As much as I live Settlers of Cattan [sic] and Axis and Allies, I see Monopoly on more shelves at homes than of the previous.
Monopoly is more complex than Settlers of Catan -- the rules are longer, there's more pieces (bills are pieces too!), and there's math requiring percentages for (un)mortgaging. Monopoly has been around since '35 while Settlers has been around since '95. In my current gen of friends, Settlers is actually more popular even among non-gamers (except for collections of "branded" Monopoly games -- but isn't that just jumping the shark?)
I'm with you on CandyLand but it's popular for the same reason Barney was popular in the 90's -- nothing to do with mass appeal, but appealing to the parents of children with money. But just cause there's a market for Barney, doesn't mean I need to worry about my Sopranos DVDs going out of style.
Linus writes/maintains the kernel last I checked. It's not the kernel that makes an OS easy to use, as the Mach Kernel isn't drastically different from an API standpoint, but OSX is much easier to use.
If we think Linux is hard to use, why not blame the people who write the higher level utilities rather than the kernel itself?
I think your issue is that you expect GMail to work like other email services rather than looking at what you're trying to do and how it can be accomplished.
no folders The tagging system is better than folders since it allows each email to share multiple tags. You can archive and place things in "tags" and view them just like folders.
no way to color items to come back to them (other than set to unread status, or starring them - heck Macs have had color labels since forever) You can tag them and set the color of the tag to whatever you want without archiving them.
inability to search on partial names (of email addresses; I have a client named r.ueda@xxxxx and cannot search for "ueda" only "r.ueda".) I've never had an issue with this, but it would be nice if Gmail supported regular expressions in searching.
and search system in general sucks considering how many search experts they have on board. they could do a heck of a lot more. I use outlook at work and WISH it worked as well as GMail. I can search my entire GMail folder instantly but outlook slogs on for minutes trying to accomplish the same task.
limited user initiated spam filtering They have automated spam filtering and you can set up your own rules if that isn't good enough.
no way to indicate important clients (who should show up at top in red I think) You remember the tagging thing? You may want to try that...set a rule for a tag and color them whatever color you want.
Seriously, you may want to try using tagging before you start complaining. GMail rocks for me since it allows me to search 3 years worth of email instantly, organize things the way I want, and I never I have to delete anything. And I can even use it with imap if I want.
Why? In what major Western Country can religion impose restrictions on free speech?
In most of Europe, I believe "hate speech" is a criminal offense. Yahoo was forced to block French internet access for the sale of Nazi artifacts. In the good 'ol USA, the FCC had a hissy fit about Janet Jackson's nipple.
I'm also fairly certain the Biblical basis for Janet Jackson's nipple uproar is about as strong as the Koranic basis for pictures of the prophet. Doesn't mean that people in both religious groups weren't primarily responsible for said outcry and resulting censorship.
I still play fairly often -- it's one of the few multidimensional RTS playable in under 15 minutes on average. I've tried newer games (the new C&C/AoE. Supreme Commander, World in Conflict, Warhammer, Total War), but none of them seem to have the balance of playing both a quick and varied game -- with the exception of WiC.
Maybe I'm just old school, but I keep coming back to it (and Starcraft to a lesser extent) even though I played since the beta program.
This certainly is going to do nothing but encourage me;)
The one thing I find appalling in the whole discussion (we are all nerds here after all right?) is the lack of feasibility of the private insurer-based solution.
According to this article in the New England Journal of Medicine, we spend 31% of health care expenditures on administrative costs for the insurance based system whereas Canada spends less than 1/3 of that. There's a huge bureaucracy created to decide who gets which health care treatment, to deny ~10% of said treatments, etc. So from a purely economic standpoint, it would cost us less money money per person to go to a European style system where the super-rich can supplement their care through private insurance.
I don't understand why so-called "fiscal conservatives" can't rally behind a policy that saves money AND gives everyone care.
