But copy protection still stops a lot of piracy Bull. You can download any game you want (cept for server only games). I don't bother buying games anymore, I haven't in years. But I did buy Sins of a Solar Empire, precisely because it came without any copy protection. I'm sure that not having to pay for the copy protection is also the reason it was $10 cheaper than other new games.
This guy sees the obvious. Pirated games are superior in quality at no cost. It's one thing to convince someone not to steal, it's quite another to ask them to accept an inferior product in return for their virtue. Same goes for MP3s. I never bought an MP3 until Amazon starting offering DRM-free tunes at acceptable quality. Now I buy them regularly. Freedom itself works on market principles. The less of it there is (in all aspects of our lives), the greater the demand is for it. There is a lot of money to be made, for businesses that understand this.
Part of it is that being a big corp, our bureaucracy is pretty harsh. I have a friend who was sucked into Schluberje (sp) recently and there you literally have to take a driving class (as a frikkin programmer???) as part of your job duties. Bureaucracy gone mad. I'm sure many of you have seen office space--- we are 3x office space. It really takes a special person to fit in a large corporation. Jobs that would take 2 hours at a small company (and be very satisfying) may take three months. I even know of one project that was finished a year ago and it is still stuck waiting to be prioritized for release. This is so true where I work too. I now put in about 4-8 hours every Friday, just doing my timesheet. The level of detail is impossible to attain, so most people end up bullshitting it, just so they can get out for the weekend. But all I ever do anymore is bureaucratic bullshit. Training, reviews, ISO process, Sarbanes-Oxley, development plans. I'm lucky if I code as much in a year as I did in a day only a few years ago.
Ironically, the supposed point of the bureaucracy is to make us more efficient, but it's slowed everything down to a do-nothing crawl (yet they say productivity is up, despite the obvious). I'd say I'm a better programmer than most of my peers, but I'm looking to get out (perhaps leave the career entirely). There are very few decent programmers left at major corporations and those that are left are getting the shit beat out of them with questions and meetings, so I imagine there will be even less in the near future.
And in the mean time, very few have noticed that one of Microsoft's published future plans is to dumb down IT to the point where any idiot can do it with the right software support. I've noticed this more and more while conducting interviews. I'll ask someone to describe the steps they took in creating a web service or something and they'll say, "well, I hit the button." I usually leave it there, but in my head I'm wondering what they'll do when the tool they're using becomes obsolete six months from now. These dumbed-down tools trap people into whatever job they're in because the knowledge is difficult to transfer. I see this trend and I'm seriously looking to get out now. It just doesn't bode well for the future IMO.
Lawmakers will go out of their way to avoid having anything that looks like a tax increase in their record. This is quite true. But in an age of total fiat currency, there is little need to raise taxes. By printing more money, they've essentially raised taxes on our savings, without most people even understanding it. Most people will blame the lose of their purchasing power on the rising prices of oil or something, but that's just blaming the symptoms. If you were to add up all the taxes, fees, cost of compliance with tax laws and cost of real inflation, and spell it out for people, then you'd see that rioting in the streets you mention.
What delusions? I said McCain would take it in the end. I only said that he doesn't really have those delegates until they count them. And many of them were bound to other candidates in any case. CNN doesn't really get the delegate system well. Hell they didn't even know how many delegates my state had.
And lest ye forget, you only need a certain number of delegates to seal the nomination. McCain got there last night. No, he didn't. I'm not saying Ron Paul has any kind of good chance. I'm merely saying that the delegates haven't even been chosen yet and we certainly haven't been polled by anyone. The media is just overlaying preference poll votes onto the delegate count. And I can tell you for certain that we captured more delegates than those preference polls would have you believe. And many of the Romney and Huckabee supporters will never vote for McCain, regardless of endorsements. He's almost as hated as Hillary. McCain will take it in the end, but not without a little negotiating. And short of another 9/11, McCain has zero chance of winning in November.
Much of Clinton's economic "successes" were brought about by spending on credit card. He depleted the social security trust fund and left an IOU in its place. If the US government were beholden to the same accounting principles as US corporations are, that "surplus" would turn into a deficit. And Greenspans managment of the fed then, essentially led to this whole sub-prime crisis.
The other half of Clinton's successes, I attribute to the government shut downs. I was a liberal back then and I was furious with him because nothing was ever getting done. Looking back now, as a conservative, I think that was a good thing. Had there not been the whole blowjob fiasco, I'm sure the taxing and spending would have gone on full tilt, thereby diminishing any economic legacy he had.
That being said, George Bush has destroyed this economy once and for all with his insane big government / big war policies. So I don't want to give the impression that I support that fucknut in any way shape or form. Can't we just settle on "they're all bad"?
