Actually, the whole 'Russian attack' angle was cooked up as grist for the propaganda mills. Meanwhile, we deploy anti-missile weaponry in former Soviet satellite states, fund dissidents in the country and bind as many former USSR states into NATO as possible.
Now, were I playing a game, I would suspect NATO's intentions as well. It's too bad that NATO leaders wish to play this game. For all our military might in the West, the USSR can still annihilate the world several times over.
The first Conan movie, not the second which was trash. Krull. Dark Crystal. Labyrinth. Legend. Loved these movies as a child.
Now..well, let's just say you notice the quirks - like Bowie's super-tight-crotch pants, or how lifeless the aelfs in Dark Crystal look, or how earnest some of the acting is in Krull. Special effects do not age well.
The difference being, marijuana, or more properly cannabis sativa and cannabis indica, as the main two species, are illegal, whereas last time I checked music was not.
Not that banning a plant that makes you relaxed and hungry makes much sense - it's par for the course with a society that bans drinking and driving but has virtually no public transit and parking lots at bars.
This exact scenario was, a few years ago, taken up by the supreme court of Canada. Essentially, if you leave a box of copyrighted documents in a room with a photocopier, have you committed infringement? The answer was no, and rightfully so as anyone with any grasp of logic can see.
Liability DOES depend on the actions of others. Simply 'making available' is not good enough. In fact, one might argue that the person doing the copying is the primary infringer, but even RI/MPAA does not want to go after every single file sharer - they prefer to concentrate on those who had large collections available. Fact is, they're as crooked as you can get, exploiting the legal system with dubious claims of lost revenue.
Very good point and well said. I often question the pie-in-the-sky, free market is god sort of capitalists. My experience has been the opposite of Rand's famous Fountainhead (a load of bollocks, by the way) - big corporations are typically some of the most poorly managed, myopic and wasteful organizations I have ever seen.
However, given that/. has lot's of Ron Paul types, expect to get modded down for your accurate, though heretical, views.
You don't get it - there's no reason to 'dumb yourself down' by just barging head first into every ambush, chokepoint or close encounter. AI in FPS these days should be capable of responding to different approaches by the player. If it's perfectly linear and you go in guns blazing, with no tactics to decide nor strategy to employ, whats the point of giving the character freedom of movement at all? Might as well make a shooter on rails.
Yeah, FarCry, made by a virtual unknown (again, at the time) is, hands-down, a better game than Doom3 no matter which angle you look at. Doom3 had the hype, FarCry was the sleeper hit.
You think Doom3 is scary? Hah. Wait till you check out the mutated monkeys.
Well, I am of the opinion that (at the time) unknown developer Crytek came out with CryEngine and FarCry and blew Doom3 out of the water. When presented with lush tropical enviornments in which to be stalked and killed by bizarre monstrosities, it's hard to go back to the same-old, same-old of cramped interior, poorly-lit enviornments, regardless of how pretty they are.
Quite obviously this is because in times of war, the Chinese could find themselves locked out of either the US or EU systems. If they are going to tightly integrate GPS capabilites into military units - a no brainer - they want to have a closed system that noone can pull the plug on come WW3.
As my philsophical opponents say so often "This is'nt rocket science".
If you want to see what a good DRM system can achieve compare the piracy rates of console games vs PC games. Obviously due to its nature the PC versions will not get close to such low rates anytime soon, but the contrast is remarkable (I've read a game developer blog where they searched for torrents of their game for XBox 360 vs PC and the difference in number of torrents/downloaders was huge). Although you allude to the differences you really don't elaborate enough. The only reason console games are not pirated as frequently or more than PC games is that to run a pirated console game you'll need a hardware hack, which typically eliminates any warranty.
Outside of the first world, consoles experience huge rates of piracy since the pricing structure is so out of whack, and modifying last-gen consoles is a piece of cake. Developers should stick to CD key schemes and move away from this phone-home garbage - it cuts into profits trying to prevent the inevitable. Show me a DRM scheme that held up for 6 months, and I'll retract my statement. The time it takes to crack most DRM can be measured in days and hours, not weeks and months.
