You are a former literature major and you can't see the difference between an empty kiddy book and something like "The Stranger" ? You think Harry Potter and Brave New World is like Beethoven and Bach ? I think a better analogy would be Justin Timberlake and Beethoven.
The same way painting is not just about pretty colors, photography not just about pretty landscapes and smiling people, a good book is not just about a pretty story. At least, that's what my high school teachers were telling me.
If nobody hear you, your free speech is a worthless illusion. Free speech is not about the right to speak, but about the right to share ideas.
The US has far more protection for free speech than Europe. Yet, social and political debates are far more present in Europe than in the US. The best way to kill an idea is not to forbid someone to speak. You'll just draw attention to the idea. The best way do is simply make sure there is 250 others guys like him who says stupid things.
Anyway, I believe I must assume my ideas and who I am (look at my nickname). Honesty and integrity are more important to me than security.
We are talking about social networking sites in the US, not some political organization in China. Anonymity in this case is not about free speech, but about the "right" to not take responsibility for what we say. Personally, I find anonymity more of a problem as it is a major cause of pollution.
The government can already spy on our phone calls, on our e-mail and with cameras, by tracking where everybody go, the government will also be able to know with whom everyone speaks. Basically, we will lose the ability to communicate without the government knowing. How could we revolt against an abusing government if the government know we are organizing a revolt ?
Sooner of later, a small group of people WILL install a dictatorship, and because we won't be able to communicate privately between ourselves, we won't be able to do anything against it.
I know several people who are very thin, and yet don't do any physical activities. You don't become obese because you play video games, but simply because eat too much. Psychological problems, like being under too much stress, is what make you eat too much.
I believe there is a relationship between video games (and the implied : not doing enough physical activities) and being obese, but it's not a direct relationship. Physical activities release endorphin, which basically reduce the effect of stress (at least it does for me). Playing video games, even games that are very rewarding, won't even come close to what some running will do to your endorphin level. This means kids will find another way to raise their endorphin level (and calm down)... and a good way is food.
Of course they could also have sex and take cocaine, but I doubt their parents will agree.
I think it's the opposite. If you want to sell the next episode, you'd better make something good. Traditional $60 games are more a fire and forget kind of thing (and they are more and more buggy).
Freedom is not the ability to be a nice citizen, to obey the law and do whatever our kind government want us to do. It's the ability to do what other people, particularly the government, don't want us to do. If someone can have a record of all the places I went, of all the people I visited and of everything I said in a "public" places, then I simply lose this ability.
When you say that in a public place you are observed, you are simply wrong. In public places, I'm just a guy among others, and nobody cares. If someone in particular is observing me, I can choose to go somewhere else to not be observed.
Of course, all this is theory and to be honest I'm mostly a law abiding person and the fact that "the government" is observing me do not matter to me much. I could decide to become a "terrorist" if the law became to restrictive, but for now I think it's acceptable even though I think governments make too much laws to protect themselves.
There is one thing that disturb me though. It's not the "government" who is watching me, it's a person. What if one of the person monitoring those cameras is someone I know ? What if it's the bitter ex-boyfriend of a girl I just met. There was a story not so long ago in the newspaper about a bell employee who was recording every phone conversations of his ex-girlfriend. Do you think it's ok ?
You may have notice that I don't hide behind a nickname so you can guess that the camera doesn't disturb me too much. I guess what really disturb me is the fact that I can't watch the watcher.
What I was trying to say is "looking smooth" for someone may be "slideshow" for someone else. The original poster may have a better framerate than you and still thinks Oblivion is a slideshow. My personnal limit is 20 FPS. Type tdt from the console and look at your framerate (or use Fraps). Compared to other games with similar graphic quality, Oblivion is really bad.
As for attacking repair center techs, this was not my intention. But as you said yourself, "a lot of them are a+ certified morons". Don't try to show off, it makes you look like a fool. That's all.
BTW, as a lot of people here, I build my system myself, thank you. My clients buy Dell, not me. And it's AMD, not Intel.
