The secret of the "Slightly Bigger Lie" is that you constantly tell people that the media is biased against you. This has a double effect.
1. It Convinces the media that if they want to keep their credibility, then they'll have to cut you some slack, and hit your enemies harder
2. It convinces people that, even though the media has rolled over submissively, on the few occasions when an inconvenient fact is pointed out, that it must be pure fiction. Lately I have seen so many people dispute facts when the numbers are right in front of their faces, simply because they have yet to hear it on Fox News.
A few years ago somebody figured out that habitual Daily Show viewers were better informed than habitual network news show watchers. In part this may be selection bias; but I'm not sure that's the complete story. It may be that at its best, political humor makes you think critically in a way that regular news does not.
Another study has recently shown that TDS viewers are more likely to be cynical about politics, politicians, and our political system, than News show viewers. They pointed this out on TDS, when a 24 hour network's newscrawl paraphrased it as "The Daily Show Harmful to Viewers". That's part of the problem. People lie to us every day (not just politicians, but advertisers, pundits, and journalists), but, if you notice that, then there must be something wrong with you.
I watch the Daily Show, I enjoy it for the most part. But it is not less biased. More factually correct? Quite possibly. But it is extremely biased. It can be used to define what bias is.
You left off an important part of my statement. I was comparing it to most of the debate shows on the air today. I just want to be clear that I'm not comparing Jon Stewart to Brian Wiliams or any of the people who read the five minute broadcasts at the "top of the hour" on 24 hour news networks (those are probably the only part of their broadcast that can be classified as news). Jon Stweart is biased, and they _DO_ hit republicans harder than democrats. Some of it may be because Republicans are in power and there are only so many "democrats are too wordy" jokes to be made, but some of it is bias. With that having been said, I'm comparing this show to what you typically see on news networks, which usually either begins or ends with a preachy monologue about why you should think the way the host does (and the host clearly has a bias in most cases).
The only exception being Hannity and Colmes, but their bias is that Allan Colmes argues like a battered housewife who is afraid that if he really defends a liberal philosophy (by saying something other than "isn't it true that theoretically a liberal might not be as bad as you say"), that he will get punched in the mouth again. There's also the bias in the debate subjects, since they mostly seem to be accusations levied at democrats.
As for me sharing Stewart's bias, you are correct. But, his bias is not purely liberal. Part of his bias is that he knows that the ability to set the debate is a powerful one. It convinces people that there are only two options in every situation, and he tries to convince people that, if they look around, there is usually a smarter answer that is being completely overlooked.
Please explain the logic behind your statement. How can possibly a humoristic show and a news TV station be comparable at all?
A). Because the Daily Show is probably more informative and less biased than many so-called "news" shows, which are really just staged arguments by people who resort to ad-hominem attacks because it is more interesting than a thoughtful and informative debate on the topic.
B). Because some of Fox News focuses on this "we are America, we are great, everybody loves us" non-sense (Oliver North's "War Stories", for example), which may not sell too well in foreign countries. It's like if a rock star shouted "no one rocks like detroit", and he was in Los Angeles. The crowd would hate it.
Isn't spyware illegal or am I thinking of Malware? Either way it's not good
IANAL, but I'm pretty sure it is perfectly legal, as long as the app that installs it has a notice somewhere. If you pay attention to most spyware-supported apps, they have something on the installer describing the spyware as if it were a bonus feature or one of those helluva-deal opportunities that you couldn't pass up.
I seem to recall that 200 MHz and an 8 Gig hard drive was top of the line, some time during the 90's. Such computers seemed to handle word processing, web browsing, email, etc. just fine. What would those components cost now? Not very much because of miniaturization. A $125 computer should be no big deal right?
Inflation doesn't just happen in economics. I had a 300Mhz k6-2 until about 4 years ago, and one thing I noticed is that, when it was brand new, it could run my favorite mp3 ripper/player, and a web browser, and still have enough resources to handle most of what I threw at it. Toward the end, it couldn't even play MP3s, because the mp3 ripper/player kept making forced updates, and released a version that took far more resources to accomplish the same task. Sure, it looked better, but it couldn't do anything useful on a 300MHz.
Anyway, the point is that if you can dig up yesterday's software, then you can use yesterday's technology to accomplish what people were doing, back in the day. But, if you try to use modern software releases, you will find that you need a more powerful system just to handle tasks people have been doing for the past twenty years.
