"No, it doesn't. You're assuming a perfect "free market" with perfect competition. The oil market is nothing like that. There will always be a need for oil at ANY price. Just like some people will smoke at ANY price/cigarette."
Bul*cough*hit. There is people that will buy the same amount of oil at 50% higher prices and there is always someone who will still smoke at 50% higher prices, but the average consumption is society clearly goes down.
Europe has far higher petrol prices than the US and consequently "fuel economy" is one of the first things people ask about with regards to purchasing a car. We have grown so accustomed to high fuel prices that many would consider the US prices to be ludicrously cheap (3-3.5 USD per US gallon compared to ~ 8 USD per US gallon in the UK).
The European miles per gallon average for cars is consequently far, far higher than the US. The typical numbers given are 37 mpg for the EU and 25 mpg for the US.
Typically it costs more to make a car more efficient (4-6% price increase for 40-70% increase in MPG), but as the fuel prices increase, it becomes sensible to spend more on making the car more efficient.
Also, people clearly drive less on average with higher prices. Lots of people commute over 60 miles per day currently in Britain.
I personally commute about 70 miles per day in total. This costs me about £7 per day in diesel alone. At about 200 working days per year this costs me about £1400 per year in petrol alone (not to mention insurance, maintenance and car depreciation).
This takes a large chunk out of my wages, so I decided to look for car sharing, and consequently I save about £600 per year in fuel alone. If the diesel prices had been half of what they are, I probably wouldn't have bothered.
On the other hand, if the prices increase by 50% I would still keep my car, but overall I would change jobs to live closer to home. The extra money I would get after deducting travelling expenses simply wouldn't be worth spending 1.5 hours per day travelling for. I actually think we are approaching this stage now. Consequently I would drive considerably less.
Do I bitch about the fuel prices sometimes? Yes, now and then.
Do I curse the government for "stealing my hard earned money"? No. I think higher fuel prices are inevitable given the situation we have put ourselves in with regards to the environment.
"Solar cannot replace Coal. It's completely unsuitable for supplying base-load power because it only works half the time (at best)."
There is no need for one source to replace coal. Multiple sources is fine. Solar, wind, geothermal, tidal wave and yes, some nuclear. You put the four first wherever they work best and you put the nuclear in some remote locations to provide some stability and extra oomph to the whole system. Hell, you can even toss in a bit of oil and coal power. As long as it is considerably reduced the impact to the environment should be minimal and the supply should last for the forseeable future.
You also work at reducing the total power consumption. Provide incentives for greener products, distribution mechanisms and ways to travel and subsidise these by higher taxes on power hungry products, distribution mechanisms etc...
Not everyone can replace their cars with electric ones at the moment, so put in a bit more investments to make this possible. There is already a fair few cars that can be replaced, so you provide incentives to help this happen.
There is no magic bullet, just lots and lots of little pieces to the jigsaw.
"There are currently experiments in geothermal electricity production being conducted a few hundred kilometres away from the mine which could possibly power it."
Excuse my ignorance, but if the mine requires 75% of the current total energy output of South Australia to operate and they are looking at geothermal electricity production to power it, why don't they simply just use the geothermal power directly and cut out the middle man (nuclear power)?
"When you buy photographic portraits from professional photographers you get prints of them. If you want more copies you must buy them from the photographer. If you copy them and try to print them you are violating copyright law."
IANAL, but it depends on whether you hired the photographer to take pictures or whether you are just buying photographs the photographer has taken.
I know lots of wedding photographers would claim to own the copyright to your wedding pictures, but unless there is a proper contract this may not be the case (in many countries anyway, YMMV). This is because it is considered "work for hire".
It is for the same reason that all the code you have created for your company as part of your job is the company's IP, not yours, unless otherwise is specified by contract. This is equally true if you are a contracter working for said company.
The wedding photographer is basically your contracter, and all the photographs taken during your wedding is thus your IP unless you have a contract that says otherwise.
Personally I'm not that fuzzed unless he starts getting cranky about me copying the photos myself.
1. None of those images where a company or product logo. This makes them irrelevant for this dicussion.
2. I never said the apple was "lifted" from Apple. I said it was inspired.
Of course apples have leaves, but it unnecessary to add a leaf to a two-dimensional drawing of an apple to make it look like an apple. This is clearly the case, remove the leaf and everyone will still see it is an apple.
Furthermore, NYC added a drop-shaped single colour leaf extending approximately 45 degrees from the stem. This was an unnecessary design decision that only served to make the logo look more like the Apple computer logo.
