WTF? Is that 1984 double speak? I'm pretty sure its "Kill", since I have never ever ever come across Thou shall not Murder and to be honest I don't really see the point you are making?
You're trying to pretend there is a difference between killing and killing a killer, or that it's somehow OK to kill during war. I don't really have any strong believes in anything but I have very strong morals on this topic.
Killing is Killing and it's bad to kill people! The passage in the bible is mis translated in some bibles. The exact passage translates more closely to "Thou shalt no murder". In certain notable translations it's translated "thou shalt no kill." This isn't double speak. most languages do not line up 1:1. The original text used a word that is more in line with the word "murder" then "kill" but for one reason or another certain translations used "kill".
Your morals are irrelevant to the translation of the word. You may believe killing a cow is wrong but it doesn't effect the translation of exodus.
If you investigate the history of Judaism and the early Christian churches you'll find neither religion does not agree on your view of "killing". Both outline circumstances where killing is morally correct. Some off shoots (modern and ancient) of Christianity might be more to your liking but it does not change the original word used int he 10 commandments.
So for sending 600,000 spam messages, they were each jailed for five years. The money means little to me since they had it from this spamming but the time in prison, I personally believe is a little harsh. I guess that's what the jury should have and did decide although I find myself not agreeing with jurors as of late in many cases involving my field of study.
A fine without jail time is just "cost of doing business". It wouldn't deter that many people, it only sets up a extra cost center if they get caught. Jail time would be appropriate although I agree 5 might be too much. Rapists sometimes get off with 1 or 2 years of probation.
Thou shalt not kill, yet people kill animals all the time for food or whatever, sometimes just for sport.
It's actually "thou shalt not murder". Murder is the unrightful termination of a presumably human life. Killing during war, self defence, or execution does nto apply. The word kill was a bad or politicized mis translation.
A. Microsoft has never given up on a flagship product line
B. They have more cash reserves then their competition
C. Their developer's network treats third party like gold
I don't think we will be seeing Microsoft leaving the market any time soon. We might be in denial, but at lease we are not delusional.
A. is not entirely true. They have discontinued unprofitable products . The distinction "flagship" might be the dividing line. But strictly speaking they have discontinued products.
B. This does not translate into "willingness to use entire cash reserve to float product line". At some point their shareholders may demand results from that division. Thus far the division if 5 billion int he hole and only had a sprinkling of profitable quarters without any profitable years.
C. I think this is true but I am not a developer. They do tend to have good docs and run a good support infrastructure.
I doubt they will give up on the product line soon. The product line does add some intangible brand value to the MS brand. But at some future date the investors may demand they shift that intangible benefit to a more tangible one or demand they scuttle the ship.
Last I heard MS was already making a profit on the 360, due to the cost coming down quicker than expected. Yes they took that billion dollar charge, but as I understand it each one sold is still profit at this point.
You heard wrong. The billion dollar allocation for RRD problems with the existing retail models pushed their possibility of profitability into 2008. Each machine is sold at a profit but the division itself is still in the red due to warranty issues. If you factor in the extended RR of D warrant it wipes out any profit on their machines and then some.
I know this is wildly offtopic, but Saturn is just simply soo cool! If you want to get ANYBODY hooked onto astronomy, just show them a picture of Saturn. I shudder to think of the day we will strip-mine Saturn (or equivalent heinousness), and will defile the planet with our greed. At least, we can hope.
You do realize Saturn id a gas giant? You can't strip mine gas. But if we ever develope any technology to siphon materials from Saturn I don't understand your aversion to it. The reason we find strip mining on earth so distasteful is due to it's disruption of the local ecology and to a lesser importance it damages the esthetic's of the area. However if there is no ecology then an argument about esthetic's alone seems rather empty.
This kind of scrutiny isn't unique to the US, many (if not most) developed countries have problems with illegal immigration. It's just simple economics - if I'm from some poor African country and I can make ten or a hundred times as much by working at McDonald's in the US, then of course I'm going to try my hardest to get in. So border officers have to be very demanding of visa applicants because once you're in the country, it's much harder to kick you out again instead of just denying entry in the first place. That said, I'd prefer that any developed country not have immigration rules in place at all, other than to block convicted felons.
Any nation that adopts that policy will see their average education of it's population fluctuate to global averages (think American Gr 9 on average), any type of social service will be abused thus all will be shut down if this is implemented. On the plus side you will tend to only get the people willing to travel so you'll at least get the most adventurous of the worlds poor, hungry, and sometimes dangerous.
