Where are the new Sam'n'Max games? Full Throttle? Maniac Mansion/Day of the Tentacle? Monkey Island?
Lucas isn't good for much any more, but he's got this IP in his vault and isn't doing a fucking thing with it. Instead he's producing uber-violent, xenophobic, pornomythic rubbish for the big screen and grubbing for tie-ins.
No, the last book is still about Harry killing Voldemort. Unless Rowling's point is that destiny is bollocks except as how belief in destiny guides people's choices (something the penultimate book states plainly). Then Hermione kills Voldemort.
The question is, how does Harry kill him? And does the class distinction between wizards and muggles remain? Does Harry have to cause all muggles to become wizards in order to have the power to end Voldemort's reign of terror? Or does Harry strip all wizards of their powers, including Voldemort?
Or has JK Rowling not thought about this philosophical question that deeply? I mean, the movies almost completely ignore the class-struggle plots from the books: muggles vs. wizards; wizards vs. elves, etc. Just don't get any thematic focus in the films. Though she also ignores certain details in the films when writing the books (can't think of one offhand though I recall noticing).
-----SPOILERS AGAIN-----
Oh, and remember we don't really see Dumbledore die, he just goes over the parapet. And he's sealed in a magic crypt in a way that surprises everyone. And his familiar is a Phoenix. So I have no confidence he's dead.
Anyone who watched and loved the film noticed it immediately.
What hardly anyone of them notice is that the movie is all about eyes.
(Go watch it again. Tell me that the fact that Tyrell has trifocals, making him an "eight-eyes," isn't symbolic. That's just one clue. They're significant everywhere.)
We worked our asses off in the 80s and 90s to create the Internet economy so that there would be good jobs for the American middle class in the new millennium.
Carly Fiorina, Craig Barrett, Larry Ellison, Scott McNealy, and Bill Gates then betrayed us by shipping those good jobs to the cheap-labor centers in India and China.
Carly even stood up in a public meeting and insisted that it was the right thing to do.
A trillion dollars in investment, gone in a few months.
If it had been a war and we'd been harmed to the cost of a trillion dollars in writeoffs and lost jobs, we'd be nuking someone. But the war was lost because the people who were supposed to be on our side were on the enemy's side.
It means that instead of our government being more intrusive and controlling, it will start having to treat other people as equals and their religious beliefs as coequal with ours, so they won't feel so threatened and vengeful that they have to fly airplanes into our buildings.
Which, some of us think, was the thing we were supposed to be doing as the United States of America, anyway.
I know you think that spoilers are funny, but this one below really ruined the end of the book for me. And there are people out there who have been meaning to see those movies who deserve the same courtesy of surprise that you got. So don't be a dick.
There are plans to create airliner remote-control systems that can be seized by air-traffic controllers on the ground should they suspect they don't have the ability to direct pilot actions.
If you don't think Wikipedia's admin corps sees itself as a government, or if you think that there is anywhere else that gets the visibility and fallacy-based respect that Wikipedia does, you're very much mistaken.
The Internet is very fluid. Anyone wishing to get out from under a government-imposed block merely needs to change their domain name, or post on a site the government wouldn't dare block. So your analogy defeats itself.
My problems with Wikipedia aren't with unpopular stances, they're with telling the truth when a few people with admin power don't want that truth told. There are a couple of thousand of them, and it only takes a couple to collude to totally shut you out of all communication with absolutely no way to get your story to people who might help.
In any case, it's not worth a month of arguing with them or trying to make Jimbo Wales realize he's created a system of self-serving bureaucrats. The Wikipedia is famous for its errors, and if Wales doesn't want to improve it, that's his business.
The mathematics of that run counter to market dynamics.
You can't have an efficient market where a portion of the goods are simply taken without payment and without the permission of the sellers.
Theft is a leakage in the economic flow, and uncontrolled theft is dumping economic fuel on the ground.
Luckily, it only burns those losing the sales, and those caught stealing. But since our governments run by siphoning a portion of legitimate flows as taxes, it's affecting us all.
Note: I include theft of public property, in the form of low- or no-cost leases on resource-bearing lands, in this leakage, so don't nobody go pretending I'm nothing but a plutocrat.
Nothing that big can be 100% reliable. At some point, it's going to break. And when it does, you'll have a 200-mile-long, nearly-unbreakable bandsaw blade whipping around the atmosphere and dragging along the ground.
Any cost savings for energy usage will be totally eaten up in liability-insurance premiums, or dwarfed by tort settlements, depending on whether it's before or after the inevitable happens.
There's no money in Silicon Valley for anyone but real-estate traders.
Everyone outside Silicon Valley can make money on the corporate interests there.
Almost all the people there are spending all their money on rent or home-loan interest.
The South Bay is only a technology hotbed because Apple and Intel started there. Beyond that, it's nothing remarkable, and in a lot of ways it's a human and economic disaster.
I mean free as in not costing to purchase what it costs to produce.