For a non-student who has a long commute and an interest in several subjects, are there any teachers who have the "Information wants to be free" attitude and make podcasts of their own lectures available to non-students?
I know, this means the professor is giving away an intellectual property for free, but some people are ok with the idea.
That's what amazes me all the time I hear of terrible acts, particularly corporate ones and you think to yourself "someone must have actually decided to do this", even worse a group of 'respected' people must have agreed on this. Perhaps it is just my middle-class upbringing but I always struggle to believe that actually at some point a director just says "I know, lets extract millions from the pension fund" or like today "The guy died but his death shouldn't stop us, he should have life insurance". And yet somehow the outrage only seems to be restricted to certain areas like/. I know there is a war going on but I have just looked at the BBC website and cant see the story yet. Just like the Sony Rookit scandal, I cant help thinking that the opposition to the RIAA/MPAA has to start using more effective propaganda campaigns to get public awareness.
I have this theory about huge business. It's like a new animal, evolved from more complex "cells", but demonstrating an intelligence of it's own. It is motivated by the instinct to "survive", which means bringing as much money to the shareholders as possible, and each of its members is constantly faced with a dilimma:
Increase the bottom line, by whatever means possible. The stockholders don't care how you do. They don't want to know, and if you fail to do so, they won't care why. They'll just replace you with someone who can improve the bottom line.
So, each organization is made up of people who follow company policy, even when they, personally would never make such a decision on their own, and who do what they must to get by, because either A). it's their job or B). "It's business".
It's just a matter of time before the FBI shows up at somebody's house, to retrieve the hitch-hikers, and finds that Noyce has spent a week as a coat rack, that packard is now at the door, acting as a "greeter", and hewlet is now an integral ocmponent in the drunken game of "throw the NASCAR cap on fancy-pants' head"
What are you talking about?!?!? The U.S. incarceration rate in 2004 was the highest in the world, at 724 per 100,000 population. Second was Russia, at 532 per 100,000. Obviously we're doing something right, catching all those criminals. We're number one!
Maybe I'm restating the obvious, but the sad thing is that we have the highest incarceration rate, but we never catch any criminals. Instead, we're arresting people for getting high, while the guy who breaks into your home pretty much walks
Seriously, here's an idea: take all those government parasites that harass airplane passengers, run eavesdropping programs, make threats to journalists, and violate the constitution in so many other ways, and drop them all in Pakistan with hunting rifles. Sooner or later, a group of them will have to stumble onto Bin Laden's cave. And voila, terrorism is dealt a serious blow,
Nah. If these guys stumbled accross Bin Laden they'd give him a pound of anthrax and ask him to throw it at Kim Jong Il, if he sees him
And WTF is this? Is this like being put on double-secret probation? When you have a government program that, according to the article, withholds bonuses and raises based on quotas, I suppose we shouldn't be surprised when agents just make stuff up. How incredibly ludicrous is this? We've once again managed to build the incompetence right there into the system.
Yeah, but now they're competing to look good on paper. We've not only built incompetence into the system, but we also built a lie-your-ass-off-or-get-fired system. Don't you love all that "no child left behind" high stakes bullshit?
yes, but many of those countries, such as Germany, have laws against hate-speech in certain mediums, and laws against denying the holocaust. Then, there are also laws similar to the U.S.'s fairness doctrine, which was repealed in the 80's, and which dictated that if one view is stated, an opposing viewpoint must be given equal time.
I'm not trying to defend hate speech, lies, or biased journalism, but, (in America, if nowhere else) we will gladly sacrifice our civil rights to see the scum of the earth imprisoned, claiming "oh, but they'll only use it on terrorists", or "they'll only use it to catch child molestors". Of course, we could preface those laws with phrases such as "in cases of suspected terrorism..." or "in cases of suspected child molestation...", but we don't put that much thought into the law (partly because the guy who opposes the most overzealous version is perceived as being pro-terror or pro-child-molestation), and such laws end up giving up all claim to whatever right is being infringed upon.
Also, maybe i will defend biased journalism, a little. As for the fairness doctrine, Fox news has shown us that any metric used to measure fairness can be manipulated to produce a biased show. Sure, a "fairness czar" could arbitrarily decide what is and isn't fair, but such a person is likely to be a political appointee who will do his best to enforce his own bias on the media. then, there is the bias of which issues are important. For example, when Sean Hannity argues "democrats are the evil sons of satan" and Alan Colmes uses his equal time to argue "we're not that bad", you end up with a biased broadcast. You will also end up with biased broadcasts if you have a debate of "universal public health-care vs. leave granny out in the snow" or "universal public health care vs privatized universal health care". Each argument is biased in the it leaves out a third option.