This is just another example of the Marxism through other means that defines the modern environmentalist movement, which the DOE is apparently beholden to. Pardon me? The entire reason the DOE is subsidizing carbon 'sequestering' is as an excuse to continue burning huge amounts of coal. Hardly Marxist - more Mussolini, that is, 'facist' aka 'corporatism'. I know not reading TFA is long-held tradition, but you make yourself look like a luddite when you refuse to have even a basic understanding of what is being discussed prior to you putting finger to key.
the sun's radiation increases, the earth becomes warmer. If it decreases, or is blocked somehow, then the earth becomes cooler. This isn't exactly rocket science. The solar flares theory has been debunked repeatedly, you'll have to excuse me for not bothering to dig up a link to edify you. Had you read more widely, you might realize how myopic and foolish you sound, not to mention paranoid.
You're obviously right - those durn scientists just want more money. Noone is actually concerned about the future of the planet, the glacial sheets or the potential for civilization-ending change, clearly, they just want funding. That is, I'm hard pressed to find any other motive that could possibly rationalize your argument and place it in the realm of the possible.
Out of curiosity, are you also one of the card-carrying members of the 'Ozone hole is a scam' club? My landlady a long time ago was my first close encounter with one of this kind - when she said the ozone hole is a conspiracy made up by scientists, my eyes almost popped out.
That's the main problem with environmental groups. At their core, many of them are just as immune to rational argument and unwilling to consider proposals that don't line up with their pre-conceived notions as the fossil fuel industries and their pet politicians. While what you say has some degree of merit, I must add, how many energy industry lobby groups are NOT 'immune to rational arguments and unwilling to consider proposals that don't line up with their pre-conceived notions of the fossil fuel industry' - those notions being incredible profitability and complete intransigence on the subject of CO2 emissions. The industry has spent more money trying to convince you that emissions are not a problem than it has on solving the problem itself.
The Chinese are exempt from Kyoto... So, too, is the US, as it refuses to sign. Meanwhile, free trade agreements with every tinpot dicator and banana republic are signed without a second thought - see: Colombia.
Your argument comes down to my neighbour won't do anything about the growing pile of garbage on their lawn, hence it's ok if I continue to pile garbage on my lawn. Plus, moving the garbage off my lawn will cost me money and let's face it, that's the real reason nothing is being done.
There's no math here - only a refusal to deal with the real issue while shuffling blame on someone else. Other people doing nothing does not make an excuse for us to do nothing. Kyoto is obviously imperfect, but a refusal to do anything is not a plan - unless you call a suicide pact a plan.
Please see above, and while you are at it, also add carbon emissions for the developing third world... what happens when Africa decides to get air conditioning? This is precisely why renewable energy needs to be heavily subsidized and deployed, combined with reducing consumption. We need to improve and cheapen the technologies we can use to make 'green' power. What happens when you bury CO2 in the ground? Do you think it magically disappears from the equation? No, it simply becomes someone else's problem - likely someone who wakes up dead when a seal fails and CO2 displaces all the air near the leak site.
Of course demand is going to go up, as I pointed out. I notice you abandoned your earlier argument of the 'biosphere' generating most atmospheric CO2 - that's progress, at least.
We have to be able to take CO2 out of the air, and put it somewhere We're not taking it out of the air, we're taking it out of coal plants, plants will will increasingly use because of the sequestration. It would go into the air, because we keep burning coal - however, we could just reduce our dependency on coal, through reduced consumption, energy-efficient technologies and renewable power sources, and end up with a net plus that does not burden future generations with nightmare 'CO2 escape' scenarios. Yes, these things cost money, which is why storing gas in a hole sounds like a good idea to suits at the DoE - it's not cheap, but it's cheaper.
Sequestration is no panecea, no cure-all - it is at best an impefect solution to an intractable problem - there are no magic bullets. Using it to justify increasingly relying on coal is idiocy at it's finest.
Well, Saddam, not known to be a good Muslim was attempting to counter disquiet in his own country by paying the families of suicide bombers in Israel - raising his own profile and attempting to give himself a shroud of legitimacy.
