares for you. 9) There are several paradoxes that show that god could not exist, the Paradox of Evil being the most famous one.
If you are willing to consider the evidence, then it all points to the existence of God as a mere delusion of the mind. There is no direct evidence for his existence and every piece of evidence points towards his non-existance. So, given that Atheists rarely try to force their beliefs on anyone, really when was the last time a an athiest knocked on your door and asked you to stop believing in God? When was the last time you saw an athiest handing out copies of the NothingToWatchForTower on the street? How could any sane person say Athiests are the worse kind of religious nutcase?
The worst kind of nutcase is really people like you. People who regardless of what they believe in who believe that they couldn't possibly be wrong. The majority of Athiests simply aren't like that, they're people who have looked at the evidence and made a reasoned decision on what to believe. They had to, most of them have had to go against popular culture, against upbringing, against family, against tradition, and even against the beliefs of their friends. And they always have to contend with shit heads like you who claim someone who doesn't believe what you believe is a nutcase.
Actually, this is actually good for the single-party and MMP campaigns. You have to understand the system and how to game it using xp costs for magic items before you understand why the change was made.
Given: 1) Challenge is based on experience level. 2) There is an "expected" amount of magical equipment for a particular experience level. 3) Under D&D 3 rules making magic items reduces your experience level and increases your magical equipment.
Then: 4) You should spend xp like the wind to make it easier to win combats.
In multi-player settings this can cause a problem because it can create a vast imabalance in power between the haves and the have nots. So in short this creates a big discrepency between the people who don't want to spend xp because they want their cool abilities and people who do because they want the magic item's cool abilities. Over time it makes the CR system of 3rd Ed fall completely apart unless everyone plays the way they're supposed to, and even then someone can unintentionally throw the system off balance.
The article might have a minor point, the Google page does look a little dated now, especially compared to the minimalistic but more modern looking ask.com front page.
Mind you, there are probably really good reasons not to change to an ask.com type frontpage like accessibility for the blind, and for that 2-3 percent of users who still don't have browsers that can handle complicated CSS.
What you don't seem to understand is that the athiests you've been talking to have chosen rationality and knowledge as moral goods. To them faith in a unprovable hypothesis is morally bad and thus why they look down upon those who believe in superstitions and religion.
The reason it's considered a moral bad is that in the area of logic and rationality an unprovable assumption invalidates all logic derived from it. The central problem therefore is that religion can be used to justify any action no matter how good or how bad, simply because you believe in it.
Yeah, Dungeon Siege 3 is going to feature new mounts. I hear two of the best mounta are going to be a Mustang named Ford and a Cavalier's horse named Chevy. Interesting there are actually 3 horses named Ford in the game, there's also a Bronco and a Pinto.
I'm going to take up your little challenge. I think it's very difficult to identifiy a threat which is objectively larger threat to the "American Way of Life" than the Bush government. Who or what would have posed a greater threat than rampant corruption in the U.S. government?
Soviet Russia? Possibly, but in hind sight. it seems questionable whether Russia would have been able to engender a communist revolution in the United States and certainly a land invasion would have been futile. Russia's threat was mostly ideological and nuklear. A nuclear threat they developed to counter the American nuclear threat.
No, great empires are seldom truly conquered from without, they become weak and deseased to the point where they can no longer defend themselves and then they are conquered. Thus ultimately, it is the empire's leaders who present the greatest threat to the empire. Bush appears to have done massive damage to the regular functions of the government. Increased censorship, decreased regulation of corporations, increased the power of the presidency, ignored the laws that government the government, increased distrust of the government among the people, create a new modus operendi for the government where politics trump reality, decreased research funding, cut spending on the poor, and cut taxes for the rich.
Taken together this is a recipe for a coup d'etat. The only reason one isn't likely to happen is everyone knows he's gone in a little over a year, no one needs to risk their life or livelyhood to stop him.
So, the question is, what external threat exists for a country whose only borders are oceans and two genuinely friendly nations, which has the worlds largest standing army and is an economic powerhouse that few nations can rival? Truly, the greatest threat to such a nation is itself.
Actually in what is obviously a hideous mockery of what was going to happen, they did try to read it aloud to the President but he decided it wasn't important enough to listen to the briefing on it before his vacation. After all, who would have thought a National Secuirty briefing on an imminent threat would be need urgent attention. Certainly not Bush.