If a corporation acquires a monopoly on food distribution in my town And how would they acquire that monopoly, without the government to back it up? If they raised the prices of food to absurd levels, eventually someone would start bringing in food themselves to make a slightly less absurd profit. This process would continue until prices are back to market rates. A true monopoly can only be achieved if the government backs you up either through direct legislation, or through so many regulations that no one can break into the business. If there's profit to be made, competing companies will come.
No one ever grilled Ron Paul on the support he gets from far right wing racist groups on air. No one has grilled Barak Obama either. He just got the endorsement from the KKK last week. That's the most racist group there is. So now, what's your point?
How can it be a mathematical certainty when the delegates haven't even been chosen yet in most cases? And who polled the delegates to see who they support? They never polled me. And what about the delegates who were bound to Romney and Huckabee? The Romney supporters in my caucus booed the McCain stump speaker off the stage and some threatened him with violence. Are all these people now magically McCain delegates? Many won't even show.
While I agree that Ron Paul has very little chance of winning at this point, he could garner enough delegates to keep McCain from automatically taking it (without concessions). This is just another case of the media talking out its ass. From their perspective, McCain has it locked up because the only other Republican in the race has dropped out. But there's still that Republican that they never talk about. And there's that whole caucus system that the media can't seem to wrap their heads around. I guess I'll see how it goes at my county convention this Saturday. But we're going in rather hopeful given our experience with McCain haters.
Seriously, if you're really that paranoid about the terrorists coming to get you, you can fly the airline with the anal probe policy. I'd rather fly an airline that had no checks at all and would let me bring a gun on the plane (not that I would bother). They could put sensors on the cockpit door where, if breached, turns the plane over to FAA remote control. If you make it impossible to take control of the plane, then target-wise, we're not talking about anything more than a bus bombing.
This also goes for bullshit FAA rules about boarding and departing the plane. If my plane is stuck on the runway for hours, then I want that door open so we can wait outside. Being stuck on the runway for 5 hours in those tiny seats with no leg room is pure torture and it's brought to me by my government. Terrorists, schmerrorists, I'd rather risk death once in a while than suffer through government bureaucracy every time I want to get from point A to point B. This is suppose to be the land of the brave, why is it run by a bunch of pussies?
The War Powers Act only allows the President to engage in armed conflict for 60 days without the consent of Congress. And I'm sure this is the reason for his "mission accomplished" BS less than two months into the war. The congress could have called him on it. But instead, they'd prefer to play the victim to the voting public.
cinelerra crashes I almost didn't bother trying Cinelerra because of all the "crashes" I hear about. While it's not the best app, I've been completely unable to get it to crash. And I believe I had to use an unstable version to even compile it for 64 bit. Are people talking about the way it use to be? Has it gotten that much better over the last year or have I just been lucky?
That being said, the lack of decent file type support makes it largely useless IMO. The render options suck big time, unless all you care about is producing DVDs. Hell, even HD-DVD is now obsolete.
The occasional person polling me for my opinions doesn't bother me at all. It's simple enough to hang up if I don't want to bother. But in the days before the Do Not Call List, I'd hardly ever bothered answering my phone if it got bad.
Junk mail is far worse, IMO. You still have to sort through it to make sure you're not throwing anything important out. It usually just ends up turning my house into a mess because I don't have the time to deal with it all. At the very least, they could put those newspaper adverts in a bag or something. It's too easy to get that crap mixed in with real mail. I don't want anything that doesn't have my name on it (resident mailings), nor do I want credit card offers that can fuck me up if I don't dispose of them properly. I wish I could direct a private company to deliver my mail that won't having a problem stripping this stuff out for me.
Talk about missing the big picture. We are at war with radical Islam because they *murdered* 3000 of our civilians and tens of thousands other civilians worldwide (a great many of them Muslim themselves). We are at war with these people because of their disgusting ideology and want-on murder they continue to perpetrate. Good to know how little you care. Right, and we went and *murdered* close to a million civilians in a country that had nothing to do with 9/11 (hint, it's murder when it's not in self-defense). Not to mention losing over 3000 of our soldiers as well. It's time to get over it. 3000 dying is a tragedy, but it's only when it happens to the US that the whole world has to pay. There are all sorts of ways that we could prevent the death of 3000 people *per year* for only a fraction of what we're spending in Iraq, and without the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives.
If that was true, Israel and the US would have bombed the crap out of half the middle-east by now. Ummm, I said *if* they nuked us. Not if they simply looked at us the wrong way. But hey, even with them simply looking at us the wrong way, none of the presidential front runners are taking a nuclear first strike against Iran off the table. That's some sick shit right there. The pentagon talks all the time about using mini-nukes to take out bunkers. And given all the depleted uranium (i.e. dirty bombs) that we've spread all over the world, I'd say that we're the only nuclear terrorists around right now. We're the ones preemptively starting wars because people want to have the same stuff that we do. Of course, that's not the real reason and everybody in Washington knows it. It's about protecting the dollar and setting up a garrison.