The chemical weapons of which you speak were developed from precursors sold to them by a variety of countries, including the US, which had no problem as long as said weapons were directed towards Iran, which is of course why the US was so friendly with Saddam for so long. If anything, he was the monster the Pentagon empowered. Had he not had such massive aid, it's likely that his administration could have been dealt with through an internal insurgency. This leads us back to the first point, why Saddam tried to improve his 'Muslim' credentials - to counter the threat of an Islam-based insurgency.
Hell, the helicopters he used to gas the Kurds were made and delivered by a US corporation. All because the US backed the Shah in Iran instead of their democratically elected government. Cheap oil, and all that - you know, the realpolitik behind our friendly protection of the House of Saud.
And yet they chose Jihad and Sharia in their Mosques. They chose to bring the sword of Islam to the people of London. So please don't make the tired old argument that Islamic terrorism is mainly about poverty or secular politics. Islamic terrorism is mainly about religious ideas, and in short, mainly about Islam, or at least their idea of what pure Islam really is. Actually, it's more about perceived injustice with the way the first world interacts with nominally Muslim nations. The US can kiss the House of Saud's ass forever, but it get's them no cred amongst ordinary Muslims who, perhaps rightfully, believe that the House of Saud is an incredible immoral and corrupt monarchy oppressing the Holy Land with the tacit approval of the US. Then of course, there's the whole Palestine-Israel-AIPAC issue.
I'm not saying it's justified, and of course the terrorists tend to be Muslims, because people from other countries just don't care enough - there are too many fscked up things happening. However, to blame it all on Islamic theology is simply incorrect - there are genuine feelings of oppression and solidarity with people living in other nations. That said, there are plenty of radical imams ready to capitalize on this kind of sympathy, and with no central organization - aka the Papal States aka the Vatican - not much to rein them in with.
I guarantee if you reversed the roles of the Muslims and the Jews in the geopolitcal game, you would have Jewish terrorists (similiar to what you had prior to Israel's creation). It's not the ideology, stupid. It's the conditions.
They never expected to collect any money. This was all about sending a message to other Torrent sites and P2P networks. "We've got legal precedent and unlimited resources. We're coming after you." Some strategy they have there. If RI/MPAA is willing to dump so much money into lawyers fees; good for them, it increasingly drains the resources of those organizations and the conglomerates that support them. Meanwhile, the genie will not be put back into the bottle - period.
Without sequestration, then, mankind has no defense against a natural carbon dioxide increase And yet, a natural carbon dioxide is the least of our worries - its mostly unpredicatble. However, human emissions are predictable - and forecast to grow at exponential rates. It's fairly disingenuous of you to suggest that sequestration is meant for natural CO2 emissions when it's in fact meant to be a solution to allow the US to keep burning coal.
Sticking them in the ground is not a sane nor rational plan for, as you put it 'managing atmospheric gases'. However, this seems to be a common theme at the Department of Energy. Waste problem? No problem - bury it in the ground and hope we are dead before the chickens come home to roost, so to speak.
The simple fact of the matter is that while man might dump 8 gigatons of carbon into the environment, the biosphere is churning through nearly one hundred times the amount I'm afraid this smells of made up statistics. Perhaps you have a source? Most atmospheric CO2 comes from fossil fuel emissions.
If you are going to manage atmospheric gases, then manage them. Otherwise, quit moaning the about the threat of GW This confirms your status as a skeptic, which is generally to be encouraged, but you're completely out of your depth and it shows. 'Managing' atmospheric gases does not mean hiding them like a corpse or feces and hoping no-one notices. It means reducing consumption, primarily, as this reduces overall emissions. Increasing emissions while relying on unproven technology to be your saviour is extremely juvenile and short-sighted.
If they had a workable model for storing the CO2, long-term, this might be possible, but as of now, it's all smoke and mirrors. 'Hey, look - the US is no longer dragging it's feet on CO2 emissions!' Which is of course, untrue. It's like designing a car around a power source that has not yet been invented.