As for any type of voter verification, that will never happen in a Democratic primary; for some reason I can never find a legitimate rationalization for, the Democrats seems to think voter verification is equal to voter suppression.
Well, there was a recent bipartisan panel on the manner and it found that there's little actual incentive for individuals to cause voter fraud -- as one risks jail time for even voting twice -- which is unlikely to change the outcome of any election. There's also very little evidence to support that it actually happens either.
However, fraud from the people in charge of the machines or whatever is very likely, since while they risk prison time as well, they actually have the means to CHANGE an election. Consequently the panel found that requiring further voter verification is just a waste of tax money and does actually disenfranchise people too busy (not like us -- we're posting on/.!) to fulfill the requirements -- you may want to read up on your history vis a vis Jim Crow laws. Checking the counters however, seemed like a good use of time and money.
Even more interesting, is to trace the argument you make to its source, the astroturfing "American Center for Voting Rights" which conveniently disappeared last summer after the whole US attorney firings scandal (its head was involved in the Florida voting proceedings in 2000 for Bush/Cheney according to his still existent website.) Feel free to do more research online of course.
Steam's windows only (last I checked) so until you do boot camp, doesn't help you.
I used Civ4 and Sims2 specifically since they don't require overly elaborate video cards: they play just fine on a regular macbook and are quite popular.
I'm probably in the minority here, but let's say you wanted to play Civilization 4 or the forthcoming Starcraft 2 on the Macbook air.
Would the "virtual CDROM" work in another machine, would you be forced to pony up for the external drive, or will game manufacturers cease the activity of requiring the CD in the drive?
(While there are means of questionable legality to circumvent this, people who play games like "The Sims 2" may well just become upset instead!)
You declare that certain libraries are off-limits for an assignment, and give a zero score to anybody who violates that.
I had profs who used this approach in C++ as well and it worked rather well, and it's rather gratifying in a way. After implementing whatever standard data struct it was, we were free to use the STL version from then on -- or our own if we liked our API better.
This continued even when learning OpenGL in C. Assignment 1: "This is the OpenGL function that draws a point in 2D. It is the only openGL function you're permitted to use. Draw an arbitrary line". After that of course, we got to use openGLs drawline function for 2D, but then had to use it to implement 3D functionality;)
Given that I now work in graphics, I definitely think the bottom-up approach is the way to go -- building libraries from scratch and then getting to use them -- and has prepared me for abstraction in much larger projects. (Caveat: I do think people should get to use a compiler before they have to write their own;))
That's the dark side to assumption, but at the same time, it does enable us to describe ideas in a different way, which seems to help in this universe;)
You can create whatever reality you want and...1+1=2. No matter what. There is no universe where 1+1=5 because such an idea would be inconsistent with itself. Calculus would work too. Of course, it wouldn't necessarily describe motion or any other physical phenomenon, but it would still be valid.
Most of CS, as I've understood it, primarily relies on mathematical principles rather than physical constants. So even in a very strange universe with 30 spacial dimensions, mergesort would still be n log n.
As far as not knowing one is in a box from inside the box, see the Truman Show or the Matrix. Assuming reality is somewhat like what is being simulated (as imagination only allows us to combine different facets of what is experienced rather than create anything actually "new"), we may be able to find inconsistencies and use them to explore how to get out. This is exactly what is being proposed here.
I swear this is the biggest straw man I've ever read. You compare an 11M person country that was behind scientifically when Castro took over to a highly educated nation with a population 30 times the size, and blame their relative lack of progress on their economic system. Bravo! That must be it!
If one wanted to compare a command economic system with a capitalist one, why not do so in the same country? The US, as history tells us, largely functioned on the basis of a command economy during the last World War (ration cards, heavy gov't R&D funding, etc). With major inventions like general purpose computers, the atomic bomb, and radar all being invented within 5ish years (through gov't funded programs like the Manhattan Project -- and cooperation with the command economy of Britain), I'd say command economies don't do so badly -- with the right commander. We can compare that with the period before, and even with many of the young would-be inventors fighting, I'd say you'd come out ahead.