And what do you mean by "runs like a charm" ? What is your framerate outdoor when fighting two or three NPC at the same time ? If there's a lot of foliage, rain at the same time and if the NPC casts spells I'd say that with your config you should get about 7 or 8 FPS (assuming you play on the default high setting). That's what I get and I have a better computer than you.
Oblivion has some serious performance problems.
BTW... I'm a computer consultant (for about 13 or 14 years now) so you don't impress me with your "I work in a computer repair center" (mainly because several times, some of my client's employees asked me if I could "repair" their computer AFTER they send it to a "computer repair center").
You think $65 is too much for a game ? I remember paying $40 to $45 CDN for my colecovision games. This means that from a constant dollar perspective, games prices were higher in 1980... and I won't talk about the quality of those games.
You are right when you say that I should not type when I'm mad (and tired btw). But, hey! This is slashdot! It's not like it matters! (Yes, I'm doing a big wink right now).
The quality of a program do not depend on the language. I saw high quality, well written code in assembly and really crappy stuff in Ada. I agree that some language are more beautiful than others, but let's be honest, this sense of beauty is purely subjective.
As for maintainability and ability to add features, once again it depends more on the programmer than on the language used. A few times I was asked if I could take over the maintenance of a project (once in Pascal, others in C or C++). Each time I asked to see the source code, and each time I refused because there was not enough documentation. A well documented assembly program is as easy to maintain as any other well documented program written in a high level language... and a program without documentation is unmaintainable, no matter what language is used. I would agree that a program without documentation written in a high level language is far more readable than the same thing in assembly, but does it really matters? If the thing is more than a few thousand lines it's probably unmaintainable anyway.
Having said that, I will be honest and admit that most of the time I program in Ada. I still use assembly sometimes, but it's more for fun than for real work. But the reason I use Ada is not because of maintainability or the ability to add features. It's because most of the work I do now is the fire and forget kind of work. I have a problem, I need a program to do the job, and once the job is done, I forget everything about it. I don't expect to maintain it so my goal is to use a tool that allows me to write the fastest way possible. I don't care about quality or documentation. That's why I use Ada. The compiler get most of the errors and I don't have to be careful. And this is where high level languages really shine. Not in doing quality code, but rather in doing crappy code.
There is also another reason I don't write much assembly anymore. You need a lot of knowledge to code efficiently in assembly. And unfortunately, since I'm not a full time coder anymore, I can't afford the time to learn new architectures. To give you an idea, when I code for fun in assembly, most of the time it's for my C64 or Amiga emulator (yes it's nostalgia). I did learn the AMD64 architecture, but I think it sucks and I have no fun using this thing.
There are good reasons we don't use assembly anymore. But "quality, maintainability and ability to add features" are not part of those. From my experience, the real reason is it allows us to be lazy, do a sloppy job and rely on a compiler to do something that kind of work instead of quality code.
You say that a good knowledge of low-level programming is essential but you obviously don't know much about assembly. Writing a small program take a lot more time in assembly than in a high-level language. But for a complex programs, where you spend more time thinking about algorithms and data structures than typing, the difference is not that significant. For someone who knows what he's doing, it's not more difficult to write in assembly. It takes more time to type the code, but it's not more difficult.
As for compilers efficiency... disassemble a program and you will immediately see the difference between human made code and compiler code. Compilers still do a lot of stupid things. Those 8% performance gain you mentioned is if you compare a shitty assembly programmer with an extremely good C++ programmer. In reality, the difference is a lot higher than 8%.
Having said that, it's true that assembly is a bad choice for most projects. Only good programmers know assembly... And a good programmer cost a lot more than a guy who just got his diploma. From a business perspective, it's easier to hire two or three shitty programmers and tell one's client to get better hardware, than to hire a good programmer.
Also... Object programming has nothing to do with physical objects that need to be modelled. So not only you don't know assembly, but you don't understand what object programming is about. Please, tell me you're not a programmer.
