So this is supposed to cast doubt on his credentials as a climate scientist... how, exactly?
Someone can give all the contrary (and unliked) opinions they want on subjects they have no credential or authority in. Hell, we do it all the time on./
OTOH, the man had to have posted his hypotheses and proofs somewhere... why not attack those, instead of attacking him?
Best guess, they're likely taking existing brains (in today's humans) and scaling down to fir the skulls. Given that you can reconstruct *most* of the outer shape from the cranial cavity, it's not a bad initial assumption to make.
OTOH, while it's not too awful likely that a given 'duty' of a set of brain cells shifts all that radically, I do agree with you to an extent.
...unless you're driving a classic Jeep, you're going to have a very hard time reaching that windshield. (well, you can play with the side window I guess - but damn it'd be hard to see out the side of your peripheral vision)
Does bring up a point, though... how would such a thing jibe with automotive safety regulations? If you tint your windshield, or in some states have too much crap attached to it (GPS, radar detector, etc etc), you can eat a ticket.
Also, I remember some car model in the 1990's getting all crazy about having a HUD installed in it (it displayed speed, fuel, etc at the bottom of the windshield), but that never really went anywhere.
I had the penultimate room-heater: a dual G5 PowerMac. I was quite able to keep the heater in that room off during most of the winter... if I wanted any extra warmth, I'd just launch Bryce and start rendering a 2048x2048 scene with full raytracing... the room temperature would rise by 15 degrees a half hour later.
I'd say - make the charter school splay by the same rules - take all comers, make all legally required accommodations (and get sued when a parent doesn't like what you did" and let them charge no more than what the voucher is worth - and reduce their payment based on scores. Let them take over an entire district - and see who long they last on vouchers and a population that can vote on how much to give them and vote themselves out of paying if they want.
As a former teacher, I'd say do the exact opposite: Allow public schools to dump the kids who won't perform, the ones who refuse to behave. For those who fail and cannot re-take a given class in a given year, bring back summer school, and start pushing failing students into re-doing a school year if needed. For those with special needs, have a parallel school/class structure (like, well, they have now) to teach them just enough to keep them from walking into traffic, and perhaps a few basic job skills appropriate to their ability. Make drug test failure (for obvious illicit substances) an automatic expulsion with no recourse.
Inform parents by all means needed that their little angel will either have to perform, or thethe kid ends up digging ditches for a living. Sure, you'll have a number of edge cases, which can be handled on a case-by-case basis. Otherwise, quite a few good things will happen:
* parents will start giving a damn about their kids' education, and not treat school as a free babysitting service. * kids will start paying attention in class, for fear of being booted (and then ridiculed/ostracised by their peers), and out of a greater fear of being shoved into a 'special' school. * if a teacher has the actual power to fail (for performance reasons) a given student without fear of retribution (or more commonly, of being overriden by spineless school administrators), then parents will cease to be so gawdawful belligerent about it.
Perhaps it's because corporations, in order to maximize profit, must minimize delivery?
Hate to say it, but minimizing delivery can hurt profits more than help, as customers wanting an item but not getting it (or those getting less than they expected) decide to buy a competing item instead. I know what you were getting at, but the sentence came out a bit awkward.
And corporations are immune, of course
While not perfectly so, they are. A *competent* ( note emphasis) contract comes with milestones, hard limits, SLAs, and escape clauses. The sad majority of government contracts have none of these.
Before you react, note that honestly, neither side in your dichotomy is a perfect solution. OTOH, I do disagree with you about the maturity of it all... I think commercial interests can begin to do space on a larger scale, and some companies have done so for quite awhile (commercial satellites don't get airborne by themselves, after all:) ). It isn't a question of faith or dogma, but a simple solution:
* require all and every company running manned launches to post a bond sufficient to cover accidental death and/or injury for all humans in their care. * have a set of simple and *sane* guidelines for safety - both in design, and in operation. * sufficiently warn all passengers that space travel could easily kill them if they do not follow all instructions given. * all spacecraft will be subject to a reasonable inspection just before launch.