But I suppose I'm rambling. My point is that European nations do have laws against certain typs of speech, so their speech is not always 100% "free"
The US isn't uncivilized simply because someone on the left wing is in disagreement with the current administration. Our entire code of laws and ethics is based around a civil society. We even have a "Bill of Rights" and an Amendment banning cruel and unusual punishment.
Heck yeah! We're not an uncivilized country. It's the cretins who wish to go against every principal this country stands for. We are a civilized country being controlled by uncivilized people
The current quibble is whether this ammendment applies to non-citizens as it does to citizens.
WTF? So, we are civilized to our own people, but not to "fur-inners"?
Now compare that to many other countries, even other Western countries such as the UK, German...etc which don't even garuntee freedom of speech and you can see how it is quite correct to call the US, civilized.
You may have a point in that Western Europe should have freedom of speech laws, but they do have something we don't. They have a law saying you have the right to a fair trial, and they enforce it.
Then you can compare the US to those great honor killing muslim societies, or those asian countries (India, China) where there are looming massive imbalances in sex ratios because for various cultural reasons parents do not want female children....
Be careful with this point. The scariest thing I've seen lately is the idea that we can justify ourselves by saying we are better than some evil dictator. Saying "i'm better than Hitler" doesn't say much, but if that is our country's only ambition, to be slightly better, then we will never have any morale authority as a nation.
But hey, the US is a free country so if you want to be snarky to the point of being petulant AND WRONG, then go right ahead.
Web designers have been asking Microsoft this question for 10 years.
(And now they're asking why Firefox 2.0 can't pass the ACID2 test, either)
Funny how monopolies don't care much about competing on merits like that. You, the consumer, get screwed as a result. 10 years on, and it still needs to be explained?
We also saw the same thing ten years ago, when Netscape was the big fish and microsoft was the upstart. Competetion was what drove those two companies away from standards compliance. They were so busy trying to invent proprietary new browser commands that neither one of them had time to worry about full W3C compliance. All because each one wanted to see websites that had those "works best in browser x" banners at the bottom.
I guess it's kind of like how most futuristic ray and beam weapons (Star Wars blasters, and especially Star Trek phasers) are vastly inferior to the far-simpler hand gun and assault rifle.
Yeah, I always wondered about Stargate's two handed blaster, which makes a "ding-da-dink" sound, opens, and then fires one shot in the amount of time it would take to squeeze off fifty rounds from an assault rifle.
I also wondered how they aimed the weapons on star trek: The next generation. They're electric razors. What do you line up with what? I wondered about the ethics of having an auto-aiming system that targets the closest thing that isn't human. How else could you hit anything?
Alternatively, they might sell none at all, as all the customers go and buy hardware that doesn't implement such restrictions, and has a plentiful supply of less expensive titles. I can see why Publishers might THINK they want this, but unless it is implemented universally (and it can't be really, modded consoles would render this moot for everything except online games, and if you're going to mod your console, you might as well pirate the games) but in reality other companies would offer a more custumer friendly approach and reap the benefits in the market.
Of course, I hate Sony anyway, so I'm all in favor of them implementing this kind of scheme. Nintendo Wii FTW.
No disrespect intended, but Lassaiz-faire doesn't work. At least it doesn't work in the modern world. I'm sure that, at one time, people may have gone to a dishonest carpenter, felt cheated, told their friends, and eventually killed the carpenter's business based on poor word-of-mouth.
In today's entertainment market, however, that is not an option. If Rockstar game refuses to make "Grand-Theft-Auto: Branson, Missouri" on any system other than PS3, then people will buy a PS3, and they will gladly buy two copies so they can play it on the new PS3 they buy when their first PS3 spontaneously explodes, six months after being purchased (Tell me you don't know somebody who has had a defective PS2). Also, there is a good chance that Sony will work out some deal with Rockstar games, to assure that the game doesn't get released on any other system.
As for modding, most people won't do it because 1). The process often requires you to break open the system and solder in a chip, running the risk of turning a $350+ game system into a paperweight, and 2). The DMCA makes it illegal for stores or people with any kind of real skill to solder a chip in. The end result is that, if you want to pay $60 for a chip, and if you know someone you trust with your system, then you can get it modded, but most people aren't that "into" gaming.