(Sorry if I'm a little bit aggressive, but I'm in a bad mood today because of a moron and I'm beginning to be fed up with people who don't know squat but who pretend to know)
How can this be a simple mistake ? It's like a human resources manager who ask a female candidate if she would agree to sleep with him during the interview and then say "sorry, I didn't know I shouldn't ask that, my mistake".
If the guys couldn't understand that it's abusing their power than they are incompetent (I really mean complete morons) and they should not have the job. And if they knew they were abusing their power than they obviously should not have it. Either way, they MUST be fired. Their only defense is if they receive the order to do such things. In that case, it's their superiors who should lose their job.
If the two guys are fired then I agree. If not, then it probably means they have at least the implicit approbation of their superiors.
As for the Bush administritation, they just have to create the climate . They certainly won't give every orders. Do you really think Hitler did everything all by himself ? There was a lot of local initiative like this one in Germany in the 1930.
And guess what... The Bush administration did create the climate for such things to happen. So yes it's related to Bush, Ashcroft and all the others.
The majority of people in Canada live in cities and the most important of them are near the US border, true. But it is also true that the majority of people in the US also live in cities where the density population is the same as in Canada.
The density population argument is bull. The real reason is price and the fact that some companies in the US abuse their monopoly without regulation to make an awful lot of profit.
Do you really think I wanted to impress people ? Do you really think I'm proud that I was able to kill someone without hesitation ?
I know I'm lucky that I never had to kill anyone and I'm strongly against war.
But back to the point. I agree that a significant percentage of soldiers still don't shoot at the enemy. But this is still a minority. And a lot of those who don't shoot, don't do it because they are paralysed with fear of dying, not fear of killing. A video game will never change that.
This is a question I asked myself several times when I did my training and the answer, to my surprise, was always yes. And again, no hesitation. You may think I just brag, but the thing is, even if I'm not ashamed of it, I'm certainly not proud of it either. I guess I may sound crazy to someone who never had military training, but this is what military training is about. It's not only about using a weapon and running, but also about changing how you view the world around you. It took me about one year after my military service to become "normal" again (by normal I mean not viewing civilians as worthless pieces of shit).
I ended my military service 8 years ago, and even now, my views are still... let's say shocking for some people. For example, I don't think that killing a 12 year old boy (or girl) is worse than killing an adult. Particularly because a 12 year old boy is certainly less predictable than an adult. I also don't have a lot of problems with a soldier raping a woman. I do think he should be punished, but more for a lack of discipline than for the rape. Let's just say that being under fire by a 12mm machine gun is kind of stressful and I can understand a soldier who decide to relieve some of that stress (no, it never happened to me, but I saw what this kind of weapon can do and it's really not difficult to imagine how someone could feel in that situation).
Having said that, I must add one thing. I am against war. And most people I knew who would kill a 12 year old kid without hesitation were also strongly against war.
Now that I think of it, video games are probably a very bad idea for soldiers. Killing should be a duty, but it should never be fun. I fear that in a few years, instead of disciplined soldiers we may end up with a bunch of trigger happy who shoot everything.
Sorry, but that's bullshit. I did two years of military services. From the beginning we shot on human looking targets and nobody had a problem with that. And a few days after our first target practice we went straight for exercises with practice ammo (not sure if it's called like that in english but, if not, you can guess what I'm talking about) and nobody had a problem with "shooting" other people. We even threw fake grenade (the kind that covers you with white stuff) and we had a lot of fun doing it.
From the beginning our training was about dying and killing. The songs we sang and a lot of what we learned in our training was about that. And you know what ? With sleep deprivation, this kind of training work pretty well. I never had to shot someone, but I know that in a combat situation I would have done it without hesitation. And except for a few who were against violence, everyone was like me.
So this "hardest thing was to get people to pull the trigger" is plain bullshit.
I wonder one thing... is this game thing really for training or simply to get people to join the army ?
I can't understand why there is so many posts saying that eye candy are not important. For people who can't judge the internal quality of a software, how it looks is what tell them if it's good or not. You can't impress a PHB with some C code, but you can sure impress him with a lot of eye candy. I need this very badly to be able to "sell" linux to my client as a desktop and I need it BEFORE Microsoft do it.