The American generating plan through 2030 is...coal, and lots of it. New scrubber technologies and filters. Of course, many plants have not even complied with current standards, let alone new ones. After all, who wants to lower profitability in the name of infrastructure investment? Paying fines for being noncompliant is cheaper than making the plants compliant since your enviornmental laws are so toothless - and that's in comparaison to other first world nations, who for the most part also have extremely lax laws.
US air traffic control centers still operate with equipment that is so outdated that some units are out of commission because they can't order vacuum tubes It may surprise you, but many mission-critical systems that require high availibility (read 5+ 9's) use solid-state electronics. Examples include your friendly neighbourhood nuclear reactor, most other energy generation plants, a ton of military applications, the space shuttle and most other space-exploration related equipment, including the ISS. There are a variety of reasons that they are used for these kinds of applications, but durability and reliability are the primary reasons.
Once apon a time, in a far away land, there lived a boy who was once a Metallica fan.
This boy spent far too much time smoking herb and listening to Metallica.
Metallica released an album with quite a different feel, and the boy was not sure he would enjoy it.
He heard of this thing called Napster, and downloaded a song about Whisker in a Pail or somesuch. He thought it was crap, but remained a fan of Metallica.
Then one day he received a letter from some Mr. Fancypants in some other Place. It said 'Your account on Napster has been deactivated because you had Whiskey in a Pail on your system, bla bla bla..'
Coupled with what he read in the papers, the boy deduced that Metallica was very much against the sharing of music. What, thought the boy, is radio then, if not sharing? What about all the statements to 'bootleg' the music that Metallica has made in the past? How was his downloading of Whiskey in the Pail hurting Metallica? Because he had a chance to evaluate their crap before buying it?
Within an hour, the boy was again checking music out with Napster - if I recall, a simple registry key change - but Whiskey in the Pail was deleted from his computer, and he would never again purchase music from Lars Ulrichs Metallica. Was it the quality of their music or their insatiable greed?
you are dreaming up to 'punish' people whose talent happens to be making music rather than configuring routers? I did not realize I could make such oodles of cash configuring routers. I did not realize that I had to learn nothing, only, essentially, produce skillful, quality works which I could then profit off eternally. Next time I get a job offer, I'm going to tell them 'I already setup your gateways and internal routes' and that I'll send them a guide on how to copy the setup, which, by the way, I own the patent to - so if you want to get your router configured, my way, you have to buy my guide. Each person who might see the guide must pay, and if you show it in restaurants you must pay me, depending on how big the restaurant/business place is.
Also, the next time a junior admin asks me a question, I'll respond with a petulant reply like 'Piss off, I worked hard to get where I am at. Figure it out yourself.'
the 'creative' types who are forced to work for free (or low wages) to entertain the rest of society Actually most creative works simply never see the light of day, and that includes authors, musicians, amateur game designers, traditional artists and more I am sure I forget. The few successful acts often in fact rip off ideas (if not entire works) made by the classic 'starving artist' who sees not a penny, and whose meager resources make them typically unable to pursue a lawsuit. Noone forces artists to work 'for free', and it's pretty damn lazy of you to use this in relation to Metallica, one of the better-renumerated bands in the history of the human race.
Apple fanboy mods strike again, +1 insightful for random AC trash.
Apple will make even a beachhead in the enterprise when they stop marketing exclusively to a 'hip and cool' segment. You see, big corporations know they're not hip or cool. They are looking for a certain featureset to standardize on, with key features, that integrates well and is inexpensive to support. The iPhone is none of these things.
RIM has a fairly prominent position amongst big corporations, because that's who they have been marketing to - in Europe as well, regardless of what the naysayers think, blackberry adoption is pretty high. Now, your average joe schmoe wants a cool phone, well they may have an iPhone, or a generic WinCE platform from a mobile carrier. This article was about corporate adoption, however.
What I don't get is that if only 30% of Fortune 500 companies signed up for a 'Beta' iPhone program - where presumably they get to play with some hardware for a reduced cost at scale, how that could possible be considered 'good'? Over two thirds of the market said 'No, thanks.' unless we are to believe that Apple did not reach them. That's not good at all and does not bode well for the iPhone vis-a-vis the corporate market.
