The big flaw in this argument - which you are not the only one making - is that CA, NY, NJ, MA et al. are NOT contested states in a general election. Therefore, Hillary's strength in them is largely irrelevant, as either she or Obama would easily carry them in the General.
More relevant - and a good sign for the Democratic party as a whole, really - is the strength that Obama (and to a lesser extent Hillary) have shown in some battleground states. Obama got 300,000 votes in Alabama - a VERY red state. Huckabee - the winner on the GOP side, got 225,000. Both of them easily outpolled the nearest Republican in Missouri.
It's these states which have to be the bread and butter of any electability argument. Obama could put Alabama and Georgia in play in a general election - a laughable idea in a 2000 or 2004 frame.
Lastly, you say there's not much that can change in the month prior to Texas and Ohio. That's manifestly incorrect. Just look at the shift in national polls that has occured since Jan 5th: at that time, Clinton had a roughly 15 point lead nationally, and is now in a statistical dead heat with Obama as of the latest CNN poll.
The next month of primaries and caucuses is very favorable to Obama - he is polling at a 13 point lead in Washington, the biggest of the weekend's caucuses (via SurveyUSA, which was by far the most accurate of the Super Tuesday pollsters). What is more, he now has a significant cash advantage. A month of momentum building smaller wins can certainly change the situation on the ground in Texas and Ohio when combined with the media advantage Obama will have due to his cash advantage. It may or may not happen - but Obama's track record when he's had time to actively campaign in a state is quite solid, and he has excellent ground operations.
There's plenty of reason to believe the situation will change. Predicting how it will change is difficult, but expecting things to remain as they are is doomed to failure.
I'm not sure it's accurate to describe the PS3 as the lead platform for the game.
After all, the demos were shown running off of 360s, I believe. (I seem to remember MS saying as much at some point during E3)
We've seen more evidence at this point to suggest that the 360 engine is at a demoable stage of development than we have for the PS3 engine - we've seen 360 demos, but we haven't seen PS3 demos.
Different than Vanguard really... I mean, the publishing deal is probably similar - but the only reason that Vanguard's IP ended up getting acquired is due to the failures of Sigil. Provided the Burning Sea guys are less dynsfunctional (and let's face it - it's pretty hard to be more dysfunctional than Sigil was, according to most reports) I see this being a pretty standard publishing arrangement.
When exactly has SOE meddled with the design of a third party that they were publishing? All of their blunders had to do primarily with IP that they designed themselves. There's a lot of irrational SOE dread out there. Yeah, they screwed up Galaxies - but that was their own game, and you have to think they learned something from that experience.
The % of market share is actually quite relevant. It isn't about whether or not someone has multiple consoles - I suppose that's vaguely interesting, but it's not particularly relevant to the purpose of this sort of market share.
Market share indicates the relative market sizes that can potentially be hit by a release on a given platform. Higher market share = more consoles in the hands of consumers = more consumers who can potentially buy your game.
A more complex analysis can be done, certainly - but it should be obvious that the maximum sales potential a game has is limited by the sales of its platform. And that's where the market share comes in.
If you're going to be publishing a game that costs $20 million to make, you need to get a return on that investment that exceeds the cost of raising that money in the first place. Now it isn't as simple as just releasing to the platform with the largest market - but those market sizes (and by proxy, market shares) are the starting point for figuring out this puzzle.
In other words - yes, market share is very important.
You're pointing out that they don't need to save messages relating to "private political associations"
That is true.
At issue, however, are the emails that are *KNOWN* to have been sent via these domains that are official government business. Scott Jennings (a Rove assistant) was interfacing with DOJ on the USA firings via his gwb43.com account. It's been openly acknowledged that Rove more or less exclusively used the RNC supplied email - both for his partisan activity and for his official governmental activity. (And yes, a fair amount of his communication is subject to the PRA - he's on the White House payroll in an official capacity, after all)
Why? Because the RNC was *aware* that they needed to save the emails the the offices of the president and the vice-president. They were made aware of this in an email from Patrick Fitzgerald in relation to his encounters with the usage of these email addresses in the Libby case. This resulted in a change in policy for those RNC accounts effective at the start of 2005 where instead of automatically being deleted after 30 days, emails in those accounts had to be manually deleted by the user. Note that they still didn't do anything to retain the emails - they just shifted the deletion action to the user (any deletion of those emails is a violation of the Presidential Records Act).
In other words - if these emails are missing, it's because someone consciously deleted them - in violation of federal law.
Congress already demands that the White House keep all emails. It's called the Presidential Records Act, and is the reason why this is an issue. The PRA requires the offices of the President and the VP to retain all government related communications.