If Bush has proven anything, it's that being hated by 50% of the country won't prevent you from getting elected, so Hillary has at least a snowball's chance...
On the other fronts, you're absolutely correct. However, Bush has never been a conservative, he's a "neo-conservative" which means he's socially conservative and fiscally liberal as long as his spending doesn't directly help the poor. He's pro-hostility with the rest of world because neo-conservative believe it's the inevitable result of power, and the primary goal of neo-conservatives to keep their country strong enough to dictate terms to the rest of the world.
Essentially neo-conservatives are the political equivalent of the dumb jocks from endless Hollywood movies.
That's the opposite direction that Bush has been taking the U.S. and it's one his great blunders. He's been stacking government agencies with political appointees who's only job is to enforce the President's wishes on the people who know better than he does. They're there to censor, distort, or just plain hide anything that doesn't agree with the way the President wants the world to be. Despite the fact that the people who are being censored, filtered and hidden are specialists on the subjects who know what they're talking about and the President is not and does not.
The President really was supposed to be a figure head for the government. Bush's government has been one long exercise in trying to subvert the checks and balances that keep him a fgiure head.
Actually, I think he has a point. You can call yourself a biologist and believe in Intelligent Design, heck you might even be able to earn a degree in biology while still adhering to Intelligent Design, but you can't actually do any work, other than writing books about Intelligent Design as long as you believe in it.
All current areas of research conflict with the premises of Intelligent Design, so you have to choose to follow your religious beliefs or suspend them so you can actually do some work.
Now you may be confusing "Intelligent Design" and faith. It's quite possible to believe that something created the universe with an inherent design in it, and still be a scientist. The difference is that "Intelligent Design" is pretty much tied other unscientific beliefs like young earth creationism, because otherwise you just can't reconcile the fossil evidence with your beliefs.
I expect Microsoft will be giving away free Xbox 360 to every media personality who'll take them come launch day. I'd certainly bet that MS is going to blow a load of money on Halo 3. Why? Two reasons: Sony and Nintendo.
Microsoft's ideal marketplace is MS with 95% of all sales and 1 or 2 competitors representing the other 5% so they're "not a monopoly". Halo 3 represents a unique chance for them to bury their competition, even if it is only for a short while.
Blackberry servers require exchange to function. Exchange requires Windows. Once you've got Exchange and Windows running, then Sharepoint pops up it's head. It wants to integrate your Web site and your Exchange server, but it only works with IIS. So now to host an integrated Web site/email system, you have to run IIS too.
Now if you're a pointy-haired boss you see your tech department running Apache and IIS, two different web servers. Well, that obviously ineffecient, training for two seperate archetectures. We need to shut one down. Well we can't get rid of the MS servers because they're running the email and customer relations software, so we have to get rid of this apache stuff. So what if we need to run more windows servers to serve the same number of web sites, less staff and less training costs overwhelms the hardware costs at least in the short run.
It's all about proprietary lock-in, as it always is with Microsoft.
It is William Gibson, in particular, who is running into a predicition problem. I haven't seen anyone else mention this, so I'm going to. It's a simple problem and it makes it very hard for him to presidct future, much more so than any other random science fiction author. You see, William Gibson's problem is he doesn't like or understand computers. In fact, last time I heard, he was still writing his novels on a typewriter. He didn't own a computer and I doubt he owns one now, or that even if he did own one, that he'd use it.
It's may be hard to believe but it's what he said himself in a number of interviews. We're reaching the point where any future technology is going to be driven by computers, and if you only have a vague idea of how computers work, then you're going to have a very hard time predicting the future.
I used to like William Gibson's writing, then I saw and interview with him where he was bragging about an X-files episode he wrote, it was one of the worst episodes of X-files I had even seen. Since that time my view of his writing has changed a little it looks a lot more like Neuromancer was the product of a fair amount of luck. The genre tropes that William Gibson somehow crystallized in Neuromancer all predate him. They were even all collected in a similar manner in a couple of books before Neuromancer, it's just that Neuromancer was the first one to sell really, really well. So, I've come to conclusion that William Gibson is a better writer than a predictor in science fiction. He's got a flair for capturing atmosphere with his argot, but he doesn't really understand the science in his science fiction and sometimes that really shows.