As a graphical artist it is virtually impossible that he was unaware of the Apple logo. In fact, it is quite likely that he was staring at an Apple logo on the very computer and screen he was designing the logo on.
He could have made a myriad of design choices that would make the logo look nothing like the Apple computer logo. People would not necessarily think of Apple computer when shown a picture of an Apple, but if shown the picture of the NYC logo, it is quite likely they would.
1. I can't see if any of these apples are company logos. They look more like photographs or clip art to me.
2. Only the first one of these is a two-dimensional depiction of an apple like the Apple logo. All the others are either photographs or drawn to look like actual apples.
3. The leaf used in the only image slightly resembling Apple Computers logo is not drop shaped and it is not a single colour.
In fact, I question if you even understand this issue at all if you include photographs of apples as some kind of argument. Nobody said that Apple has a monopoly on pictures of apples.
The question is simple: should another company be allowed to trade mark a two-dimensional drawn, "non-natural looking" outline of an apple with a single colour, non attached, drop shaped leaf extending 45 degrees from the stem, as their company logo?
As someone else here said, all of the images you included are much less similar than the NYC and Apple logos in question.
Come on. Saying they are nothing alike is just as biased as saying they are identical.
In particular the leaf gives immediate associations with Apple Computers. Just because it is mirrored to extend to the left instead of the right doesn't mean it isn't inspired by the Apple logo. The leaf is drop shaped, extending approximately 45 degrees and it is even detached from the body of the apple, just like in the Apple logo.
The leaf is completely unnecessary to make it look like an apple, and it was completely unnecessary to make the leaf detached from the shape of the body (hell, no real apple actually looks like that)
Personally I don't agree with Apple in this case, but it should be easy enough to see their point. The graphical artist (probably out of laziness) made some design decisions that area clearly inspired by the Apple logo.
First, I don't believe Apple should get their way here, because they are not nearly in the same business, so the similarities in the logo isn't that important.. but these logos are clearly alike in many other ways than simply depicting an Apple.
1. They both are purely TWO-dimensional depictions of an apple. 2. The shapes are matching far more than what is necessary to make it look like an apple. 3. Both apples have a leaf attached to them, where the NYC one is almost an exact mirror.
In particular the leaf is clearly unnecessary to make it look like an apple and makes the logo look like it is clearly inspired by Apple's logo. Saying they are 'nothing alike' is just bullcrap. If I was to guess, this was a result of a slightly lazy and uninventive graphical artist.
Still, given that NYC is known as the Big Apple, the logos are used for wildly different purposes I'd say the logos are different enough to be ok.
But: Apple has not sued, they are simply opposing NYC getting the trade mark registered. I think it should be easy to see Apple's point even if you don't agree with them.
"What about the last administration and it's wagging the dog wars in Somalia and Kosovo - where there was NO US interest at all let alone oil interests?"
So if there had been oil interest, that would have made it better? At least the Kosovo war was well supported by the US allies. The Afghanistan war was pretty well supported, and the Iraq war was strongly opposed by many, many close allies of the US.
And even though Kosovo was a NATO and not a UN action, the UN helped pick up the pieces afterwards.
Even though there was some annoyed mumblings from Russia (as a traditional ally of Serbia), the Kosovo war was uncontroversial in comparison to Iraq.
Yes, it clearly wasn't as black and white as "Serbia evil, everyone else good", but overall stability seemed to improve in Europe after it.
I find it rather hard to compare Kosovo with Iraq at present.
Exactly! Who holds the pursestrings here?? Congress!
Bush may have made a series of stupid mistakes, but Congress didn't need to ENABLE his mistakes by continuing to fund them long after it became evident that we were throwing good money after bad! I'm sorry, but they had to do exactly this. Going into the war in the first place was a mistake, just suddenly pulling out would be a disaster.
And simply reducing funding to the war when it obviously isn't going well would just put many, many more service men in terrible danger as underfunded and under staffed cannon fodder.
And I'm not even American, I have no particular love for the American soldiers other than a general concern for my fellow man.
I strongly opposed the war, but now that you are there I can't see any option but for the US to finish what you started.
"But criticism is opinion, and violates the neutral POV."
And awards are just opinion given with a shiny metal/glass/whatnot object. Referencing criticism, as well as praise does NOT violate neutral POV. The crucial thing is that a neutral POV stipulates that you report things with references, but you do not make judgements. In fact, if you only reference the good and not the bad, you are violating NPOV. The same goes for the opposite case of course.
