It is a political troll that is based on nothing more than hate-filled partisan fantasy.
This is/.
What do you expect? Political discourse at a level greater than (and I quote) "Neener neener neener"?
Besides, this isn't a partisan thing. Both major parties are equally bad about it, it's just that the one in power gets all the attention. The problem is that it seems 95% of people seem to be able to believe one party could be sinister and evil, but their party of choice is completely blameless and altruistic. The fact of the matter is that there is a "culture of corruption", and the party that's guilty of creating and perpetuating it is the U.S. Government. Will Rogers and Mark Twain were right.
Still, to play on a paraphrase of Disraeli (or somebody famous and smarter than me): The U.S. is the worst country to live in the entire world, except for all the others.
edlin was the line editor that shipped with DOS back in the day. It made vi look like emacs. I almost mentioned TECO, which I think I used about 20 years ago, but I might be confusing it with something else. EDT on VMS wasn't too bad, given what I was used to at the time.
Can you believe that guy is still trolling me (or that I am stupidly responding)? The sheer amount and degree of that guy's doublethink is staggering. It's like the Marlboro Man ridiculing someone for smoking who has never touched a cigarette. How can people reall be like that without collapsing into a singularity of stupidity?
BTW, if you want to upgrade Windows, I would recommend getting a copy of Windows 2000. While it's game compatibility isn't great for old Windows games (W9x), it is pretty much a completely different OS and will run reasonably well on your hardware. Of course you are still feeding the Beast, but least you are buying something worth the money. Of course actually _buying_ Windows 2000 (or 98, etc) could be a challenge since MS has pretty much abandoned it.
If you insist on being that pedantic, I was comparing the spelling error to CBS's other problems not the story itself. If you actually looked at the _context_ of my statement, that would be clear.
What I was trying to do with my post was get you to answer the original charge: That Dan Rather had an agenda in publishing the story when and how he did... that CBS News' credibility is already shot, so poor editing shouldn't be a surprise.
I've pointed this out about 3 times now, and made it really obvious that _that_ was what I was trying to accomplish. Your insistence on not answering the question or even acknowledging it makes me wonder if you are actrually a member of Congress. Your ability to act all high and mighty while completely dodging the question would be the envy of Capitol Hill.
I made an assertion. You ignored the assertion and attacked me... completely out of the blue. I pointed out that you were dodging the point. You attacked me again. I attacked you back, because of how you act (i.e., immature and ignorant) not based on what I think you believe, and you continue to attack me on based on things that you are implying despite no material evidence whatsoever (other than prejudice). I ask you to a address my original charge a third time and you can't understand what I'm saying.
Really, no wonder this country's going to hell if you are an example of an "adult". Using the occasional Latin phrase does not mean you can think or argue coherently. The inability to address on idea on its merit rather than dragging in a dead horse to beat some more is a sign of someone who is incapable of thinking independently. Is that the image you wish to portray about yourself?
Here's one that should make your head explode like an android after Captain Kirk makes an illogical statement. I think Ann Coulter is unprofessional and irresponsible in the way she attacks people. Her articles, while often amusing, are often childish and always mean-spirited. Of course, she doesn't pretend that she is giving out anything but opinion, but I think she does huge damage to the people and ideas she supports. She, like Katie Couric is a nasty hate-monger. She's just not little. Now, in your world this should suddenly make me Hillary Clinton's towel boy? Shouldn't I be carrying around a little spray bottle of alum for Howard Dean's next scream? Or be lining up olives on toothpicks for Senator Kennedy's lunches? Wouldn't this make me an apologist the hate Bush crowd?
Based on your reactions that is the logical conclusion. Only a true fanboy would twist a discussion to the subject of his obsession (Bush vs. Kerry), when it is not relevant to the topic at hand (Dan Rather has an agenda.) I understand what you are accusing me of, because you demonstrate it so well.
Well, the Republicans aren't being Republicans, I guess someone has to.
Actually, the Democrat Party is being run more like a rally for INSERT-YOUR-FAVORITE-HATE-GROUP-HERE. They can't seem to get past bashing the President to actually talk about anything.
I think U.S. politics has hit an all-time low... not that that's hard to do.
Yeah, some guy I know pointed out the folly of expression an opinion of something even tangentially related to politics would bring out the lamest of the lame.
How silly of me.
Thanks.