The Dreamcast was killed by hype, at least in my experience working in game retail at the time. Everytime the Dreamcast had a major release or announcement Sony popped out more hype about the PS2 and people just held back for the PS2 - who could blame them, the Saturn was roundly trounced by PlayStation in the previous generation.
The Dreamcast was killed bad terrible internal management, at least Dreamcast in the US/CA. Also piracy hurt it. As much as DRM sucks, the cheap and easy disk-copying of the DC made it trivial to copy a $40 game. The request for retailers to take a loss on it along with sega limited it's distribution, and the decision to severely limit the number of games for it by not allowing huge numbers of Japaneses ports further hurt it. They could have been facing the management team and PR team at SCO and they would have still went belly up.
I do, all the time. Just one recent example: the people that hung a noose on the black prof's door are now looking at a felony and a long time in jail.
Thats not censorship, thats the criminal justice system working. Issuing death threats is a crime you know.
1. You have not done a survey, you are just spouting out the same bullcrap PR produced by Sony and other companies, namely "our product is more expensive therefore better". You do NOT know what most serious gamers are doing, just what you personally are doing and from the fact that only about 50% of the posters here agree with you, I would assume that only about 50% of the 'serious gamers' agree with you that the Wii is not for them. While this is not a survey, it is a lot better than than blindly repeating your own impressions as if they belong to everyone. 1- A sales dip constitutes hard data, harder then a survey. Their extrapolating a bit too much but it's not just blind PR.
2. Serious gamers don't give a crap about whether their grandma or little sister also likes it. They care about the games (see other opinion below). If Nintendo comes out with some kick ass games for the Wii, that take advantage of the cool interface instead of trying to take advantage of the high end graphics, then guess what, Serious Gamers will use it. 2- Control scheme is one part of a number of factors that makes a game fun. Many use the scheme because Nintendo will not license them otherwise but it doesn't necessarily add to the game. You also have to deal with the fact that if certain demographics get into something it repels other demographics. As soon as Grandma starts listening to elvis, elvis is no longer cool. When Grandma starts listening to Micheal Jackson, Micheal Jackson is no longer cool. etc.. So as soon as wii seem attractive to grandma it turns off "1337 h4xx0r" grandson. They just bet that grand ma and aunt yoga crazed stacy will buy more games then uncle tom and your nephew "K1ng pWn4g3".
3. What makes you think that next year, they won't come out with a cool upgrade along the same lines that seriously boosts the popularity of the old system? Merely a new, better interface will probably be just as easy to create as creating a new game that goes with it. -------------- The other opinion is basically that people really don't care that much about the system, they care about the games. Yeah, one system might have better interface and the other better video and processing power, but the truth is that the differences between them are relatively MINOR compared to the differences between the games. That is, people would rather play a good game on a bad system than a bad game on a good system. If people were to take HALO 3 and downgrade the graphics etc. to make it work on Nintendo, People would rather play HALO 3 on Nintendo with BAD graphics than playing Tic Tac Toe on a Sony machine or an XBOX, even if it had incredibally detailed graphics and animation. 3. Never under estimate the simplicity of gamers minds. Many great games go unnoticed because they don't have enough eye candy. Many sell merely by being eye candy. For instance there is no redeeming quality to Lair except it's eye candy and perhaps it's attempt at innovating a control scheme. It still sold. Remember that sports games sell, and the only real upgrade are in stats, and graphics. Things like Katamari damacy were amazing games but don't' sell nearly as well as madden 08.
This means that the game companies have no one but themselves to blame If in fact Wii is dropping in popularity it is because the companies failed to put out good games. no game company except Nintendo has a very large stake in the wii's success. If the wii dies it's because Nintendo failed to pitch it right to the game studios. IF it goes belly up, they can always develop for the 360, PC or PS3.
statement. I agree things are changing, and we may have some part in it.
I just have one simple little question concerning all the hype around this:
Can someone tell me exactly what is bad about change? The earth has undergone radical changes throughout its entire history, so exactly why do all the global warming fanatics fear this change?
I grant you that water levels may rise, and expensive coast lines may move in land a bit, but that is just an inconvenience to humans. Weather patterns may change so that the Sahara is once again a rain forest and the arctic is farmland, but it wouldn't be the first time. This might shift economic power, but again that is an inconvenience to society, not a threat.
So why exactly does everyone consider an increase in temperature to be such a big bogey-man?
Economic costs mostly. The change in weather patterns will re-adjust where arable land is and if the change is significant enough it may drastically reduce the over all carrying capacity of earth. The jury is out on how much it is going to adjust by. It's going to cause a fair amount of social upheaval and more frequent storms. The extent of how bad it's going to be is not known or even reasonably guessed at. It will likely benifit some areas like Russia, Canada, and most far north countries. But it's uncertain what it will do to the other areas.
