You imply I'm some sort of spokesman for all Democrats, when the logical implication of what I'm saying (don't just vote your own personal pocketbook) would actually help Republicans. If everyone did have Mr. Adams' attitude, Republicans couldn't get elected dogcatcher in this country.
The fact is I'm a proud American, and I personally plan on voting on who I think would be best for the country, and the country my children will inherit. If everyone does that and Republicans get elected as a result, perhaps that's what should happen.
I can see why you are confused. If I was looking at it in a strictly partisan way, it probably would have confused me too.
Here's one hint that might help you understand Democrats: Believe it or not, we are all individuals with our own personal sets of beliefs and ideals. We don't have some kind of weekly meeting where our latest beliefs are handed down from on high. It makes us looks rather disorganized to someone who is used to the opposite. On the other hand, we aren't hamstrug by the need to reduce all problems to something that can be solved by letting rich folks pay less taxes. I call it a wash.
Moneywise, I can't support a candidate who promises to tax the bejeezus out of my bracket,
Man, that's sad. He's making more than 200K (must be, or the O-man's plan has him in line for a tax cut), and *that's* his whole basis for voting? No cocern for society as a whole huh? Just your own personal pocketbook. I guess in that case the %98 of the rest of us should blindly vote Democratic, as we'll get a tax cut.
Let's not even mention the fact that he's not actually going to *raise* taxes on the rich, so much as rescind the huge "temporary" emergency tax cut Bush pushed through in his first term as an "economic stimulus package". That economic experiment sure worked well, didn't it?
No. The difference between these two types of anonymity is that the former actually protects you against a tyrant, while the latter only protects you against a nice, law-abiding, touchy-feely tyrant who'd never torture your name out of the journalist.
You seem to be sharing the general delusion that torture is some magic truth wand. It is not. It's a magic "tell me what I want to hear" wand. If you live in a country that uses it, then anyone who that poor journalist knows the name of will get hauled in, not just the "guilty" party. This is exactly how one innocent Canadian got hauled off by the CIA and tortured. A guy they were torturing before him happened to know his name, and said it in hopes of getting the torture to stop for a bit.
If they keep at it, anyone those people know by name will get hauled in too. Your only defences in such a place are to keep to yourself, not talk to *anyone* at all radical (even by association), and turn the other guy in before he does the same to you.
Perhaps when Bill handed the company over, he left them with a Brewster's Millions clause in the contract. To keep control of the company, the current executive team has to spend all its cash. Any money they actually get in return for their investment would be counter-productive.
The Mojave campaign had the problem that it was about how people thought that Vista sucks and that is not a fact that you want to be advertising to your customers.
Bingo!
By being about nothing, the Seinfeld+Gates campaign does not make the same mistake. But it still fails to overcome the problem which is that Vista is a bad product and their is growing public perception of that.
Slight quibble. The problem is the perception that it's a bad product. It might in fact be a bad product, but commercials are about perception, so the truth of the matter is immaterial.
The way to fight that would be with ads about Vista being great. If they can repeat that enough for it to sink in, many people will think any problems they may have are either odball cases, or a result of their own incompetence.
Their are subtle and indirect forms of promotion. Consumers are irrational. Based on the advertisements which I see, I am pretty sure that male brains actually work in way which makes "Wow, the woman in that photo holding that bottle has great tits, therefore I will drink Budweiser."
Not quite. Its more like "Perhaps if I was drinking that beer too, I'd also end up haging around hot chicks like that. My consumption of competing beers must be my problem." Sort of like that, but at a subconcious level. Label the male sex drive "irrational" if you want to, I suppose. Evolutionary biologists would probably want to argue the point. They've got lots of time to do so, since the Busweiser doesn't seem to be working for them either.:-)
Seinfeld when the US wanted an unfunny comic on TV.
I've never been a Seinfeld fan, but this is way overstating the case. He's got a really good schtic built around pointing out the drama we can inject into what should be mundane things. The problem here isn't him, is the ad agency behind this and how they are using him.