The only thing that can kill a system or hardware is a lack of high quality games, and DMCA cripplling is like spanish fly to the people who make those games.
That's why we have futuristic shooters. In the future, apparently, we have all kinds of technology, but we're mostly just interested in using it to do cool stuff
"Sir. I don't wanna go in there and stab the mechademon with my power-genk 3000. Can't we just throw grandaes at it?"
"No son, then you wouldn't get to do that cool jumping strafe move."
Why the hell would MS care if they move from a pirated version of Windows to something else? Big whoop, they aren't making money either way. And if someone has critical data on a system running a pirated OS, I'm not inclined to feel much pity.
Others may have made similar points, but here's it is in a nutshell. Microsoft's claim to fame is that people don't know anything else. They are dependant upon Windows because they know that if they need help, most of the people they know use windows, and can't help with anything other than the few pieces of software that came prepackaged with their previous purchases. They do it because tech support personell are just looking for any excuse to say "not my problem", and if they find out you're not using Windows, hot damn, will their eyes light-up. In short, they are in the Windows camp because they have nowhere else to go.
If other operating systems start to creep their way out of the "niche audience" category, and into the "mainstream, yes, my freakin' grandmother has a copy (and no, i didn't install it for her)" category, then microsoft will soon find themselves competing again.
Right now, Windows' main competitor is piracy, which still gives them a monopoly. So, if half the world steals Windows, and the other half buys, then, no biggie; they can just charge double. But, if half the world uses the competition, they can't raise prices, for fear of losing the customers they have left.
I'm not trying to start a flame ware, just putting down the facts.
flameware? Hey, that's a pretty good idea...software that says insulting and offensive things to the user. Now, I'll just have to create artificial intelligence smart enough to craft a good insult, but dumb enough to enjoy flaming.
This article sounds more like the author is describing creationism or astrology, rather than real science. They say that there are no real formulae or predictions that have ever been made, that it is more like a "framework" (as opposed to something scientists would use), and that they can justify wrongful experiments or equations by saying that the equation came out, just as preditced, but in a parallel universe.
So, either string theory is a religion, which has fooled an entire generation of bright young scientists, or the article is one-sided. I suspect the latter. Is there another side to this story (other than just claims that the author supports a different theory)? Is there anything one could look at that would explain in a little more detail how either the author is wrong, or how this idea has suckered some of the brightest people on earth into trading science for religion?
That's subjective. Coming from the other direction (a Linux user that has to interact with Windows) there are a lot of things that I cannot do on Windows without serious work. There are plenty of times when I have to use Windows that I think, "Damn this is easy as hell on Linux but I have no idea how to do it on Windows". Take for example shell scripting. It sucks on Windows. Even small ~50 line scripts turn into 150 lines when I try to implement the same thing on Windows.
Ah. And there is some place where I think we can agree. For your purposes, Linux is often better, but for the pusposes of the guy who just wants to be able to buy a new game every so often, and know that it will take a minimal amount of skill on his or her part (and I use the word "skill" as a way of conceding that these are people who often blame Linux because they are incompetent; Microsoft's biggest selling point is that it is "software for the incompetent"). My point was that there are some people, such as these people, for whom Windows is simply a better solution.
As for the comment about who is to blame for an ATI card not working on Linux, I acknowledge that the blame should be placed with ATI, and not the free source community, but, the point is that hardware support is hardware support, and regardless of who is to blame, a practical and casual user will consider support for a larger amount of hardware and software to be an advantage.
Also, for those of you who interpreted my original post as "Linux sucks" (if you're still reading these comments), I do wish to apologize. That was never my intention. My intention was to state that microsoft has it's strengths. I feel that if both OSes compete in areas where Linux is strong (shell scripting, customizability, and stability being a few of them), then Linux would win, hands down, but if they competed in the areas where Microsoft is strong (hardware and software support, and wizards), then microsoft would win.
If those are actually representative of your needs as a Windows user than you wouldn't have a problem moving over to Linux. If they aren't representative of your needs then get better examples and ask yourself why you chose those examples in the first place.
Actually, they are not my needs. I was replying to the comment implying that Linux is giving Microsoft serious competetion in the mainstream Desktop OS market. As for the examples, yes, I did name one app that can actually be installed on Linux, by a newbie, as easily as it could on windows, and a few others that could, including one that Disney pumped a great deal of cash into paying developers to make it work. Granted, you can make quite a bit work on Linux, but you have to admit, Linux is a great deal more work than Windows. Even if you take into account that Windows isn't always stable, and you have to reboot or uninstall and reinstall software to make it work, how many messageboards are there out there with people saying "why won't this work on my system?"