If I wanted to straw man you of course, I could compare the Soviet Union to the UAE or some other sufficiently small country....
I have a simple 25 lb free weight I keep at my desk and do a few curls whenever code is compiling. (Cost $20, found anywhere)
You really, really shouldn't be doing cardio at your desk though. You should become sweaty and stinky by the end of it (assuming you're actually getting a workout) which your coworkers probably won't appreciate. Just jog for 20 minutes after work.
I don't know, I'm mistaken on a near daily basis and I've become accustomed to it, especially on the phone. What's the polite way of saying "Ma'am" is not the proper way to address you? It's only happened a couple of times in person (and only one of those was face to face) and those are always good for a laugh later. The only few times it's become awkward is when the person wants to speak to my husband or father. Good for a laugh as well;) It's especially good because the person on the other end knows she or she has committed a faux pas. Usually, I just let it go -- if you want to call me ma'am and treat me properly, it's not worth the hassle.
I just don't understand why it's so bloody offensive. I think the female gender and its qualities are beautiful and admirable -- so why should I be offended when someone mistakes me for thus?
What the Iraqis do to each other is no concern of ours. It wasn't in 2003, and it isn't now.
It's OUR mess. We made it our mess when we invaded. While Saddam was no paragon of moral superiority, the number of innocents who died under his charge were less than under ours. It's like Valdiz incident. While it would have surely been profitable for Exxon to retreat and say "Not our problem", you cause a mess, you clean it. There wasn't Islamic Jihad, Muslim Brotherhood, or any other suicide bombing group in Iraq before the invasion.
I'm all in favor of a pull-out, but for God's sake, we've got a moral responsibility to clean up our own mess before we do as best we can.
No offense, but your argument against this gen is crap.
PS3 was too expensive, and doesn't have a lot of games PS2's launch library was crap initially too. The PS3's price is coming down.
Xbox360 dies on you So did the PSX's laser, for those of us who remember. Later, the hardware got better.
I'm not the type that would like the Wiimote controller [my emphasis] As in a human being?;) At least try it before you decide you don't like it. I didn't think I would like sashimi either, but it is yummy.
Now, if you'd wanted to MS's pay-for-multiplayer system or the lack of any coherent system on Wii/PS3, that's one thing. But you dislike two systems based on incidental qualities, won't even try the 3rd, and throw up your hands and say that's it?
It should also be noted that he purchased the book AFTER the disappearance, which is documented by receipt. It would seem more likely to me, IMHO, he would have purchased the books before, as the whole thing -- if he did it -- seems to clean NOT to be pre-meditated.
Yes. I use Redhat Enterprise at work (no choice) and Ubuntu at home. My last trouble was trying to upgrade to current from Feisty Fawn (? Maybe it was Breezy Badger, I don't quite remember, but Badger seems to old to be right). After the GUI utility failed, tried running the command line version, that failed, googled it, the googled solution didn't work, the new error wasn't shown on google. At work, trying to install anything from scratch is a pure joy since the dependencies for the distro require some ancient version of GTK+ libraries whereas anything newish requires a newer version. GTK+ has to be one of my favorite libraries to install and reinstall. The pure irony is I still can't get fscking Pidgin to install on Linux at work, while it took me 2 minutes to install it on Windows last night. When I find it easier to upgrade the kernel from source than install an instant messenger client, it's just sad.
I'll probably have a chance to play around with Ubuntu again at some point -- like I said in my original post, it's very well-intentioned and probably the most complete distro I've ever used, but its usability is still somewhere between Win 3.11 and Win95.
My gonzo journalistic observation is that 99% of women want some guy who will listen to them and that instead 99% of guys THINK girls want the guy you describe and either (a) try to be him or (b) so flustered by the this fact that they are completely paralyzed by inaction or to lack confidence when they do act. Another result of people in (b) is to spend time place where the female % is like 5% (like/.) and then wonder why it's hard to find women. Confucius say "Man who wants fish should look in pond instead of mountain" and all that.