"And if he did sentence her to jail, there would be such a major public uproar that it would bring the MPAA and Crown to their knees."
Would that be just like the public outcry over Dmitry Sklyarov resulted in his swift and speedy release?
I know there'd be some outrage over the incident but there's just too much to be pissed off about recently. They could send her to jail for 10 years and the only response would be that theater receipts would fall a little more. To see what I mean, there are people right here arguing that it's entirely reasonable and fair to take someone to trial over a 20 second clip of a movie recorded on a cell phone.
I find it particularly disturbing that people would actually say it's not fair to the theater owner to expect him to exercise his discretion on whether to prosecute someone. Yeah, it's not like we actually want people to act as thinking beings instead of little automatons with no will of their own.
The only reason this ridiculous travesty of justice is occurring is because the copyright holder lobbies have successfully bribed, wheedled, and lied their way into making recording a criminal offense. If it was still a civil offense the theater would have taken her camera, or kicked her out of the theater and that would have been the end of it. It's because the theater and the MPAA can now force the American public to pay for their vain lawsuits that they are pursuing action on this. After all, why not, when 300 million other people are footing the bill?
"No physical or mental torture, nor any other form of coercion, may be inflicted on prisoners of war to secure from them information of any kind whatever. Prisoners of war who refuse to answer may not be threatened, insulted or exposed to unpleasant or disadvantageous treatment of any kind." -- Third Geneva Convention
It's against the Geneva Convention. Since the U.S. (and 193 other countries) have ratified the treaty, they are required to abide by it's restrictions. It's obvious that you don't want to believe that the U.S. is engaged in a systematic betrayal of its values, but it's equally obvious that you are selectively choosing your facts to convince yourself that what you want to believe is true.
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Hey, you've convinced me. Microsoft is a company and it will sell customers what they want them to buy no matter what. You don't want Vista? We're Microsoft and you'll damn well buy it or else.
There are two many problems with Vista for many people to want it. Few people care about the flashy new interface when it full of bugs.
People don't like to have their network traffic throttled because they're playing music.
People don't like operating systems that crash.
People don't like having their arm twisted into installing a new operating system or buying a new computer just to play the latest game.
And while Microsoft will eventually be able to force most people to "upgrade" to Vista, why didn't they learn from XP. People liked XP, it was more stable than Windows 95, 98 and ME. Well, the reason they didn't learn is they're still working the long term game plan which is basically "put everyone's balls in a vice and then squeeze them until the money falls out". They keep forgetting that people don't actually like to be on the receiving end of that gameplan.
Of course, the old testament could also be a book of Jewish myths, with no attempt made to be historically accurate and that might be why there's a guy who married his rib in it among other bizarre mythological events.
No, I think it really is about $150 million dollars to delay Blu-ray disks for 18 months since it seems to me $150 million is much, much larger than the profit they can expect to make on sales of both HD formats, they really do have a duty to their shareholders to take the offer.
Of course you're talking about the rights people should have versus the rights they are actually accorded in law.
That's really what "natural rights" are, the basic rights that everyone should have. I just have a problem with that particular way of expressing the idea I suppose. It seems meaningless to say someone has a "natural right" if no one else respects that right. You can only have rights if other people respect them. No respect for the rights of others means no rights at all. It's the simple reason anarchism is never a tolerable form of government, without any rights life is nasty, brutish and short.
Now on the other hand, property rights are actually a government granted right to monopolize physical objects. Especially since you could, in theory, have a state where no property rights exist at all. For instance you could in theory have a state where only the items you are currently using are protected from the use of others. It a difficult concept to fully imagine and I doubt it would be workable in practice, except maybe in a post-scarcity world.
I personally, don't think that you can accord property rights as anything more than a necessary right for our society to function and prosper. As such, it stands a bit below the absolute rights to life, liberty and security of your person that everyone should have.
That's not entirely true. The ESRB is caving in to government pressure and kissing politicians asses to try and keep the U.S. government from creating a ratings board. Much of the asshatery that is going on can be traced back to the influence of Jack Thompson who, as a snake-bellied moral grandstander, has cozied up to a number of politicians who should know better and fired them up over the hot coffee scandal.