For instance this does not violate NPOV: "On the third of July 2007, Washington Post reported that XXXX was having a sexual relationship with YYYY. XXXX has so far refused to comment on the allegations"
This does violate it: "On the third of July 2007, Washington Post reported that XXXX was having a sexual relationship with YYYY. XXXX has so far refused to comment on the allegations, but we all know what the truth is"
Having browsed through the Hillary Clinton page today I can't help feeling that the article has been vacuumed clean of any real criticism against her. One thing is removing obvious vandalism, but has Schilling (or someone else) gone too far in removing any reasonable criticism of Hillary?
1. Where is the mention of her being criticised for taking lobbyist money? 2. Where is the mention of critisism for her "exaggerating" her own stories for dramatic effect?
These are just two issues I can list at the top of my head which are completely missing from the article. Instead there is ample reference to awards she has been given.
As far as I know, Schilling has no official authority at Wikipedia and at the moment just acts as a self-appointed dictator that spends so much time on it that he manages to keep it "clean". When this happens, it is only fair to question whether he actually has an overly censoring position with regards to this article.
He could have a Toyota sports car from 1992 and be very enthusiastic about it you know. Plenty of people would rather spend loads of money on their old MR2 than buy a new car.
Personally that's not my cup of tea, but it is pretty ignorant to label him as some kind of cheap moron and it is pretty daft to think that a top level manager at Microsoft is somehow a poor man.
"People did not die just because old fashioned paper/pencil was used. Companies were not incompetent just because they had to do things without computers."
No, but it took many years for these companies to switch from old fashioned paper/pencil to an Internet based infrastructure. Literally years of mindset changes, development, procedural chances and investments.
What makes you think that they would be able to switch back to paper/pencil in just a few days if the Internet suddenly 'disappeared'?
"Those are fundamental flaws of Windows, not PCs. Don't blame the hardware manufacturers for Microsoft's blunders."
Please.... you can't blame Microsoft for everything. It isn't Microsoft's fault that ATI has shoddy drivers. It isn't Microsoft's fault when two hardware manufacturers implement a spec subtly differently so that the system crashes if you combine the two pieces of hardware in one system. It isn't Microsoft's fault when a hardware manufacturer releases a firmware update that fixes a bug which some other manufacturer actually depends on as a 'feature'.
The number of different combinations you have to test to cater for every possibility is simply staggering, so the best you can do is to test the most likely combinations and hope that most follow the specs so well that this works for most people.
There are plenty of casual game companies that are cashing in on this already. Devs like Epic and id are as much about showcasing their technology as they are about games so his comments are pretty reasonable from his perspective. That being said, I have a feeling the hardcore pc gamers are the suckers in the crowd. Their preferred platform is more and more going to be home to games like Bejeweled at the low-end and games like Crysis at the high-end with very little middle ground. It will be interesting to see how long the hardcore will holdout; is quint SLI/Crossfire too much to swallow? I understand that Epic and Id wants to show off their technology since they sell engines as well as end-user games, but surely it would make them more money if their engine allowed people with integrated graphics to play the games, even if it meant heavily reduced graphics?
Games like bejeweled are all well and good, but I think the industry is missing out on revenue by ignoring this middle ground you mention. A PC is in many ways much easier to justify spending money on than a console, because it is multi-purpose and can be used for work as well as play. Thus there will probably be a lot of new family PCs sold to homes for a long time coming which leaves a market void between 'bejeweled' and 'crysis'.
"No. They want to sell one game on as many platforms as possible. At the moment it seems like PC game devs and graphics card manufacturers are just trying hard to show that they can do better than those "next-gen" consoles while the rest of the world apparently doesn't give a crap (except for those PC gaming nerds getting big powerful... just watch that Zero Punctuation video about Crysis)."
I have a hard time seeing what you are arguing against. I see no conflict in what you are saying with my post. Wanting to sell the game on as many platforms as possible already makes it imperative that you make the game engine flexible. Two platforms are not going to have the same capabilities, so you have to make your game capable on running on different specs. Thus this is hardly counter to the notion of scaling down the graphics for less powerful PCs.
"At the moment it seems like PC game devs and graphics card manufacturers are just trying hard to show that they can do better than those "next-gen" consoles while the rest of the world apparently doesn't give a crap".
This is pretty much exactly what I was saying. I don't think there is anything wrong with having great graphics and I understand that it isn't much fun to scale a game down and test it with hardware they consider to be sub-standard, but if they lose sales because most PCs can't play them, then I think they have only themselves to blame.