The issue is that government communications which contain discourse relevant to the US Attorney firings were made on RNC owned services and devices - and while the White House systems retain everything, the claim is that the RNC ones don't. Which is a violation of the Presidential Records Act.
So.. er... Yeah, they ALREADY have to keep all emails. The problem is that they didn't. (And problem 2 is that while it's illegal, there doesn't seem to be a consequence)
The problem with the cuts is that we simply can't afford them, especially not with Bush's increased spending.
That said, I find Bush to be incompetent, and find his extreme social conservatism frightening, especially considering the prospect of several Supreme Court justices retiring within the next four years. I recommend reading conservative blogger Andrew Sullivan's endorsement of Kerry for an endorsement of Kerry coming from a viewpoint similar to yours (Sullivan regards Kerry as the lesser of two evils).
Bush scares me. He's not particularly competent, and is ill equipped for dealing with adversity. I don't necessarily agree or believe everything that Kerry says, but I believe that he is a far more intelligent and capable individual.
Idealogically, I feel that taxes are inevitable and needed. The government needs funding, whether it needs to pay for wars on foreign soil, nation building, or social programs. Neither candidate is likely to reverse the fiscal problems (record deficits) within four years, but Kerry seems much more likely to take the problem seriously. (Bush already has a track record of not taking it seriously, as evidenced by the record budget deficits, whereas Kerry's senatorial record indicates that he is much more of a budget hawk - he has a significantly better understanding of budgetary issues than Dubya)
Most people aren't entirely satisfied with either candidate. However, in the long run, Kerry will prove to be the better choice for the good of the country. At the very least, I feel he is willing to acknowledge mistakes and change course to correct them. This is something that the incumbent seems constitutionally unable to do.
Re:Terry Pratchett
on
Ask Neil Gaiman
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· Score: 4, Informative
He's been asked this a lot. The answer was that "Good Omens" was somethign that happened before either of them had really made it. To do a sequel now would involve really high expectations, probably a lot of much to wade through, and they'd both pretty much rather just leave the wonderful "Good Omens" as the result of their collaboration, rather than risk tainting the process in some way.
Re:Tattoos and other forms of fan appreciation
on
Ask Neil Gaiman
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· Score: 1
I believe his full description of one of the people who'd had his name tattooed into them was that there were still little droplets of blood everywhere.. Ewww. He's a great speaker though. I was at that Borders signing and the "NY Is Book Country" talk on Saturday - He read the Despair story out of endless nights, and what's going to be a new McKean/Gaiman children's book "Crazy Hair" (Which had apparantly started just as a sort of joke poem.) Gaiman signings are very worth it. He's a very personable author.
I think too much is being read into this comment. For one, it's obvious English is not this guy's first language from the text. Secondly, he seemed to be addressing Linux as it pertained to larger corporations. As far as large companies go, Suse and Red Hat likely ARE the only two distros they're really concerned with. They're the ones that have the parterships with the likes of IBM and Sun after all. He's not delusional - he's just not talking about what everyone seems to think he is.
I had a bad reaction to Ritalin - I had a prescription for it for the duration of nearly ten years.. I must have been diagnosed around 15 years ago or so. I started to refuse to take it while in High School. It made me depressive, and I just hated how it made me feel. I'm currently on Aderal when I need it, but I tend to try not to medicate. To be honest, I don't deal very well with the problems caused by my ADHD, but I still choose to avoid the medication when at all possible.
Re:Please be respectful on this topic
on
Working with ADHD?
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· Score: 1
Forms for Aderal? I don't recall any. Perhaps the XL makes a difference, but I've had a prescription for Aderal for a while and can't recall having to do anything onerous red-tape wise.
The article is of interest because it is about a highly visible success of Linux. That is why it is of interest. Regardless of whose detriment it is to, the point is that Linux can be used to save cash.
If the GUI made use of hardware acceleration, isn't there a good chance that it could be less resource intensive than current ones? After all, I hardly think that my Geforce3 is being stressed overmuch by KDE...
Or am I wrong and is hardware acceleration at work under some layer of many current GUIs? If not... Why not? Are there any current GUIs that make use of OpenGL (for example) to speed up rendering performance and reduce drain on processor? It seems to me that for a system with a 3d accelerator, there are a lot of reasons for using the processing power on that 3d card for some purposed other than gaming. Currently I'd say that my card is going to waste 95% of the time... Probably more. Why not use those cycles?
Yes. There are doublesided DVDs in existence, I have some... However, these are the exception rather than the rule. For commercial products - ie software we may buy on this type of media - I doubt that the marketers will let them use both sides of the disc, and lose the opportunity to put their pretty logo on it.
