Except for scratched DVDs. I heard this one way too often. Harddisks don't get scratched as often. And you can make backups. And there's a dozen of troubleshooting steps you can take to get the game to work. If your XBOX game ceases to work for some reason, you're screwed.
Except for when you need to reinstall the game (did you back up your save file? Can you even find it?). Except for when you don't have the disk available, so you can't play, Mr. Pirate. Except for when you can't get online, so you can't play, Mr. Filthy Pirate. Except for when the game requires "patch of the week" to load (remember Eidos?). Except for when you failed to submit a valid retinal scan, DNA registration, your social security number and two credit cards, you worthless human scum who dared to exchange money for our game from a reputable retailer without our explicit permission.;)
Sure, you can scratch a disk. But there are MANY reasons a game will simply refuse to run on a PC, ignoring insufficient hardware. Hell, I challenge you to take a call from your mom at 9pm while she's frantic that SIMS-2 keeps crashing due to the beta nVidia drivers required to even get the game past the loading screen.
I used to say PC and console gaming were about even. Now, I'm not so sure.
2. Every game is guarenteed to work This is the only true advantage to consoles. It's also only true because stupid users BREAK their PC's. Not a fault of the platform, it's a fault of the user. Consoles protect you from yourself.
Coming from a console/pc agnostic, you're wrong here. Need I bring up Eidos? They have to release the buggiest shit on the face of the Earth on a fairly regular basis. If you remember back that far, the Final Fantasy VII release for the PC was notorious for its inexcusable level of bugs; it wouldn't even work out of the box without several patches many weeks after its release. Hell, even Diablo II has 10(!) patches. Sure, a bad user can hose their system, but game crashes are definitely a major PITA when PC gaming.
And as a PC gamer on occasion, I have to say registration is easily my biggest pet-peeve. Why do I have to get no-cd cracks for a game I paid for? I didn't install multiple gigs of files to keep a CD around. With games that require online activation per play (ala Steam), how the hell do I play on a damn road trip to kill some time? Seriously, game companies being a bunch of paranoid asshats has significantly reduced my enthusiasm for PC gaming.
It really is entirely dependant on the laptop. In their particular test-bed, they saw roughly a 8-9% decrease in battery performance per clock, but other manufacturers:
Claim 7 hours using the Core 2 Duo. Remember there's also a screen, a high-end video-card and other power sucking elements. The Merom runs at 34W idle, while the Core Duo runs 31W idle. There's your difference in a nutshell; anything else is purely laptop design limitations. If that's one of your major selling points, just make it one of your buying criteria, and I'm sure you'll find something that suits. Maybe not the 7-hour laptop from Pegasus, but that should give you some idea of the range available.
According to them, there's rough parity on battery usage (within 10% by clock) yet the chip is anywhere from 15-50% faster than the Core Duo depending on what you're doing.
This is seriously a massive step forward, and I for one plan on buying a laptop equipped with one of these.
Are you kidding? I reserved my PS2 a year before it was released. I have a V1 console, probably the buggiest, most expensive, and oldest version alive. I play constantly, as I play RPGs and DDR for hours every week, and have since I received it in 2000. I've used it in the vertical position, in the horizontal position, moved to a new apartment four times, left it on overnight multiple times on accident, and let it sit covered in dust in a cramped entertainment center, and it still won't die. I know my experience is atypical, but I'm pretty sure my PS2 will survive to the heat death of the universe.
So your guarantee is wrong, I for one will still have a PS2.;)
Now my PS on the other hand... well, that only works upside down.
That's what I thought. Constants, macros, block delimiters in various languages (ADA, Pascal, etc), SQL, acronyms, etc. Does the person who posted this article actually write code?
You'll pry my caps-lock from my COLD DEAD FINGERS!
It's not really disdain in a lot of cases. I have a hyperactive metabolism, so while I ate my family out of house and home while growing up, and walking to school in most cases, I didn't get any bigger. I've tried lifting weights multiple times, gaining nothing except sore muscles for months on end. I guess having a heart condition doesn't help, either.
What helped me was simply standing up to anyone who tried to bully me, or I just happend to share a friend of theirs, and so on. Now that I think about it, nobody ever really bothered me in High School, I was almost invisible in the grand scheme of things. Weird.