As for my actual needs, they are not mainstream. My needs are:
Support for an ATI X300 graphics card
Support for the TV-tuner on an ATI X300 graphics card
Support for the TV-out on an ATI X300 graphics card
Support for the remote control that comes with a Media center PC (I already checked the LIRC project)
The ability to write software using several development environments, due to school coursework. This includes things like.net (and no, Mono is not quite good enough), Microsoft Project, and anything else that may come along a few months or a year from now
Linux has it's place, but, expecting it do everything Windows does is often a great deal of work, with excentricities (like features missing from a gnu app), hassles (work-arounds needed to make a specific app work), and the occasional beating-one's-head-against-a-wall session (having ta much needed app give a crazy error message, and having to spend hours digging through message board posts looking for a solution).
To use CS terminology, Linux as a mainstream desktop solution is a kludge. It can be done, but simply using Windows is sometimes a far more elegant solution.
Wine is not supposed to be "a real Windows system". It is supposed to emulate the Windows API on top of X11 and Unix. That said, World of Warcraft runs on Wine. Also, another post pointed out the fallacy of your Quake 4 claim. So congrats, you have some gigantic holes in your logic. Well done.
The point of my argument is that Linux cannot compete with Windows in the games arena, and I stand behind that. Yes, Quake 4 may actually have a Linux port. If you could say that about 90% of the gameson the market, then true gamers would still be dissapointed at missing out on the other 10%, but the truth is that you probably can only say that about five or ten percent of the games on the market.
So, let me get this right about wine. What you're saying is, "it's not supposed to be as good, so overlook it if it falls short of the real thing, but it's just as good and how dare you imply that it's not as good as the real thing"? Sounds like you've got some choice logic yourself. If Wine is to be used to justify the argument that Linux can do everything Windows can, then it's perfectly fair to point out that Wine cannot, in fact, do everything Windows can.
I'm sure that, with a little bit of effort, and research, you can figure out a way to make quite a bit of software work, and in many cases it may run as well as it would if run natively on Windows. So, if you happen to have well supported hardware (ie, not an ATI card), and if you're willing to spend time researching how to do something that Windows users can get accomplish using a simple wizard, then yes, Linux can technically run almost anything Windows can run.
Don't get me wrong. Linux has it's place. It is great as an OS for servers of all types, or for machines where the user needs pure performance and is using certain pieces of software like Maya, or HPC applications, but if Gateway or Dell were to remove Windows from every system they sold, and replace them with copies of Linux, they would have a __lot__ of unhappy customers. That's my point. Linux has it's place, but there are some areas where Linux needs a great deal of improvement before it could ever compete with Windows (assuming "compete" means "has a chance of getting a more customers/users than").
Slashdot Mirror
The secret of the "Slightly Bigger Lie" is that you constantly tell people that the media is biased against you. This has a double effect.
1. It Convinces the media that if they want to keep their credibility, then they'll have to cut you some slack, and hit your enemies harder
2. It convinces people that, even though the media has rolled over submissively, on the few occasions when an inconvenient fact is pointed out, that it must be pure fiction. Lately I have seen so many people dispute facts when the numbers are right in front of their faces, simply because they have yet to hear it on Fox News.
Another study has recently shown that TDS viewers are more likely to be cynical about politics, politicians, and our political system, than News show viewers. They pointed this out on TDS, when a 24 hour network's newscrawl paraphrased it as "The Daily Show Harmful to Viewers". That's part of the problem. People lie to us every day (not just politicians, but advertisers, pundits, and journalists), but, if you notice that, then there must be something wrong with you.
You left off an important part of my statement. I was comparing it to most of the debate shows on the air today. I just want to be clear that I'm not comparing Jon Stewart to Brian Wiliams or any of the people who read the five minute broadcasts at the "top of the hour" on 24 hour news networks (those are probably the only part of their broadcast that can be classified as news). Jon Stweart is biased, and they _DO_ hit republicans harder than democrats. Some of it may be because Republicans are in power and there are only so many "democrats are too wordy" jokes to be made, but some of it is bias. With that having been said, I'm comparing this show to what you typically see on news networks, which usually either begins or ends with a preachy monologue about why you should think the way the host does (and the host clearly has a bias in most cases).