...and similar.
I'm trying to think up some line that would fit about this not being rocket science, but, well...:)
Snark all you like, but I posit that whoever successfully colonizes space first, will be the first to begin its dominance over Humanity a century later, and will achieve it 150-200 years on.
It's already happened in history, where roughly a century after the US was officially founded (1786, when the US Constitution was ratified), it began stretching its power base, and within 50-60 years of that, became a global superpower. two centuries on, it became the world's strongest power (economic/military/influence). Further back, the UK did the exact same thing within 150 years of its mercantile/colonization push. Spain did so before that.
Now you can certainly quibble over whether or not that power will be held on to, and for how long, but the facts remain.
Unlike undiscovered continents and (relatively) primitive peoples, space is going to be a toughie to conquer. However, once someone finagles a way to begin mining/manufacturing on a mass scale out there, and figures down a way to build self-sustaining colonies, the sheer power that one can wield over the rest of humanity (economic, military, or any other valid metric) will be staggering.
Anyone who gets left behind will become like the rest of the previous world empires: a subject nation living on past glories and a crumbling sense of future, as the best and brightest among their populations abandon them for the adventure and opportunities to be had among the powerful.
X axis (state control over the individual): This involves things like speed limits, banned substances or items, zoning laws, things like that... that is, how much state control over individual action is one willing to tolerate or desire?
Y axis (fiscal ideology): How much money is one willing to have government spend and levy? Should money be no object to achieve governmental goals (and taxation not a bother), or should it be done with as little spending as possible, with as little taxation as possible?
Z axis (charity): How much charity should government participate in? This covers things like foreign aid, welfare/public assistance, health care, etc.
Depends - what if he replaced the word "marijuana" with "heroin" ?
Personally, I believe that the government has no right at all to ban drugs as a chattel item, but I do believe they have the right to intervene and regulate when the use/manufacture of it interferes with public safety (e.g. driving while under influence, creating a demonstrably toxic chemical environment, etc). OTOH, I can at least recognize that the issues are a lot more subtle than calling the sale/consumption of drugs an essential liberty.
How is "the penalty for selling small quantities of marijuana", a local issue, give that it should be universally legal, and yet most governments fail on this point?
I live in Oregon, where it is perfectly legal to grow and sell the stuff to medically-licensed individuals in small quantities (the sale price can only be to cover costs, however, and not for profit). There is no penalty for doing so here. This is an example of states doing what they feel best for their population, and is actually protected by the US Constitution.
Now in New York OTOH, selling small quantities of marijuana would likely get you a ticket to Rikers Island.
You have to be 35 years old to be president. Lady Gaga has 10 years to go before she can be eligible.
...and by then the music industry will have been long-since done with her, and aside from DJs and a few die-hard fanboy types, most folks will forget she ever existed.
The problem is, politics is more than one dimensional. It is even more than two dimensional.
In fact, it is (at least) fully cartesian: The X axis is one's desire/tolerance for state control over individuals in general (order vs individualism), the Y axis is one's fiscal ideological inclination (spending/taxation tolerance), and the Z axis is one's social ideological inclination (charity vs non-involvement).
Most folks only think in one-dimensional left-right terms, which is IMHO stupid and dangerous.
All that the internet has helped raise more money for the same old candidates pushing the same old agenda.
Actually, to be fair, w/o the Internet, Obama would not be president right now.
No, not because McCain would've won, but because w/o the Internet and its organizing power, Hillary Clinton would have likely won the convention, and Obama would have been a footnote. Sure, he had a strong press backing, but so did many other candidates in the field.
Now honestly? Not a democrat here, and I never supported Obama with a dollar or a vote. OTOH, I am rather impressed how a short-tenure (one or two term?) senator managed, in less than a year, to come out of nowhere and break the back of the strongest political machine in the US. IMHO, the Internet played a large part in that.
Find me a US general with just one of those traits.