You can never agree on everything, so you have to decide whether your partner's beliefs are something you can live with or not. You may think you can live with their irrational and downright stupid beliefs, but even if you do, there is a strong chance that he/she can't live with your disrespect for those beliefs. Nobody wants to be made to feel stupid. If the conflicting issue is a minor stupidity that you can't respect (i.e. she loves vi/vim), then you can probably live with it. If it is a major issue, you should probably consider it carefully.
A partner with a strong, unmovable belief in astrology is likely to annoy the hell out of people with a scientific mindset, because astrology makes testable predictions about real life and can thus be proven wrong (and as far as I'm concerned already have been). If my wife still believed it in when confronted with the evidence, I would consider it downright stupid and I would have a hard time respecting her, something which would seriously hurt our relationship.
When it comes to 'spirituality' it becomes more difficult to say. When I met my wife, she was a catholic from birth and I was an atheist. I had no problems with her beliefs because her religion, as a general rule, did not put out testable predictions that could be disproved. Thus I saw no conflict between her beliefs and my scientific nature. I didn't consider her beliefs 'irrational' or 'stupid' and so had no problems respecting her beliefs. From her point of view, she was also a scientist and had no problems respecting my atheism.
If any of us didn't respect the other one, we would not have lasted long. An example would be if she had been a "young earth Christian" and believed the world is less than 10000 years old. There is a mountain of evidence to the contrary and while I can't disprove that God made it look like the world is billions of years old to 'test us', I have no time for this idea. Also, I have little respect for people that try to mix religion and science. I.e. try to pass of religious ideas as scientific (think creationism or 'intelligent design').
These days we are both Christians although I really don't want to be associated with the 'born again' loons.
If 90% of all PC's sold can't play 90% of the games sold, who's fault is this? Is it the hardware manufacturers that sell people PCs at a reasonable price, or the game manufacturers who target hardware only found in 10% of PCs? Even if only 1/9th of all the people buying low-end PCs wanted to buy games, that would still double the target market (and that is assuming that all of the people buying "capable" machines want to buy games).
Games manufacturers could easily start to target the 90% instead if they wanted to increase their market. Even an Intel GMA 950 (which is in an awful lot of PCs and laptops) should be capable of playing 3D games if the graphics are scaled down properly.
Personally I think a lot of games manufacturers are pissing away the chance for a large increase in their sales, by being way too '1337'. They want to show off their game, and they want to make it look super slick, which is fair enough... but don't come complaining if this rules the game out for a large part of the market.
Correction. According to the article you reference, they are the number 2 music retailer, full stop. The are the clear number one in the online market, they just also happen to be so big that they have surpassed all the traditional retailers except Wal-Mart.
Your conclusions are surely right, however. I'm convinced that the notion that the iTunes store is a loss-leader for iPods is a myth or at best outdated information. The iTunes store surely makes money on it's own at this stage.
The bad thing is used everywhere in the media; namely that it is easier for a sexual predator to get in touch with children without being seen.
The good thing is hardly ever mention in the media; namely that the online world is just that: the online world. In order to molest the child, the sexual predator has to move the interaction over to the real world. So essentially, there is a buffer between the child and the pedophile that the pedophile has to overcome and if the child acts in a sensible manner, there is virtually no risk of ending up molested due to Internet encounters.
Of course, children do not always act sensibly (hell, adults do not always act sensibly), so the risk is always there. The risk, can however be minimised to such an extent that it is negligible by combining adult supervision and both child and adult education.
Should we now close all public pools to underage kids in the name of "save the children"? This is somewhat of a straw-man argument. Very few people think that we should "close the internet" to save the children. In the case of a public pool one could make decent arguments for having separate "adult" and "parent/child" dressing rooms. This may not be necessary and it may be expensive and impractical, but it isn't impossible to achieve.
In the case of the Internet, such measures really are impossible to achieve. I.e. how do you check the age of participants in chat rooms, on Facebook, etc? Also, here both parties have a tendency to lie about their age.
"The *ONLY* advantage Blu-Ray had was more disc space....."
This is not true. Blu-ray also has the advantage of being a good excuse I can tell my wife for getting a PS3.
Since Microsoft wasn't ballsy enough to release an Xbox 360 with a built-in HD-DVD player it is much harder for me to justify spending our money on one.
"All other Blu-Ray lite (tm) Profile 1.x devices (which means everything else) are as good as a motherboard with ISA slots. Doesn't matter if that motherboard has a 3 trillion Ghz CPU on it if it only works with last year's (okay, decade's) stuff."