The only exception being Hannity and Colmes, but their bias is that Allan Colmes argues like a battered housewife who is afraid that if he really defends a liberal philosophy (by saying something other than "isn't it true that theoretically a liberal might not be as bad as you say"), that he will get punched in the mouth again. There's also the bias in the debate subjects, since they mostly seem to be accusations levied at democrats.
As for me sharing Stewart's bias, you are correct. But, his bias is not purely liberal. Part of his bias is that he knows that the ability to set the debate is a powerful one. It convinces people that there are only two options in every situation, and he tries to convince people that, if they look around, there is usually a smarter answer that is being completely overlooked.
IANAL, but I'm pretty sure it is perfectly legal, as long as the app that installs it has a notice somewhere. If you pay attention to most spyware-supported apps, they have something on the installer describing the spyware as if it were a bonus feature or one of those helluva-deal opportunities that you couldn't pass up.
Inflation doesn't just happen in economics. I had a 300Mhz k6-2 until about 4 years ago, and one thing I noticed is that, when it was brand new, it could run my favorite mp3 ripper/player, and a web browser, and still have enough resources to handle most of what I threw at it. Toward the end, it couldn't even play MP3s, because the mp3 ripper/player kept making forced updates, and released a version that took far more resources to accomplish the same task. Sure, it looked better, but it couldn't do anything useful on a 300MHz.
Anyway, the point is that if you can dig up yesterday's software, then you can use yesterday's technology to accomplish what people were doing, back in the day. But, if you try to use modern software releases, you will find that you need a more powerful system just to handle tasks people have been doing for the past twenty years.
For a non-student who has a long commute and an interest in several subjects, are there any teachers who have the "Information wants to be free" attitude and make podcasts of their own lectures available to non-students?
I know, this means the professor is giving away an intellectual property for free, but some people are ok with the idea.
I have this theory about huge business. It's like a new animal, evolved from more complex "cells", but demonstrating an intelligence of it's own. It is motivated by the instinct to "survive", which means bringing as much money to the shareholders as possible, and each of its members is constantly faced with a dilimma:
Increase the bottom line, by whatever means possible. The stockholders don't care how you do. They don't want to know, and if you fail to do so, they won't care why. They'll just replace you with someone who can improve the bottom line.
So, each organization is made up of people who follow company policy, even when they, personally would never make such a decision on their own, and who do what they must to get by, because either A). it's their job or B). "It's business".
Yeah, but he was also the only star trek character to ever use it. Why do you think the holodeck crashed every time they used it?
It's just a matter of time before the FBI shows up at somebody's house, to retrieve the hitch-hikers, and finds that Noyce has spent a week as a coat rack, that packard is now at the door, acting as a "greeter", and hewlet is now an integral ocmponent in the drunken game of "throw the NASCAR cap on fancy-pants' head"
Maybe I'm restating the obvious, but the sad thing is that we have the highest incarceration rate, but we never catch any criminals. Instead, we're arresting people for getting high, while the guy who breaks into your home pretty much walks
Nah. If these guys stumbled accross Bin Laden they'd give him a pound of anthrax and ask him to throw it at Kim Jong Il, if he sees him
Yeah, but now they're competing to look good on paper. We've not only built incompetence into the system, but we also built a lie-your-ass-off-or-get-fired system. Don't you love all that "no child left behind" high stakes bullshit?
yes, but many of those countries, such as Germany, have laws against hate-speech in certain mediums, and laws against denying the holocaust. Then, there are also laws similar to the U.S.'s fairness doctrine, which was repealed in the 80's, and which dictated that if one view is stated, an opposing viewpoint must be given equal time.
I'm not trying to defend hate speech, lies, or biased journalism, but, (in America, if nowhere else) we will gladly sacrifice our civil rights to see the scum of the earth imprisoned, claiming "oh, but they'll only use it on terrorists", or "they'll only use it to catch child molestors". Of course, we could preface those laws with phrases such as "in cases of suspected terrorism..." or "in cases of suspected child molestation...", but we don't put that much thought into the law (partly because the guy who opposes the most overzealous version is perceived as being pro-terror or pro-child-molestation), and such laws end up giving up all claim to whatever right is being infringed upon.