One of the best ads I ever saw was the one Seinfeld did for the pay-at-the-pump feature, where he purposely put an extra penny on the pump to get the sadistic cachier's hopes up, only to dash them by pulling out his card and paying at the pump (all to Toriador music, while his smokin' hot date watched on). That was probably at least 15 years ago, and I still remember it vividly. Better yet it got its point across, and its point was actually helpful to the product.
People attacking these ads are mainly attacking these ads because they attack ANYTHING microsoft does. The ads are completely fine.
Er...no. Happy Vista user here and child of two parents who worked in advertising for a bit. I think those ads stink. Perhaps I'm wrong, but its not because I hate Microsoft or know nothing about advertising.
About the only thing I think the ads are doing well is making you watch them (once) intently. "Confuse" ads do that, because you want to know WTF is going on in them. However, there needs to be a big payoff at the end that explains it, like a punchline or something. There's nothing in these.
You at *least* should leave the viewer with some kind of impression of the product when the Ad is over. By the end of these ads, I'm so confused I hardly even noticed the one tiny mention of Microsoft. So now people are going around saying, "What's with these new Seinfeld/Bill Gates ads?" rather than "What's with these new Microsoft ads"?
Worse, I think they actually make Apple's ads more effective. The Mac ads portray Macs as younger, cooler, and hipper than PCs. This ad shows us that Bill Gates is actually older and more out of touch than even Apple's cartoonish "PC" guy. 20 years ago with the young skinny geeky Bill Gates this campaign might have worked well, but now he just looks like a grandpa that needs to be led around.
Thinking about it, that would be a great game mechanic. Instead of "petitioning" a GM, what you do is run to the nearest shrine and/pray. If enough players pray for the same thing (or the GMs are just bored that day), *then* the all-powerful GM toon comes around and takes care of the problem.
You could even work out some kind of holiness or karma system, to help filter out the prayers of the greifers from everyone else. Perhaps someone who buffs strangers lot might get extra consideration than the normal player.
Anyone who heals PUGs regularly should get a karma so high, others will seek them out to pray on their behalf.:-)
I've been playing in beta for a few weeks. Your objection has merits in theory, but it doesn't really apply to Warhammer. The PvP they have is not really so integral to the game that you can't do without it. A lot of it is actually just PvE, where the "E" happens to mobs that look just like players of the other faction.
My wife *hates* PvP, and she's now playing the game with me.
Perhaps the endgame is all PvP, I haven't gotten there. But I bet most casual players (who are typically the ones who don't go in for PvP) probably wouldn't get there for quite some time either.
The solution is a badass, omnipotent, omniscient being, able to smite at will, subscription bedamned. When the forest god assumes wolf form and eats you dead, dead, dead as you attempt to exterminate the wolves, everyone else will think twice about doing it.
Not really. You can't pay to have your godlike supercops everywhere at once. All GrieferGuild would do is have one tard keep the Cop busy while the rest go sneak into the noob area and start killing everything in sight.
I've concluded that organized efforts are more likely to get attention because the potential impact is much greater.
I have to agree. Probably the best approach would be to find ways to make it worth their while to *not* use DRM.
For instance, if game reviews included DRM prominently in their ratings, rather than just as aside mentions it would make a big difference. The first time a $100 millon game loses two "stars" in prominent reviews due to DRM, I guarantee you the publishers will take notice.
Another thing that would help would be to develop a "DRM Free" label that the good guys can use on their products. Then suddenly there will be marketing value in being able to use that label. The sociopaths running the big companies will understand that. This model has been used successfully in many other industries to help fight things like rainforest deforestration and child labor.
I rebuild my machine pretty regularly for one reason or another... I don't want to have to jump through a hoop every time I want to install a game I purchased
Here's a not so funny story along the same vein. Back in 1921 there was a little race war in Tulsa, OK. Being less numerous, the blacks lost and their part of town was burned to the ground. Nobody to this day knows how many died in its defense and the ensuing carnage.
