So, those are the two options? Keep it in your head or back it up to the cloud?
Really? In all of computing we've never solved this?
I know for a fact that things like KeePass have their DB as an encrypted file. I know you can have that copied onto your phone, or your tablet... and I also know for a fact that you can have a phone or a tablet which isn't backed up to the cloud.
Passwords that stay in your head can't be stolen.
They can be beaten out of you. They can be compelled by the court. They can also be forgotten, which is why password managers exist in the first place. (And, yes, obviously the same applied to the password for your password manager.)
I know a lot of people who have switched to using something like KeePass for their personal stuff.
And I know quite a few places which use it when passwords need to be available and shared among a team of people.
First articles here, then a new policy on Fark, and now yet another story about misogyny. It's a constant, subtle pressure in the background for Millenials that women are oppressed
Or, you know, there's a lot of men who are childish assholes and misogynists.
Because, really, death threats? Threats to rape her? The crap I've seen in the coverage about this pretty much means this isn't hand-wringing and moralizing... this is a sign of some pretty terrible (if not criminal) behavior.
Some people get online and become complete and utter sociopaths. Others don't seem to need to be online.
There's two lessons to be learned here (one for you, and one for me)... first, never ask for mercy on the interwebs, not likely to happen. Second, your namesake had way too many damned albums for that to not be a painful process for both of us.;-)
Cheers (and, yes, feel free to say it... it was rather childish and annoying.;-)
Both were epic disasters. IMHO, 2167 pretty much guaranteed mediocre at best software, taking 3x longer to do, at a cost at least 6x of non-2167
But, I've always assumed that the function of government specs was to achieve precisely that.
I mean, a quality standard defined by a government committee can't actually be expected to have been designed to product actual quality outputs, can it?
I've just assumed they were there to give the bureaucrats something to tick off on their checklist, even if it has nothing to do with the real world.
Ford was vague in explaining exactly how his plan would be paid for. He cited a number of funding options, including money from senior levels of government, development charges, the sale of air rights and asset sales.
Well, speaking as one of the skill-less cretins... many video games (especially a FPS) left me in the dust years ago. I simply can't play them.
I don't have the ability to operate all of the buttons at once, and can't do the fine grained aiming and the like.
I'm just too old and slow, and the dexterity isn't there. I'm not saying an on-line game should be dumbed down to my level, but for an offline game, if the game doesn't have some rubber banding to account for my complete lack of skill, I won't even play it.
So, either you make something which needs m4d sk1ll5, and only a small amount of the potential market will ever play your game... or you figure out how to make it appealing to more people, possibly at the risk of losing some of the hardcore gamers. But, who's the bigger market?
It's games like this why I simply have no interest in playing any form of online game. Because after the first 10 minutes when I've demonstrated I'm just a sitting duck, I give up and stop playing entirely.
Well, they're saying that since it's "only" metadata, it's not the same as getting all the data, and since the metadata is already used for billing, it can't be secret, right?
The second half of the equation seems to be "since we passed this law, it must be legal because we said so".
I figure if eventually a court doesn't say "sorry guys, but you really can't do that just because you say so", then America has pretty much jumped the shark and the Constitution no longer applies.
And then things will get really interesting.
I'm sure no lawyer, but it's always been incomprehensible how this could NOT violate the 4th amendment, because it amounts to general warrants and collecting everything just in case you need it.
And when law enforcement started doing parallel reconstruction, you could see how all of their claims of "don't worry, citizen, we will only use this for terrorism" were completely false.
9/11 triggered (or simply sped up) a decline into a totalitarian state where the law is whatever the government says it is, and the Constitution is meaningless.
I so wish I had posted a few years ago when I first thought that SpaceX should land on a barge or ship instead of land.
You know, if you can land the craft on land, how is this much different from landing it on a platform?
I mean, the game Lunar Lander is how old? The idea of using retro-rockets to slow your descent onto where you're landing is literally decades old, and was probably shown in early sci-fi shows.
I'm having a hard time understanding how this patent could possibly be adding anything new.
As usual, I hear about the patent system and think "yeah, right, and the monkeys who approve patents get paid for being morons."