By the way, Windows is always better than Linux will ever be, vi and emacs will never hold a candle to edlin, copyrights should persist until the heat death of the universe and you should be able to patent movie plots.
No more ad hominem than you are being, in fact far less, since I am responding to how you are acting. I'm not defending the GOP. I never was. All you are doing is repeating the party mantra of the Democrats. You are doing everything you falsely accuse me of doing. Can't you see that? Can't you get past you childish partisan blinders and respond to what I'm saying rather than just ape a bunch of irrelevant talking points?
You have yet to respond to the merits of my assertion. I was talking about a journalist with an agenda so blatant and transparent he would end his career in controversy rather than retire with dignity, and all you can do is parrot Howard Dean's talking points (Well, the coherent ones anyway, thankfully you haven't started into the "Republicans are just plain evil." nonsense).
I never said his assertions weren't true. I never mentioned Bush's service and how it compared to Kerry's. I never mentioned the merits of either candidate, yet you've turned it into the same, lame partisan tit-for-tat that passes for political discussion in this country but has as much in common with real discussion as playground taunting. In short, you are acting like a little kid who doesn't know anything and just repeats what he's heard, even when it has nothing to do with the topic at hand.
Once again (since you have failed to respond several times), if Dan Rather doesn't have an agenda why did he take a story that was years in the making and spring it on the eve of an election when he didn't have the proper evidence to back it up? Why would a journalist of his stature use a document that he didn't take the proper time to verify, and ignored the feedback of what little verification he did do? Why did he so blatantly act when the information could do the most damage rather than act like the profession he's supposed to be?
Of course at the rate you're going you'll just start chanting "Bush lied, people died." over and over. You haven't ranted about WMD's yet, there's a rich vein, Heck, I'm surprised you haven't brought up Iran-Contra and Watergate.
Of course, it just seems that 2004 was the year people like CBS News and the New York Times stopped pretending they were journalists.
Between the execrable performance of the press and the following two quotes I think the 2000's will go down as the decade that everyone in public life stopped pretending they believed anything they say.
The first was when John Edwards claimed that electing him and Kerry would allow people like Christopher Reeves to walk again. Not possibly. Not maybe. He flat out said that it would happen.
The other quote was when Tom DeLay said, with a straight face apparently, that the GOP had succeeded in finally cutting all the waste out of government and that there wasn't anything else to cut.
That either of these men could say these things without their heads exploding (which mine almost did) is a testament to power of doublethink in politics today.
War is Peace, Ignorance is Strength, Freedom is Slavery.
Because Dan Rather was a foaming-at-the-mouth enemy of Bush who would willingly end his career in well-deserved disgrace after transparently trying to swing a presidential election at the last minute means _I'm_ a tool of the GOP? Whether the story is true or not, if CBS News spends _5 years_ working on something and the best they can come up with is a document that doesn't even _begin_ to look real, and then springs it just days before an election, doesn't that look even a bit suspicious?
Grow up.
They were working on this story for 5 years. Count 'em. And that's all they could show for it? Just because I point out the fact that the bias in the media is more obvious than the sun at noon out in the desert doesn't make me a shill for a political party. It just means I'm aware of what's going on. It means I'm conscious.
Dan Rather finally acknowledged that the document's veracity was questionable (at best), but that it wasn't relevant that he based a major news story on the eve of an election on a fraudulent document. That isn't me making up quotes, that's what happened.
If you think that stunt was anything other than a transparent and clumsy attempt to swing an election, then why did it take them five years of sitting on the information? Was it because they needed a document obviously typed up in Microsoft Word but supposedly from 1972 provided by a virulent Bush-hater to clinch their case?
Just because Dan Rather was nothing more than a mouthpiece for a political viewpoint who had nothing but contempt for any facts that didn't fit in his worldview makes _me_ a "tool" of the GOP?
Just because there are people on the left who smear and distort means I would deny that people on the right wouldn't do the same? Can there possibly be a person in this world apparently smart enough to operate a computer keyboard that could have a view as infantile as the one you are espousing?
Lots of political commentators overreacted to Bill Clinton, distorted his accomplishments and attempted to slur him based on spotty evidence. Am I now a member of the Democratic Party? Am I now a shill for Hillary in 2008?
Can anyone on/. even make an objective response to a political comment or is everyone here destined to draw knee-jerk, non sequitur conclusions just like you have done?