Keep your juvenile taunts to yourself. They aren't making you look any better when you write two hundred words showing you don't get the point even when it's explained to you.
How does the hypothesis that anyone dumping will return to a profitable model once they've driven the competition out of business have anything to do with violation of anti-dumping laws?
Hint: don't let the word hypothesis make you think the paradigm of the argument has changed. Hypothesis, accusation, tort, complaint, suit, they're all the same thing.
loss leaders are not illegal, and not necessarily anticompetitive.
That depends on the goal of the loss-leader. If it's to induce collateral purchases and thus still gain a net profit on the gross total, then the effect is not a loss to corner a market.
But unless you're new to "Free Software" you know that the whole point is to compete with and hopefully end un-free software.
And Linus Torvalds has been employed by someone for most of his Linux-kernel-writing career. The true fact is that there is an enormous value input to the body of "free software" and as nobody is attempting to recoup that value, it's being dumped. Not disposed of, because it intends to continue production. The only real question is, who do you sue for that? The person who's giving away the copy that competes with your product. It's up to them to sue the person who gave it to them. Eventually, it gets back to the person who paid for the labor and gave the product away for free.
The fact that no American company has attempted to corner an American market through dumping in a long time is testament to the fact that judges usually recognize dumping when they see it.
However, check recent stories about Citgo giving heating oil away for reduced prices in northeast towns this past winter. They did it to embarass the Bush administration, but their competitors started crying that they were dumping.
We can only hope that the real facts in this case are that the plaintiff merely bollixed the proof portion of his claim of dumping, and not that the judge just said that dumping isn't anticompetitive.
Slashdot Mirror
Unemployment rates don't include the millions who've simply quit looking for work.
And they don't reflect the decline in wages. Newer jobs are way less valuable than the ones we created in the '90s.
Here's a quiz: How many jobs has Bush created? How many undocumented immigrants has he let come over our borders?
The reason there are jobs "Americans won't take" is that the wage for those jobs won't let them keep their house.
Where are the new Sam'n'Max games?
Full Throttle?
Maniac Mansion/Day of the Tentacle?
Monkey Island?
Lucas isn't good for much any more, but he's got this IP in his vault and isn't doing a fucking thing with it. Instead he's producing uber-violent, xenophobic, pornomythic rubbish for the big screen and grubbing for tie-ins.
No, the last book is still about Harry killing Voldemort. Unless Rowling's point is that destiny is bollocks except as how belief in destiny guides people's choices (something the penultimate book states plainly). Then Hermione kills Voldemort.
The question is, how does Harry kill him? And does the class distinction between wizards and muggles remain? Does Harry have to cause all muggles to become wizards in order to have the power to end Voldemort's reign of terror? Or does Harry strip all wizards of their powers, including Voldemort?
Or has JK Rowling not thought about this philosophical question that deeply? I mean, the movies almost completely ignore the class-struggle plots from the books: muggles vs. wizards; wizards vs. elves, etc. Just don't get any thematic focus in the films. Though she also ignores certain details in the films when writing the books (can't think of one offhand though I recall noticing).
-----SPOILERS AGAIN-----
Oh, and remember we don't really see Dumbledore die, he just goes over the parapet. And he's sealed in a magic crypt in a way that surprises everyone. And his familiar is a Phoenix. So I have no confidence he's dead.
Anyone who watched and loved the film noticed it immediately.
What hardly anyone of them notice is that the movie is all about eyes.
(Go watch it again. Tell me that the fact that Tyrell has trifocals, making him an "eight-eyes," isn't symbolic. That's just one clue. They're significant everywhere.)
We worked our asses off in the 80s and 90s to create the Internet economy so that there would be good jobs for the American middle class in the new millennium.
Carly Fiorina, Craig Barrett, Larry Ellison, Scott McNealy, and Bill Gates then betrayed us by shipping those good jobs to the cheap-labor centers in India and China.
Carly even stood up in a public meeting and insisted that it was the right thing to do.
A trillion dollars in investment, gone in a few months.
If it had been a war and we'd been harmed to the cost of a trillion dollars in writeoffs and lost jobs, we'd be nuking someone. But the war was lost because the people who were supposed to be on our side were on the enemy's side.
There's a word for that.
How are you supposed to get out of poverty when education, transportation, day-care, and now egalitarian speech are too expensive for your budget?
This is actually a good thing.
It means that instead of our government being more intrusive and controlling, it will start having to treat other people as equals and their religious beliefs as coequal with ours, so they won't feel so threatened and vengeful that they have to fly airplanes into our buildings.
Which, some of us think, was the thing we were supposed to be doing as the United States of America, anyway.
Crap. I fumbled it.
!!!!SPOILER WARNING!!!!!
Snape kills Dumbledore.
I know you think that spoilers are funny, but this one below really ruined the end of the book for me. And there are people out there who have been meaning to see those movies who deserve the same courtesy of surprise that you got. So don't be a dick.
!!!!SPOILER WARNING!!!!!
Snape kills Voldemort.