This is the fall out, the ESRB is scared that it will be replaced with a real censor board, and so now they're ending up being stooges for the government even though they're supposed to the be the industries stooges.
It's not believers or non-believers who are the problem, it's the ignorant people who are sure they know the answer, even if those people are agnostic. I already said it can't be proven or disproven absolutely, but then again that's not a really a barrier to making a rational decision based on the evidence. You can't prove that slashdot isn't just your personal delusion, does that mean you should spend the rest of your life questioning whether it really exists or not?
Of course not, you look at the evidence and make your decision.
Of course, there is no emperical proof that God doesn't exist. There is NEVER any emperical proof that anything doesn't exist. You can only prove that something doesn't exist by enumerating everything within your set and showing what you say doesn't exist there isn't among those pieces. Since we're theoretically talking about something which may not even be in our universe, we will never be able to prove that God doesn't exist.
Choosing the Christian God for the example we can, on the other hand we can show certain things:
1) The Bible is not literally true. Jesus said he'd return before those before him died. They died 2000 years ago and still no return.
2) The Bible is often mistaken. The world was not created in 7 days.
3) God doesn't intervene in our world like the Bible indicates he should.
4) Prayer doesn't accomplish anything (It's been tested, mortality rates for people who were "prayed for" were slightly higher than those that were "not prayed for" but well within the area of statistical insignificance.
5) Humans aren't very well designed so "Intelligent design" seems unlikely. I mean really, if you could design anything you wanted and make it human, why put the brains in the head and put it at the end of fragile neck?
6) Evolutionary theory favours the idea that we create supernatural forces as beings behind events we don't understand. As early primates it was evolutionarily advantageous to assign a motive to the shaking bush because sometimes there really was a predator there.
7) Socialogy favours the idea that as our knowledge of the world expanded we would naturally gravitate to monotheistic religions with their far-removed God who can't be proven to not exist. Because one you really prove that a God doesn't exist people stop believing in it. It's the pretty simply concept behind memetic evolution.
8) God is conforting all-father who never dies, never leaves and always cares for you.
9) There are several paradoxes that show that god could not exist, the Paradox of Evil being the most famous one.
If you are willing to consider the evidence, then it all points to the existence of God as a mere delusion of the mind. There is no direct evidence for his existence and every piece of evidence points towards his non-existance. So, given that Atheists rarely try to force their beliefs on anyone, really when was the last time a an athiest knocked on your door and asked you to stop believing in God? When was the last time you saw an athiest handing out copies of the NothingToWatchForTower on the street? How could any sane person say Athiests are the worse kind of religious nutcase?
The worst kind of nutcase is really people like you. People who regardless of what they believe in who believe that they couldn't possibly be wrong. The majority of Athiests simply aren't like that, they're people who have looked at the evidence and made a reasoned decision on what to believe. They had to, most of them have had to go against popular culture, against upbringing, against family, against tradition, and even against the beliefs of their friends. And they always have to contend with shit heads like you who claim someone who doesn't believe what you believe is a nutcase.
Actually, this is actually good for the single-party and MMP campaigns. You have to understand the system and how to game it using xp costs for magic items before you understand why the change was made.
Given:
1) Challenge is based on experience level.
2) There is an "expected" amount of magical equipment for a particular experience level.
3) Under D&D 3 rules making magic items reduces your experience level and increases your magical equipment.
Then:
4) You should spend xp like the wind to make it easier to win combats.
In multi-player settings this can cause a problem because it can create a vast imabalance in power between the haves and the have nots. So in short this creates a big discrepency between the people who don't want to spend xp because they want their cool abilities and people who do because they want the magic item's cool abilities. Over time it makes the CR system of 3rd Ed fall completely apart unless everyone plays the way they're supposed to, and even then someone can unintentionally throw the system off balance.
The article might have a minor point, the Google page does look a little dated now, especially compared to the minimalistic but more modern looking ask.com front page.
Mind you, there are probably really good reasons not to change to an ask.com type frontpage like accessibility for the blind, and for that 2-3 percent of users who still don't have browsers that can handle complicated CSS.
What you don't seem to understand is that the athiests you've been talking to have chosen rationality and knowledge as moral goods. To them faith in a unprovable hypothesis is morally bad and thus why they look down upon those who believe in superstitions and religion.