Until someone brings in a bottle of Drain-o and a separate suspension of aluminum, or a container of bleach, and a container of ammonia. A good chemist can come up with many wonderful and much more deadly concoctions, so tell me again why they're just pouring everything into a giant vat as a safety precaution?
I didn't see you mention government programs helping you out... your mom worked hard to provide for you and you not only got out of the situation you became a successful and educated person...
I didn't mention it, because it went without saying. We were frequently on welfare, food stamps, and I always had reduced lunch at school. Every time we dipped below her ability to pay the bills, that was our last resort. She told me that being on welfare made her feel like a failure, and even working multiple jobs and having no life was a better fate.
Sure, I'm successful, but only through my own abilities and latent genetic predisposition. I score well into the "genius" range in IQ tests, so while I'd like to credit some kind of work ethic, I can't. What about the "normal" people out there who can't get by without parental involvement or guidance? I'm fairly certain that a child incapable of raising itself in my situation would have been SOL. As good as my mom was at keeping a roof over our heads, that's all she was good for. How can you raise a child you never see, because you're always at work?
And while I'd like to continue this conversation, your response shows you missed the entire point of my first response. This is not a what-if game: it's reality. What if many men weren't worthless pieces of shit with little responsibility for their actions? What if she didn't come from an abusive household? What if she didn't give birth to a child with multiple severe heart defects that required yearly followup from congenital specialists (the only reason I'm even alive!) without insurance? What if the moon was a source of limitless cheese that would feed the starving throngs? What if there were little happy fairies in a fruity little wonderland where everything went according to plan and everybody shit gumdrops? Regardless of what could have been done to avoid the situation in the first place, it happened. It always happens; human nature does not restrict itself to theoretical or philosophical imperatives of morality or ideal circumstance. Shit happens. We can either ignore the shit, and sweep it under the rug, or be caring human beings and clean it up.
We pay more for the war in Iraq every day than is ever given to charity or distributed by social programs. We prop up corporations with bad business plans with billions from the public coffers, yet as soon as someone suggests we show kindness to the less fortunate, there is outright revulsion and accusations against the listless and lazy poor. From a supposedly Christian Nation (tm) (the religion of peace and charity!), this sickens me, and proves that we are a society of self-serving opportunists and sanctimonious simpletons regardless of social status or economic position.
Now excuse me, I have to go finish my plan on uniting all the world's religions in peace and harmony, ending war, and curing cancer so we can all sing and dance and play in this alternate dimension you think exists were nobody ever fucking needs help from anyone else because we're all geniuses capable of knowing everything and doing anything short of breaking the laws of physics.
I don't think someone working 2 jobs could be considered destitute...
And that is what this all really comes down to. As intelligent, successful, and hardworking as you may be, you lack perspective. Let me tell you a story; don't worry, it's short.
When my mom became pregnant with me and word got out, her boyfriend vanished one night, never to be heard from again. Sure, she managed to raise me while working two, sometimes three jobs and living in trailers or bad neighborhoods. We got by, barely sometimes, thanks to the kindness of people she befriended. One year, the only reason we had a christmas was thanks to her boss donating various canned goods and a turkey to us, because she respected my mother's work and hoped the best for us. It was a hard and thankless way to live, and I resented it. Maybe the only reason I worked so hard to get an IB diploma in High School and finish college was to ensure my escape from such a meager existence.
No matter what anyone thinks of my mother, whether or not she was lazy or bad at making decisions, why was I saddled with the consequences of her actions? What did I do to deserve eating canned beets between visits to the grocery store?
Regardless of what your experience has led you to believe, there are situations where no amount of resolve or skill can bring relief. Whatever suffering my mother earned for herself fell upon me as well, and that's partially why we have social programs in the first place. Now I'm a successful DBA and have little concern over finances, but then I had no outlet but to survive for the next day.
I know, the "it's for the kids," argument is old and played-out, but sometimes overused arguments have a sliver of truth behind them.
The same thing your TV does on standby, or your powered-subwoofer with signal detection, or your TV, or your DTS receiver, or your... Practically everything these days has a standby mode. Power leakage is not news, and Zonk is once again proving he has some kind of irrational hatred toward consoles. I saw someone say that in a story a couple days ago, but now I'm starting to believe it. I mean, what about people who leave their PC on all day? I'd like to think a few hundred watts is more of an issue than the handful a console may use to monitor for remote activity.