Nothing is free. You pay for WMP. The problem is not that Microsoft sells a bundle, but the fact that you cannot buy the operating system without also buying their other products.
What would you say if, when you buy a car, the dealer tells you that you'll also have to buy gas from the dealer directly? What would you say if he then tells you that if you decide to buy gas from someone else, you'll have to pay him anyway?
Of course, if Windows was not a monopoly, nobody would care. But even though some small niche market exist, Windows is a monopoly in the general desktop computing market.
You have to remember one thing : the day capitalism will allow monopolies to do whatever they want, you'll end up with communism. The only difference is there will be a "company" instead of a "party".
If you surrender to the police after killing someone and if you say you are guilty, then your jail time will be shorter. That's a fact.
As I said, the main idea behind jail is dissuasion (not punishment). So chances of getting caught SHOULD enter into it. If your chances of being caught are slim, then dissuasion will work only if the punishment is important. You may not agree with this, but I do and that's how things work.
The main idea behind jail time is dissuasion. If your chances of getting away with your crime are higher, than sentences should be longer. It's easier to catch a guy who breaks into a house, than a guy who access a wireless network from somewhere.
Thinking that terrorists are a serious threat to your life only shows your lack of judgement.
Since 9/11, approx. 120,000 died in car accidents; 60,000 died from the common flu; 50,000 died by murders. And I'm not even talking about people who died because of tobacco (about 1,000,000) or alcohol (200,000). 3000 death by terrorists are really insignificant. You really should buy that clue.
For Christ's sake! Obviously, you're paranoid! Get a grip! Your mainland is not under attack!
Here's a question for you. Since 9/11 how many people died from terrorist attacks? And how many died from car accident? How can you value freedom so little that you're willing to give up any rights you have just to feel a bit safer.
Slashdot Mirror
You are a former literature major and you can't see the difference between an empty kiddy book and something like "The Stranger" ? You think Harry Potter and Brave New World is like Beethoven and Bach ? I think a better analogy would be Justin Timberlake and Beethoven.
The same way painting is not just about pretty colors, photography not just about pretty landscapes and smiling people, a good book is not just about a pretty story. At least, that's what my high school teachers were telling me.
If nobody hear you, your free speech is a worthless illusion. Free speech is not about the right to speak, but about the right to share ideas.
The US has far more protection for free speech than Europe. Yet, social and political debates are far more present in Europe than in the US. The best way to kill an idea is not to forbid someone to speak. You'll just draw attention to the idea. The best way do is simply make sure there is 250 others guys like him who says stupid things.
Anyway, I believe I must assume my ideas and who I am (look at my nickname). Honesty and integrity are more important to me than security.
We are talking about social networking sites in the US, not some political organization in China. Anonymity in this case is not about free speech, but about the "right" to not take responsibility for what we say. Personally, I find anonymity more of a problem as it is a major cause of pollution.
The government can already spy on our phone calls, on our e-mail and with cameras, by tracking where everybody go, the government will also be able to know with whom everyone speaks. Basically, we will lose the ability to communicate without the government knowing. How could we revolt against an abusing government if the government know we are organizing a revolt ?
Sooner of later, a small group of people WILL install a dictatorship, and because we won't be able to communicate privately between ourselves, we won't be able to do anything against it.
I know several people who are very thin, and yet don't do any physical activities. You don't become obese because you play video games, but simply because eat too much. Psychological problems, like being under too much stress, is what make you eat too much.
I believe there is a relationship between video games (and the implied : not doing enough physical activities) and being obese, but it's not a direct relationship. Physical activities release endorphin, which basically reduce the effect of stress (at least it does for me). Playing video games, even games that are very rewarding, won't even come close to what some running will do to your endorphin level. This means kids will find another way to raise their endorphin level (and calm down)... and a good way is food.
Of course they could also have sex and take cocaine, but I doubt their parents will agree.