That is just bullsh*t. The motherboard with ISA slots is completely useless, the older Blu-Ray players will still play the new Blu-ray discs, they just won't do the extras.
Yes, losing out on the extras is annoying and crap, but playing the f*cking film is the most important thing, and they will still do that.
Slashdot Mirror
"No, it doesn't. You're assuming a perfect "free market" with perfect competition. The oil market is nothing like that. There will always be a need for oil at ANY price. Just like some people will smoke at ANY price/cigarette."
Bul*cough*hit. There is people that will buy the same amount of oil at 50% higher prices and there is always someone who will still smoke at 50% higher prices, but the average consumption is society clearly goes down.
Europe has far higher petrol prices than the US and consequently "fuel economy" is one of the first things people ask about with regards to purchasing a car. We have grown so accustomed to high fuel prices that many would consider the US prices to be ludicrously cheap (3-3.5 USD per US gallon compared to ~ 8 USD per US gallon in the UK).
The European miles per gallon average for cars is consequently far, far higher than the US. The typical numbers given are 37 mpg for the EU and 25 mpg for the US.
Typically it costs more to make a car more efficient (4-6% price increase for 40-70% increase in MPG), but as the fuel prices increase, it becomes sensible to spend more on making the car more efficient.
Also, people clearly drive less on average with higher prices. Lots of people commute over 60 miles per day currently in Britain.
I personally commute about 70 miles per day in total. This costs me about £7 per day in diesel alone. At about 200 working days per year this costs me about £1400 per year in petrol alone (not to mention insurance, maintenance and car depreciation).
This takes a large chunk out of my wages, so I decided to look for car sharing, and consequently I save about £600 per year in fuel alone. If the diesel prices had been half of what they are, I probably wouldn't have bothered.
On the other hand, if the prices increase by 50% I would still keep my car, but overall I would change jobs to live closer to home. The extra money I would get after deducting travelling expenses simply wouldn't be worth spending 1.5 hours per day travelling for. I actually think we are approaching this stage now. Consequently I would drive considerably less.
Do I bitch about the fuel prices sometimes? Yes, now and then.
Do I curse the government for "stealing my hard earned money"? No. I think higher fuel prices are inevitable given the situation we have put ourselves in with regards to the environment.
"Solar cannot replace Coal. It's completely unsuitable for supplying base-load power because it only works half the time (at best)."
There is no need for one source to replace coal. Multiple sources is fine. Solar, wind, geothermal, tidal wave and yes, some nuclear. You put the four first wherever they work best and you put the nuclear in some remote locations to provide some stability and extra oomph to the whole system. Hell, you can even toss in a bit of oil and coal power. As long as it is considerably reduced the impact to the environment should be minimal and the supply should last for the forseeable future.
You also work at reducing the total power consumption. Provide incentives for greener products, distribution mechanisms and ways to travel and subsidise these by higher taxes on power hungry products, distribution mechanisms etc...
Not everyone can replace their cars with electric ones at the moment, so put in a bit more investments to make this possible. There is already a fair few cars that can be replaced, so you provide incentives to help this happen.
There is no magic bullet, just lots and lots of little pieces to the jigsaw.
"There are currently experiments in geothermal electricity production being conducted a few hundred kilometres away from the mine which could possibly power it."
Excuse my ignorance, but if the mine requires 75% of the current total energy output of South Australia to operate and they are looking at geothermal electricity production to power it, why don't they simply just use the geothermal power directly and cut out the middle man (nuclear power)?
"When you buy photographic portraits from professional photographers you get prints of them. If you want more copies you must buy them from the photographer. If you copy them and try to print them you are violating copyright law."
IANAL, but it depends on whether you hired the photographer to take pictures or whether you are just buying photographs the photographer has taken.
I know lots of wedding photographers would claim to own the copyright to your wedding pictures, but unless there is a proper contract this may not be the case (in many countries anyway, YMMV). This is because it is considered "work for hire".
It is for the same reason that all the code you have created for your company as part of your job is the company's IP, not yours, unless otherwise is specified by contract. This is equally true if you are a contracter working for said company.
The wedding photographer is basically your contracter, and all the photographs taken during your wedding is thus your IP unless you have a contract that says otherwise.
Personally I'm not that fuzzed unless he starts getting cranky about me copying the photos myself.
That surely can't be it?
What about insurance, road tax, license plates, etc? It can't possibly be legal to drive on public roads.