Arnold (before he turned traitor at the behest of his Tory girlfriend) Lee (before he fought for the Confederates - see also the Mexican-American War) Sherman Grant Roosevelt (Theodore, not Franklin) Pershing Patton Bradley Eisenhower MacArthur
...the lineup kind of craps out after Korea (esp. w/ Westmoreland), though Schwartzkopf got pretty creative back in 1991 (though to be fair he was facing a pretty crap army).
Long story short, well... your point doesn't stand.
/P (who, as a USAF veteran, is wondering why the hell he's defending the frickin' *army*...)
The foam is there for good reason, too... you don't want hard drives banging (even at a sub-millimeter distance) against the top of the case - tends to wear out the drives, cause more errors, and makes noise.
I know, I know... 'but they're flush!' Well, unless you custom-machined each HDD case *and* the unit case they went in, you're guaranteed to have a few drives in that type of physical array vibrate like that.
Nice try, but most cases never go to court (the only exception I can think of is the FAT32 patent).
Microsoft's MO is to go to a target company (usually someone who hasn't the money to fight back), show them the patents in question, then 'settle' at a 'discounted' price and tie it all up with an NDA (whereupon violation of said NDA likely results in a higher 'licensing fee').
Pretty slick work when viewed objectively. Ethically? More like slime.
I live in Portland... what the hell is this "snow" stuff you keep talking about? Oh, and the guys down in Los Angeles and Phoenix called and asked the same thing...
...kidding, but only sorta. I used to live in SLC. I can say though that with a properly insulated house, the stuff does hang around for as long as the snow on the ground does. Now the sidewalks and roads are different, but only because the concrete and asphalt absorb sunlight/heat and radiate it on a slower but surer scale.
Not a mod, but I can say that while not overrated, your proposition is, well, naive.
There is a reason why nearly all attempts at mass social engineering has failed utterly. There's also a reason why most attempts at marketing for world peace has failed.
The reason that social engineering has failed on a mass scale has to do with culture, tradition (folks do cling to those), and a total disregard for both by those who are out to build a 'perfect society'. 100 years ago, we had the likes of Lenin and the Bolsheviks who were trying to engineer a perfect society, and on the surface, it sounded ultimately equitable and fair ('from each according to his ability, to each according to his need', was a good summary of the ideal). Folks bought the ideal, but history shows the results, no? Now you're going to propose that we do something like that again? We also got to see, 80-some-odd years ago, what the other extreme brought (national/racial/ideological). Long story short, the biggest cause of human suffering and death in the 20th century wasn't famine, pestilence, or disaster... it was war and the internal miseries brought on by political experimentation gone horribly wrong. To be fair, maybe your political/social scientists might have a different idea altogether, but having seen where both extremes (communism and fascism) went, most folks are rightfully horrified at the idea, and prefer to stick with their imperfect-but-workable solutions.
The reasons that marketing for world peace has failed? Much simpler... most other folks have their own ideas, and it usually involves advantages gained at your expense. After all, it's drop-easy for the EU member state politicians and citizenry to preach about world peace and not really needing an army... they have more than sufficient security and backstopping provided courtesy of the US military. Same with Japan and South Korea, or numerous other nations.
Personally, I like the idea of not spending so much money on US military effort. We can start by proposing that we withdraw from all but a small handful of logistic-critical bases globally. Of course, every time the subject comes up, suddenly the population there isn't too keen on the idea. Even the most strident US-hating socialist cringes when the idea of defending themselves comes up (see also South Korea in the 1990's when the population wanted US personnel out of there... until the US began to consider the idea, leaving the whole peninsula practically defenseless against North Korea. Suddenly the South Koreans were all kinds of happy to see a US soldier in their neighborhood).
To sum it all up, things are a lot more complex than you propose, you know?
That decay has been going on for well over a decade now.