I think it's the opposite. If you want to sell the next episode, you'd better make something good. Traditional $60 games are more a fire and forget kind of thing (and they are more and more buggy).
Freedom is not the ability to be a nice citizen, to obey the law and do whatever our kind government want us to do. It's the ability to do what other people, particularly the government, don't want us to do. If someone can have a record of all the places I went, of all the people I visited and of everything I said in a "public" places, then I simply lose this ability.
When you say that in a public place you are observed, you are simply wrong. In public places, I'm just a guy among others, and nobody cares. If someone in particular is observing me, I can choose to go somewhere else to not be observed.
Of course, all this is theory and to be honest I'm mostly a law abiding person and the fact that "the government" is observing me do not matter to me much. I could decide to become a "terrorist" if the law became to restrictive, but for now I think it's acceptable even though I think governments make too much laws to protect themselves.
There is one thing that disturb me though. It's not the "government" who is watching me, it's a person. What if one of the person monitoring those cameras is someone I know ? What if it's the bitter ex-boyfriend of a girl I just met. There was a story not so long ago in the newspaper about a bell employee who was recording every phone conversations of his ex-girlfriend. Do you think it's ok ?
You may have notice that I don't hide behind a nickname so you can guess that the camera doesn't disturb me too much. I guess what really disturb me is the fact that I can't watch the watcher.
What I was trying to say is "looking smooth" for someone may be "slideshow" for someone else. The original poster may have a better framerate than you and still thinks Oblivion is a slideshow. My personnal limit is 20 FPS. Type tdt from the console and look at your framerate (or use Fraps). Compared to other games with similar graphic quality, Oblivion is really bad.
As for attacking repair center techs, this was not my intention. But as you said yourself, "a lot of them are a+ certified morons". Don't try to show off, it makes you look like a fool. That's all.
BTW, as a lot of people here, I build my system myself, thank you. My clients buy Dell, not me. And it's AMD, not Intel.
And what do you mean by "runs like a charm" ? What is your framerate outdoor when fighting two or three NPC at the same time ? If there's a lot of foliage, rain at the same time and if the NPC casts spells I'd say that with your config you should get about 7 or 8 FPS (assuming you play on the default high setting). That's what I get and I have a better computer than you.
Oblivion has some serious performance problems.
BTW... I'm a computer consultant (for about 13 or 14 years now) so you don't impress me with your "I work in a computer repair center" (mainly because several times, some of my client's employees asked me if I could "repair" their computer AFTER they send it to a "computer repair center").
You think $65 is too much for a game ? I remember paying $40 to $45 CDN for my colecovision games. This means that from a constant dollar perspective, games prices were higher in 1980... and I won't talk about the quality of those games.
$65 US for a game is cheap.
You are right when you say that I should not type when I'm mad (and tired btw). But, hey! This is slashdot! It's not like it matters! (Yes, I'm doing a big wink right now).
The quality of a program do not depend on the language. I saw high quality, well written code in assembly and really crappy stuff in Ada. I agree that some language are more beautiful than others, but let's be honest, this sense of beauty is purely subjective.
As for maintainability and ability to add features, once again it depends more on the programmer than on the language used. A few times I was asked if I could take over the maintenance of a project (once in Pascal, others in C or C++). Each time I asked to see the source code, and each time I refused because there was not enough documentation. A well documented assembly program is as easy to maintain as any other well documented program written in a high level language... and a program without documentation is unmaintainable, no matter what language is used. I would agree that a program without documentation written in a high level language is far more readable than the same thing in assembly, but does it really matters? If the thing is more than a few thousand lines it's probably unmaintainable anyway.
Having said that, I will be honest and admit that most of the time I program in Ada. I still use assembly sometimes, but it's more for fun than for real work. But the reason I use Ada is not because of maintainability or the ability to add features. It's because most of the work I do now is the fire and forget kind of work. I have a problem, I need a program to do the job, and once the job is done, I forget everything about it. I don't expect to maintain it so my goal is to use a tool that allows me to write the fastest way possible. I don't care about quality or documentation. That's why I use Ada. The compiler get most of the errors and I don't have to be careful. And this is where high level languages really shine. Not in doing quality code, but rather in doing crappy code.