You're not incorrect.
There are plans to create airliner remote-control systems that can be seized by air-traffic controllers on the ground should they suspect they don't have the ability to direct pilot actions.
If you don't think Wikipedia's admin corps sees itself as a government, or if you think that there is anywhere else that gets the visibility and fallacy-based respect that Wikipedia does, you're very much mistaken.
The Internet is very fluid. Anyone wishing to get out from under a government-imposed block merely needs to change their domain name, or post on a site the government wouldn't dare block. So your analogy defeats itself.
My problems with Wikipedia aren't with unpopular stances, they're with telling the truth when a few people with admin power don't want that truth told. There are a couple of thousand of them, and it only takes a couple to collude to totally shut you out of all communication with absolutely no way to get your story to people who might help.
In any case, it's not worth a month of arguing with them or trying to make Jimbo Wales realize he's created a system of self-serving bureaucrats. The Wikipedia is famous for its errors, and if Wales doesn't want to improve it, that's his business.
It's no less censorship.
The mathematics of that run counter to market dynamics.
You can't have an efficient market where a portion of the goods are simply taken without payment and without the permission of the sellers.
Theft is a leakage in the economic flow, and uncontrolled theft is dumping economic fuel on the ground.
Luckily, it only burns those losing the sales, and those caught stealing. But since our governments run by siphoning a portion of legitimate flows as taxes, it's affecting us all.
Note: I include theft of public property, in the form of low- or no-cost leases on resource-bearing lands, in this leakage, so don't nobody go pretending I'm nothing but a plutocrat.
Does Amnesty International include the Wikipedia in its list of those censoring dissenters?
Because I and others have been prevented from telling the truth there several times.
Nothing that big can be 100% reliable. At some point, it's going to break. And when it does, you'll have a 200-mile-long, nearly-unbreakable bandsaw blade whipping around the atmosphere and dragging along the ground.
Any cost savings for energy usage will be totally eaten up in liability-insurance premiums, or dwarfed by tort settlements, depending on whether it's before or after the inevitable happens.
Sure. Look up the economic statistics. Hyperexpensive real-estate. Relatively low average income for the cost of living.
It's a classic post-gold-rush mining town, and doesn't know it yet.
Cringely is, as usual, talking out of his ass.
Google has a blog that tells you what's going on.
Google puts its in-house development projects online as "beta" tools.
Google's ultra-simple front-page portal isn't about secrecy, it's about giving you exactly what you want when you go to Google's front-page.
Cringley needs to start thinking faster than he can type instead of the other way around.
Why recreate a recipe for depression?
There's no money in Silicon Valley for anyone but real-estate traders.
Everyone outside Silicon Valley can make money on the corporate interests there.
Almost all the people there are spending all their money on rent or home-loan interest.
The South Bay is only a technology hotbed because Apple and Intel started there. Beyond that, it's nothing remarkable, and in a lot of ways it's a human and economic disaster.
Why would I mix English and French in the same euphemism?
I mean free as in not costing to purchase what it costs to produce.
Keep your juvenile taunts to yourself. They aren't making you look any better when you write two hundred words showing you don't get the point even when it's explained to you.
Because I want to start a cadre of petit bureaucrats who think their subjectivity is objective and your objectivity is subjective.
GPL is not BSD.
When was the last time you read the GPL in every file you downloaded?
All it takes is a little linguistic shift.
How does the hypothesis that anyone dumping will return to a profitable model once they've driven the competition out of business have anything to do with violation of anti-dumping laws?
Hint: don't let the word hypothesis make you think the paradigm of the argument has changed. Hypothesis, accusation, tort, complaint, suit, they're all the same thing.
That's right, like us "dumping" our opinions on the market instead of charging for them like professional opinion writers.
That presumes your opinion had any value when it was created.
I submit that it clearly does not.
loss leaders are not illegal, and not necessarily anticompetitive.
That depends on the goal of the loss-leader. If it's to induce collateral purchases and thus still gain a net profit on the gross total, then the effect is not a loss to corner a market.
But unless you're new to "Free Software" you know that the whole point is to compete with and hopefully end un-free software.
And Linus Torvalds has been employed by someone for most of his Linux-kernel-writing career. The true fact is that there is an enormous value input to the body of "free software" and as nobody is attempting to recoup that value, it's being dumped. Not disposed of, because it intends to continue production. The only real question is, who do you sue for that? The person who's giving away the copy that competes with your product. It's up to them to sue the person who gave it to them. Eventually, it gets back to the person who paid for the labor and gave the product away for free.
The fact that no American company has attempted to corner an American market through dumping in a long time is testament to the fact that judges usually recognize dumping when they see it.
However, check recent stories about Citgo giving heating oil away for reduced prices in northeast towns this past winter. They did it to embarass the Bush administration, but their competitors started crying that they were dumping.
We can only hope that the real facts in this case are that the plaintiff merely bollixed the proof portion of his claim of dumping, and not that the judge just said that dumping isn't anticompetitive.