Really, people like you make the playground look like the friggin' McLaughlin Group. Neener neener neener.
What do you expect from the network that brought us: "OK. I admit it was forged, but it's still true." and is courting that nasty little hatemonger Katie Couric to be an anchor.
Most mainstream journalists have stopped even pretending they care. It's all about smearing your enemies and promoting your agenda. The simple ability to communicate in English is far less important than pledging allegiance to political agenda of the editors-in-chief or network news vice-presidents.
Actually, I've come to very similar conclusions regarding screenshots. Whereas I really prefer some aesthetic quality to the game UI, I judge based on how much information is on the screen. More info usually means I'm more likely to be interested.
Master of Orion 3 was a good example of a game which I should like (I bought it), but I can't get past the completely rococo UI. It suffers from (IMO) a fatal case of Photoshopitis that many apps suffer from these days... so much decoration and no adherence to standards that you can't tell what are UI elements and what is just part of the "screen". I spent way too much time poking at random chrome on the screen wondering if it's a control or not. After an hour or so, I gave up and haven't gone back to it, although I'll give it another shot.
From what I recall GalCiv seemed pretty good, the game wasd just a little to simple for my taste.
Your comments about cutscenes are dead-on. A screenshot of a cutscene is a big minus in my book... unless there are also a ton of gameplay screens to go along with it.
Hey developers, this isn't 1994 any more... FMV screenshots are nice but they are not a selling point.
Or maybe he needs a little practice with his powers of 10.
Back on topic: I find video game reviews to be fairly uninformative. The only thing that can really make my mind up for me is a demo version.
With all the hoopla over GalCiv 2, I was sorely disappointed to see there's no demo. I tried the first one, and thought it was OK, but not quite there. From what I've read, the second could be a real winner for me, as I am a big fan of 4X games since the beginning (anyone remember Starflight? Star Command? Starfleet II? Or the grandaddy of them all, the original text-based Star Trek game from the 70's... not 4X, but quite an inspiration for the genre?)
You wouldn't feel that way if you had a kid diagnosed with ADHD and knew that it wasn't:
- Too much sugar and caffeine - Too much TV - Bad teachers
or a whole bunch of other obvious things you haven't mentioned.
Despite your skepticism, and the fact that the pharmaceutical companies _are_ pushing these drugs relentlessly, the problem is real.
I agree that ADHD is not in and of itself a "real" diagnosis but rather a description of symptons. The real cause is obviously not yet understood. But I am convinced that, just like with autism, there are serious environmental influences beyond simple bad parenting or bad teachers or too much sugar, etc, that are causing these very real and very serious effects in many children and even adults.
I agree that using drugs should be a last resort, but to rule them out as totally unnecessary in all instances is just as naive and thinking drugs are a cure-all. You sound an awful lot like someone who never had to deal with the problem first-hand, and if so, you should consider yourself lucky. But to blithely write the problem off is to ignore the real effects that are occurring around us.
It's quite possible that, as you claim, there are many cases where ADHD is diagnosed instead of simply recognizing other non-medical problems. It's also the case that the feminization and dumbing-down of our education system is partly to blame, but I am convinced that ADHD is a real problem, and like autism, it is growing, and that it is probably caused by more than these obvious influences, and finally, that drugs are sometimes a necessary (if last) resort to helping someone with ADHD try to function normally.
McDonald's never claimed a count of people served. The traditional sign was:
McDonald's Hamburgers Over XXX Sold
Where XXX used to be a number, but they stopped that years ago, probably because it was too expensive to change the signs all the time. Regardless, they can claim that if the number is 100 billion (probably much higher) that they have, in fact, served a hamburger to a person more 100 billion times. It's a consumable item. If I eat 100 hamburgers, I've consumed a lot more, but if I've downloaded Firefox 100 times (which is quite possible seeing as how I've been using it since about 0.4), I'm still only using one program.
Troll or not, the article has a good point. Nonetheless, you can't have 150 million downloads of anything unless it's a significant piece of software or you are seriously cheating by having one machine constantly redownloading the package from another over a seriously fast link... but only people like the Scientologists would do crap like that.
At 40 minutes each, though, they'd probably be priced considerably higher.