There is also another reason I don't write much assembly anymore. You need a lot of knowledge to code efficiently in assembly. And unfortunately, since I'm not a full time coder anymore, I can't afford the time to learn new architectures. To give you an idea, when I code for fun in assembly, most of the time it's for my C64 or Amiga emulator (yes it's nostalgia). I did learn the AMD64 architecture, but I think it sucks and I have no fun using this thing.
There are good reasons we don't use assembly anymore. But "quality, maintainability and ability to add features" are not part of those. From my experience, the real reason is it allows us to be lazy, do a sloppy job and rely on a compiler to do something that kind of work instead of quality code.
You say that a good knowledge of low-level programming is essential but you obviously don't know much about assembly. Writing a small program take a lot more time in assembly than in a high-level language. But for a complex programs, where you spend more time thinking about algorithms and data structures than typing, the difference is not that significant. For someone who knows what he's doing, it's not more difficult to write in assembly. It takes more time to type the code, but it's not more difficult.
As for compilers efficiency... disassemble a program and you will immediately see the difference between human made code and compiler code. Compilers still do a lot of stupid things. Those 8% performance gain you mentioned is if you compare a shitty assembly programmer with an extremely good C++ programmer. In reality, the difference is a lot higher than 8%.
Having said that, it's true that assembly is a bad choice for most projects. Only good programmers know assembly... And a good programmer cost a lot more than a guy who just got his diploma. From a business perspective, it's easier to hire two or three shitty programmers and tell one's client to get better hardware, than to hire a good programmer.
Also... Object programming has nothing to do with physical objects that need to be modelled. So not only you don't know assembly, but you don't understand what object programming is about. Please, tell me you're not a programmer.
(Sorry if I'm a little bit aggressive, but I'm in a bad mood today because of a moron and I'm beginning to be fed up with people who don't know squat but who pretend to know)
Wasn't Osama Bin Laden rich enough to have a 4 bedroom house, 2 Mercedes and a BMW ?
How can this be a simple mistake ? It's like a human resources manager who ask a female candidate if she would agree to sleep with him during the interview and then say "sorry, I didn't know I shouldn't ask that, my mistake".
If the guys couldn't understand that it's abusing their power than they are incompetent (I really mean complete morons) and they should not have the job. And if they knew they were abusing their power than they obviously should not have it. Either way, they MUST be fired. Their only defense is if they receive the order to do such things. In that case, it's their superiors who should lose their job.
If the two guys are fired then I agree. If not, then it probably means they have at least the implicit approbation of their superiors.
As for the Bush administritation, they just have to create the climate . They certainly won't give every orders. Do you really think Hitler did everything all by himself ? There was a lot of local initiative like this one in Germany in the 1930.
And guess what... The Bush administration did create the climate for such things to happen. So yes it's related to Bush, Ashcroft and all the others.
The majority of people in Canada live in cities and the most important of them are near the US border, true. But it is also true that the majority of people in the US also live in cities where the density population is the same as in Canada.
The density population argument is bull. The real reason is price and the fact that some companies in the US abuse their monopoly without regulation to make an awful lot of profit.
Do you really think I wanted to impress people ? Do you really think I'm proud that I was able to kill someone without hesitation ?
I know I'm lucky that I never had to kill anyone and I'm strongly against war.
But back to the point. I agree that a significant percentage of soldiers still don't shoot at the enemy. But this is still a minority. And a lot of those who don't shoot, don't do it because they are paralysed with fear of dying, not fear of killing. A video game will never change that.
This is a question I asked myself several times when I did my training and the answer, to my surprise, was always yes. And again, no hesitation. You may think I just brag, but the thing is, even if I'm not ashamed of it, I'm certainly not proud of it either. I guess I may sound crazy to someone who never had military training, but this is what military training is about. It's not only about using a weapon and running, but also about changing how you view the world around you. It took me about one year after my military service to become "normal" again (by normal I mean not viewing civilians as worthless pieces of shit).