Additionally, having it double sided leaves precious little room to label the media, so I'd expect most of the blank media available to be single sided as well. I'm sure there will be double sided available, but in practice I think that most of what is used would be single sided.
The article says that to achieve 100GB, the disc has to be double sided.. So presumably most of the media we see will actually only have a 50GB capacity.
Well.. I see it more as a conviction that is actually based on the fact that there is no evidence. In fact, for agnostics the very evidence that validates belief (for me anyway) is the lack of evidence pointing towards anything else. Your "typical agnostic" is not an agnostic. He or she is simply undecided, and never bothered looking up the word in the dictionary.
Word History: An agnostic does not deny the existence of God and heaven but holds that one cannot know for certain whether or not they exist. The term agnostic was fittingly coined by the 19th-century British scientist Thomas H. Huxley, who believed that only material phenomena were objects of exact knowledge. He made up the word from the prefix a-, meaning "without, not," as in amoral, and the noun Gnostic. Gnostic is related to the Greek word gnsis, "knowledge," which was used by early Christian writers to mean "higher, esoteric knowledge of spiritual things" hence, Gnostic referred to those with such knowledge. In coining the term agnostic, Huxley was considering as "Gnostics" a group of his fellow intellectuals"ists," as he called themwho had eagerly embraced various doctrines or theories that explained the world to their satisfaction. Because he was a "man without a rag of a label to cover himself with," Huxley coined the term agnostic for himself, its first published use being in 1870.
I also fail to see how someone who is truly agnostic (i.e. holds that man can not know for certain whether god exists, and in what form) is necessarily militant, any more than anyone else who is religious. An agnostic, (Like people who have other beliefs) is perfectly able to believe in what he or she believes in without trying to enforce it upon others.
This is not to say that none do - but there are those of every belief who are "militant".
Anyway, the ones who are particularly aggressive are probably just pissed that everyone keeps confusing us with those who are merely undecided, or who don't care.
Wouldn't it be interesting if two thousand years ago a bunch of people (as a joke) started professing belief that a certain guy was the son of god. This sort of caught on, and soon it became quite trendy to say that this guy was the son of god.
Eventually people forgot it was a joke...
Well, I said I thought it was interesting. Don't think that's what happened.
None is not agnostic. An agnostic is not someone who can't make up his or her mind. What an agnostic actually believes in (Yes, real agnostics do believe in something...) is that the human race cannot know the form of a supreme being/beings or whether any in fact exist. In essence, agnosticism is the belief that there are some things that we as humans cannot know.
Agnosticism is a belief system in itself, and it most certainly doesn't fall under the category of "no religion".
Slashdot Mirror
The big flaw in this argument - which you are not the only one making - is that CA, NY, NJ, MA et al. are NOT contested states in a general election. Therefore, Hillary's strength in them is largely irrelevant, as either she or Obama would easily carry them in the General.
More relevant - and a good sign for the Democratic party as a whole, really - is the strength that Obama (and to a lesser extent Hillary) have shown in some battleground states. Obama got 300,000 votes in Alabama - a VERY red state. Huckabee - the winner on the GOP side, got 225,000. Both of them easily outpolled the nearest Republican in Missouri.
It's these states which have to be the bread and butter of any electability argument. Obama could put Alabama and Georgia in play in a general election - a laughable idea in a 2000 or 2004 frame.
Lastly, you say there's not much that can change in the month prior to Texas and Ohio. That's manifestly incorrect. Just look at the shift in national polls that has occured since Jan 5th: at that time, Clinton had a roughly 15 point lead nationally, and is now in a statistical dead heat with Obama as of the latest CNN poll.
The next month of primaries and caucuses is very favorable to Obama - he is polling at a 13 point lead in Washington, the biggest of the weekend's caucuses (via SurveyUSA, which was by far the most accurate of the Super Tuesday pollsters). What is more, he now has a significant cash advantage. A month of momentum building smaller wins can certainly change the situation on the ground in Texas and Ohio when combined with the media advantage Obama will have due to his cash advantage. It may or may not happen - but Obama's track record when he's had time to actively campaign in a state is quite solid, and he has excellent ground operations.
There's plenty of reason to believe the situation will change. Predicting how it will change is difficult, but expecting things to remain as they are is doomed to failure.
You can use either O or one of the right triggers to fire.
Nice to finally have something worth playing on my PS3 (Aside from PS2 games and BluRay movies)
I'm not sure it's accurate to describe the PS3 as the lead platform for the game.