1. None of those images where a company or product logo. This makes them irrelevant for this dicussion.
2. I never said the apple was "lifted" from Apple. I said it was inspired.
Of course apples have leaves, but it unnecessary to add a leaf to a two-dimensional drawing of an apple to make it look like an apple. This is clearly the case, remove the leaf and everyone will still see it is an apple.
Furthermore, NYC added a drop-shaped single colour leaf extending approximately 45 degrees from the stem. This was an unnecessary design decision that only served to make the logo look more like the Apple computer logo.
As a graphical artist it is virtually impossible that he was unaware of the Apple logo. In fact, it is quite likely that he was staring at an Apple logo on the very computer and screen he was designing the logo on.
He could have made a myriad of design choices that would make the logo look nothing like the Apple computer logo. People would not necessarily think of Apple computer when shown a picture of an Apple, but if shown the picture of the NYC logo, it is quite likely they would.
1. I can't see if any of these apples are company logos. They look more like photographs or clip art to me.
2. Only the first one of these is a two-dimensional depiction of an apple like the Apple logo. All the others are either photographs or drawn to look like actual apples.
3. The leaf used in the only image slightly resembling Apple Computers logo is not drop shaped and it is not a single colour.
In fact, I question if you even understand this issue at all if you include photographs of apples as some kind of argument. Nobody said that Apple has a monopoly on pictures of apples.
The question is simple: should another company be allowed to trade mark a two-dimensional drawn, "non-natural looking" outline of an apple with a single colour, non attached, drop shaped leaf extending 45 degrees from the stem, as their company logo?
As someone else here said, all of the images you included are much less similar than the NYC and Apple logos in question.
Come on. Saying they are nothing alike is just as biased as saying they are identical.
In particular the leaf gives immediate associations with Apple Computers. Just because it is mirrored to extend to the left instead of the right doesn't mean it isn't inspired by the Apple logo. The leaf is drop shaped, extending approximately 45 degrees and it is even detached from the body of the apple, just like in the Apple logo.
The leaf is completely unnecessary to make it look like an apple, and it was completely unnecessary to make the leaf detached from the shape of the body (hell, no real apple actually looks like that)
Personally I don't agree with Apple in this case, but it should be easy enough to see their point. The graphical artist (probably out of laziness) made some design decisions that area clearly inspired by the Apple logo.
First, I don't believe Apple should get their way here, because they are not nearly in the same business, so the similarities in the logo isn't that important.. but these logos are clearly alike in many other ways than simply depicting an Apple.
1. They both are purely TWO-dimensional depictions of an apple.
2. The shapes are matching far more than what is necessary to make it look like an apple.
3. Both apples have a leaf attached to them, where the NYC one is almost an exact mirror.
In particular the leaf is clearly unnecessary to make it look like an apple and makes the logo look like it is clearly inspired by Apple's logo. Saying they are 'nothing alike' is just bullcrap. If I was to guess, this was a result of a slightly lazy and uninventive graphical artist.
Still, given that NYC is known as the Big Apple, the logos are used for wildly different purposes I'd say the logos are different enough to be ok.
But: Apple has not sued, they are simply opposing NYC getting the trade mark registered. I think it should be easy to see Apple's point even if you don't agree with them.
"What about the last administration and it's wagging the dog wars in Somalia and Kosovo - where there was NO US interest at all let alone oil interests?"
So if there had been oil interest, that would have made it better?
At least the Kosovo war was well supported by the US allies. The Afghanistan war was pretty well supported, and the Iraq war was strongly opposed by many, many close allies of the US.
And even though Kosovo was a NATO and not a UN action, the UN helped pick up the pieces afterwards.
Even though there was some annoyed mumblings from Russia (as a traditional ally of Serbia), the Kosovo war was uncontroversial in comparison to Iraq.
Yes, it clearly wasn't as black and white as "Serbia evil, everyone else good", but overall stability seemed to improve in Europe after it.
I find it rather hard to compare Kosovo with Iraq at present.
Bush may have made a series of stupid mistakes, but Congress didn't need to ENABLE his mistakes by continuing to fund them long after it became evident that we were throwing good money after bad! I'm sorry, but they had to do exactly this. Going into the war in the first place was a mistake, just suddenly pulling out would be a disaster.
And simply reducing funding to the war when it obviously isn't going well would just put many, many more service men in terrible danger as underfunded and under staffed cannon fodder.
And I'm not even American, I have no particular love for the American soldiers other than a general concern for my fellow man.