How can you stomp them if you don't know who is responsible? By them, I meant Iran. We're already pretty much at war with the entire Muslim war over a measly 3,000 deaths that happened almost seven years ago. If a nuke went off here, we be nuking Iran and everyone involved knows that.
So far, I haven't really heard a good conspiracy theory yet, so I'm still judging natural event as the most likely, pending more information. Read up on the Iranian Oil Bourse and when it was set to come on line. If you consider the sad shape of the dollar these days, it may become a little more clear. It's not a prelude to attack, it's an alternative. Or rather it's an attempt to forestall the need for attack.
The Iranian Oil Bourse was set to come on line by Monday. That would allow all of these countries to exchange oil in Euros instead of dollars. When that happens the dollar is toast. They've now delayed it's launch. All these threats of invasion have been an attempt to get them to change their mind (on the bourse, not the nukes). These cuttings, seem like an attempt to delay the inevitable war a little longer. The timing cannot be a coincidence.
With the oil bourse set to go online before the 11th (now delayed), that is obviously why this was done. When Iraq stopped pricing it's oil in dollars, we invaded two months later. I don't think people understand the magnitude of the dollar's decline or how much an impact that has on our foreign policy. If the dollar is no longer seen as the world's primary currency, then they'll pull out the investment needed to sustain our mammoth debt. We're just about there already, but if Iran does this (and they have every right), then our economy is finished. That's why we've still talk about war all the time, even in light of the NIE. By prolonging the crash, we're just making the problem worse. Not to mention, pissing off the world in the process. We're just following the same pattern of all collapsing empires.
My guess is Islamic isolationists. Ummm, are these the same Islamofascists that we're told rely on the internet to get their message out and train their followers? Did they use one of their submarines? And what they hell does fundamentalist Islam have anything to do with corporatist fascism?
If you want to avoid war with Iran then you should be in favor of diplomatic action to prevent them from obtaining nuclear weapons which could be a pretext for such a war.
Everyone has nukes, who cares? Why exactly is that any of our business? Even if they could claim plausible deniability by clandestinely giving a nuke to a terrorist, they know we'd stomp them anyway, so why would they do that? Oh yeah, they're crazy Islamofascists bent on subordinating our women and eating our babies. We'll all be speaking Farsi or some stupid bullshit.
It seems to mostly be related to having a lot of tabs open (even with enough memory). It could also be flash as well.
As for more stable apps, I'd say every app I use in Linux is more stable. Even cinelerra, which they warn I will have to save often with. Granted, I'm probably not using any other app as hard as my browser, I'm just saying that firefox is the only app I use that crashes regularly these days. And I will only execute financial orders on a fresh browser anymore.
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This guy sees the obvious. Pirated games are superior in quality at no cost. It's one thing to convince someone not to steal, it's quite another to ask them to accept an inferior product in return for their virtue. Same goes for MP3s. I never bought an MP3 until Amazon starting offering DRM-free tunes at acceptable quality. Now I buy them regularly. Freedom itself works on market principles. The less of it there is (in all aspects of our lives), the greater the demand is for it. There is a lot of money to be made, for businesses that understand this.
Ironically, the supposed point of the bureaucracy is to make us more efficient, but it's slowed everything down to a do-nothing crawl (yet they say productivity is up, despite the obvious). I'd say I'm a better programmer than most of my peers, but I'm looking to get out (perhaps leave the career entirely). There are very few decent programmers left at major corporations and those that are left are getting the shit beat out of them with questions and meetings, so I imagine there will be even less in the near future.
What delusions? I said McCain would take it in the end. I only said that he doesn't really have those delegates until they count them. And many of them were bound to other candidates in any case. CNN doesn't really get the delegate system well. Hell they didn't even know how many delegates my state had.
Yes, but most of those candidates dropped out. Their delegates don't have to support McCain.
Much of Clinton's economic "successes" were brought about by spending on credit card. He depleted the social security trust fund and left an IOU in its place. If the US government were beholden to the same accounting principles as US corporations are, that "surplus" would turn into a deficit. And Greenspans managment of the fed then, essentially led to this whole sub-prime crisis.
The other half of Clinton's successes, I attribute to the government shut downs. I was a liberal back then and I was furious with him because nothing was ever getting done. Looking back now, as a conservative, I think that was a good thing. Had there not been the whole blowjob fiasco, I'm sure the taxing and spending would have gone on full tilt, thereby diminishing any economic legacy he had.