Right, but I was speaking of my proposed design where each column pulls out of the chassis on a rail. In order to keep the drives live, you'd need to integrate cables into the rail to keep the backplanes active.
Kids these days... what ever happened to reading comprehension?;)
Right, the entire thing is rail mounted. You still have to pull out the entire enclosure to replace one drive. And it weighs 170 pounds... pulling out such a beast frequently doesn't seem very safe to me, personally.
And of course, little red lights appear on failed disks, at which point you simply swap it out and everything operates as if nothing happened...
I was thinking about that. With that case design, you have to pull the entire server and pop off the cover to yank one drive. I couldn't tell from the pictures how the enclosures worked, either; handles didn't seem evident. The idea is interesting, though. It almost looks like they could even squeeze it down to 2U with some creative cooling.
Since they have 12-rows of 4 drives each, I wonder if they could have mounted each column on rails so you could slide out the column of the offending drive and pop it out from the front. If they could manage to integrate the data cable into one or both of the rails, it would be much more accessible. Here's hoping for next-gen!
Yeah... I took Russian in High School. The hardest part for me, was the heavy-handed grid on word endings based on context, speaker, word gender, and so on. It was like trying to learn Latin. I've pretty much sworn off all European languages now in favor of Japanese which at least makes some sense (what do you mean chair is feminine?!) Russian just replaces a bunch of arbitrary rules with different arbitrary rules that only experience with the idiosyncrasies can solve.
Major points here. Back in High School IB History, we were taught the proper pronunciation for the first few stanzas of the Canterbury Tales.
Whan that aprill with his shoures soote The droghte of march hath perced to the roote, And bathed every veyne in swich licour Of which vertu engendred is the flour
Is phonetically (forgiving my rewrites):
Wan dat ap-ril wit ees shur-as so-te The drooked of marsh hath per-ced to de ro-te And ba-thed every vein in svitch li-coor Of which ver-tu en-jahn-dahred is de fluur
And so on.
Then in college, I heard an English major reading the Canturbery Tales phonetically using modern rules, and it made my skin crawl. (Whan that april in his shour-es sotay.) I imagine in another few hundred years, e'll reach a similar situation with current writing, but such a thing must be gradual. But most of those old pronunciations are long dead. Simplifying spelling won't work, simply because phonetics change. If you think the differences between Middle and Modern English are bad, try Old English.
But really, for shudder-inducing fun, you should try reading Chaucer using modern phonetics. In less than a stanza, you'll be wanting to shoot your inner voice.
You laugh, but this is exactly what languages like Chinese and Japanese accomplish with the complex characters many find difficult to memorize. See that crazy 40-stroke symbol? It means 'wonderful'. Sure it sounds just like 'fortunate', 'drunk', and 'salad', but I dare you to confuse the symbols if you know them. (No, I don't know if that example is true, I don't know Chinese, it's merely illustrative.)
But we'll all be speaking Mandarin in twenty years anyway, so better start studying! No more problems spelling those pesky English words!;)
Part of the problem is context. In English, since there are so many words which are homonyms, information is actually transmitted by the spelling of the word. It's bad enough one word can have dozens of meanings, but then you have cases like: Weigh, way, and whey. If we compressed that to simply 'way', which way would you way the way? (In which manner would you determine the effect of gravity upon watery milk byproducts?) See the problem?
Simplified spelling destroys context and meaning in English. We would basically have to rewrite the language from scratch to avoid problems like the one outlined above. In not so simple terms: that will never happen.
Not a coastal thing, they do it all over the Chicago area too. Evanston in particular is rather overzealous when it comes to parking fines. We've frequently had people move their cars, and still get a ticket because the chalk line didn't move enough. People in my company grudgingly accept the 2-hour-shuffle, since the only other alternative is paying over $150 a month for a spot in the parking garages six or seven blocks away.
It makes me glad I sold my car and use public transportation to avoid the hassle. I'd probably end up strangling someone if I had to move my car every two hours on a busy workday and I got trapped in a meeting.
I'm an American with that particular experience. I was basically a fully functioning adult at eleven or twelve. I've come to terms with the fact most people here don't value self reliance, and must consult a dictionary to decipher responsibility: but it's not their fault. You've read stories linked here and elsewhere concerning "helicopter parents," I assume, so it's worse than simply being spoiled. Kids here aren't *allowed* to mature, out of some misguided sense of parental overprotectiveness. Unfortunately there's no antidote to that except for time.