Hell, I should think landing a helicopter on a ship or a barge is pretty much all you need to invalidate this. Or Flash Gordon. Or any number of things which have been showing a tail-first landing for the last 50+ years.
Big deal, that flat surface is now a floating platform... that doesn't change a damned thing about the fact that this is exactly the same as any other VTOL type scenario. Applying thrust is all that's really at play here, and that's just straight physics.
The most likely explanation is that the teacher's behavior had grown erratic and he had shown signs of mental disorder that caused grave concern in his co-workers and friends.
Sorry, not buying that without any evidence to suggest it.
I think the most likely explanation is that overly paranoid police have detained someone for a trumped up "emergency medical evaluation" because he wrote a book on a controversial topic, and because law enforcement can't accept that you could write a piece of fiction and not have it be a real threat.
There is absolutely nothing in the linked article to suggest any crime (actual, imagined, or planned), or so suggest any link whatsoever with schizophrenia or any other mental illness.
If law-enforcement authorities in Dorchester County have additional information that implicates McLaw in a crime, or in the planning of a crime, it is imperative that they release it immediately. As it stands now, they appear to be violating the constitutional rights of a citizen, and also, by the way, teaching the children of their county something awful about the power of fear over reason.
And until such time as they actually do have some evidence, I'm going to take this as a gross over-reaction by the police and school board.
Tuwaitha and an adjacent research facility were well known for decades as the centerpiece of Saddam's nuclear efforts.
Israeli warplanes bombed a reactor project at the site in 1981. Later, U.N. inspectors documented and safeguarded the yellowcake, which had been stored in aging drums and containers since before the 1991 Gulf War. There was no evidence of any yellowcake dating from after 1991, the official said.
Or, as the New York Times stated more plainly:
The yellowcake removed from Iraq was not the same yellowcake that President Bush claimed, in a now discredited section of his 2003 State of the Union address, that Mr. Hussein was trying to purchase in Africa.
The U.S. did manage to ameliorate a substantial security concern by secretly shipping stored yellowcake out of Iraq in mid-2008, but that act was not, as claimed above, proof that Iraq had been purchasing uranium and attempting to restart its nuclear program prior to the U.S. invasion.
No, I pulled it from the Linux Mint VM I have which didn't give me any obvious mechanism to do something as trivial as setting my search provider to Google.
If it isn't in the drop down list, and I have to play hunt the wumpus to figure out WTF I need to be doing to add it, I'll stand by my initial assertion... that, for whatever reason, they've made setting Google as a search provider less than easy or obvious.
Google is not in the default list, after spending a small amount of time trying to figure out how to do it, I gave up on the Distro entirely.
Some times non-invasive therapies are indicated, but quite often the best course is surgery. Sadly, what we have in the White House is a "herbal remedies" charlatan...
Right, as opposed to the previous guy, who went into Iraq to settle his daddy's score, and based on "intelligence" which was provably NOT true at the time? The overly simplistic moron who said "you're either with us or with the terrorists" when there was no connection between the war and what they said it was for? The one whose administration said they'd pay for that little jaunt with all the oil money you'd be getting? The one who started the sledge-hammer of an agency which is DHS?
Because, the yellow cake thing was a lie, there were no WMDs, they weren't sponsoring terrorism, and had nothing whatsoever to do with 9/11.
You mean that kind of "surgery", where you blunder around with pointy objects in the dark making a lot of noise and hoping everyone swoons over your manliness?
Because, really the chimpanzee who was Bush the Second didn't exactly do anything with surgical precision. He wasn't even in the right country until far too late, and the country you did invade is falling into civil war.
So, tell us another story, please. But, we're still not buying it.
Yup, a former co-worker introduced me to these kind of games.
Any my immediate response was "why the hell have I had to put up with these other shitty games for so long?"
For many of us, the games like Monopoly were no fun, and made themselves less fun when taken to their extremes.
I like the mechanics of the game play of the German style games, and the social nature of them -- we can all laugh that you had something happen, because nobody is ganging up on you, and the conditions for someone "winning" could be completely random. Because one player getting hammered on until they're eliminated means they'll probably never play with you again.