That being said, George Bush has destroyed this economy once and for all with his insane big government / big war policies. So I don't want to give the impression that I support that fucknut in any way shape or form. Can't we just settle on "they're all bad"?
How can it be a mathematical certainty when the delegates haven't even been chosen yet in most cases? And who polled the delegates to see who they support? They never polled me. And what about the delegates who were bound to Romney and Huckabee? The Romney supporters in my caucus booed the McCain stump speaker off the stage and some threatened him with violence. Are all these people now magically McCain delegates? Many won't even show.
While I agree that Ron Paul has very little chance of winning at this point, he could garner enough delegates to keep McCain from automatically taking it (without concessions). This is just another case of the media talking out its ass. From their perspective, McCain has it locked up because the only other Republican in the race has dropped out. But there's still that Republican that they never talk about. And there's that whole caucus system that the media can't seem to wrap their heads around. I guess I'll see how it goes at my county convention this Saturday. But we're going in rather hopeful given our experience with McCain haters.
...to get a job already. Sheesh!
Seriously, if you're really that paranoid about the terrorists coming to get you, you can fly the airline with the anal probe policy. I'd rather fly an airline that had no checks at all and would let me bring a gun on the plane (not that I would bother). They could put sensors on the cockpit door where, if breached, turns the plane over to FAA remote control. If you make it impossible to take control of the plane, then target-wise, we're not talking about anything more than a bus bombing.
This also goes for bullshit FAA rules about boarding and departing the plane. If my plane is stuck on the runway for hours, then I want that door open so we can wait outside. Being stuck on the runway for 5 hours in those tiny seats with no leg room is pure torture and it's brought to me by my government. Terrorists, schmerrorists, I'd rather risk death once in a while than suffer through government bureaucracy every time I want to get from point A to point B. This is suppose to be the land of the brave, why is it run by a bunch of pussies?
That being said, the lack of decent file type support makes it largely useless IMO. The render options suck big time, unless all you care about is producing DVDs. Hell, even HD-DVD is now obsolete.
The occasional person polling me for my opinions doesn't bother me at all. It's simple enough to hang up if I don't want to bother. But in the days before the Do Not Call List, I'd hardly ever bothered answering my phone if it got bad.
Junk mail is far worse, IMO. You still have to sort through it to make sure you're not throwing anything important out. It usually just ends up turning my house into a mess because I don't have the time to deal with it all. At the very least, they could put those newspaper adverts in a bag or something. It's too easy to get that crap mixed in with real mail. I don't want anything that doesn't have my name on it (resident mailings), nor do I want credit card offers that can fuck me up if I don't dispose of them properly. I wish I could direct a private company to deliver my mail that won't having a problem stripping this stuff out for me.
Sorry, long day, I misread your post or confused it with a similar one.
The Iranian Oil Bourse was set to come on line by Monday. That would allow all of these countries to exchange oil in Euros instead of dollars. When that happens the dollar is toast. They've now delayed it's launch. All these threats of invasion have been an attempt to get them to change their mind (on the bourse, not the nukes). These cuttings, seem like an attempt to delay the inevitable war a little longer. The timing cannot be a coincidence.
With the oil bourse set to go online before the 11th (now delayed), that is obviously why this was done. When Iraq stopped pricing it's oil in dollars, we invaded two months later. I don't think people understand the magnitude of the dollar's decline or how much an impact that has on our foreign policy. If the dollar is no longer seen as the world's primary currency, then they'll pull out the investment needed to sustain our mammoth debt. We're just about there already, but if Iran does this (and they have every right), then our economy is finished. That's why we've still talk about war all the time, even in light of the NIE. By prolonging the crash, we're just making the problem worse. Not to mention, pissing off the world in the process. We're just following the same pattern of all collapsing empires.
If you want to avoid war with Iran then you should be in favor of diplomatic action to prevent them from obtaining nuclear weapons which could be a pretext for such a war.
Everyone has nukes, who cares? Why exactly is that any of our business? Even if they could claim plausible deniability by clandestinely giving a nuke to a terrorist, they know we'd stomp them anyway, so why would they do that? Oh yeah, they're crazy Islamofascists bent on subordinating our women and eating our babies. We'll all be speaking Farsi or some stupid bullshit.
It seems to mostly be related to having a lot of tabs open (even with enough memory). It could also be flash as well.
As for more stable apps, I'd say every app I use in Linux is more stable. Even cinelerra, which they warn I will have to save often with. Granted, I'm probably not using any other app as hard as my browser, I'm just saying that firefox is the only app I use that crashes regularly these days. And I will only execute financial orders on a fresh browser anymore.