My instinct still stays that when all the dust settles, the slow-but-steady pace set by the 360, with no gimmicks, few headline-grabbing features, but an increasingly solid and well-rounded games lineup will win the day.
In the North America. Worldwide the 360 is moving like N-gages outside N.A.
The DS had the same problem. Even now, most of the truly good DS games are Nintendo first-party titles (although I have a number of well-liked third-party titles on my DS). Hopefully the Wii just needs a little more time to build up a library, like the DS did.
The wii i agree but the DS? I have a library of about 30 games only 2 are Nintendo. Nintendogs (GF compelled purchase) and Super Mario. The ones I play most are either Atlus, Konami, or square. Each releasing tons of games on the DS.
It also 'seems reasonable' to speculate that everyone who bought one still plays it every night...
That is an unreasonable speculation because we have no data denying or supporting that claim and it's not intuitively correct either. Many people buy things and do not use them. Most use them but not every night. So it does not seem reasonable that people who bought wii's use them every night.
You assume that he thinks those are all good things, whereas I know a lot of people who would love to do away with most if not all those things.
I have no doubt he thinks those things are bad. He seems to be the sort who wishes the Gov ran nothing but the police and judicial system. He may even believe those are too much for a state. However most of the prosperous countries enact those legislation and programs and they are missing in the least prosperous countries. So they correlate with prosperity in some way making his statement somewhat empty.
That is not the big issue. They are holding our bonds, and we don't have the Gold standard. So we just print them as many dollars as we want and give it to them. They know it too. So they won't cash the bonds, but they might start a war.
In the last war, almost all historians agree, Germany was defeated mainly by the huge industrial output of USA. In the next Sino-US war, just see who has the industrial capacity to out produce weapons to foresee the winner.
Well the massive strategic blundering of the Germans combined with the huge body count Russia absorbed and inflicted likely won the war. The American guns, tanks, and money supplied to the Russians helped. But it would have been a far closer shave if Germany stayed out of Russia, and Russia didn't threaten Germany so much.
Perhaps people would listen to you if you showed them a little more respect, eh?
A large swath of the American public voted in a administration that had thrashed your economy, national prestige, and your liberty. they did so twice. Idiot is a very generous description. English does not have a noun that is strong enough to accurately describe the target audience.
The world is full of irony. It's amazing how well a person rationalizes/compartmentalizes. I have my own moral framework which does not lean on absolutes. I am not an ideologists, I am a pragmatist. I am aware that Gore does not pedal science, he pedals fear. But it seems fear is the most important commodity these days.
By that logic, do you think that the US should ban products coming from China since unscrupulous manufacturing operations are not subject to the same kinds of labor standards that employers in the US must meet? That way, at least you knew you'd be buying from honest, reputable Hecho-in-Americano companies whether you shop at Walmart or not. The US no longer has the manufacturing capacity to pick up the slack. If they banned all Chinese products today, there would be another great depression as the cost for everything goes up and inflation hits double maybe triple digits. China may also then cash in their US debt they have been buying making it worse.
Ever wonder why the US is or at least used to be so very careful about treaties and treaty obligations? Here's a great example.
Congress passes a law to protect US citizens from unscrupulous gambling operations that are not subject to the same kind of regulations that Casinos in the U.S. must meet -- and the world responds via the WTO by trying to extort $100 Billion dollars from the U.S. -- which means taking money from every citizen and company in the U.S. that pays taxes to support offshore companies right to not live up to regulations that make it more difficult to cheat the gamblers out of all their money -- and each of us will pay for that whether we as individuals or companies gamble or not.
They didn't pass the law to protect the US population. They passed the laws to protect gambling corporations interest. The US Gov. are all for cheating American out of their money, but they only want companies who make campaign contributions to do so.
Slashdot Mirror
You're trying to pretend there is a difference between killing and killing a killer, or that it's somehow OK to kill during war. I don't really have any strong believes in anything but I have very strong morals on this topic.
Killing is Killing and it's bad to kill people! The passage in the bible is mis translated in some bibles. The exact passage translates more closely to "Thou shalt no murder". In certain notable translations it's translated "thou shalt no kill." This isn't double speak. most languages do not line up 1:1. The original text used a word that is more in line with the word "murder" then "kill" but for one reason or another certain translations used "kill".
Your morals are irrelevant to the translation of the word. You may believe killing a cow is wrong but it doesn't effect the translation of exodus.
If you investigate the history of Judaism and the early Christian churches you'll find neither religion does not agree on your view of "killing". Both outline circumstances where killing is morally correct. Some off shoots (modern and ancient) of Christianity might be more to your liking but it does not change the original word used int he 10 commandments.