* Installing programs doesn't require clicking through legalese, and refusing offers to register. They install, no questions asked.
I'm sorry but I had to laugh out loud when I read that. I don't think anyone actually reads the legalese to install a program. Further, whenever I try to install someone non-trivial on Linux, I wish I got questions. Instead, I get standard error output! I usually spend an hour or so trying to resolve some dependency error, or debug on obtuse error when trying to use some very well-intentioned but buggy (in my experience) utility for automating it (e.g. apt-get).
I use Linux as my primary OS at work and I have been using it for years, but I spend much more time at work tweaking my machine than I do at home. And further, I don't know any non-zealot who believes the whole "Linux is easier to maintain and use on the desktop" nonsense. Hell, even Linus doesn't. RMS might, but he hasn't used a non-GNU OS since System V;)
I hate feeding the trolls but:
No DRM, no activation There's some nice folks at the the pirate bay that can help you with that....
no Aero, no interface changes. You can turn it off. Before you bitch about it being the default, let me ask you if you just choose all the defaults for your Linux install?
That being said... I thought "grand theft auto" was a very standard English word with a lot of history prior to Rockstar's usage, can they REALLY claim trademark on it?
Trademark always applies to a specific domain. Think of "Windows". No, they're not going to sue you for having a house with glass panes. They will come a-callin' if you write a software package with the same name though. Think of any of the MS product names in fact, "Office", "Word", or "Excel". All of these are common English words, much more so than the phrase Grand Theft Auto.
Slashdot Mirror
As much as I live Settlers of Cattan [sic] and Axis and Allies, I see Monopoly on more shelves at homes than of the previous.
Monopoly is more complex than Settlers of Catan -- the rules are longer, there's more pieces (bills are pieces too!), and there's math requiring percentages for (un)mortgaging. Monopoly has been around since '35 while Settlers has been around since '95. In my current gen of friends, Settlers is actually more popular even among non-gamers (except for collections of "branded" Monopoly games -- but isn't that just jumping the shark?)
I'm with you on CandyLand but it's popular for the same reason Barney was popular in the 90's -- nothing to do with mass appeal, but appealing to the parents of children with money. But just cause there's a market for Barney, doesn't mean I need to worry about my Sopranos DVDs going out of style.
I think that should really be the next slashdot poll!
You listening CowboyNeal?;)
Part of MS's strategy is to let other companies find markets, and then compete in them once those markets exist.
XBox. Zune. Live Search (let's buy Yahoo!)
The iPhone was wildly successful so let's copy it, since that seems to be working for us so well with the iPod.
The best part of this "strategy" is that every division except the office/Windows division, loses money. Which leads me to wonder why they even try.
Linus writes/maintains the kernel last I checked. It's not the kernel that makes an OS easy to use, as the Mach Kernel isn't drastically different from an API standpoint, but OSX is much easier to use.
If we think Linux is hard to use, why not blame the people who write the higher level utilities rather than the kernel itself?
I think your issue is that you expect GMail to work like other email services rather than looking at what you're trying to do and how it can be accomplished.
no folders
The tagging system is better than folders since it allows each email to share multiple tags. You can archive and place things in "tags" and view them just like folders.
no way to color items to come back to them (other than set to unread status, or starring them - heck Macs have had color labels since forever)
You can tag them and set the color of the tag to whatever you want without archiving them.
inability to search on partial names (of email addresses; I have a client named r.ueda@xxxxx and cannot search for "ueda" only "r.ueda".)
I've never had an issue with this, but it would be nice if Gmail supported regular expressions in searching.
and search system in general sucks considering how many search experts they have on board. they could do a heck of a lot more.