The reason it's considered a moral bad is that in the area of logic and rationality an unprovable assumption invalidates all logic derived from it. The central problem therefore is that religion can be used to justify any action no matter how good or how bad, simply because you believe in it.
Yeah, Dungeon Siege 3 is going to feature new mounts. I hear two of the best mounta are going to be a Mustang named Ford and a Cavalier's horse named Chevy. Interesting there are actually 3 horses named Ford in the game, there's also a Bronco and a Pinto.
Good point, I wasn't thinking of other interal threats that the U.S. had produced for itself.
So... Why don't you turn off the politics section in your options?
Then you won't see the politics stories any more.
I'm going to take up your little challenge. I think it's very difficult to identifiy a threat which is objectively larger threat to the "American Way of Life" than the Bush government. Who or what would have posed a greater threat than rampant corruption in the U.S. government?
Soviet Russia? Possibly, but in hind sight. it seems questionable whether Russia would have been able to engender a communist revolution in the United States and certainly a land invasion would have been futile. Russia's threat was mostly ideological and nuklear. A nuclear threat they developed to counter the American nuclear threat.
No, great empires are seldom truly conquered from without, they become weak and deseased to the point where they can no longer defend themselves and then they are conquered. Thus ultimately, it is the empire's leaders who present the greatest threat to the empire. Bush appears to have done massive damage to the regular functions of the government. Increased censorship, decreased regulation of corporations, increased the power of the presidency, ignored the laws that government the government, increased distrust of the government among the people, create a new modus operendi for the government where politics trump reality, decreased research funding, cut spending on the poor, and cut taxes for the rich.
Taken together this is a recipe for a coup d'etat. The only reason one isn't likely to happen is everyone knows he's gone in a little over a year, no one needs to risk their life or livelyhood to stop him.
So, the question is, what external threat exists for a country whose only borders are oceans and two genuinely friendly nations, which has the worlds largest standing army and is an economic powerhouse that few nations can rival? Truly, the greatest threat to such a nation is itself.
Actually in what is obviously a hideous mockery of what was going to happen, they did try to read it aloud to the President but he decided it wasn't important enough to listen to the briefing on it before his vacation. After all, who would have thought a National Secuirty briefing on an imminent threat would be need urgent attention. Certainly not Bush.
If Bush has proven anything, it's that being hated by 50% of the country won't prevent you from getting elected, so Hillary has at least a snowball's chance...
On the other fronts, you're absolutely correct. However, Bush has never been a conservative, he's a "neo-conservative" which means he's socially conservative and fiscally liberal as long as his spending doesn't directly help the poor. He's pro-hostility with the rest of world because neo-conservative believe it's the inevitable result of power, and the primary goal of neo-conservatives to keep their country strong enough to dictate terms to the rest of the world.
Essentially neo-conservatives are the political equivalent of the dumb jocks from endless Hollywood movies.
That's the opposite direction that Bush has been taking the U.S. and it's one his great blunders. He's been stacking government agencies with political appointees who's only job is to enforce the President's wishes on the people who know better than he does. They're there to censor, distort, or just plain hide anything that doesn't agree with the way the President wants the world to be. Despite the fact that the people who are being censored, filtered and hidden are specialists on the subjects who know what they're talking about and the President is not and does not.
The President really was supposed to be a figure head for the government. Bush's government has been one long exercise in trying to subvert the checks and balances that keep him a fgiure head.
Actually, I think he has a point. You can call yourself a biologist and believe in Intelligent Design, heck you might even be able to earn a degree in biology while still adhering to Intelligent Design, but you can't actually do any work, other than writing books about Intelligent Design as long as you believe in it.
All current areas of research conflict with the premises of Intelligent Design, so you have to choose to follow your religious beliefs or suspend them so you can actually do some work.
Now you may be confusing "Intelligent Design" and faith. It's quite possible to believe that something created the universe with an inherent design in it, and still be a scientist. The difference is that "Intelligent Design" is pretty much tied other unscientific beliefs like young earth creationism, because otherwise you just can't reconcile the fossil evidence with your beliefs.
98% accuracy isn't usually refered to as "total garbage". You might be showing a bit of bias here.