The next twenty years or so will definitely be entertaining, if nothing else.
I think to a certain degree, that something like this happened to me. I grew up dirt poor, and worked diligently to absolutely pulverize school, finish a fully loaded IB curriculum, and get a college degree to escape that whole mess. I went to bed hungry, lived in trailers, moved a lot, and basically ran the house myself until I went to college.
There's something about barely having a childhood that makes me want to be childish. I was 40 when I was 15, so I think I deserve the luxury of a few video games and a silly outlook now that I've made something of myself. I know what it's like to live a banal existence where laughs are forced or tied to shutting out everything looming menacingly ahead. I burned out at 18, and reached the conclusion that people take life too seriously; I made a vow to live and enjoy the little time I've been allotted. It's a cycle, really. I could spend the rest of my days resenting my past, be a bitter old fart ranting of rules and rigid discipline to reach success, but I know where that road leads.
Responsibility? Sure, no question. Maturity to a fault? No. We have a rare opportunity to retain some of our childish antics in our old age, so why not enjoy it? Ever notice people generally calm down considerably once they are grandparents? They've experienced the utter maturity of raising children, they've tried the rules and regulations, punishments and experimentation. Grandma knows the deal now, she conspires with your children to undermine your authority, because she knows something you haven't quite learned: sometimes it's better to be "immature."
But the parent poster had a major point: spoiled children aren't merely immature, they're sheltered and unprepared for maturity. It's a critical difference, and one the article misses. Without any other recourse, people continue with what they know and slowly realize it doesn't suffice when confronted with the inherent complexity of the adult world. Without a bailout, these people flounder horribly, and make immature decisions mostly through ignorance. They'll "grow up," but it'll take longer. Now we see where "helicopter parenting" truly leads.
Not pretty, is it?
By the way, some of those friends of yours who act immature? Talk to them sometime. That part of them which lived hard and grew up before their time is still there. Tell them to flip the switch and speak candidly, and they'll likely comply. If you ever want to see one of your funny or seemingly flippant friends suddenly become a wise old sage, it's a simultaneously terrible and awe-inspiring sight to behold.
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The US already has the highest prison population in the world. Somehow I doubt locking more people up is the answer.
Except for when you need to reinstall the game (did you back up your save file? Can you even find it?). Except for when you don't have the disk available, so you can't play, Mr. Pirate. Except for when you can't get online, so you can't play, Mr. Filthy Pirate. Except for when the game requires "patch of the week" to load (remember Eidos?). Except for when you failed to submit a valid retinal scan, DNA registration, your social security number and two credit cards, you worthless human scum who dared to exchange money for our game from a reputable retailer without our explicit permission.
Sure, you can scratch a disk. But there are MANY reasons a game will simply refuse to run on a PC, ignoring insufficient hardware. Hell, I challenge you to take a call from your mom at 9pm while she's frantic that SIMS-2 keeps crashing due to the beta nVidia drivers required to even get the game past the loading screen.
I used to say PC and console gaming were about even. Now, I'm not so sure.
Coming from a console/pc agnostic, you're wrong here. Need I bring up Eidos? They have to release the buggiest shit on the face of the Earth on a fairly regular basis. If you remember back that far, the Final Fantasy VII release for the PC was notorious for its inexcusable level of bugs; it wouldn't even work out of the box without several patches many weeks after its release. Hell, even Diablo II has 10(!) patches. Sure, a bad user can hose their system, but game crashes are definitely a major PITA when PC gaming.
And as a PC gamer on occasion, I have to say registration is easily my biggest pet-peeve. Why do I have to get no-cd cracks for a game I paid for? I didn't install multiple gigs of files to keep a CD around. With games that require online activation per play (ala Steam), how the hell do I play on a damn road trip to kill some time? Seriously, game companies being a bunch of paranoid asshats has significantly reduced my enthusiasm for PC gaming.
It really is entirely dependant on the laptop. In their particular test-bed, they saw roughly a 8-9% decrease in battery performance per clock, but other manufacturers:
http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=6547
Claim 7 hours using the Core 2 Duo. Remember there's also a screen, a high-end video-card and other power sucking elements. The Merom runs at 34W idle, while the Core Duo runs 31W idle. There's your difference in a nutshell; anything else is purely laptop design limitations. If that's one of your major selling points, just make it one of your buying criteria, and I'm sure you'll find something that suits. Maybe not the 7-hour laptop from Pegasus, but that should give you some idea of the range available.