I use outlook at work and WISH it worked as well as GMail. I can search my entire GMail folder instantly but outlook slogs on for minutes trying to accomplish the same task.
limited user initiated spam filtering
They have automated spam filtering and you can set up your own rules if that isn't good enough.
no way to indicate important clients (who should show up at top in red I think)
You remember the tagging thing? You may want to try that...set a rule for a tag and color them whatever color you want.
Seriously, you may want to try using tagging before you start complaining. GMail rocks for me since it allows me to search 3 years worth of email instantly, organize things the way I want, and I never I have to delete anything. And I can even use it with imap if I want.
Why? In what major Western Country can religion impose restrictions on free speech?
In most of Europe, I believe "hate speech" is a criminal offense. Yahoo was forced to block French internet access for the sale of Nazi artifacts. In the good 'ol USA, the FCC had a hissy fit about Janet Jackson's nipple.
I'm also fairly certain the Biblical basis for Janet Jackson's nipple uproar is about as strong as the Koranic basis for pictures of the prophet. Doesn't mean that people in both religious groups weren't primarily responsible for said outcry and resulting censorship.
I'm willing to be shown wrong of course....
I still play fairly often -- it's one of the few multidimensional RTS playable in under 15 minutes on average. I've tried newer games (the new C&C/AoE. Supreme Commander, World in Conflict, Warhammer, Total War), but none of them seem to have the balance of playing both a quick and varied game -- with the exception of WiC.
Maybe I'm just old school, but I keep coming back to it (and Starcraft to a lesser extent) even though I played since the beta program.
This certainly is going to do nothing but encourage me;)
Anyone else still play often?
The one thing I find appalling in the whole discussion (we are all nerds here after all right?) is the lack of feasibility of the private insurer-based solution.
According to this article in the New England Journal of Medicine, we spend 31% of health care expenditures on administrative costs for the insurance based system whereas Canada spends less than 1/3 of that. There's a huge bureaucracy created to decide who gets which health care treatment, to deny ~10% of said treatments, etc. So from a purely economic standpoint, it would cost us less money money per person to go to a European style system where the super-rich can supplement their care through private insurance.
I don't understand why so-called "fiscal conservatives" can't rally behind a policy that saves money AND gives everyone care.
As for any type of voter verification, that will never happen in a Democratic primary; for some reason I can never find a legitimate rationalization for, the Democrats seems to think voter verification is equal to voter suppression.
/.!) to fulfill the requirements -- you may want to read up on your history vis a vis Jim Crow laws. Checking the counters however, seemed like a good use of time and money.
Well, there was a recent bipartisan panel on the manner and it found that there's little actual incentive for individuals to cause voter fraud -- as one risks jail time for even voting twice -- which is unlikely to change the outcome of any election. There's also very little evidence to support that it actually happens either.
However, fraud from the people in charge of the machines or whatever is very likely, since while they risk prison time as well, they actually have the means to CHANGE an election. Consequently the panel found that requiring further voter verification is just a waste of tax money and does actually disenfranchise people too busy (not like us -- we're posting on
Even more interesting, is to trace the argument you make to its source, the astroturfing "American Center for Voting Rights" which conveniently disappeared last summer after the whole US attorney firings scandal (its head was involved in the Florida voting proceedings in 2000 for Bush/Cheney according to his still existent website.) Feel free to do more research online of course.
Last I checked Jobs didn't unveil a new console yesterday;)
Patching has always been common to personal computing, Microsoft's blunde^H^H^H^H^H revolutionary innovative technology brought it to gaming!
Steam's windows only (last I checked) so until you do boot camp, doesn't help you.
I used Civ4 and Sims2 specifically since they don't require overly elaborate video cards: they play just fine on a regular macbook and are quite popular.
I'm probably in the minority here, but let's say you wanted to play Civilization 4 or the forthcoming Starcraft 2 on the Macbook air.
Would the "virtual CDROM" work in another machine, would you be forced to pony up for the external drive, or will game manufacturers cease the activity of requiring the CD in the drive?
(While there are means of questionable legality to circumvent this, people who play games like "The Sims 2" may well just become upset instead!)