Playing with a super competitive "I must win at any cost" person sucks all the fun out of a game, and isn't conducive to bringing in new people, or having a quick game where the stakes don't ratchet up into someone's mania about winning.
Screw that, I want my leisure time to be about fun, not magnifying the antisocial tendencies of one of the players.:-P
Want a fun game? Try one where a 5 year old might beat you with a random turn of a card and absolutely no strategy, instead of one in which you can feel good about yourself by constantly beating a 5 year old.
I said that sometimes you call the bluff of the "bully", and discover it isn't a bluff, and that the bully is far more dangerous than anybody realized.
Everything else, that's all your baggage and not mine.
I'm no more convinced that the Ukrainian government is blameless than I am that the 'referendum' wasn't rigged, and carried out by people who are, historically speaking, relatively new to Ukraine, and not actually representative of the entire population.
So, if all the Chinese Americans in California decided they were forming their own country, how would you feel about that?
I have a fairly simple rule: there's at least one more side to any story than that are actors involved. Which makes this a complex and multi-faceted thing where anybody who says "all of these people say this" are being overly reductionist.
But, I also know other Ukrainian expats who feel this is something which is being brought about by what are essentially Russian people who have been in Ukraine for however long and have decide they want to separate and join Russia.
So, either I conclude you're wrong, they're wrong, or like all things like this... it's much more complicated and attempt to distill it down to one point is hopeless.
#1 STOP USING 'old school', you aren't, and you sound like a douche bag.
OK, Grandpa, yes, we know it's all been downhill since the hoop and stick you used to play with... but, really, the Atari 2600 came out in 1977, and really is considered "old school" by pretty much everybody as far as video games are concerned.
While you might be nostalgic for the old steam powered games of your youth, anybody up to the age of 50 considers the Atari 2600 as old school. Because prior to that was Pong, and actual mechanical pin-ball.
Now, do you need a blanket or a cup of tea? You're disturbing the children, and they're not actually on your lawn.;-)
And it's in a class of games which are either best played cooperatively, or which completely make the game mechanics drive the play.
Some co-workers used to play games at lunch -- in fact, they probably still do.
And the appeal of these games isn't "ha ha, I beat you". It's more like "Doh, Bob got eaten by a weasel, causing Sally to fall down the stairs, and when the flower pot landed on Steve's head he won." The victory/conclusion conditions change the dynamic of the play a lot -- to the extent that sometimes it's hilarious to be the one who "loses" or triggers the end of the game.
For many of us, we prefer it when the game mechanics preclude personal scores, or when one person gets to play king maker.
The games are much more social that way, and for many of us, that is a very big plus in games.
In fact, for many of us, games like Monopoly suck, because it's all about beating your opponents into the ground, or other things which suck the fun out of the game. And games which eliminate players means for the remainder of the game everyone is just sort of going "well, that wasn't really fun, and it's over, but they'll be at it a while".
It's a completely different style of play, and it is much more focused on play and having fun, than winning at all costs. And it means one person doesn't always win the game, and everyone else decides they have better things to do.
You know how you deal with a playground bully? You stand up to his crap, get people behind you, and call his bluff.
Which works really well right up until you discover the schoolyard bully is a little unhinged, and is playing out of his own book because he believes his own story.
And then you discover it's not a bluff, and then things get really hairy.
Chairman Mao, Ho Chi Minh and Hitler, not so much with the bluffing.
Old Skool: The Mario Bros and Donkey Kong games are where my heart lies. 2D side scrollers.
Tabletop: I've always loved the German style board/card games -- fun for the whole family, the outcome is pretty much random, and someone doesn't get ganged up on or eliminated early in play. The goofier the premise the better, it's the mechanics which makes them enjoyable to play in groups, and sometimes strategy is pointless or impossible.
New Skool: I'm afraid I'm pretty much eternally hooked on Skyrim. I like not being constrained to a linear plot or where I can go.
My wife and some of our friends are also huge fans of the Kinect games, because drunk people dancing is hilarious. Also good for a girls exercise night, while the guys play a golf video game.
I also miss my copies of Rock Band/Guitar Hero... because I learned to appreciate a vast amount of music and greatly expanded my music collection as a result of it. The sheer amount of punk rock I now own is directly attributable to those games.