There's actually a much better review at Hot Hardware:
l eid=864&cid=10
http://www.hothardware.com/viewarticle.aspx?artic
According to them, there's rough parity on battery usage (within 10% by clock) yet the chip is anywhere from 15-50% faster than the Core Duo depending on what you're doing.
This is seriously a massive step forward, and I for one plan on buying a laptop equipped with one of these.
Are you kidding? I reserved my PS2 a year before it was released. I have a V1 console, probably the buggiest, most expensive, and oldest version alive. I play constantly, as I play RPGs and DDR for hours every week, and have since I received it in 2000. I've used it in the vertical position, in the horizontal position, moved to a new apartment four times, left it on overnight multiple times on accident, and let it sit covered in dust in a cramped entertainment center, and it still won't die. I know my experience is atypical, but I'm pretty sure my PS2 will survive to the heat death of the universe.
;)
So your guarantee is wrong, I for one will still have a PS2.
Now my PS on the other hand... well, that only works upside down.
That's what I thought. Constants, macros, block delimiters in various languages (ADA, Pascal, etc), SQL, acronyms, etc. Does the person who posted this article actually write code?
You'll pry my caps-lock from my COLD DEAD FINGERS!
It's not really disdain in a lot of cases. I have a hyperactive metabolism, so while I ate my family out of house and home while growing up, and walking to school in most cases, I didn't get any bigger. I've tried lifting weights multiple times, gaining nothing except sore muscles for months on end. I guess having a heart condition doesn't help, either.
What helped me was simply standing up to anyone who tried to bully me, or I just happend to share a friend of theirs, and so on. Now that I think about it, nobody ever really bothered me in High School, I was almost invisible in the grand scheme of things. Weird.
...
Until someone brings in a bottle of Drain-o and a separate suspension of aluminum, or a container of bleach, and a container of ammonia. A good chemist can come up with many wonderful and much more deadly concoctions, so tell me again why they're just pouring everything into a giant vat as a safety precaution?
I didn't see you mention government programs helping you out... your mom worked hard to provide for you and you not only got out of the situation you became a successful and educated person...
I didn't mention it, because it went without saying. We were frequently on welfare, food stamps, and I always had reduced lunch at school. Every time we dipped below her ability to pay the bills, that was our last resort. She told me that being on welfare made her feel like a failure, and even working multiple jobs and having no life was a better fate.
Sure, I'm successful, but only through my own abilities and latent genetic predisposition. I score well into the "genius" range in IQ tests, so while I'd like to credit some kind of work ethic, I can't. What about the "normal" people out there who can't get by without parental involvement or guidance? I'm fairly certain that a child incapable of raising itself in my situation would have been SOL. As good as my mom was at keeping a roof over our heads, that's all she was good for. How can you raise a child you never see, because you're always at work?
And while I'd like to continue this conversation, your response shows you missed the entire point of my first response. This is not a what-if game: it's reality. What if many men weren't worthless pieces of shit with little responsibility for their actions? What if she didn't come from an abusive household? What if she didn't give birth to a child with multiple severe heart defects that required yearly followup from congenital specialists (the only reason I'm even alive!) without insurance? What if the moon was a source of limitless cheese that would feed the starving throngs? What if there were little happy fairies in a fruity little wonderland where everything went according to plan and everybody shit gumdrops? Regardless of what could have been done to avoid the situation in the first place, it happened. It always happens; human nature does not restrict itself to theoretical or philosophical imperatives of morality or ideal circumstance. Shit happens. We can either ignore the shit, and sweep it under the rug, or be caring human beings and clean it up.
We pay more for the war in Iraq every day than is ever given to charity or distributed by social programs. We prop up corporations with bad business plans with billions from the public coffers, yet as soon as someone suggests we show kindness to the less fortunate, there is outright revulsion and accusations against the listless and lazy poor. From a supposedly Christian Nation (tm) (the religion of peace and charity!), this sickens me, and proves that we are a society of self-serving opportunists and sanctimonious simpletons regardless of social status or economic position.
Now excuse me, I have to go finish my plan on uniting all the world's religions in peace and harmony, ending war, and curing cancer so we can all sing and dance and play in this alternate dimension you think exists were nobody ever fucking needs help from anyone else because we're all geniuses capable of knowing everything and doing anything short of breaking the laws of physics.