So for sending 600,000 spam messages, they were each jailed for five years. The money means little to me since they had it from this spamming but the time in prison, I personally believe is a little harsh. I guess that's what the jury should have and did decide although I find myself not agreeing with jurors as of late in many cases involving my field of study.
A fine without jail time is just "cost of doing business". It wouldn't deter that many people, it only sets up a extra cost center if they get caught. Jail time would be appropriate although I agree 5 might be too much. Rapists sometimes get off with 1 or 2 years of probation.
Thou shalt not kill, yet people kill animals all the time for food or whatever, sometimes just for sport.
It's actually "thou shalt not murder". Murder is the unrightful termination of a presumably human life. Killing during war, self defence, or execution does nto apply. The word kill was a bad or politicized mis translation.
Considering three facts:
A. Microsoft has never given up on a flagship product line
B. They have more cash reserves then their competition
C. Their developer's network treats third party like gold
I don't think we will be seeing Microsoft leaving the market any time soon. We might be in denial, but at lease we are not delusional.
A. is not entirely true. They have discontinued unprofitable products . The distinction "flagship" might be the dividing line. But strictly speaking they have discontinued products.
B. This does not translate into "willingness to use entire cash reserve to float product line". At some point their shareholders may demand results from that division. Thus far the division if 5 billion int he hole and only had a sprinkling of profitable quarters without any profitable years.
C. I think this is true but I am not a developer. They do tend to have good docs and run a good support infrastructure.
I doubt they will give up on the product line soon. The product line does add some intangible brand value to the MS brand. But at some future date the investors may demand they shift that intangible benefit to a more tangible one or demand they scuttle the ship.
Last I heard MS was already making a profit on the 360, due to the cost coming down quicker than expected. Yes they took that billion dollar charge, but as I understand it each one sold is still profit at this point.
You heard wrong. The billion dollar allocation for RRD problems with the existing retail models pushed their possibility of profitability into 2008. Each machine is sold at a profit but the division itself is still in the red due to warranty issues. If you factor in the extended RR of D warrant it wipes out any profit on their machines and then some.
Simply because you're an uneducated boor who can't appreciate beauty for its own sake
Thank you for highlighting how empty your argument is.
I know this is wildly offtopic, but Saturn is just simply soo cool! If you want to get ANYBODY hooked onto astronomy, just show them a picture of Saturn. I shudder to think of the day we will strip-mine Saturn (or equivalent heinousness), and will defile the planet with our greed. At least, we can hope.
You do realize Saturn id a gas giant? You can't strip mine gas. But if we ever develope any technology to siphon materials from Saturn I don't understand your aversion to it. The reason we find strip mining on earth so distasteful is due to it's disruption of the local ecology and to a lesser importance it damages the esthetic's of the area. However if there is no ecology then an argument about esthetic's alone seems rather empty.
This kind of scrutiny isn't unique to the US, many (if not most) developed countries have problems with illegal immigration. It's just simple economics - if I'm from some poor African country and I can make ten or a hundred times as much by working at McDonald's in the US, then of course I'm going to try my hardest to get in. So border officers have to be very demanding of visa applicants because once you're in the country, it's much harder to kick you out again instead of just denying entry in the first place. That said, I'd prefer that any developed country not have immigration rules in place at all, other than to block convicted felons.
Any nation that adopts that policy will see their average education of it's population fluctuate to global averages (think American Gr 9 on average), any type of social service will be abused thus all will be shut down if this is implemented. On the plus side you will tend to only get the people willing to travel so you'll at least get the most adventurous of the worlds poor, hungry, and sometimes dangerous.
It could get even worse... I knew someone named Richard Wadd... those were some cruel parents...
I had a school acquaintance names Micheal Hunt. Pages for him were hilarious.
Intel are noobs, everyone knows the new X38 are 48 less powerful then the x86.
The Dreamcast was killed by hype, at least in my experience working in game retail at the time. Everytime the Dreamcast had a major release or announcement Sony popped out more hype about the PS2 and people just held back for the PS2 - who could blame them, the Saturn was roundly trounced by PlayStation in the previous generation.
The Dreamcast was killed bad terrible internal management, at least Dreamcast in the US/CA. Also piracy hurt it. As much as DRM sucks, the cheap and easy disk-copying of the DC made it trivial to copy a $40 game. The request for retailers to take a loss on it along with sega limited it's distribution, and the decision to severely limit the number of games for it by not allowing huge numbers of Japaneses ports further hurt it. They could have been facing the management team and PR team at SCO and they would have still went belly up.