For those of us who are old and creaky, and grew up where video games took quarters, and had a joystick and two buttons... many modern games left us in the dust years ago, and simply stopped being fun. I doubt I could beat a 6 year old at a first person shooter.
Linux Mint recommends the following search engines: Engine Preserves your privacy Funds Linux Mint Description
Yahoo The 2nd largest search engine on the Web, full of features.
DuckDuckGo A safe and secure engine providing augmented Yahoo results.
Ixquick A safe and secure engine gathering results from multiple search engines.
Startpage A safe and secure engine providing augmented Google results.
Amazon The largest online store.
Wikipedia The largest online encyclopedia.
Why aren't some search engines included in Linux Mint?
Engines are included based on the following criteria:
Funding: Whether using the engine funds Linux Mint
Privacy: Whether the engine provides users with best-in-class privacy/security features
Non-commercial: Whether the engine is popular and non-commercial
So, sorry, but for whatever reason in the version I had Google wasn't an option -- and figuring out what was required to change it wasn't worth it for me.
I was shopping for a distribution, not an ideology.
I completely fail to comprehend why most Slashdotters seem to push everyone towards DRM'ed iPads and Chromebooks that put Palladium to shame instead of more open Windows PCs.
I guess it's more about Microsoft hate and the desire to bring them down than software freedom.
You know, it's as much about giving our friends and family a user experience which a) won't drive them insane, and b) won't make them come to us for tech support.
And, really, for many of us this whole "software freedom" thing is a little overplayed.
I've always found Stallman to be a bit of a crank, and the vast majority of people hear this stuff, and they think of teenagers spouting Marxist theory because the school cafeteria switched from Coke to Pepsi... it becomes a little tired and melodramatic.
I'd wager that 99% of all people will never audit their IP stack, recompile their browser, or otherwise want any involvement in this stuff. They want the latest cool thing, and not some near approximation of it which comes in a kit.
What they want is a tool to get the stuff done they need/want to, and they want it with as little hair pulling as possible.
And, really, let's be honest here... Windows is no more (or less) open than Apple, and in the places where they're more open, they're trying to be less, just like Apple. Everybody wants their own walled garden.
Hell, I installed a Linux Mint VM image a while back, and it wasn't even possible to set the search provider to Google, apparently because it's not ideologically pure enough or something.
So, if my Mom was looking for a tablet... I'm going to find her one which suits her needs and will work for her, and I am never going to say "ZOMG, but this software is teh free".
Because my Mom already rolls her eyes at the rest of my loony rants, and doesn't give a damn about software freedom.
So, if you want to know why people aren't doing this, it's because when someone starts screaming "viva la revolucion" over software freedom, people roll their eyes and try to get distance from you.
Don't get me wrong, I likes me some Open Source software. But, have I built an entire ideology around it? Hell no.
Slashdot Mirror
So, those are the two options? Keep it in your head or back it up to the cloud?
Really? In all of computing we've never solved this?
I know for a fact that things like KeePass have their DB as an encrypted file. I know you can have that copied onto your phone, or your tablet ... and I also know for a fact that you can have a phone or a tablet which isn't backed up to the cloud.
They can be beaten out of you. They can be compelled by the court. They can also be forgotten, which is why password managers exist in the first place. (And, yes, obviously the same applied to the password for your password manager.)
I know a lot of people who have switched to using something like KeePass for their personal stuff.
And I know quite a few places which use it when passwords need to be available and shared among a team of people.
I LOL'd.
The image of a pig on propane thrust will keep me laughing for a few hours.
Piiiigs .... iiiiiinnnnnnnnn .... spaaaaaaaaaace!! *splat*
Or, you know, there's a lot of men who are childish assholes and misogynists.
Because, really, death threats? Threats to rape her? The crap I've seen in the coverage about this pretty much means this isn't hand-wringing and moralizing ... this is a sign of some pretty terrible (if not criminal) behavior.
Some people get online and become complete and utter sociopaths. Others don't seem to need to be online.
Your momma so fat ...
LOL ... well, tell me how you feel, time is on my side, it's just a feeling, but I almost believed you.
This is the internet, everybody's crazy, don't like it, walk away.