After all, the demos were shown running off of 360s, I believe. (I seem to remember MS saying as much at some point during E3)
We've seen more evidence at this point to suggest that the 360 engine is at a demoable stage of development than we have for the PS3 engine - we've seen 360 demos, but we haven't seen PS3 demos.
Actually, it's not even really new.
Looks to basically be the adventure mode from Melee at a much larger scale.
It worked in Melee - no reason why more of the same (except bigger and with more plot) wouldn't work in Brawl.
Different than Vanguard really... I mean, the publishing deal is probably similar - but the only reason that Vanguard's IP ended up getting acquired is due to the failures of Sigil. Provided the Burning Sea guys are less dynsfunctional (and let's face it - it's pretty hard to be more dysfunctional than Sigil was, according to most reports) I see this being a pretty standard publishing arrangement.
When exactly has SOE meddled with the design of a third party that they were publishing? All of their blunders had to do primarily with IP that they designed themselves. There's a lot of irrational SOE dread out there. Yeah, they screwed up Galaxies - but that was their own game, and you have to think they learned something from that experience.
The % of market share is actually quite relevant. It isn't about whether or not someone has multiple consoles - I suppose that's vaguely interesting, but it's not particularly relevant to the purpose of this sort of market share.
Market share indicates the relative market sizes that can potentially be hit by a release on a given platform. Higher market share = more consoles in the hands of consumers = more consumers who can potentially buy your game.
A more complex analysis can be done, certainly - but it should be obvious that the maximum sales potential a game has is limited by the sales of its platform. And that's where the market share comes in.
If you're going to be publishing a game that costs $20 million to make, you need to get a return on that investment that exceeds the cost of raising that money in the first place. Now it isn't as simple as just releasing to the platform with the largest market - but those market sizes (and by proxy, market shares) are the starting point for figuring out this puzzle.
In other words - yes, market share is very important.
You're pointing out that they don't need to save messages relating to "private political associations"
That is true.
At issue, however, are the emails that are *KNOWN* to have been sent via these domains that are official government business. Scott Jennings (a Rove assistant) was interfacing with DOJ on the USA firings via his gwb43.com account. It's been openly acknowledged that Rove more or less exclusively used the RNC supplied email - both for his partisan activity and for his official governmental activity. (And yes, a fair amount of his communication is subject to the PRA - he's on the White House payroll in an official capacity, after all)
One big difference is that you didn't have a legal mandate to keep records of those things you couldn't find.
It is actually pretty suspicious.
Why? Because the RNC was *aware* that they needed to save the emails the the offices of the president and the vice-president. They were made aware of this in an email from Patrick Fitzgerald in relation to his encounters with the usage of these email addresses in the Libby case. This resulted in a change in policy for those RNC accounts effective at the start of 2005 where instead of automatically being deleted after 30 days, emails in those accounts had to be manually deleted by the user. Note that they still didn't do anything to retain the emails - they just shifted the deletion action to the user (any deletion of those emails is a violation of the Presidential Records Act).
In other words - if these emails are missing, it's because someone consciously deleted them - in violation of federal law.
Congress already demands that the White House keep all emails. It's called the Presidential Records Act, and is the reason why this is an issue. The PRA requires the offices of the President and the VP to retain all government related communications.
The issue is that government communications which contain discourse relevant to the US Attorney firings were made on RNC owned services and devices - and while the White House systems retain everything, the claim is that the RNC ones don't. Which is a violation of the Presidential Records Act.
So.. er... Yeah, they ALREADY have to keep all emails. The problem is that they didn't. (And problem 2 is that while it's illegal, there doesn't seem to be a consequence)
The problem with the cuts is that we simply can't afford them, especially not with Bush's increased spending.
That said, I find Bush to be incompetent, and find his extreme social conservatism frightening, especially considering the prospect of several Supreme Court justices retiring within the next four years.
I recommend reading conservative blogger Andrew Sullivan's endorsement of Kerry for an endorsement of Kerry coming from a viewpoint similar to yours (Sullivan regards Kerry as the lesser of two evils).
Bush scares me. He's not particularly competent, and is ill equipped for dealing with adversity. I don't necessarily agree or believe everything that Kerry says, but I believe that he is a far more intelligent and capable individual.
Idealogically, I feel that taxes are inevitable and needed. The government needs funding, whether it needs to pay for wars on foreign soil, nation building, or social programs. Neither candidate is likely to reverse the fiscal problems (record deficits) within four years, but Kerry seems much more likely to take the problem seriously. (Bush already has a track record of not taking it seriously, as evidenced by the record budget deficits, whereas Kerry's senatorial record indicates that he is much more of a budget hawk - he has a significantly better understanding of budgetary issues than Dubya)
Most people aren't entirely satisfied with either candidate. However, in the long run, Kerry will prove to be the better choice for the good of the country. At the very least, I feel he is willing to acknowledge mistakes and change course to correct them. This is something that the incumbent seems constitutionally unable to do.