You declare that certain libraries are off-limits for an assignment, and give a zero score to anybody who violates that.
I had profs who used this approach in C++ as well and it worked rather well, and it's rather gratifying in a way. After implementing whatever standard data struct it was, we were free to use the STL version from then on -- or our own if we liked our API better.
This continued even when learning OpenGL in C. Assignment 1: "This is the OpenGL function that draws a point in 2D. It is the only openGL function you're permitted to use. Draw an arbitrary line". After that of course, we got to use openGLs drawline function for 2D, but then had to use it to implement 3D functionality;)
Given that I now work in graphics, I definitely think the bottom-up approach is the way to go -- building libraries from scratch and then getting to use them -- and has prepared me for abstraction in much larger projects. (Caveat: I do think people should get to use a compiler before they have to write their own;))
You're exactly right. Kudos;)
That's the dark side to assumption, but at the same time, it does enable us to describe ideas in a different way, which seems to help in this universe;)
You can create whatever reality you want and...1+1=2. No matter what. There is no universe where 1+1=5 because such an idea would be inconsistent with itself. Calculus would work too. Of course, it wouldn't necessarily describe motion or any other physical phenomenon, but it would still be valid.
Most of CS, as I've understood it, primarily relies on mathematical principles rather than physical constants. So even in a very strange universe with 30 spacial dimensions, mergesort would still be n log n.
As far as not knowing one is in a box from inside the box, see the Truman Show or the Matrix. Assuming reality is somewhat like what is being simulated (as imagination only allows us to combine different facets of what is experienced rather than create anything actually "new"), we may be able to find inconsistencies and use them to explore how to get out. This is exactly what is being proposed here.
I swear this is the biggest straw man I've ever read. You compare an 11M person country that was behind scientifically when Castro took over to a highly educated nation with a population 30 times the size, and blame their relative lack of progress on their economic system. Bravo! That must be it!
If one wanted to compare a command economic system with a capitalist one, why not do so in the same country? The US, as history tells us, largely functioned on the basis of a command economy during the last World War (ration cards, heavy gov't R&D funding, etc). With major inventions like general purpose computers, the atomic bomb, and radar all being invented within 5ish years (through gov't funded programs like the Manhattan Project -- and cooperation with the command economy of Britain), I'd say command economies don't do so badly -- with the right commander. We can compare that with the period before, and even with many of the young would-be inventors fighting, I'd say you'd come out ahead.
If I wanted to straw man you of course, I could compare the Soviet Union to the UAE or some other sufficiently small country....
I have a simple 25 lb free weight I keep at my desk and do a few curls whenever code is compiling. (Cost $20, found anywhere)
You really, really shouldn't be doing cardio at your desk though. You should become sweaty and stinky by the end of it (assuming you're actually getting a workout) which your coworkers probably won't appreciate. Just jog for 20 minutes after work.
I don't know, I'm mistaken on a near daily basis and I've become accustomed to it, especially on the phone. What's the polite way of saying "Ma'am" is not the proper way to address you? It's only happened a couple of times in person (and only one of those was face to face) and those are always good for a laugh later. The only few times it's become awkward is when the person wants to speak to my husband or father. Good for a laugh as well;) It's especially good because the person on the other end knows she or she has committed a faux pas. Usually, I just let it go -- if you want to call me ma'am and treat me properly, it's not worth the hassle.
I just don't understand why it's so bloody offensive. I think the female gender and its qualities are beautiful and admirable -- so why should I be offended when someone mistakes me for thus?
What the Iraqis do to each other is no concern of ours. It wasn't in 2003, and it isn't now.
It's OUR mess. We made it our mess when we invaded. While Saddam was no paragon of moral superiority, the number of innocents who died under his charge were less than under ours. It's like Valdiz incident. While it would have surely been profitable for Exxon to retreat and say "Not our problem", you cause a mess, you clean it. There wasn't Islamic Jihad, Muslim Brotherhood, or any other suicide bombing group in Iraq before the invasion.