If Tolkien is, to you 'Second rate fantasy', what qualifies as 'First rate fantasy' in your mind? Or is the question rhetorical flamebait posted simply because you couldn't think of something intelligent to say quickly enough?
Perhaps you meant we should be reading Shakespeare (no thanks, had enough already) or Aristotle? If so, I salute your observation that just about every story has a greek tragedy at the heart - in other words, its already been done.
Somehow, though, I think you were more likely referring to modern authors. I'm sorry but the latest self-fellating pap by l'auture de jour tends to be pretentious as hell and without entertainment value. It's no wonder that most of my reading is either old books or non-fiction. Like modern 'art' (ahem) most modern fiction is trash.
Uh...I refuse to call behaviours that have no physical component - such as game playing, excessive masturbation, gambling, risk taking, overeating etc. - addictions. They are not addictions, they are behaviours which, for whatever reason, a certain individual cannot seemingly refrain from engaging in, despite negative consequences. The vast majority of individuals can enjoy the above referenced behaviours without negative consequences. These instances should be called compulsive behaviours.
On the other hand, no one can have can smoke crack, shoot heroin or snort synthetic opiates for several days without becoming physcially addicted - ie. there are physical symptoms of illness. These are accurately called addictions. Everyone will be susceptible, except for those prescient enough to take the Chem Resistant trait.
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Actually, the whole 'Russian attack' angle was cooked up as grist for the propaganda mills. Meanwhile, we deploy anti-missile weaponry in former Soviet satellite states, fund dissidents in the country and bind as many former USSR states into NATO as possible.
Now, were I playing a game, I would suspect NATO's intentions as well. It's too bad that NATO leaders wish to play this game. For all our military might in the West, the USSR can still annihilate the world several times over.
Kindred spirits.
The first Conan movie, not the second which was trash. Krull. Dark Crystal. Labyrinth. Legend. Loved these movies as a child.
Now..well, let's just say you notice the quirks - like Bowie's super-tight-crotch pants, or how lifeless the aelfs in Dark Crystal look, or how earnest some of the acting is in Krull. Special effects do not age well.
The difference being, marijuana, or more properly cannabis sativa and cannabis indica, as the main two species, are illegal, whereas last time I checked music was not.
Not that banning a plant that makes you relaxed and hungry makes much sense - it's par for the course with a society that bans drinking and driving but has virtually no public transit and parking lots at bars.
This exact scenario was, a few years ago, taken up by the supreme court of Canada. Essentially, if you leave a box of copyrighted documents in a room with a photocopier, have you committed infringement? The answer was no, and rightfully so as anyone with any grasp of logic can see.
Liability DOES depend on the actions of others. Simply 'making available' is not good enough. In fact, one might argue that the person doing the copying is the primary infringer, but even RI/MPAA does not want to go after every single file sharer - they prefer to concentrate on those who had large collections available. Fact is, they're as crooked as you can get, exploiting the legal system with dubious claims of lost revenue.
Very good point and well said. I often question the pie-in-the-sky, free market is god sort of capitalists. My experience has been the opposite of Rand's famous Fountainhead (a load of bollocks, by the way) - big corporations are typically some of the most poorly managed, myopic and wasteful organizations I have ever seen.
/. has lot's of Ron Paul types, expect to get modded down for your accurate, though heretical, views.
However, given that
You don't get it - there's no reason to 'dumb yourself down' by just barging head first into every ambush, chokepoint or close encounter. AI in FPS these days should be capable of responding to different approaches by the player. If it's perfectly linear and you go in guns blazing, with no tactics to decide nor strategy to employ, whats the point of giving the character freedom of movement at all? Might as well make a shooter on rails.
Yeah, FarCry, made by a virtual unknown (again, at the time) is, hands-down, a better game than Doom3 no matter which angle you look at. Doom3 had the hype, FarCry was the sleeper hit.
You think Doom3 is scary? Hah. Wait till you check out the mutated monkeys.