I strongly opposed the war, but now that you are there I can't see any option but for the US to finish what you started.
"But criticism is opinion, and violates the neutral POV."
And awards are just opinion given with a shiny metal/glass/whatnot object. Referencing criticism, as well as praise does NOT violate neutral POV. The crucial thing is that a neutral POV stipulates that you report things with references, but you do not make judgements. In fact, if you only reference the good and not the bad, you are violating NPOV. The same goes for the opposite case of course.
For instance this does not violate NPOV:
"On the third of July 2007, Washington Post reported that XXXX was having a sexual relationship with YYYY. XXXX has so far refused to comment on the allegations"
This does violate it:
"On the third of July 2007, Washington Post reported that XXXX was having a sexual relationship with YYYY. XXXX has so far refused to comment on the allegations, but we all know what the truth is"
Having browsed through the Hillary Clinton page today I can't help feeling that the article has been vacuumed clean of any real criticism against her. One thing is removing obvious vandalism, but has Schilling (or someone else) gone too far in removing any reasonable criticism of Hillary?
1. Where is the mention of her being criticised for taking lobbyist money?
2. Where is the mention of critisism for her "exaggerating" her own stories for dramatic effect?
These are just two issues I can list at the top of my head which are completely missing from the article. Instead there is ample reference to awards she has been given.
As far as I know, Schilling has no official authority at Wikipedia and at the moment just acts as a self-appointed dictator that spends so much time on it that he manages to keep it "clean". When this happens, it is only fair to question whether he actually has an overly censoring position with regards to this article.
He could have a Toyota sports car from 1992 and be very enthusiastic about it you know. Plenty of people would rather spend loads of money on their old MR2 than buy a new car.
Personally that's not my cup of tea, but it is pretty ignorant to label him as some kind of cheap moron and it is pretty daft to think that a top level manager at Microsoft is somehow a poor man.
"People did not die just because old fashioned paper/pencil was used. Companies were not incompetent just because they had to do things without computers."
No, but it took many years for these companies to switch from old fashioned paper/pencil to an Internet based infrastructure. Literally years of mindset changes, development, procedural chances and investments.
What makes you think that they would be able to switch back to paper/pencil in just a few days if the Internet suddenly 'disappeared'?
"Those are fundamental flaws of Windows, not PCs. Don't blame the hardware manufacturers for Microsoft's blunders."
Please.... you can't blame Microsoft for everything. It isn't Microsoft's fault that ATI has shoddy drivers. It isn't Microsoft's fault when two hardware manufacturers implement a spec subtly differently so that the system crashes if you combine the two pieces of hardware in one system. It isn't Microsoft's fault when a hardware manufacturer releases a firmware update that fixes a bug which some other manufacturer actually depends on as a 'feature'.
The number of different combinations you have to test to cater for every possibility is simply staggering, so the best you can do is to test the most likely combinations and hope that most follow the specs so well that this works for most people.
Games like bejeweled are all well and good, but I think the industry is missing out on revenue by ignoring this middle ground you mention. A PC is in many ways much easier to justify spending money on than a console, because it is multi-purpose and can be used for work as well as play. Thus there will probably be a lot of new family PCs sold to homes for a long time coming which leaves a market void between 'bejeweled' and 'crysis'.
"No. They want to sell one game on as many platforms as possible. At the moment it seems like PC game devs and graphics card manufacturers are just trying hard to show that they can do better than those "next-gen" consoles while the rest of the world apparently doesn't give a crap (except for those PC gaming nerds getting big powerful ... just watch that Zero Punctuation video about Crysis)."
I have a hard time seeing what you are arguing against. I see no conflict in what you are saying with my post. Wanting to sell the game on as many platforms as possible already makes it imperative that you make the game engine flexible. Two platforms are not going to have the same capabilities, so you have to make your game capable on running on different specs. Thus this is hardly counter to the notion of scaling down the graphics for less powerful PCs.
"At the moment it seems like PC game devs and graphics card manufacturers are just trying hard to show that they can do better than those "next-gen" consoles while the rest of the world apparently doesn't give a crap".
This is pretty much exactly what I was saying. I don't think there is anything wrong with having great graphics and I understand that it isn't much fun to scale a game down and test it with hardware they consider to be sub-standard, but if they lose sales because most PCs can't play them, then I think they have only themselves to blame.