I'm all in favor of a pull-out, but for God's sake, we've got a moral responsibility to clean up our own mess before we do as best we can.
No offense, but your argument against this gen is crap.
PS3 was too expensive, and doesn't have a lot of games
PS2's launch library was crap initially too. The PS3's price is coming down.
Xbox360 dies on you
So did the PSX's laser, for those of us who remember. Later, the hardware got better.
I'm not the type that would like the Wiimote controller [my emphasis]
As in a human being?;) At least try it before you decide you don't like it. I didn't think I would like sashimi either, but it is yummy.
Now, if you'd wanted to MS's pay-for-multiplayer system or the lack of any coherent system on Wii/PS3, that's one thing. But you dislike two systems based on incidental qualities, won't even try the 3rd, and throw up your hands and say that's it?
It should also be noted that he purchased the book AFTER the disappearance, which is documented by receipt. It would seem more likely to me, IMHO, he would have purchased the books before, as the whole thing -- if he did it -- seems to clean NOT to be pre-meditated.
Yes. I use Redhat Enterprise at work (no choice) and Ubuntu at home. My last trouble was trying to upgrade to current from Feisty Fawn (? Maybe it was Breezy Badger, I don't quite remember, but Badger seems to old to be right). After the GUI utility failed, tried running the command line version, that failed, googled it, the googled solution didn't work, the new error wasn't shown on google. At work, trying to install anything from scratch is a pure joy since the dependencies for the distro require some ancient version of GTK+ libraries whereas anything newish requires a newer version. GTK+ has to be one of my favorite libraries to install and reinstall. The pure irony is I still can't get fscking Pidgin to install on Linux at work, while it took me 2 minutes to install it on Windows last night. When I find it easier to upgrade the kernel from source than install an instant messenger client, it's just sad.
I'll probably have a chance to play around with Ubuntu again at some point -- like I said in my original post, it's very well-intentioned and probably the most complete distro I've ever used, but its usability is still somewhere between Win 3.11 and Win95.
My gonzo journalistic observation is that 99% of women want some guy who will listen to them and that instead 99% of guys THINK girls want the guy you describe and either (a) try to be him or (b) so flustered by the this fact that they are completely paralyzed by inaction or to lack confidence when they do act. Another result of people in (b) is to spend time place where the female % is like 5% (like /.) and then wonder why it's hard to find women. Confucius say "Man who wants fish should look in pond instead of mountain" and all that.
* Installing programs doesn't require clicking through legalese, and refusing offers to register. They install, no questions asked.
I'm sorry but I had to laugh out loud when I read that. I don't think anyone actually reads the legalese to install a program. Further, whenever I try to install someone non-trivial on Linux, I wish I got questions. Instead, I get standard error output! I usually spend an hour or so trying to resolve some dependency error, or debug on obtuse error when trying to use some very well-intentioned but buggy (in my experience) utility for automating it (e.g. apt-get).
I use Linux as my primary OS at work and I have been using it for years, but I spend much more time at work tweaking my machine than I do at home. And further, I don't know any non-zealot who believes the whole "Linux is easier to maintain and use on the desktop" nonsense. Hell, even Linus doesn't. RMS might, but he hasn't used a non-GNU OS since System V;)
I hate feeding the trolls but:
No DRM, no activation
There's some nice folks at the the pirate bay that can help you with that....
no Aero, no interface changes.
You can turn it off. Before you bitch about it being the default, let me ask you if you just choose all the defaults for your Linux install?
That being said... I thought "grand theft auto" was a very standard English word with a lot of history prior to Rockstar's usage, can they REALLY claim trademark on it?
Trademark always applies to a specific domain. Think of "Windows". No, they're not going to sue you for having a house with glass panes. They will come a-callin' if you write a software package with the same name though. Think of any of the MS product names in fact, "Office", "Word", or "Excel". All of these are common English words, much more so than the phrase Grand Theft Auto.