It may be just grumpy-old-guy syndrome, but in spite of the cmoparatively crap graphics, the old 1990's era games were a lot more fun to play (yes, bugs and all). The reason why have to do with elements that have little to do with the technical:
* Most of the old games (Quake/II/III, Unreal/UT, Half-Life, etc) were devilishly customizable, and the software companies actually encouraged modifications * With only a few games of a given genre, you had a *lot* more players * dial-up may have sucked, but it did equalize the field by quite a bit (everyone had lag to some extent) - OTOH, this is obviously more of a bandwidth thing and not a game design thing. * the good games back then were more concerned about flow and content, and less concerned about "balance" or graphics * most of the games were hosted and played freely online, not kept behind a pay-gate * Some folks complain about bots and griefers back in the old days, but hell, they're just as common now as they were back then, if not moreso... just that the cheats are more subtle now, and the greifers less so. * nobody gave a crap if you 'pirated' or copied the game, because odds were very good that you'd buy the next iteration when it came out (see also id Software)
Only opinion, but I'm blaming around 2000-2001 as the time when gaming began declining. CD Keys were only the barest hint of the DRM to come. More and more games got shoved into pay-for-play mode. The flood of games meant a growing fragmentation (even among folks playing the same title... You had Unreal Tournament, UT 2003, UT 2004, etc... all running w/ players at the same time). LAN parties became less and less common, and the ones still going only meant that there were UT players, Quake players, BF 1942 players, CS players, etc... and each new game or iteration meant less folks in a given LAN that could play a given game (or that wanted to, instead preferring their own game/version).
Sure, the consoles kept things going for awhile, but IMHO (and nothing more), it only pushed game publishers down paths that meant more DRM, higher prices, and pay-to-play online experiences. Not even going to touch on the remakes/reboots/re-whatevers that means the majority of games coming out are some re-iteration of something you've already played before.
Certainly, there are bright spots in this dark prose... games that stood out and demanded attention, and/or broke new ground (games like GTA). That said, most of the big ones just became more fodder for sequels, each not quite as good as the last.
Slashdot Mirror
So this is supposed to cast doubt on his credentials as a climate scientist... how, exactly?
Someone can give all the contrary (and unliked) opinions they want on subjects they have no credential or authority in. Hell, we do it all the time on ./
OTOH, the man had to have posted his hypotheses and proofs somewhere... why not attack those, instead of attacking him?
Best guess, they're likely taking existing brains (in today's humans) and scaling down to fir the skulls. Given that you can reconstruct *most* of the outer shape from the cranial cavity, it's not a bad initial assumption to make.
OTOH, while it's not too awful likely that a given 'duty' of a set of brain cells shifts all that radically, I do agree with you to an extent.
...unless you're driving a classic Jeep, you're going to have a very hard time reaching that windshield.
(well, you can play with the side window I guess - but damn it'd be hard to see out the side of your peripheral vision)
Does bring up a point, though... how would such a thing jibe with automotive safety regulations? If you tint your windshield, or in some states have too much crap attached to it (GPS, radar detector, etc etc), you can eat a ticket.
Also, I remember some car model in the 1990's getting all crazy about having a HUD installed in it (it displayed speed, fuel, etc at the bottom of the windshield), but that never really went anywhere.
I had the penultimate room-heater: a dual G5 PowerMac. I was quite able to keep the heater in that room off during most of the winter... if I wanted any extra warmth, I'd just launch Bryce and start rendering a 2048x2048 scene with full raytracing... the room temperature would rise by 15 degrees a half hour later.
I'd say - make the charter school splay by the same rules - take all comers, make all legally required accommodations (and get sued when a parent doesn't like what you did" and let them charge no more than what the voucher is worth - and reduce their payment based on scores. Let them take over an entire district - and see who long they last on vouchers and a population that can vote on how much to give them and vote themselves out of paying if they want.
As a former teacher, I'd say do the exact opposite: Allow public schools to dump the kids who won't perform, the ones who refuse to behave. For those who fail and cannot re-take a given class in a given year, bring back summer school, and start pushing failing students into re-doing a school year if needed. For those with special needs, have a parallel school/class structure (like, well, they have now) to teach them just enough to keep them from walking into traffic, and perhaps a few basic job skills appropriate to their ability. Make drug test failure (for obvious illicit substances) an automatic expulsion with no recourse.