You can never agree on everything, so you have to decide whether your partner's beliefs are something you can live with or not. You may think you can live with their irrational and downright stupid beliefs, but even if you do, there is a strong chance that he/she can't live with your disrespect for those beliefs. Nobody wants to be made to feel stupid. If the conflicting issue is a minor stupidity that you can't respect (i.e. she loves vi/vim), then you can probably live with it. If it is a major issue, you should probably consider it carefully.
A partner with a strong, unmovable belief in astrology is likely to annoy the hell out of people with a scientific mindset, because astrology makes testable predictions about real life and can thus be proven wrong (and as far as I'm concerned already have been). If my wife still believed it in when confronted with the evidence, I would consider it downright stupid and I would have a hard time respecting her, something which would seriously hurt our relationship.
When it comes to 'spirituality' it becomes more difficult to say. When I met my wife, she was a catholic from birth and I was an atheist. I had no problems with her beliefs because her religion, as a general rule, did not put out testable predictions that could be disproved. Thus I saw no conflict between her beliefs and my scientific nature. I didn't consider her beliefs 'irrational' or 'stupid' and so had no problems respecting her beliefs. From her point of view, she was also a scientist and had no problems respecting my atheism.
If any of us didn't respect the other one, we would not have lasted long. An example would be if she had been a "young earth Christian" and believed the world is less than 10000 years old. There is a mountain of evidence to the contrary and while I can't disprove that God made it look like the world is billions of years old to 'test us', I have no time for this idea. Also, I have little respect for people that try to mix religion and science. I.e. try to pass of religious ideas as scientific (think creationism or 'intelligent design').
These days we are both Christians although I really don't want to be associated with the 'born again' loons.
If 90% of all PC's sold can't play 90% of the games sold, who's fault is this? Is it the hardware manufacturers that sell people PCs at a reasonable price, or the game manufacturers who target hardware only found in 10% of PCs? Even if only 1/9th of all the people buying low-end PCs wanted to buy games, that would still double the target market (and that is assuming that all of the people buying "capable" machines want to buy games).
Games manufacturers could easily start to target the 90% instead if they wanted to increase their market. Even an Intel GMA 950 (which is in an awful lot of PCs and laptops) should be capable of playing 3D games if the graphics are scaled down properly.
Personally I think a lot of games manufacturers are pissing away the chance for a large increase in their sales, by being way too '1337'. They want to show off their game, and they want to make it look super slick, which is fair enough... but don't come complaining if this rules the game out for a large part of the market.
"I recently heard Itunes is the number 2 on-line music store: http://money.cnn.com/2008/02/26/technology/itunes_walmart.ap/ just behind Walmart, they can't sell this much music and not make money."
Correction. According to the article you reference, they are the number 2 music retailer, full stop. The are the clear number one in the online market, they just also happen to be so big that they have surpassed all the traditional retailers except Wal-Mart.
Your conclusions are surely right, however. I'm convinced that the notion that the iTunes store is a loss-leader for iPods is a myth or at best outdated information. The iTunes store surely makes money on it's own at this stage.
.. when it comes to child safety.
The bad thing is used everywhere in the media; namely that it is easier for a sexual predator to get in touch with children without being seen.
The good thing is hardly ever mention in the media; namely that the online world is just that: the online world. In order to molest the child, the sexual predator has to move the interaction over to the real world. So essentially, there is a buffer between the child and the pedophile that the pedophile has to overcome and if the child acts in a sensible manner, there is virtually no risk of ending up molested due to Internet encounters.
Of course, children do not always act sensibly (hell, adults do not always act sensibly), so the risk is always there. The risk, can however be minimised to such an extent that it is negligible by combining adult supervision and both child and adult education.
In the case of the Internet, such measures really are impossible to achieve. I.e. how do you check the age of participants in chat rooms, on Facebook, etc? Also, here both parties have a tendency to lie about their age.
"The *ONLY* advantage Blu-Ray had was more disc space ....."
This is not true. Blu-ray also has the advantage of being a good excuse I can tell my wife for getting a PS3.
Since Microsoft wasn't ballsy enough to release an Xbox 360 with a built-in HD-DVD player it is much harder for me to justify spending our money on one.
"All other Blu-Ray lite (tm) Profile 1.x devices (which means everything else) are as good as a motherboard with ISA slots. Doesn't matter if that motherboard has a 3 trillion Ghz CPU on it if it only works with last year's (okay, decade's) stuff."
That is just bullsh*t. The motherboard with ISA slots is completely useless, the older Blu-Ray players will still play the new Blu-ray discs, they just won't do the extras.
Yes, losing out on the extras is annoying and crap, but playing the f*cking film is the most important thing, and they will still do that.