I hope they cremate him in a fusion reactor. I'm sure it's hot enough.
I do, all the time. Just one recent example: the people that hung a noose on the black prof's door are now looking at a felony and a long time in jail.
Thats not censorship, thats the criminal justice system working. Issuing death threats is a crime you know.
statement. I agree things are changing, and we may have some part in it.
I just have one simple little question concerning all the hype around this:
Can someone tell me exactly what is bad about change? The earth has undergone radical changes throughout its entire history, so exactly why do all the global warming fanatics fear this change?
I grant you that water levels may rise, and expensive coast lines may move in land a bit, but that is just an inconvenience to humans. Weather patterns may change so that the Sahara is once again a rain forest and the arctic is farmland, but it wouldn't be the first time. This might shift economic power, but again that is an inconvenience to society, not a threat.
So why exactly does everyone consider an increase in temperature to be such a big bogey-man?
Economic costs mostly. The change in weather patterns will re-adjust where arable land is and if the change is significant enough it may drastically reduce the over all carrying capacity of earth. The jury is out on how much it is going to adjust by. It's going to cause a fair amount of social upheaval and more frequent storms. The extent of how bad it's going to be is not known or even reasonably guessed at. It will likely benifit some areas like Russia, Canada, and most far north countries. But it's uncertain what it will do to the other areas.
My instinct still stays that when all the dust settles, the slow-but-steady pace set by the 360, with no gimmicks, few headline-grabbing features, but an increasingly solid and well-rounded games lineup will win the day.
In the North America. Worldwide the 360 is moving like N-gages outside N.A.
The DS had the same problem. Even now, most of the truly good DS games are Nintendo first-party titles (although I have a number of well-liked third-party titles on my DS). Hopefully the Wii just needs a little more time to build up a library, like the DS did.
The wii i agree but the DS? I have a library of about 30 games only 2 are Nintendo. Nintendogs (GF compelled purchase) and Super Mario. The ones I play most are either Atlus, Konami, or square. Each releasing tons of games on the DS.
It also 'seems reasonable' to speculate that everyone who bought one still plays it every night...
That is an unreasonable speculation because we have no data denying or supporting that claim and it's not intuitively correct either. Many people buy things and do not use them. Most use them but not every night. So it does not seem reasonable that people who bought wii's use them every night.
You assume that he thinks those are all good things, whereas I know a lot of people who would love to do away with most if not all those things.
I have no doubt he thinks those things are bad. He seems to be the sort who wishes the Gov ran nothing but the police and judicial system. He may even believe those are too much for a state. However most of the prosperous countries enact those legislation and programs and they are missing in the least prosperous countries. So they correlate with prosperity in some way making his statement somewhat empty.
That is not the big issue. They are holding our bonds, and we don't have the Gold standard. So we just print them as many dollars as we want and give it to them. They know it too. So they won't cash the bonds, but they might start a war.
In the last war, almost all historians agree, Germany was defeated mainly by the huge industrial output of USA. In the next Sino-US war, just see who has the industrial capacity to out produce weapons to foresee the winner.
Well the massive strategic blundering of the Germans combined with the huge body count Russia absorbed and inflicted likely won the war. The American guns, tanks, and money supplied to the Russians helped. But it would have been a far closer shave if Germany stayed out of Russia, and Russia didn't threaten Germany so much.
I think if they just changed the name to "OMG Ponies" the BBFC might change their mind.
Perhaps people would listen to you if you showed them a little more respect, eh?
A large swath of the American public voted in a administration that had thrashed your economy, national prestige, and your liberty. they did so twice. Idiot is a very generous description. English does not have a noun that is strong enough to accurately describe the target audience.
The world is full of irony. It's amazing how well a person rationalizes/compartmentalizes. I have my own moral framework which does not lean on absolutes. I am not an ideologists, I am a pragmatist. I am aware that Gore does not pedal science, he pedals fear. But it seems fear is the most important commodity these days.
Ever wonder why the US is or at least used to be so very careful about treaties and treaty obligations? Here's a great example.
Congress passes a law to protect US citizens from unscrupulous gambling operations that are not subject to the same kind of regulations that Casinos in the U.S. must meet -- and the world responds via the WTO by trying to extort $100 Billion dollars from the U.S. -- which means taking money from every citizen and company in the U.S. that pays taxes to support offshore companies right to not live up to regulations that make it more difficult to cheat the gamblers out of all their money -- and each of us will pay for that whether we as individuals or companies gamble or not.
They didn't pass the law to protect the US population. They passed the laws to protect gambling corporations interest. The US Gov. are all for cheating American out of their money, but they only want companies who make campaign contributions to do so.