Inform parents by all means needed that their little angel will either have to perform, or thethe kid ends up digging ditches for a living. Sure, you'll have a number of edge cases, which can be handled on a case-by-case basis. Otherwise, quite a few good things will happen:
* parents will start giving a damn about their kids' education, and not treat school as a free babysitting service.
* kids will start paying attention in class, for fear of being booted (and then ridiculed/ostracised by their peers), and out of a greater fear of being shoved into a 'special' school.
* if a teacher has the actual power to fail (for performance reasons) a given student without fear of retribution (or more commonly, of being overriden by spineless school administrators), then parents will cease to be so gawdawful belligerent about it.
Point of order, re:
Perhaps it's because corporations, in order to maximize profit, must minimize delivery?
Hate to say it, but minimizing delivery can hurt profits more than help, as customers wanting an item but not getting it (or those getting less than they expected) decide to buy a competing item instead. I know what you were getting at, but the sentence came out a bit awkward.
And corporations are immune, of course
While not perfectly so, they are. A *competent* ( note emphasis) contract comes with milestones, hard limits, SLAs, and escape clauses. The sad majority of government contracts have none of these.
Before you react, note that honestly, neither side in your dichotomy is a perfect solution. OTOH, I do disagree with you about the maturity of it all... I think commercial interests can begin to do space on a larger scale, and some companies have done so for quite awhile (commercial satellites don't get airborne by themselves, after all :) ). It isn't a question of faith or dogma, but a simple solution:
* require all and every company running manned launches to post a bond sufficient to cover accidental death and/or injury for all humans in their care.
* have a set of simple and *sane* guidelines for safety - both in design, and in operation.
* sufficiently warn all passengers that space travel could easily kill them if they do not follow all instructions given.
* all spacecraft will be subject to a reasonable inspection just before launch.
I'm trying to think up some line that would fit about this not being rocket science, but, well... :)
Snark all you like, but I posit that whoever successfully colonizes space first, will be the first to begin its dominance over Humanity a century later, and will achieve it 150-200 years on.
It's already happened in history, where roughly a century after the US was officially founded (1786, when the US Constitution was ratified), it began stretching its power base, and within 50-60 years of that, became a global superpower. two centuries on, it became the world's strongest power (economic/military/influence). Further back, the UK did the exact same thing within 150 years of its mercantile/colonization push. Spain did so before that.
Now you can certainly quibble over whether or not that power will be held on to, and for how long, but the facts remain.
Unlike undiscovered continents and (relatively) primitive peoples, space is going to be a toughie to conquer. However, once someone finagles a way to begin mining/manufacturing on a mass scale out there, and figures down a way to build self-sustaining colonies, the sheer power that one can wield over the rest of humanity (economic, military, or any other valid metric) will be staggering.
Anyone who gets left behind will become like the rest of the previous world empires: a subject nation living on past glories and a crumbling sense of future, as the best and brightest among their populations abandon them for the adventure and opportunities to be had among the powerful.
There is actually a difference between each.
X axis (state control over the individual): This involves things like speed limits, banned substances or items, zoning laws, things like that... that is, how much state control over individual action is one willing to tolerate or desire?
Y axis (fiscal ideology): How much money is one willing to have government spend and levy? Should money be no object to achieve governmental goals (and taxation not a bother), or should it be done with as little spending as possible, with as little taxation as possible?
Z axis (charity): How much charity should government participate in? This covers things like foreign aid, welfare/public assistance, health care, etc.
Does that liberty of the mouth (for lack of better term) permit fraud, slander, and similar as essential liberties?
Depends - what if he replaced the word "marijuana" with "heroin" ?