From now on you'll know that forever isn't long enough until you hear another Michael Bolton joke.
Just remember to love somebody. The one thing to remember, this is the time you're asking yourself Why me?
So, before you turn a whiter shade of pale, I wanna hear you say it ... If I could go the distance, That's life!
All the best".
There's two lessons to be learned here (one for you, and one for me) ... first, never ask for mercy on the interwebs, not likely to happen. Second, your namesake had way too many damned albums for that to not be a painful process for both of us. ;-)
Cheers (and, yes, feel free to say it ... it was rather childish and annoying. ;-)
But, I've always assumed that the function of government specs was to achieve precisely that.
I mean, a quality standard defined by a government committee can't actually be expected to have been designed to product actual quality outputs, can it?
I've just assumed they were there to give the bureaucrats something to tick off on their checklist, even if it has nothing to do with the real world.
But but ... how are we supposed to live without you, now that we've been loving you so long?
Dude, seriously, it must be suck to evoke such a reviled musician every time someone hears your name.
Well, speaking as one of the skill-less cretins ... many video games (especially a FPS) left me in the dust years ago. I simply can't play them.
I don't have the ability to operate all of the buttons at once, and can't do the fine grained aiming and the like.
I'm just too old and slow, and the dexterity isn't there. I'm not saying an on-line game should be dumbed down to my level, but for an offline game, if the game doesn't have some rubber banding to account for my complete lack of skill, I won't even play it.
So, either you make something which needs m4d sk1ll5, and only a small amount of the potential market will ever play your game ... or you figure out how to make it appealing to more people, possibly at the risk of losing some of the hardcore gamers. But, who's the bigger market?
It's games like this why I simply have no interest in playing any form of online game. Because after the first 10 minutes when I've demonstrated I'm just a sitting duck, I give up and stop playing entirely.
And, worse, anybody who did dissent was accused of sympathizing with terrorists.
And debate was reduced to "ZOMG, but, teh terrorists ... why do you hate America?", and hasn't really gotten much better since.
Well, they're saying that since it's "only" metadata, it's not the same as getting all the data, and since the metadata is already used for billing, it can't be secret, right?
The second half of the equation seems to be "since we passed this law, it must be legal because we said so".
I figure if eventually a court doesn't say "sorry guys, but you really can't do that just because you say so", then America has pretty much jumped the shark and the Constitution no longer applies.
And then things will get really interesting.
I'm sure no lawyer, but it's always been incomprehensible how this could NOT violate the 4th amendment, because it amounts to general warrants and collecting everything just in case you need it.
And when law enforcement started doing parallel reconstruction, you could see how all of their claims of "don't worry, citizen, we will only use this for terrorism" were completely false.
9/11 triggered (or simply sped up) a decline into a totalitarian state where the law is whatever the government says it is, and the Constitution is meaningless.
You know, if you can land the craft on land, how is this much different from landing it on a platform?
I mean, the game Lunar Lander is how old? The idea of using retro-rockets to slow your descent onto where you're landing is literally decades old, and was probably shown in early sci-fi shows.
I'm having a hard time understanding how this patent could possibly be adding anything new.
As usual, I hear about the patent system and think "yeah, right, and the monkeys who approve patents get paid for being morons."
Hell, I should think landing a helicopter on a ship or a barge is pretty much all you need to invalidate this. Or Flash Gordon. Or any number of things which have been showing a tail-first landing for the last 50+ years.
Big deal, that flat surface is now a floating platform ... that doesn't change a damned thing about the fact that this is exactly the same as any other VTOL type scenario. Applying thrust is all that's really at play here, and that's just straight physics.
Sorry, not buying that without any evidence to suggest it.
I think the most likely explanation is that overly paranoid police have detained someone for a trumped up "emergency medical evaluation" because he wrote a book on a controversial topic, and because law enforcement can't accept that you could write a piece of fiction and not have it be a real threat.
There is absolutely nothing in the linked article to suggest any crime (actual, imagined, or planned), or so suggest any link whatsoever with schizophrenia or any other mental illness.
And until such time as they actually do have some evidence, I'm going to take this as a gross over-reaction by the police and school board.
You should learn to fact check a little better:
Because you're full of shit.