I expect Microsoft will be giving away free Xbox 360 to every media personality who'll take them come launch day. I'd certainly bet that MS is going to blow a load of money on Halo 3. Why? Two reasons: Sony and Nintendo.
Microsoft's ideal marketplace is MS with 95% of all sales and 1 or 2 competitors representing the other 5% so they're "not a monopoly". Halo 3 represents a unique chance for them to bury their competition, even if it is only for a short while.
Actually, I think it might just be tie-in.
Blackberry servers require exchange to function.
Exchange requires Windows.
Once you've got Exchange and Windows running, then Sharepoint pops up it's head.
It wants to integrate your Web site and your Exchange server, but it only works with IIS.
So now to host an integrated Web site/email system, you have to run IIS too.
Now if you're a pointy-haired boss you see your tech department running Apache and IIS, two different web servers. Well, that obviously ineffecient, training for two seperate archetectures. We need to shut one down. Well we can't get rid of the MS servers because they're running the email and customer relations software, so we have to get rid of this apache stuff. So what if we need to run more windows servers to serve the same number of web sites, less staff and less training costs overwhelms the hardware costs at least in the short run.
It's all about proprietary lock-in, as it always is with Microsoft.
It is William Gibson, in particular, who is running into a predicition problem. I haven't seen anyone else mention this, so I'm going to. It's a simple problem and it makes it very hard for him to presidct future, much more so than any other random science fiction author. You see, William Gibson's problem is he doesn't like or understand computers. In fact, last time I heard, he was still writing his novels on a typewriter. He didn't own a computer and I doubt he owns one now, or that even if he did own one, that he'd use it.
It's may be hard to believe but it's what he said himself in a number of interviews. We're reaching the point where any future technology is going to be driven by computers, and if you only have a vague idea of how computers work, then you're going to have a very hard time predicting the future.
I used to like William Gibson's writing, then I saw and interview with him where he was bragging about an X-files episode he wrote, it was one of the worst episodes of X-files I had even seen. Since that time my view of his writing has changed a little it looks a lot more like Neuromancer was the product of a fair amount of luck. The genre tropes that William Gibson somehow crystallized in Neuromancer all predate him. They were even all collected in a similar manner in a couple of books before Neuromancer, it's just that Neuromancer was the first one to sell really, really well. So, I've come to conclusion that William Gibson is a better writer than a predictor in science fiction. He's got a flair for capturing atmosphere with his argot, but he doesn't really understand the science in his science fiction and sometimes that really shows.
"And if he did sentence her to jail, there would be such a major public uproar that it would bring the MPAA and Crown to their knees."
Would that be just like the public outcry over Dmitry Sklyarov resulted in his swift and speedy release?
I know there'd be some outrage over the incident but there's just too much to be pissed off about recently. They could send her to jail for 10 years and the only response would be that theater receipts would fall a little more. To see what I mean, there are people right here arguing that it's entirely reasonable and fair to take someone to trial over a 20 second clip of a movie recorded on a cell phone.
I find it particularly disturbing that people would actually say it's not fair to the theater owner to expect him to exercise his discretion on whether to prosecute someone. Yeah, it's not like we actually want people to act as thinking beings instead of little automatons with no will of their own.
The only reason this ridiculous travesty of justice is occurring is because the copyright holder lobbies have successfully bribed, wheedled, and lied their way into making recording a criminal offense. If it was still a civil offense the theater would have taken her camera, or kicked her out of the theater and that would have been the end of it. It's because the theater and the MPAA can now force the American public to pay for their vain lawsuits that they are pursuing action on this. After all, why not, when 300 million other people are footing the bill?
"No physical or mental torture, nor any other form of coercion, may be inflicted on prisoners of war to secure from them information of any kind whatever. Prisoners of war who refuse to answer may not be threatened, insulted or exposed to unpleasant or disadvantageous treatment of any kind." -- Third Geneva Convention
It's against the Geneva Convention. Since the U.S. (and 193 other countries) have ratified the treaty, they are required to abide by it's restrictions. It's obvious that you don't want to believe that the U.S. is engaged in a systematic betrayal of its values, but it's equally obvious that you are selectively choosing your facts to convince yourself that what you want to believe is true.
So obviously, they're all rolling Blood Elves.