Personally, I believe that the government has no right at all to ban drugs as a chattel item, but I do believe they have the right to intervene and regulate when the use/manufacture of it interferes with public safety (e.g. driving while under influence, creating a demonstrably toxic chemical environment, etc). OTOH, I can at least recognize that the issues are a lot more subtle than calling the sale/consumption of drugs an essential liberty.
How is "the penalty for selling small quantities of marijuana", a local issue, give that it should be universally legal, and yet most governments fail on this point?
I live in Oregon, where it is perfectly legal to grow and sell the stuff to medically-licensed individuals in small quantities (the sale price can only be to cover costs, however, and not for profit). There is no penalty for doing so here. This is an example of states doing what they feel best for their population, and is actually protected by the US Constitution.
Now in New York OTOH, selling small quantities of marijuana would likely get you a ticket to Rikers Island.
That's why it is currently a 'local' issue.
You have to be 35 years old to be president. Lady Gaga has 10 years to go before she can be eligible.
The problem is, politics is more than one dimensional. It is even more than two dimensional.
In fact, it is (at least) fully cartesian: The X axis is one's desire/tolerance for state control over individuals in general (order vs individualism), the Y axis is one's fiscal ideological inclination (spending/taxation tolerance), and the Z axis is one's social ideological inclination (charity vs non-involvement).
Most folks only think in one-dimensional left-right terms, which is IMHO stupid and dangerous.
All that the internet has helped raise more money for the same old candidates pushing the same old agenda.
Actually, to be fair, w/o the Internet, Obama would not be president right now.
No, not because McCain would've won, but because w/o the Internet and its organizing power, Hillary Clinton would have likely won the convention, and Obama would have been a footnote. Sure, he had a strong press backing, but so did many other candidates in the field.
Now honestly? Not a democrat here, and I never supported Obama with a dollar or a vote. OTOH, I am rather impressed how a short-tenure (one or two term?) senator managed, in less than a year, to come out of nowhere and break the back of the strongest political machine in the US. IMHO, the Internet played a large part in that.
He never specified the presence of a pulse. ;)
Pedant pick: "Take off every Zig"
Find me a US general with just one of those traits.
Arnold (before he turned traitor at the behest of his Tory girlfriend)
Lee (before he fought for the Confederates - see also the Mexican-American War)
Sherman
Grant
Roosevelt (Theodore, not Franklin)
Pershing
Patton
Bradley
Eisenhower
MacArthur
Long story short, well... your point doesn't stand.
The foam is there for good reason, too... you don't want hard drives banging (even at a sub-millimeter distance) against the top of the case - tends to wear out the drives, cause more errors, and makes noise.
I know, I know... 'but they're flush!' Well, unless you custom-machined each HDD case *and* the unit case they went in, you're guaranteed to have a few drives in that type of physical array vibrate like that.
True, but that one line will be approximately 10,000 characters long.
(I kid! I kid!)
I'm having a hard time seeing where the GNU folks do the 'extinguish' portion. Could you present an example, perhaps?
Nice try, but most cases never go to court (the only exception I can think of is the FAT32 patent).
Microsoft's MO is to go to a target company (usually someone who hasn't the money to fight back), show them the patents in question, then 'settle' at a 'discounted' price and tie it all up with an NDA (whereupon violation of said NDA likely results in a higher 'licensing fee').
Pretty slick work when viewed objectively. Ethically? More like slime.
I live in Portland... what the hell is this "snow" stuff you keep talking about? Oh, and the guys down in Los Angeles and Phoenix called and asked the same thing...
Not a mod, but I can say that while not overrated, your proposition is, well, naive.
There is a reason why nearly all attempts at mass social engineering has failed utterly. There's also a reason why most attempts at marketing for world peace has failed.