No, I pulled it from the Linux Mint VM I have which didn't give me any obvious mechanism to do something as trivial as setting my search provider to Google.
If it isn't in the drop down list, and I have to play hunt the wumpus to figure out WTF I need to be doing to add it, I'll stand by my initial assertion ... that, for whatever reason, they've made setting Google as a search provider less than easy or obvious.
Google is not in the default list, after spending a small amount of time trying to figure out how to do it, I gave up on the Distro entirely.
The hookers come out at night to screw their clients, the stock market guys get up early to screw all of us.
Everything in the middle depends on who your clients are, and type of industry you're in.
Educated people see daylight (or get paid a premium), less educated get shift work.
I don't even need to read TFA to know these things. ;-)
And, yes, I'm mostly kidding.
Right, as opposed to the previous guy, who went into Iraq to settle his daddy's score, and based on "intelligence" which was provably NOT true at the time? The overly simplistic moron who said "you're either with us or with the terrorists" when there was no connection between the war and what they said it was for? The one whose administration said they'd pay for that little jaunt with all the oil money you'd be getting? The one who started the sledge-hammer of an agency which is DHS?
Because, the yellow cake thing was a lie, there were no WMDs, they weren't sponsoring terrorism, and had nothing whatsoever to do with 9/11.
You mean that kind of "surgery", where you blunder around with pointy objects in the dark making a lot of noise and hoping everyone swoons over your manliness?
Because, really the chimpanzee who was Bush the Second didn't exactly do anything with surgical precision. He wasn't even in the right country until far too late, and the country you did invade is falling into civil war.
So, tell us another story, please. But, we're still not buying it.
Yup, a former co-worker introduced me to these kind of games.
Any my immediate response was "why the hell have I had to put up with these other shitty games for so long?"
For many of us, the games like Monopoly were no fun, and made themselves less fun when taken to their extremes.
I like the mechanics of the game play of the German style games, and the social nature of them -- we can all laugh that you had something happen, because nobody is ganging up on you, and the conditions for someone "winning" could be completely random. Because one player getting hammered on until they're eliminated means they'll probably never play with you again.
Playing with a super competitive "I must win at any cost" person sucks all the fun out of a game, and isn't conducive to bringing in new people, or having a quick game where the stakes don't ratchet up into someone's mania about winning.
Screw that, I want my leisure time to be about fun, not magnifying the antisocial tendencies of one of the players. :-P
Want a fun game? Try one where a 5 year old might beat you with a random turn of a card and absolutely no strategy, instead of one in which you can feel good about yourself by constantly beating a 5 year old.
I said nothing of the sort.
I said that sometimes you call the bluff of the "bully", and discover it isn't a bluff, and that the bully is far more dangerous than anybody realized.
Everything else, that's all your baggage and not mine.
I'm no more convinced that the Ukrainian government is blameless than I am that the 'referendum' wasn't rigged, and carried out by people who are, historically speaking, relatively new to Ukraine, and not actually representative of the entire population.
So, if all the Chinese Americans in California decided they were forming their own country, how would you feel about that?
I have a fairly simple rule: there's at least one more side to any story than that are actors involved. Which makes this a complex and multi-faceted thing where anybody who says "all of these people say this" are being overly reductionist.
But, I also know other Ukrainian expats who feel this is something which is being brought about by what are essentially Russian people who have been in Ukraine for however long and have decide they want to separate and join Russia.
So, either I conclude you're wrong, they're wrong, or like all things like this ... it's much more complicated and attempt to distill it down to one point is hopeless.
OK, Grandpa, yes, we know it's all been downhill since the hoop and stick you used to play with ... but, really, the Atari 2600 came out in 1977, and really is considered "old school" by pretty much everybody as far as video games are concerned.
While you might be nostalgic for the old steam powered games of your youth, anybody up to the age of 50 considers the Atari 2600 as old school. Because prior to that was Pong, and actual mechanical pin-ball.
Now, do you need a blanket or a cup of tea? You're disturbing the children, and they're not actually on your lawn. ;-)
I've actually played Pandemic a few times.
And it's in a class of games which are either best played cooperatively, or which completely make the game mechanics drive the play.