Also, maybe i will defend biased journalism, a little. As for the fairness doctrine, Fox news has shown us that any metric used to measure fairness can be manipulated to produce a biased show. Sure, a "fairness czar" could arbitrarily decide what is and isn't fair, but such a person is likely to be a political appointee who will do his best to enforce his own bias on the media. then, there is the bias of which issues are important. For example, when Sean Hannity argues "democrats are the evil sons of satan" and Alan Colmes uses his equal time to argue "we're not that bad", you end up with a biased broadcast. You will also end up with biased broadcasts if you have a debate of "universal public health-care vs. leave granny out in the snow" or "universal public health care vs privatized universal health care". Each argument is biased in the it leaves out a third option.
But I suppose I'm rambling. My point is that European nations do have laws against certain typs of speech, so their speech is not always 100% "free"
Heck yeah! We're not an uncivilized country. It's the cretins who wish to go against every principal this country stands for. We are a civilized country being controlled by uncivilized people
WTF? So, we are civilized to our own people, but not to "fur-inners"?
You may have a point in that Western Europe should have freedom of speech laws, but they do have something we don't. They have a law saying you have the right to a fair trial, and they enforce it.
Be careful with this point. The scariest thing I've seen lately is the idea that we can justify ourselves by saying we are better than some evil dictator. Saying "i'm better than Hitler" doesn't say much, but if that is our country's only ambition, to be slightly better, then we will never have any morale authority as a nation.
Thank you. I think I will
We also saw the same thing ten years ago, when Netscape was the big fish and microsoft was the upstart. Competetion was what drove those two companies away from standards compliance. They were so busy trying to invent proprietary new browser commands that neither one of them had time to worry about full W3C compliance. All because each one wanted to see websites that had those "works best in browser x" banners at the bottom.
Yeah, I always wondered about Stargate's two handed blaster, which makes a "ding-da-dink" sound, opens, and then fires one shot in the amount of time it would take to squeeze off fifty rounds from an assault rifle.
I also wondered how they aimed the weapons on star trek: The next generation. They're electric razors. What do you line up with what? I wondered about the ethics of having an auto-aiming system that targets the closest thing that isn't human. How else could you hit anything?
No disrespect intended, but Lassaiz-faire doesn't work. At least it doesn't work in the modern world. I'm sure that, at one time, people may have gone to a dishonest carpenter, felt cheated, told their friends, and eventually killed the carpenter's business based on poor word-of-mouth.
In today's entertainment market, however, that is not an option. If Rockstar game refuses to make "Grand-Theft-Auto: Branson, Missouri" on any system other than PS3, then people will buy a PS3, and they will gladly buy two copies so they can play it on the new PS3 they buy when their first PS3 spontaneously explodes, six months after being purchased (Tell me you don't know somebody who has had a defective PS2). Also, there is a good chance that Sony will work out some deal with Rockstar games, to assure that the game doesn't get released on any other system.
As for modding, most people won't do it because 1). The process often requires you to break open the system and solder in a chip, running the risk of turning a $350+ game system into a paperweight, and 2). The DMCA makes it illegal for stores or people with any kind of real skill to solder a chip in. The end result is that, if you want to pay $60 for a chip, and if you know someone you trust with your system, then you can get it modded, but most people aren't that "into" gaming.
The only thing that can kill a system or hardware is a lack of high quality games, and DMCA cripplling is like spanish fly to the people who make those games.
That's why we have futuristic shooters. In the future, apparently, we have all kinds of technology, but we're mostly just interested in using it to do cool stuff
"Sir. I don't wanna go in there and stab the mechademon with my power-genk 3000. Can't we just throw grandaes at it?"
"No son, then you wouldn't get to do that cool jumping strafe move."
Others may have made similar points, but here's it is in a nutshell. Microsoft's claim to fame is that people don't know anything else. They are dependant upon Windows because they know that if they need help, most of the people they know use windows, and can't help with anything other than the few pieces of software that came prepackaged with their previous purchases. They do it because tech support personell are just looking for any excuse to say "not my problem", and if they find out you're not using Windows, hot damn, will their eyes light-up. In short, they are in the Windows camp because they have nowhere else to go.
If other operating systems start to creep their way out of the "niche audience" category, and into the "mainstream, yes, my freakin' grandmother has a copy (and no, i didn't install it for her)" category, then microsoft will soon find themselves competing again.
Right now, Windows' main competitor is piracy, which still gives them a monopoly. So, if half the world steals Windows, and the other half buys, then, no biggie; they can just charge double. But, if half the world uses the competition, they can't raise prices, for fear of losing the customers they have left.
flameware? Hey, that's a pretty good idea...software that says insulting and offensive things to the user. Now, I'll just have to create artificial intelligence smart enough to craft a good insult, but dumb enough to enjoy flaming.