He's been asked this a lot. The answer was that "Good Omens" was somethign that happened before either of them had really made it. To do a sequel now would involve really high expectations, probably a lot of much to wade through, and they'd both pretty much rather just leave the wonderful "Good Omens" as the result of their collaboration, rather than risk tainting the process in some way.
I believe his full description of one of the people who'd had his name tattooed into them was that there were still little droplets of blood everywhere.. Ewww.
He's a great speaker though. I was at that Borders signing and the "NY Is Book Country" talk on Saturday - He read the Despair story out of endless nights, and what's going to be a new McKean/Gaiman children's book "Crazy Hair" (Which had apparantly started just as a sort of joke poem.)
Gaiman signings are very worth it. He's a very personable author.
I think too much is being read into this comment. For one, it's obvious English is not this guy's first language from the text. Secondly, he seemed to be addressing Linux as it pertained to larger corporations. As far as large companies go, Suse and Red Hat likely ARE the only two distros they're really concerned with. They're the ones that have the parterships with the likes of IBM and Sun after all. He's not delusional - he's just not talking about what everyone seems to think he is.
I had a bad reaction to Ritalin - I had a prescription for it for the duration of nearly ten years.. I must have been diagnosed around 15 years ago or so. I started to refuse to take it while in High School. It made me depressive, and I just hated how it made me feel.
I'm currently on Aderal when I need it, but I tend to try not to medicate.
To be honest, I don't deal very well with the problems caused by my ADHD, but I still choose to avoid the medication when at all possible.
Forms for Aderal? I don't recall any. Perhaps the XL makes a difference, but I've had a prescription for Aderal for a while and can't recall having to do anything onerous red-tape wise.
GamePC Story on the subject
The article is of interest because it is about a highly visible success of Linux. That is why it is of interest. Regardless of whose detriment it is to, the point is that Linux can be used to save cash.
If the GUI made use of hardware acceleration, isn't there a good chance that it could be less resource intensive than current ones? After all, I hardly think that my Geforce3 is being stressed overmuch by KDE...
Or am I wrong and is hardware acceleration at work under some layer of many current GUIs? If not... Why not? Are there any current GUIs that make use of OpenGL (for example) to speed up rendering performance and reduce drain on processor? It seems to me that for a system with a 3d accelerator, there are a lot of reasons for using the processing power on that 3d card for some purposed other than gaming. Currently I'd say that my card is going to waste 95% of the time... Probably more. Why not use those cycles?
Yes. There are doublesided DVDs in existence, I have some... However, these are the exception rather than the rule. For commercial products - ie software we may buy on this type of media - I doubt that the marketers will let them use both sides of the disc, and lose the opportunity to put their pretty logo on it.
Additionally, having it double sided leaves precious little room to label the media, so I'd expect most of the blank media available to be single sided as well. I'm sure there will be double sided available, but in practice I think that most of what is used would be single sided.
The article says that to achieve 100GB, the disc has to be double sided.. So presumably most of the media we see will actually only have a 50GB capacity.
Wow. I get my genuine Rolexes two for $10.
Your "typical agnostic" is not an agnostic. He or she is simply undecided, and never bothered looking up the word in the dictionary.
I also fail to see how someone who is truly agnostic (i.e. holds that man can not know for certain whether god exists, and in what form) is necessarily militant, any more than anyone else who is religious. An agnostic, (Like people who have other beliefs) is perfectly able to believe in what he or she believes in without trying to enforce it upon others.
This is not to say that none do - but there are those of every belief who are "militant".
Anyway, the ones who are particularly aggressive are probably just pissed that everyone keeps confusing us with those who are merely undecided, or who don't care.
Okay... Just had to write this...
Wouldn't it be interesting if two thousand years ago a bunch of people (as a joke) started professing belief that a certain guy was the son of god. This sort of caught on, and soon it became quite trendy to say that this guy was the son of god.
Eventually people forgot it was a joke...
Well, I said I thought it was interesting. Don't think that's what happened.
Me and my big mouth... Here comes -1 flamebait!
None is not agnostic. An agnostic is not someone who can't make up his or her mind. What an agnostic actually believes in (Yes, real agnostics do believe in something...) is that the human race cannot know the form of a supreme being/beings or whether any in fact exist. In essence, agnosticism is the belief that there are some things that we as humans cannot know.
Agnosticism is a belief system in itself, and it most certainly doesn't fall under the category of "no religion".