Not on eMusic.com. I signed up in November because I discovered they don't use DRM. Of course, the downside is that the big record labels won't deal with them, but there's more than enough stuff on there to keep me on a $20/month subscription which gives you 90 songs.
Heck, 3/4 of what I buy isn't carried by services like iTunes or Napster anyway (although that's starting to change). eMusic is like a library (at least for me)... you don't go looking for something in particular because they almost never have it. You go looking to see what they have and discover something interesting you'd never heard of.
If you want Top 40, forget it, but if you want Top 40 you're hopeless anyway. If you are willing to take some risks (and when tracks are as low as 30 cents a piece, who isn't?), and explore, then eMusic is a great service. Since November, I've gotten about 50 albums and a couple dozen random songs and I've spent maybe $150... and a good bit of it is stuff I _would easily_ pay full price (i.e, regular CD prices) for.
Regardless, the media companies need to realize that they have to compare the value they are providing with compact discs. They are essentially relieving you of having to go to the store, and of having to buy a whole CD of filler for one good track (something that's rarely a problem when you listen to music based on merit rather than what the musicians wear or how big their boobs are), you are trading-off quality and flexibility (because of DRM), and although it doesn't matter unless you are someone like me, selection. At best, that's an even trade. There's no sane reason why it should cost more, especially when most of the few overhead costs of delivering music are eliminated. And don't give me any crap about the artists not getting their cut. They don't get their cut from the labels now... a miniscule fraction of the price of a CD goes to the musicians who actually created it. 90% of it is markup by middlemen, much of which suddenly goes away. If 99 cents a track isn't good enough, then you need to learn how to add value. Jacking up the prices will, like Steve Jobs said, just send people back to piracy.
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It is a political troll that is based on nothing more than hate-filled partisan fantasy.
/.
This is
What do you expect? Political discourse at a level greater than (and I quote) "Neener neener neener"?
Besides, this isn't a partisan thing. Both major parties are equally bad about it, it's just that the one in power gets all the attention. The problem is that it seems 95% of people seem to be able to believe one party could be sinister and evil, but their party of choice is completely blameless and altruistic. The fact of the matter is that there is a "culture of corruption", and the party that's guilty of creating and perpetuating it is the U.S. Government. Will Rogers and Mark Twain were right.
Still, to play on a paraphrase of Disraeli (or somebody famous and smarter than me): The U.S. is the worst country to live in the entire world, except for all the others.
edlin was the line editor that shipped with DOS back in the day. It made vi look like emacs. I almost mentioned TECO, which I think I used about 20 years ago, but I might be confusing it with something else. EDT on VMS wasn't too bad, given what I was used to at the time.
Can you believe that guy is still trolling me (or that I am stupidly responding)? The sheer amount and degree of that guy's doublethink is staggering. It's like the Marlboro Man ridiculing someone for smoking who has never touched a cigarette. How can people reall be like that without collapsing into a singularity of stupidity?
BTW, if you want to upgrade Windows, I would recommend getting a copy of Windows 2000. While it's game compatibility isn't great for old Windows games (W9x), it is pretty much a completely different OS and will run reasonably well on your hardware. Of course you are still feeding the Beast, but least you are buying something worth the money. Of course actually _buying_ Windows 2000 (or 98, etc) could be a challenge since MS has pretty much abandoned it.
"Troll" is a good word. You're good at it.
If you insist on being that pedantic, I was comparing the spelling error to CBS's other problems not the story itself. If you actually looked at the _context_ of my statement, that would be clear.
What I was trying to do with my post was get you to answer the original charge: That Dan Rather had an agenda in publishing the story when and how he did... that CBS News' credibility is already shot, so poor editing shouldn't be a surprise.
I've pointed this out about 3 times now, and made it really obvious that _that_ was what I was trying to accomplish. Your insistence on not answering the question or even acknowledging it makes me wonder if you are actrually a member of Congress. Your ability to act all high and mighty while completely dodging the question would be the envy of Capitol Hill.
I made an assertion. You ignored the assertion and attacked me... completely out of the blue. I pointed out that you were dodging the point. You attacked me again. I attacked you back, because of how you act (i.e., immature and ignorant) not based on what I think you believe, and you continue to attack me on based on things that you are implying despite no material evidence whatsoever (other than prejudice). I ask you to a address my original charge a third time and you can't understand what I'm saying.