Some co-workers used to play games at lunch -- in fact, they probably still do.
And the appeal of these games isn't "ha ha, I beat you". It's more like "Doh, Bob got eaten by a weasel, causing Sally to fall down the stairs, and when the flower pot landed on Steve's head he won." The victory/conclusion conditions change the dynamic of the play a lot -- to the extent that sometimes it's hilarious to be the one who "loses" or triggers the end of the game.
For many of us, we prefer it when the game mechanics preclude personal scores, or when one person gets to play king maker.
The games are much more social that way, and for many of us, that is a very big plus in games.
In fact, for many of us, games like Monopoly suck, because it's all about beating your opponents into the ground, or other things which suck the fun out of the game. And games which eliminate players means for the remainder of the game everyone is just sort of going "well, that wasn't really fun, and it's over, but they'll be at it a while".
It's a completely different style of play, and it is much more focused on play and having fun, than winning at all costs. And it means one person doesn't always win the game, and everyone else decides they have better things to do.
Which works really well right up until you discover the schoolyard bully is a little unhinged, and is playing out of his own book because he believes his own story.
And then you discover it's not a bluff, and then things get really hairy.
Chairman Mao, Ho Chi Minh and Hitler, not so much with the bluffing.
And I'm not so sure about Putin either.
Old Skool: The Mario Bros and Donkey Kong games are where my heart lies. 2D side scrollers.
Tabletop: I've always loved the German style board/card games -- fun for the whole family, the outcome is pretty much random, and someone doesn't get ganged up on or eliminated early in play. The goofier the premise the better, it's the mechanics which makes them enjoyable to play in groups, and sometimes strategy is pointless or impossible.
New Skool: I'm afraid I'm pretty much eternally hooked on Skyrim. I like not being constrained to a linear plot or where I can go.
My wife and some of our friends are also huge fans of the Kinect games, because drunk people dancing is hilarious. Also good for a girls exercise night, while the guys play a golf video game.
I also miss my copies of Rock Band/Guitar Hero ... because I learned to appreciate a vast amount of music and greatly expanded my music collection as a result of it. The sheer amount of punk rock I now own is directly attributable to those games.
For those of us who are old and creaky, and grew up where video games took quarters, and had a joystick and two buttons ... many modern games left us in the dust years ago, and simply stopped being fun. I doubt I could beat a 6 year old at a first person shooter.
From their own page, right now:
So, sorry, but for whatever reason in the version I had Google wasn't an option -- and figuring out what was required to change it wasn't worth it for me.
I was shopping for a distribution, not an ideology.
I'm holding out for Mildly Irked in an Ironic Post-Modern-Sort-of-Way Birds.
That would be cool. ;-)
You know, it's as much about giving our friends and family a user experience which a) won't drive them insane, and b) won't make them come to us for tech support.
And, really, for many of us this whole "software freedom" thing is a little overplayed.
I've always found Stallman to be a bit of a crank, and the vast majority of people hear this stuff, and they think of teenagers spouting Marxist theory because the school cafeteria switched from Coke to Pepsi ... it becomes a little tired and melodramatic.
I'd wager that 99% of all people will never audit their IP stack, recompile their browser, or otherwise want any involvement in this stuff. They want the latest cool thing, and not some near approximation of it which comes in a kit.
What they want is a tool to get the stuff done they need/want to, and they want it with as little hair pulling as possible.
And, really, let's be honest here ... Windows is no more (or less) open than Apple, and in the places where they're more open, they're trying to be less, just like Apple. Everybody wants their own walled garden.
Hell, I installed a Linux Mint VM image a while back, and it wasn't even possible to set the search provider to Google, apparently because it's not ideologically pure enough or something.
So, if my Mom was looking for a tablet ... I'm going to find her one which suits her needs and will work for her, and I am never going to say "ZOMG, but this software is teh free".
Because my Mom already rolls her eyes at the rest of my loony rants, and doesn't give a damn about software freedom.
So, if you want to know why people aren't doing this, it's because when someone starts screaming "viva la revolucion" over software freedom, people roll their eyes and try to get distance from you.
Don't get me wrong, I likes me some Open Source software. But, have I built an entire ideology around it? Hell no.