One of the immediate causes was said to be an article in one of the Tulsa papers. In the ensuing coverup, all copies of that article seem to have disappeared. You can go try to look it up in your local library today if you want. Any copy of the Tulsa World from Tuesday, May 31, 1921 that historians will ever see has an article cut out of it.
but why go with the correct numbers when you can exaggerate and sound so much better?
During the Eisnehower era, congress was still controlled by democrats, excepting his first 2 years. Of the next 4 elected presidents, 3 were democrats, and the democrats controlled congress for the entire time.
More to the point, no president in that entire time, Democrat or Republican, seriously challenged the New Deal. It was only with the election of Regan that things truly changed. Even then I don't think the Reps took over Congress until midway through his term.
So that's actually, what, 1980 - 1932 = 48 years? If anything, I was playing it down.
And, who's to say the GOP won't try to rig this election?
Back in the late 70's and early 80's I used to play soccer on a team that was mostly black. In Oklahoma. All our opponents were all white, as were all the referees. I happen to know a little bit about playing the game when supposedly impartial "officials" are putting their thumbs on the scales.
Your only defense against this is to be that much better than your competition. You can't allow it to be close, because then its a crapshoot who wins, and you are holding loaded dice.
For the Dems to win in this day in age, I think it is going to have to be a landslide. Aiming to win a squeaker is a fools game.
Yes, this talk is particularly silly considering that the latest polls have McCain ahead.
He's not ahead if you look at delagate count, but he's in easy striking distance there too.
Note that after the democratic convention bounce in '88, Dukakis (the democrat) was up by 19 points. That's far more than Obama has ever been up. After the Rep dirty trick machine had 3 months to work him over, he ended up taking only 10 states. If you think they won't spend the next 3 months doing the exact same thing this time, you are living in la-la land.
At the moment, it looks to me like Obama is going to lose. The only chance I see is if people who care get involved in unprecedented numbers. "Involved" does not mean just showing up to vote. "Involved" means going to your local Democratic Party HQ and asking what you can do to help.
Are you saying that ten million dollars in damage is comparable to killing several thousand people?
Worse, its not even real "damage". In most of these cases no actual property was destroyed. Its all just made up numbers for the value of people's time when they had to track down and stop the attacks, or when they were being inconvienenced. But all that money would have been paid anyway, the companies would just have got more work out of it.
If productivity losses counts for "damage", then NCAA's March Madness does far more damage every year. Perhaps NCAA president Myles Brand should be thrown in the pokey too.
Selling bandwidth that does not exist is lying . There is no excuse for selling services that you cannot render.
In that case, I guess your bank is lying too when it says it has your money. At any one time there isn't nearly as much cash in a bank as the value of its accounts.
ISP's are hardly alone in doing this kind of thing. Its is indeed disingenuous of them to complain about people actually using their facilities. If their lines are getting saturated, I agree they should add more capacity. However, insisting they set aside enough bandwith for every paying customer to take up the theoretical maximum at once is crazy talk.
It's true what's been said, that Fannie and Freddie were "too big to fail." Failure without a buyout would have caused...utter chaos - literally runs on the banks not seen since 1929.
...which wouldn't really be all that bad from a Republican perspective. After all, those banks rolled their dice and took their chances, right? Where's the incentive for responsibility if we don't let anyone pay the piper?
But wait...I remember something else happened in 1929...what was it? Hmmm...Oh yeah! Americans got a good look at where that social dawanist philosophy actually leads, and rejected the Republicans for the next 30 years. OMFG! This is an emergency!
Neither, the first is wrongly formed, and the second is nothing but conjecture.
Icelanders are just Scandanvians. They only settled the island in 874. That's not enough time to evolve a lot of traits in-situ. If you are talking about "Icelanders" geneticly, you are talking about Scandanavians (who, I should note, live directly adjacent to some Sami people).
Any supposed Sami visits to Iceland after settlement would have happened in *historical* times, and there would be records of that.
It would be fairly easy to check on that with genetic studies. I'm not going to buy your assertions on the matter without seeing such.