I ended my military service 8 years ago, and even now, my views are still... let's say shocking for some people. For example, I don't think that killing a 12 year old boy (or girl) is worse than killing an adult. Particularly because a 12 year old boy is certainly less predictable than an adult. I also don't have a lot of problems with a soldier raping a woman. I do think he should be punished, but more for a lack of discipline than for the rape. Let's just say that being under fire by a 12mm machine gun is kind of stressful and I can understand a soldier who decide to relieve some of that stress (no, it never happened to me, but I saw what this kind of weapon can do and it's really not difficult to imagine how someone could feel in that situation).
Having said that, I must add one thing. I am against war. And most people I knew who would kill a 12 year old kid without hesitation were also strongly against war.
Now that I think of it, video games are probably a very bad idea for soldiers. Killing should be a duty, but it should never be fun. I fear that in a few years, instead of disciplined soldiers we may end up with a bunch of trigger happy who shoot everything.
Sorry, but that's bullshit. I did two years of military services. From the beginning we shot on human looking targets and nobody had a problem with that. And a few days after our first target practice we went straight for exercises with practice ammo (not sure if it's called like that in english but, if not, you can guess what I'm talking about) and nobody had a problem with "shooting" other people. We even threw fake grenade (the kind that covers you with white stuff) and we had a lot of fun doing it.
From the beginning our training was about dying and killing. The songs we sang and a lot of what we learned in our training was about that. And you know what ? With sleep deprivation, this kind of training work pretty well. I never had to shot someone, but I know that in a combat situation I would have done it without hesitation. And except for a few who were against violence, everyone was like me.
So this "hardest thing was to get people to pull the trigger" is plain bullshit.
I wonder one thing... is this game thing really for training or simply to get people to join the army ?
I can't understand why there is so many posts saying that eye candy are not important. For people who can't judge the internal quality of a software, how it looks is what tell them if it's good or not. You can't impress a PHB with some C code, but you can sure impress him with a lot of eye candy. I need this very badly to be able to "sell" linux to my client as a desktop and I need it BEFORE Microsoft do it.
Nothing is free. You pay for WMP. The problem is not that Microsoft sells a bundle, but the fact that you cannot buy the operating system without also buying their other products.
What would you say if, when you buy a car, the dealer tells you that you'll also have to buy gas from the dealer directly? What would you say if he then tells you that if you decide to buy gas from someone else, you'll have to pay him anyway?
Of course, if Windows was not a monopoly, nobody would care. But even though some small niche market exist, Windows is a monopoly in the general desktop computing market.
You have to remember one thing : the day capitalism will allow monopolies to do whatever they want, you'll end up with communism. The only difference is there will be a "company" instead of a "party".
If you surrender to the police after killing someone and if you say you are guilty, then your jail time will be shorter. That's a fact.
As I said, the main idea behind jail is dissuasion (not punishment). So chances of getting caught SHOULD enter into it. If your chances of being caught are slim, then dissuasion will work only if the punishment is important. You may not agree with this, but I do and that's how things work.
The main idea behind jail time is dissuasion. If your chances of getting away with your crime are higher, than sentences should be longer. It's easier to catch a guy who breaks into a house, than a guy who access a wireless network from somewhere.
Thinking that terrorists are a serious threat to your life only shows your lack of judgement.
Since 9/11, approx. 120,000 died in car accidents; 60,000 died from the common flu; 50,000 died by murders. And I'm not even talking about people who died because of tobacco (about 1,000,000) or alcohol (200,000). 3000 death by terrorists are really insignificant. You really should buy that clue.
For Christ's sake! Obviously, you're paranoid! Get a grip! Your mainland is not under attack!
Here's a question for you. Since 9/11 how many people died from terrorist attacks? And how many died from car accident? How can you value freedom so little that you're willing to give up any rights you have just to feel a bit safer.