Really, no wonder this country's going to hell if you are an example of an "adult". Using the occasional Latin phrase does not mean you can think or argue coherently. The inability to address on idea on its merit rather than dragging in a dead horse to beat some more is a sign of someone who is incapable of thinking independently. Is that the image you wish to portray about yourself?
Here's one that should make your head explode like an android after Captain Kirk makes an illogical statement. I think Ann Coulter is unprofessional and irresponsible in the way she attacks people. Her articles, while often amusing, are often childish and always mean-spirited. Of course, she doesn't pretend that she is giving out anything but opinion, but I think she does huge damage to the people and ideas she supports. She, like Katie Couric is a nasty hate-monger. She's just not little. Now, in your world this should suddenly make me Hillary Clinton's towel boy? Shouldn't I be carrying around a little spray bottle of alum for Howard Dean's next scream? Or be lining up olives on toothpicks for Senator Kennedy's lunches? Wouldn't this make me an apologist the hate Bush crowd?
Based on your reactions that is the logical conclusion. Only a true fanboy would twist a discussion to the subject of his obsession (Bush vs. Kerry), when it is not relevant to the topic at hand (Dan Rather has an agenda.) I understand what you are accusing me of, because you demonstrate it so well.
Well, the Republicans aren't being Republicans, I guess someone has to.
Actually, the Democrat Party is being run more like a rally for INSERT-YOUR-FAVORITE-HATE-GROUP-HERE. They can't seem to get past bashing the President to actually talk about anything.
I think U.S. politics has hit an all-time low... not that that's hard to do.
I know what you mean. That was the best-selling record of all time... at one point.
Yeah, some guy I know pointed out the folly of expression an opinion of something even tangentially related to politics would bring out the lamest of the lame.
How silly of me.
Thanks.
By the way, Windows is always better than Linux will ever be, vi and emacs will never hold a candle to edlin, copyrights should persist until the heat death of the universe and you should be able to patent movie plots.
No more ad hominem than you are being, in fact far less, since I am responding to how you are acting. I'm not defending the GOP. I never was. All you are doing is repeating the party mantra of the Democrats. You are doing everything you falsely accuse me of doing. Can't you see that? Can't you get past you childish partisan blinders and respond to what I'm saying rather than just ape a bunch of irrelevant talking points?
You have yet to respond to the merits of my assertion. I was talking about a journalist with an agenda so blatant and transparent he would end his career in controversy rather than retire with dignity, and all you can do is parrot Howard Dean's talking points (Well, the coherent ones anyway, thankfully you haven't started into the "Republicans are just plain evil." nonsense).
I never said his assertions weren't true. I never mentioned Bush's service and how it compared to Kerry's. I never mentioned the merits of either candidate, yet you've turned it into the same, lame partisan tit-for-tat that passes for political discussion in this country but has as much in common with real discussion as playground taunting. In short, you are acting like a little kid who doesn't know anything and just repeats what he's heard, even when it has nothing to do with the topic at hand.
Once again (since you have failed to respond several times), if Dan Rather doesn't have an agenda why did he take a story that was years in the making and spring it on the eve of an election when he didn't have the proper evidence to back it up? Why would a journalist of his stature use a document that he didn't take the proper time to verify, and ignored the feedback of what little verification he did do? Why did he so blatantly act when the information could do the most damage rather than act like the profession he's supposed to be?
Of course at the rate you're going you'll just start chanting "Bush lied, people died." over and over. You haven't ranted about WMD's yet, there's a rich vein, Heck, I'm surprised you haven't brought up Iran-Contra and Watergate.
Who is the tool here?
Once again, you make a whole bunch of irrelevant assertions that also aren't true.
Tell you what, graduate from high school and read a few books and then come back and we'll have a talk.
Of course, it just seems that 2004 was the year people like CBS News and the New York Times stopped pretending they were journalists.
Between the execrable performance of the press and the following two quotes I think the 2000's will go down as the decade that everyone in public life stopped pretending they believed anything they say.
The first was when John Edwards claimed that electing him and Kerry would allow people like Christopher Reeves to walk again. Not possibly. Not maybe. He flat out said that it would happen.
The other quote was when Tom DeLay said, with a straight face apparently, that the GOP had succeeded in finally cutting all the waste out of government and that there wasn't anything else to cut.
That either of these men could say these things without their heads exploding (which mine almost did) is a testament to power of doublethink in politics today.