Also, I'm not sure what you mean by "mongol peoples". The mongols, turks (and ancient huns), and siberians are generally considered "Altaic" people. The vast majority of Altaic speakers live in a temperate band across Asia though, not in the north. I don't believe it is very closely related to Eskimo-Aleut (what Inuits speak), and certianly not to Icelandic.
It is certianly possible there was some small amount of genetic flow between the groups, but my understanding is that every time geneticists look for that, they find suprisingly little of it.
there has been considerable debate about the existence and degree of contact between Polynesians and South Americans, with the presence of the sweet potato throughout the Pacific often used as evidence of early trading contacts.
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You imply I'm some sort of spokesman for all Democrats, when the logical implication of what I'm saying (don't just vote your own personal pocketbook) would actually help Republicans. If everyone did have Mr. Adams' attitude, Republicans couldn't get elected dogcatcher in this country.
The fact is I'm a proud American, and I personally plan on voting on who I think would be best for the country, and the country my children will inherit. If everyone does that and Republicans get elected as a result, perhaps that's what should happen.
I can see why you are confused. If I was looking at it in a strictly partisan way, it probably would have confused me too.
Here's one hint that might help you understand Democrats: Believe it or not, we are all individuals with our own personal sets of beliefs and ideals. We don't have some kind of weekly meeting where our latest beliefs are handed down from on high. It makes us looks rather disorganized to someone who is used to the opposite. On the other hand, we aren't hamstrug by the need to reduce all problems to something that can be solved by letting rich folks pay less taxes. I call it a wash.
From TFA:
Man, that's sad. He's making more than 200K (must be, or the O-man's plan has him in line for a tax cut), and *that's* his whole basis for voting? No cocern for society as a whole huh? Just your own personal pocketbook. I guess in that case the %98 of the rest of us should blindly vote Democratic, as we'll get a tax cut.
Let's not even mention the fact that he's not actually going to *raise* taxes on the rich, so much as rescind the huge "temporary" emergency tax cut Bush pushed through in his first term as an "economic stimulus package". That economic experiment sure worked well, didn't it?
and what cabinet position would Steve Ballmer have?
McCain's temper is even more notorious than Ballmer's. So it would be poetic justice if Ballmer's title started with "Chair of the ..."
You seem to be sharing the general delusion that torture is some magic truth wand. It is not. It's a magic "tell me what I want to hear" wand. If you live in a country that uses it, then anyone who that poor journalist knows the name of will get hauled in, not just the "guilty" party. This is exactly how one innocent Canadian got hauled off by the CIA and tortured. A guy they were torturing before him happened to know his name, and said it in hopes of getting the torture to stop for a bit.
If they keep at it, anyone those people know by name will get hauled in too. Your only defences in such a place are to keep to yourself, not talk to *anyone* at all radical (even by association), and turn the other guy in before he does the same to you.
Perhaps when Bill handed the company over, he left them with a Brewster's Millions clause in the contract. To keep control of the company, the current executive team has to spend all its cash. Any money they actually get in return for their investment would be counter-productive.
Best comment on the ads I've seen yet. Grats.
The Mojave campaign had the problem that it was about how people thought that Vista sucks and that is not a fact that you want to be advertising to your customers.
Bingo!
By being about nothing, the Seinfeld+Gates campaign does not make the same mistake. But it still fails to overcome the problem which is that Vista is a bad product and their is growing public perception of that.
Slight quibble. The problem is the perception that it's a bad product. It might in fact be a bad product, but commercials are about perception, so the truth of the matter is immaterial.
The way to fight that would be with ads about Vista being great. If they can repeat that enough for it to sink in, many people will think any problems they may have are either odball cases, or a result of their own incompetence.
Their are subtle and indirect forms of promotion. Consumers are irrational. Based on the advertisements which I see, I am pretty sure that male brains actually work in way which makes "Wow, the woman in that photo holding that bottle has great tits, therefore I will drink Budweiser."