The reason that social engineering has failed on a mass scale has to do with culture, tradition (folks do cling to those), and a total disregard for both by those who are out to build a 'perfect society'. 100 years ago, we had the likes of Lenin and the Bolsheviks who were trying to engineer a perfect society, and on the surface, it sounded ultimately equitable and fair ('from each according to his ability, to each according to his need', was a good summary of the ideal). Folks bought the ideal, but history shows the results, no? Now you're going to propose that we do something like that again? We also got to see, 80-some-odd years ago, what the other extreme brought (national/racial/ideological). Long story short, the biggest cause of human suffering and death in the 20th century wasn't famine, pestilence, or disaster... it was war and the internal miseries brought on by political experimentation gone horribly wrong. To be fair, maybe your political/social scientists might have a different idea altogether, but having seen where both extremes (communism and fascism) went, most folks are rightfully horrified at the idea, and prefer to stick with their imperfect-but-workable solutions.
The reasons that marketing for world peace has failed? Much simpler... most other folks have their own ideas, and it usually involves advantages gained at your expense. After all, it's drop-easy for the EU member state politicians and citizenry to preach about world peace and not really needing an army... they have more than sufficient security and backstopping provided courtesy of the US military. Same with Japan and South Korea, or numerous other nations.
Personally, I like the idea of not spending so much money on US military effort. We can start by proposing that we withdraw from all but a small handful of logistic-critical bases globally. Of course, every time the subject comes up, suddenly the population there isn't too keen on the idea. Even the most strident US-hating socialist cringes when the idea of defending themselves comes up (see also South Korea in the 1990's when the population wanted US personnel out of there... until the US began to consider the idea, leaving the whole peninsula practically defenseless against North Korea. Suddenly the South Koreans were all kinds of happy to see a US soldier in their neighborhood).
To sum it all up, things are a lot more complex than you propose, you know?
If Apple tries that with Nokia over WinPhone all Nokia has to do is pick up the phone and the MSFT lawyers will coming dropping in like the Nazgul.
...err, not if the patent involves hardware or hardware design, which the majority of what Apple's litigation does involve.
Also, I'd love to see where Microsoft said they would indemnify WP 7 devs over software patent issues.
That decay has been going on for well over a decade now.
It may be just grumpy-old-guy syndrome, but in spite of the cmoparatively crap graphics, the old 1990's era games were a lot more fun to play (yes, bugs and all). The reason why have to do with elements that have little to do with the technical:
* Most of the old games (Quake/II/III, Unreal/UT, Half-Life, etc) were devilishly customizable, and the software companies actually encouraged modifications
* With only a few games of a given genre, you had a *lot* more players
* dial-up may have sucked, but it did equalize the field by quite a bit (everyone had lag to some extent) - OTOH, this is obviously more of a bandwidth thing and not a game design thing.
* the good games back then were more concerned about flow and content, and less concerned about "balance" or graphics
* most of the games were hosted and played freely online, not kept behind a pay-gate
* Some folks complain about bots and griefers back in the old days, but hell, they're just as common now as they were back then, if not moreso... just that the cheats are more subtle now, and the greifers less so.
* nobody gave a crap if you 'pirated' or copied the game, because odds were very good that you'd buy the next iteration when it came out (see also id Software)
Only opinion, but I'm blaming around 2000-2001 as the time when gaming began declining. CD Keys were only the barest hint of the DRM to come. More and more games got shoved into pay-for-play mode. The flood of games meant a growing fragmentation (even among folks playing the same title... You had Unreal Tournament, UT 2003, UT 2004, etc... all running w/ players at the same time). LAN parties became less and less common, and the ones still going only meant that there were UT players, Quake players, BF 1942 players, CS players, etc... and each new game or iteration meant less folks in a given LAN that could play a given game (or that wanted to, instead preferring their own game/version).
Sure, the consoles kept things going for awhile, but IMHO (and nothing more), it only pushed game publishers down paths that meant more DRM, higher prices, and pay-to-play online experiences. Not even going to touch on the remakes/reboots/re-whatevers that means the majority of games coming out are some re-iteration of something you've already played before.
Certainly, there are bright spots in this dark prose... games that stood out and demanded attention, and/or broke new ground (games like GTA). That said, most of the big ones just became more fodder for sequels, each not quite as good as the last.
Ah well... enough rambling. :)