I don't think someone working 2 jobs could be considered destitute...
And that is what this all really comes down to. As intelligent, successful, and hardworking as you may be, you lack perspective. Let me tell you a story; don't worry, it's short.
When my mom became pregnant with me and word got out, her boyfriend vanished one night, never to be heard from again. Sure, she managed to raise me while working two, sometimes three jobs and living in trailers or bad neighborhoods. We got by, barely sometimes, thanks to the kindness of people she befriended. One year, the only reason we had a christmas was thanks to her boss donating various canned goods and a turkey to us, because she respected my mother's work and hoped the best for us. It was a hard and thankless way to live, and I resented it. Maybe the only reason I worked so hard to get an IB diploma in High School and finish college was to ensure my escape from such a meager existence.
No matter what anyone thinks of my mother, whether or not she was lazy or bad at making decisions, why was I saddled with the consequences of her actions? What did I do to deserve eating canned beets between visits to the grocery store?
Regardless of what your experience has led you to believe, there are situations where no amount of resolve or skill can bring relief. Whatever suffering my mother earned for herself fell upon me as well, and that's partially why we have social programs in the first place. Now I'm a successful DBA and have little concern over finances, but then I had no outlet but to survive for the next day.
I know, the "it's for the kids," argument is old and played-out, but sometimes overused arguments have a sliver of truth behind them.
The same thing your TV does on standby, or your powered-subwoofer with signal detection, or your TV, or your DTS receiver, or your... Practically everything these days has a standby mode. Power leakage is not news, and Zonk is once again proving he has some kind of irrational hatred toward consoles. I saw someone say that in a story a couple days ago, but now I'm starting to believe it. I mean, what about people who leave their PC on all day? I'd like to think a few hundred watts is more of an issue than the handful a console may use to monitor for remote activity.
OH NOES!!! PCs wastorz teh NRG!!111!1
Right, but I was speaking of my proposed design where each column pulls out of the chassis on a rail. In order to keep the drives live, you'd need to integrate cables into the rail to keep the backplanes active.
;)
Kids these days... what ever happened to reading comprehension?
Right, the entire thing is rail mounted. You still have to pull out the entire enclosure to replace one drive. And it weighs 170 pounds... pulling out such a beast frequently doesn't seem very safe to me, personally.
And of course, little red lights appear on failed disks, at which point you simply swap it out and everything operates as if nothing happened...
I was thinking about that. With that case design, you have to pull the entire server and pop off the cover to yank one drive. I couldn't tell from the pictures how the enclosures worked, either; handles didn't seem evident. The idea is interesting, though. It almost looks like they could even squeeze it down to 2U with some creative cooling.
Since they have 12-rows of 4 drives each, I wonder if they could have mounted each column on rails so you could slide out the column of the offending drive and pop it out from the front. If they could manage to integrate the data cable into one or both of the rails, it would be much more accessible. Here's hoping for next-gen!
I also use a WIMP setup...
I prefer a LIMP setup myself.
Wait, no!
Yeah... I took Russian in High School. The hardest part for me, was the heavy-handed grid on word endings based on context, speaker, word gender, and so on. It was like trying to learn Latin. I've pretty much sworn off all European languages now in favor of Japanese which at least makes some sense (what do you mean chair is feminine?!) Russian just replaces a bunch of arbitrary rules with different arbitrary rules that only experience with the idiosyncrasies can solve.
Major points here. Back in High School IB History, we were taught the proper pronunciation for the first few stanzas of the Canterbury Tales.
Whan that aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of march hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour
Is phonetically (forgiving my rewrites):
Wan dat ap-ril wit ees shur-as so-te
The drooked of marsh hath per-ced to de ro-te
And ba-thed every vein in svitch li-coor
Of which ver-tu en-jahn-dahred is de fluur
And so on.
Then in college, I heard an English major reading the Canturbery Tales phonetically using modern rules, and it made my skin crawl. (Whan that april in his shour-es sotay.) I imagine in another few hundred years, e'll reach a similar situation with current writing, but such a thing must be gradual. But most of those old pronunciations are long dead. Simplifying spelling won't work, simply because phonetics change. If you think the differences between Middle and Modern English are bad, try Old English.
But really, for shudder-inducing fun, you should try reading Chaucer using modern phonetics. In less than a stanza, you'll be wanting to shoot your inner voice.