Not quite. Its more like "Perhaps if I was drinking that beer too, I'd also end up haging around hot chicks like that. My consumption of competing beers must be my problem." Sort of like that, but at a subconcious level. Label the male sex drive "irrational" if you want to, I suppose. Evolutionary biologists would probably want to argue the point. They've got lots of time to do so, since the Busweiser doesn't seem to be working for them either. :-)
I've never been a Seinfeld fan, but this is way overstating the case. He's got a really good schtic built around pointing out the drama we can inject into what should be mundane things. The problem here isn't him, is the ad agency behind this and how they are using him.
One of the best ads I ever saw was the one Seinfeld did for the pay-at-the-pump feature, where he purposely put an extra penny on the pump to get the sadistic cachier's hopes up, only to dash them by pulling out his card and paying at the pump (all to Toriador music, while his smokin' hot date watched on). That was probably at least 15 years ago, and I still remember it vividly. Better yet it got its point across, and its point was actually helpful to the product.
Er...no. Happy Vista user here and child of two parents who worked in advertising for a bit. I think those ads stink. Perhaps I'm wrong, but its not because I hate Microsoft or know nothing about advertising.
About the only thing I think the ads are doing well is making you watch them (once) intently. "Confuse" ads do that, because you want to know WTF is going on in them. However, there needs to be a big payoff at the end that explains it, like a punchline or something. There's nothing in these.
You at *least* should leave the viewer with some kind of impression of the product when the Ad is over. By the end of these ads, I'm so confused I hardly even noticed the one tiny mention of Microsoft. So now people are going around saying, "What's with these new Seinfeld/Bill Gates ads?" rather than "What's with these new Microsoft ads"?
Worse, I think they actually make Apple's ads more effective. The Mac ads portray Macs as younger, cooler, and hipper than PCs. This ad shows us that Bill Gates is actually older and more out of touch than even Apple's cartoonish "PC" guy. 20 years ago with the young skinny geeky Bill Gates this campaign might have worked well, but now he just looks like a grandpa that needs to be led around.
Total washout in my book.
Thinking about it, that would be a great game mechanic. Instead of "petitioning" a GM, what you do is run to the nearest shrine and /pray. If enough players pray for the same thing (or the GMs are just bored that day), *then* the all-powerful GM toon comes around and takes care of the problem.
You could even work out some kind of holiness or karma system, to help filter out the prayers of the greifers from everyone else. Perhaps someone who buffs strangers lot might get extra consideration than the normal player.
Anyone who heals PUGs regularly should get a karma so high, others will seek them out to pray on their behalf. :-)
I've played both games quite a bit, and I think this is a great post. Just reverse the logic on everything he said, and its 100% accurate!
Oh! You mean this putative MMO is going to hire God Almighty himself to be an admin? That is different. He definitely could fix the problem.
I've been playing in beta for a few weeks. Your objection has merits in theory, but it doesn't really apply to Warhammer. The PvP they have is not really so integral to the game that you can't do without it. A lot of it is actually just PvE, where the "E" happens to mobs that look just like players of the other faction.
My wife *hates* PvP, and she's now playing the game with me.
Perhaps the endgame is all PvP, I haven't gotten there. But I bet most casual players (who are typically the ones who don't go in for PvP) probably wouldn't get there for quite some time either.
Not really. You can't pay to have your godlike supercops everywhere at once. All GrieferGuild would do is have one tard keep the Cop busy while the rest go sneak into the noob area and start killing everything in sight.
I have to agree. Probably the best approach would be to find ways to make it worth their while to *not* use DRM.
For instance, if game reviews included DRM prominently in their ratings, rather than just as aside mentions it would make a big difference. The first time a $100 millon game loses two "stars" in prominent reviews due to DRM, I guarantee you the publishers will take notice.
Another thing that would help would be to develop a "DRM Free" label that the good guys can use on their products. Then suddenly there will be marketing value in being able to use that label. The sociopaths running the big companies will understand that. This model has been used successfully in many other industries to help fight things like rainforest deforestration and child labor.
You must not like XP or Vista much either then.
Here's a not so funny story along the same vein. Back in 1921 there was a little race war in Tulsa, OK. Being less numerous, the blacks lost and their part of town was burned to the ground. Nobody to this day knows how many died in its defense and the ensuing carnage.