War is Peace, Ignorance is Strength, Freedom is Slavery.
Because Dan Rather was a foaming-at-the-mouth enemy of Bush who would willingly end his career in well-deserved disgrace after transparently trying to swing a presidential election at the last minute means _I'm_ a tool of the GOP? Whether the story is true or not, if CBS News spends _5 years_ working on something and the best they can come up with is a document that doesn't even _begin_ to look real, and then springs it just days before an election, doesn't that look even a bit suspicious?
/. even make an objective response to a political comment or is everyone here destined to draw knee-jerk, non sequitur conclusions just like you have done?
Grow up.
They were working on this story for 5 years. Count 'em. And that's all they could show for it? Just because I point out the fact that the bias in the media is more obvious than the sun at noon out in the desert doesn't make me a shill for a political party. It just means I'm aware of what's going on. It means I'm conscious.
Dan Rather finally acknowledged that the document's veracity was questionable (at best), but that it wasn't relevant that he based a major news story on the eve of an election on a fraudulent document. That isn't me making up quotes, that's what happened.
If you think that stunt was anything other than a transparent and clumsy attempt to swing an election, then why did it take them five years of sitting on the information? Was it because they needed a document obviously typed up in Microsoft Word but supposedly from 1972 provided by a virulent Bush-hater to clinch their case?
Just because Dan Rather was nothing more than a mouthpiece for a political viewpoint who had nothing but contempt for any facts that didn't fit in his worldview makes _me_ a "tool" of the GOP?
Just because there are people on the left who smear and distort means I would deny that people on the right wouldn't do the same? Can there possibly be a person in this world apparently smart enough to operate a computer keyboard that could have a view as infantile as the one you are espousing?
Lots of political commentators overreacted to Bill Clinton, distorted his accomplishments and attempted to slur him based on spotty evidence. Am I now a member of the Democratic Party? Am I now a shill for Hillary in 2008?
Can anyone on
Really, people like you make the playground look like the friggin' McLaughlin Group. Neener neener neener.
Seems like no one gives a shit these days.
What do you expect from the network that brought us: "OK. I admit it was forged, but it's still true." and is courting that nasty little hatemonger Katie Couric to be an anchor.
Most mainstream journalists have stopped even pretending they care. It's all about smearing your enemies and promoting your agenda. The simple ability to communicate in English is far less important than pledging allegiance to political agenda of the editors-in-chief or network news vice-presidents.
Funny... that's how I always felt about "Family Guy".
Writology is good. Not great, but good.
I have a Master's in Writonomy, which is much better.
And you think the Democrats aren't bitches to the rich? Give me a break.
I'm just glad to see people discussing the Bible rather than mocking it for a change.
Shakespeare is best appreciated when read in the original Klingon.
Actually, I've come to very similar conclusions regarding screenshots. Whereas I really prefer some aesthetic quality to the game UI, I judge based on how much information is on the screen. More info usually means I'm more likely to be interested.
Master of Orion 3 was a good example of a game which I should like (I bought it), but I can't get past the completely rococo UI. It suffers from (IMO) a fatal case of Photoshopitis that many apps suffer from these days... so much decoration and no adherence to standards that you can't tell what are UI elements and what is just part of the "screen". I spent way too much time poking at random chrome on the screen wondering if it's a control or not. After an hour or so, I gave up and haven't gone back to it, although I'll give it another shot.
From what I recall GalCiv seemed pretty good, the game wasd just a little to simple for my taste.
Your comments about cutscenes are dead-on. A screenshot of a cutscene is a big minus in my book... unless there are also a ton of gameplay screens to go along with it.
Hey developers, this isn't 1994 any more... FMV screenshots are nice but they are not a selling point.
Or maybe he needs a little practice with his powers of 10.
Back on topic: I find video game reviews to be fairly uninformative. The only thing that can really make my mind up for me is a demo version.
With all the hoopla over GalCiv 2, I was sorely disappointed to see there's no demo. I tried the first one, and thought it was OK, but not quite there. From what I've read, the second could be a real winner for me, as I am a big fan of 4X games since the beginning (anyone remember Starflight? Star Command? Starfleet II? Or the grandaddy of them all, the original text-based Star Trek game from the 70's... not 4X, but quite an inspiration for the genre?)