You laugh, but this is exactly what languages like Chinese and Japanese accomplish with the complex characters many find difficult to memorize. See that crazy 40-stroke symbol? It means 'wonderful'. Sure it sounds just like 'fortunate', 'drunk', and 'salad', but I dare you to confuse the symbols if you know them. (No, I don't know if that example is true, I don't know Chinese, it's merely illustrative.)
;)
But we'll all be speaking Mandarin in twenty years anyway, so better start studying! No more problems spelling those pesky English words!
Part of the problem is context. In English, since there are so many words which are homonyms, information is actually transmitted by the spelling of the word. It's bad enough one word can have dozens of meanings, but then you have cases like: Weigh, way, and whey. If we compressed that to simply 'way', which way would you way the way? (In which manner would you determine the effect of gravity upon watery milk byproducts?) See the problem?
Simplified spelling destroys context and meaning in English. We would basically have to rewrite the language from scratch to avoid problems like the one outlined above. In not so simple terms: that will never happen.
Maybe it's just me, but I'm not particularly excited about MS Execs being hired by Google. Do we really want Google to turn into another Microsoft?
Please Google, for the love of $diety, please hire execs from reputable companies...
Not a coastal thing, they do it all over the Chicago area too. Evanston in particular is rather overzealous when it comes to parking fines. We've frequently had people move their cars, and still get a ticket because the chalk line didn't move enough. People in my company grudgingly accept the 2-hour-shuffle, since the only other alternative is paying over $150 a month for a spot in the parking garages six or seven blocks away.
It makes me glad I sold my car and use public transportation to avoid the hassle. I'd probably end up strangling someone if I had to move my car every two hours on a busy workday and I got trapped in a meeting.
I'm an American with that particular experience. I was basically a fully functioning adult at eleven or twelve. I've come to terms with the fact most people here don't value self reliance, and must consult a dictionary to decipher responsibility: but it's not their fault. You've read stories linked here and elsewhere concerning "helicopter parents," I assume, so it's worse than simply being spoiled. Kids here aren't *allowed* to mature, out of some misguided sense of parental overprotectiveness. Unfortunately there's no antidote to that except for time.
The next twenty years or so will definitely be entertaining, if nothing else.
Oh, I almost forgot...
penis, fart, vagina, testicle, queef, cooties, and silly monkies!
I think to a certain degree, that something like this happened to me. I grew up dirt poor, and worked diligently to absolutely pulverize school, finish a fully loaded IB curriculum, and get a college degree to escape that whole mess. I went to bed hungry, lived in trailers, moved a lot, and basically ran the house myself until I went to college.
There's something about barely having a childhood that makes me want to be childish. I was 40 when I was 15, so I think I deserve the luxury of a few video games and a silly outlook now that I've made something of myself. I know what it's like to live a banal existence where laughs are forced or tied to shutting out everything looming menacingly ahead. I burned out at 18, and reached the conclusion that people take life too seriously; I made a vow to live and enjoy the little time I've been allotted. It's a cycle, really. I could spend the rest of my days resenting my past, be a bitter old fart ranting of rules and rigid discipline to reach success, but I know where that road leads.
Responsibility? Sure, no question. Maturity to a fault? No. We have a rare opportunity to retain some of our childish antics in our old age, so why not enjoy it? Ever notice people generally calm down considerably once they are grandparents? They've experienced the utter maturity of raising children, they've tried the rules and regulations, punishments and experimentation. Grandma knows the deal now, she conspires with your children to undermine your authority, because she knows something you haven't quite learned: sometimes it's better to be "immature."
But the parent poster had a major point: spoiled children aren't merely immature, they're sheltered and unprepared for maturity. It's a critical difference, and one the article misses. Without any other recourse, people continue with what they know and slowly realize it doesn't suffice when confronted with the inherent complexity of the adult world. Without a bailout, these people flounder horribly, and make immature decisions mostly through ignorance. They'll "grow up," but it'll take longer. Now we see where "helicopter parenting" truly leads.
Not pretty, is it?
By the way, some of those friends of yours who act immature? Talk to them sometime. That part of them which lived hard and grew up before their time is still there. Tell them to flip the switch and speak candidly, and they'll likely comply. If you ever want to see one of your funny or seemingly flippant friends suddenly become a wise old sage, it's a simultaneously terrible and awe-inspiring sight to behold.