One of the immediate causes was said to be an article in one of the Tulsa papers. In the ensuing coverup, all copies of that article seem to have disappeared. You can go try to look it up in your local library today if you want. Any copy of the Tulsa World from Tuesday, May 31, 1921 that historians will ever see has an article cut out of it.
During the Eisnehower era, congress was still controlled by democrats, excepting his first 2 years. Of the next 4 elected presidents, 3 were democrats, and the democrats controlled congress for the entire time.
More to the point, no president in that entire time, Democrat or Republican, seriously challenged the New Deal. It was only with the election of Regan that things truly changed. Even then I don't think the Reps took over Congress until midway through his term.
So that's actually, what, 1980 - 1932 = 48 years? If anything, I was playing it down.
Back in the late 70's and early 80's I used to play soccer on a team that was mostly black. In Oklahoma. All our opponents were all white, as were all the referees. I happen to know a little bit about playing the game when supposedly impartial "officials" are putting their thumbs on the scales.
Your only defense against this is to be that much better than your competition. You can't allow it to be close, because then its a crapshoot who wins, and you are holding loaded dice.
For the Dems to win in this day in age, I think it is going to have to be a landslide. Aiming to win a squeaker is a fools game.
Yes, this talk is particularly silly considering that the latest polls have McCain ahead.
He's not ahead if you look at delagate count, but he's in easy striking distance there too.
Note that after the democratic convention bounce in '88, Dukakis (the democrat) was up by 19 points. That's far more than Obama has ever been up. After the Rep dirty trick machine had 3 months to work him over, he ended up taking only 10 states. If you think they won't spend the next 3 months doing the exact same thing this time, you are living in la-la land.
At the moment, it looks to me like Obama is going to lose. The only chance I see is if people who care get involved in unprecedented numbers. "Involved" does not mean just showing up to vote. "Involved" means going to your local Democratic Party HQ and asking what you can do to help.
Worse, its not even real "damage". In most of these cases no actual property was destroyed. Its all just made up numbers for the value of people's time when they had to track down and stop the attacks, or when they were being inconvienenced. But all that money would have been paid anyway, the companies would just have got more work out of it.
If productivity losses counts for "damage", then NCAA's March Madness does far more damage every year. Perhaps NCAA president Myles Brand should be thrown in the pokey too.
In that case, I guess your bank is lying too when it says it has your money. At any one time there isn't nearly as much cash in a bank as the value of its accounts.
ISP's are hardly alone in doing this kind of thing. Its is indeed disingenuous of them to complain about people actually using their facilities. If their lines are getting saturated, I agree they should add more capacity. However, insisting they set aside enough bandwith for every paying customer to take up the theoretical maximum at once is crazy talk.
But wait...I remember something else happened in 1929...what was it? Hmmm...Oh yeah! Americans got a good look at where that social dawanist philosophy actually leads, and rejected the Republicans for the next 30 years. OMFG! This is an emergency!
Neither, the first is wrongly formed, and the second is nothing but conjecture.
Icelanders are just Scandanvians. They only settled the island in 874. That's not enough time to evolve a lot of traits in-situ. If you are talking about "Icelanders" geneticly, you are talking about Scandanavians (who, I should note, live directly adjacent to some Sami people).
Any supposed Sami visits to Iceland after settlement would have happened in *historical* times, and there would be records of that.
It would be fairly easy to check on that with genetic studies. I'm not going to buy your assertions on the matter without seeing such.
Also, I'm not sure what you mean by "mongol peoples". The mongols, turks (and ancient huns), and siberians are generally considered "Altaic" people. The vast majority of Altaic speakers live in a temperate band across Asia though, not in the north. I don't believe it is very closely related to Eskimo-Aleut (what Inuits speak), and certianly not to Icelandic.
It is certianly possible there was some small amount of genetic flow between the groups, but my understanding is that every time geneticists look for that, they find suprisingly little of it.
Ack. Actually, they did:
I missed that part somehow. My bad.