No, but that's because cars cost 10^4 times as much as video games!
Either you're the Sultan of Brunei, or I think you need to shop around for your cars.
Or maybe you're buying CD-R's of a games in Hong Kong for a two bucks each.
You wouldn't feel that way if you had a kid diagnosed with ADHD and knew that it wasn't:
- Too much sugar and caffeine
- Too much TV
- Bad teachers
or a whole bunch of other obvious things you haven't mentioned.
Despite your skepticism, and the fact that the pharmaceutical companies _are_ pushing these drugs relentlessly, the problem is real.
I agree that ADHD is not in and of itself a "real" diagnosis but rather a description of symptons. The real cause is obviously not yet understood. But I am convinced that, just like with autism, there are serious environmental influences beyond simple bad parenting or bad teachers or too much sugar, etc, that are causing these very real and very serious effects in many children and even adults.
I agree that using drugs should be a last resort, but to rule them out as totally unnecessary in all instances is just as naive and thinking drugs are a cure-all. You sound an awful lot like someone who never had to deal with the problem first-hand, and if so, you should consider yourself lucky. But to blithely write the problem off is to ignore the real effects that are occurring around us.
It's quite possible that, as you claim, there are many cases where ADHD is diagnosed instead of simply recognizing other non-medical problems. It's also the case that the feminization and dumbing-down of our education system is partly to blame, but I am convinced that ADHD is a real problem, and like autism, it is growing, and that it is probably caused by more than these obvious influences, and finally, that drugs are sometimes a necessary (if last) resort to helping someone with ADHD try to function normally.
McDonald's never claimed a count of people served. The traditional sign was:
McDonald's Hamburgers
Over XXX Sold
Where XXX used to be a number, but they stopped that years ago, probably because it was too expensive to change the signs all the time. Regardless, they can claim that if the number is 100 billion (probably much higher) that they have, in fact, served a hamburger to a person more 100 billion times. It's a consumable item. If I eat 100 hamburgers, I've consumed a lot more, but if I've downloaded Firefox 100 times (which is quite possible seeing as how I've been using it since about 0.4), I'm still only using one program.
Troll or not, the article has a good point. Nonetheless, you can't have 150 million downloads of anything unless it's a significant piece of software or you are seriously cheating by having one machine constantly redownloading the package from another over a seriously fast link... but only people like the Scientologists would do crap like that.
...much pointless debate about the side of the steering wheel is on...
Of course, they _never_ could have just flipped the video.
"The Sun" and /. have editors?
Wait till I post this to usenet!
You said it. Boy, I sure hope someone lost his job over that!
At 40 minutes each, though, they'd probably be priced considerably higher.
Not on eMusic.com. I signed up in November because I discovered they don't use DRM. Of course, the downside is that the big record labels won't deal with them, but there's more than enough stuff on there to keep me on a $20/month subscription which gives you 90 songs.
Heck, 3/4 of what I buy isn't carried by services like iTunes or Napster anyway (although that's starting to change). eMusic is like a library (at least for me)... you don't go looking for something in particular because they almost never have it. You go looking to see what they have and discover something interesting you'd never heard of.
If you want Top 40, forget it, but if you want Top 40 you're hopeless anyway. If you are willing to take some risks (and when tracks are as low as 30 cents a piece, who isn't?), and explore, then eMusic is a great service. Since November, I've gotten about 50 albums and a couple dozen random songs and I've spent maybe $150... and a good bit of it is stuff I _would easily_ pay full price (i.e, regular CD prices) for.
Regardless, the media companies need to realize that they have to compare the value they are providing with compact discs. They are essentially relieving you of having to go to the store, and of having to buy a whole CD of filler for one good track (something that's rarely a problem when you listen to music based on merit rather than what the musicians wear or how big their boobs are), you are trading-off quality and flexibility (because of DRM), and although it doesn't matter unless you are someone like me, selection. At best, that's an even trade. There's no sane reason why it should cost more, especially when most of the few overhead costs of delivering music are eliminated. And don't give me any crap about the artists not getting their cut. They don't get their cut from the labels now... a miniscule fraction of the price of a CD goes to the musicians who actually created it. 90% of it is markup by middlemen, much of which suddenly goes away. If 99 cents a track isn't good enough, then you need to learn how to add value. Jacking up the prices will, like Steve Jobs said, just send people back to piracy.