:)
This article sounds more like the author is describing creationism or astrology, rather than real science. They say that there are no real formulae or predictions that have ever been made, that it is more like a "framework" (as opposed to something scientists would use), and that they can justify wrongful experiments or equations by saying that the equation came out, just as preditced, but in a parallel universe.
So, either string theory is a religion, which has fooled an entire generation of bright young scientists, or the article is one-sided. I suspect the latter. Is there another side to this story (other than just claims that the author supports a different theory)? Is there anything one could look at that would explain in a little more detail how either the author is wrong, or how this idea has suckered some of the brightest people on earth into trading science for religion?
Does anybody know how difficult it is to safely dispose of an old, unreliable nuclear weapon?
Ah. And there is some place where I think we can agree. For your purposes, Linux is often better, but for the pusposes of the guy who just wants to be able to buy a new game every so often, and know that it will take a minimal amount of skill on his or her part (and I use the word "skill" as a way of conceding that these are people who often blame Linux because they are incompetent; Microsoft's biggest selling point is that it is "software for the incompetent"). My point was that there are some people, such as these people, for whom Windows is simply a better solution.
As for the comment about who is to blame for an ATI card not working on Linux, I acknowledge that the blame should be placed with ATI, and not the free source community, but, the point is that hardware support is hardware support, and regardless of who is to blame, a practical and casual user will consider support for a larger amount of hardware and software to be an advantage.
Also, for those of you who interpreted my original post as "Linux sucks" (if you're still reading these comments), I do wish to apologize. That was never my intention. My intention was to state that microsoft has it's strengths. I feel that if both OSes compete in areas where Linux is strong (shell scripting, customizability, and stability being a few of them), then Linux would win, hands down, but if they competed in the areas where Microsoft is strong (hardware and software support, and wizards), then microsoft would win.
Actually, they are not my needs. I was replying to the comment implying that Linux is giving Microsoft serious competetion in the mainstream Desktop OS market. As for the examples, yes, I did name one app that can actually be installed on Linux, by a newbie, as easily as it could on windows, and a few others that could, including one that Disney pumped a great deal of cash into paying developers to make it work. Granted, you can make quite a bit work on Linux, but you have to admit, Linux is a great deal more work than Windows. Even if you take into account that Windows isn't always stable, and you have to reboot or uninstall and reinstall software to make it work, how many messageboards are there out there with people saying "why won't this work on my system?"
As for my actual needs, they are not mainstream. My needs are:
Linux has it's place, but, expecting it do everything Windows does is often a great deal of work, with excentricities (like features missing from a gnu app), hassles (work-arounds needed to make a specific app work), and the occasional beating-one's-head-against-a-wall session (having ta much needed app give a crazy error message, and having to spend hours digging through message board posts looking for a solution).
To use CS terminology, Linux as a mainstream desktop solution is a kludge. It can be done, but simply using Windows is sometimes a far more elegant solution.
The point of my argument is that Linux cannot compete with Windows in the games arena, and I stand behind that. Yes, Quake 4 may actually have a Linux port. If you could say that about 90% of the gameson the market, then true gamers would still be dissapointed at missing out on the other 10%, but the truth is that you probably can only say that about five or ten percent of the games on the market.
So, let me get this right about wine. What you're saying is, "it's not supposed to be as good, so overlook it if it falls short of the real thing, but it's just as good and how dare you imply that it's not as good as the real thing"? Sounds like you've got some choice logic yourself. If Wine is to be used to justify the argument that Linux can do everything Windows can, then it's perfectly fair to point out that Wine cannot, in fact, do everything Windows can.
I'm sure that, with a little bit of effort, and research, you can figure out a way to make quite a bit of software work, and in many cases it may run as well as it would if run natively on Windows. So, if you happen to have well supported hardware (ie, not an ATI card), and if you're willing to spend time researching how to do something that Windows users can get accomplish using a simple wizard, then yes, Linux can technically run almost anything Windows can run.
Don't get me wrong. Linux has it's place. It is great as an OS for servers of all types, or for machines where the user needs pure performance and is using certain pieces of software like Maya, or HPC applications, but if Gateway or Dell were to remove Windows from every system they sold, and replace them with copies of Linux, they would have a __lot__ of unhappy customers. That's my point. Linux has it's place, but there are some areas where Linux needs a great deal of improvement before it could ever compete with Windows (assuming "compete" means "has a chance of getting a more customers/users than").