Well, I am of the opinion that (at the time) unknown developer Crytek came out with CryEngine and FarCry and blew Doom3 out of the water. When presented with lush tropical enviornments in which to be stalked and killed by bizarre monstrosities, it's hard to go back to the same-old, same-old of cramped interior, poorly-lit enviornments, regardless of how pretty they are.
Quite obviously this is because in times of war, the Chinese could find themselves locked out of either the US or EU systems. If they are going to tightly integrate GPS capabilites into military units - a no brainer - they want to have a closed system that noone can pull the plug on come WW3.
As my philsophical opponents say so often "This is'nt rocket science".
You're obviously right - those durn scientists just want more money. Noone is actually concerned about the future of the planet, the glacial sheets or the potential for civilization-ending change, clearly, they just want funding. That is, I'm hard pressed to find any other motive that could possibly rationalize your argument and place it in the realm of the possible.
Out of curiosity, are you also one of the card-carrying members of the 'Ozone hole is a scam' club? My landlady a long time ago was my first close encounter with one of this kind - when she said the ozone hole is a conspiracy made up by scientists, my eyes almost popped out.
Sequestration is no panecea, no cure-all - it is at best an impefect solution to an intractable problem - there are no magic bullets. Using it to justify increasingly relying on coal is idiocy at it's finest.
Well, Saddam, not known to be a good Muslim was attempting to counter disquiet in his own country by paying the families of suicide bombers in Israel - raising his own profile and attempting to give himself a shroud of legitimacy.
The chemical weapons of which you speak were developed from precursors sold to them by a variety of countries, including the US, which had no problem as long as said weapons were directed towards Iran, which is of course why the US was so friendly with Saddam for so long. If anything, he was the monster the Pentagon empowered. Had he not had such massive aid, it's likely that his administration could have been dealt with through an internal insurgency. This leads us back to the first point, why Saddam tried to improve his 'Muslim' credentials - to counter the threat of an Islam-based insurgency.
Hell, the helicopters he used to gas the Kurds were made and delivered by a US corporation. All because the US backed the Shah in Iran instead of their democratically elected government. Cheap oil, and all that - you know, the realpolitik behind our friendly protection of the House of Saud.
I'm not saying it's justified, and of course the terrorists tend to be Muslims, because people from other countries just don't care enough - there are too many fscked up things happening. However, to blame it all on Islamic theology is simply incorrect - there are genuine feelings of oppression and solidarity with people living in other nations. That said, there are plenty of radical imams ready to capitalize on this kind of sympathy, and with no central organization - aka the Papal States aka the Vatican - not much to rein them in with.
I guarantee if you reversed the roles of the Muslims and the Jews in the geopolitcal game, you would have Jewish terrorists (similiar to what you had prior to Israel's creation). It's not the ideology, stupid. It's the conditions.
Sticking them in the ground is not a sane nor rational plan for, as you put it 'managing atmospheric gases'. However, this seems to be a common theme at the Department of Energy. Waste problem? No problem - bury it in the ground and hope we are dead before the chickens come home to roost, so to speak. The simple fact of the matter is that while man might dump 8 gigatons of carbon into the environment, the biosphere is churning through nearly one hundred times the amount I'm afraid this smells of made up statistics. Perhaps you have a source? Most atmospheric CO2 comes from fossil fuel emissions. If you are going to manage atmospheric gases, then manage them. Otherwise, quit moaning the about the threat of GW This confirms your status as a skeptic, which is generally to be encouraged, but you're completely out of your depth and it shows. 'Managing' atmospheric gases does not mean hiding them like a corpse or feces and hoping no-one notices. It means reducing consumption, primarily, as this reduces overall emissions. Increasing emissions while relying on unproven technology to be your saviour is extremely juvenile and short-sighted.
If they had a workable model for storing the CO2, long-term, this might be possible, but as of now, it's all smoke and mirrors. 'Hey, look - the US is no longer dragging it's feet on CO2 emissions!' Which is of course, untrue. It's like designing a car around a power source that has not yet been invented.
The American generating plan through 2030 is...coal, and lots of it. New scrubber technologies and filters. Of course, many plants have not even complied with current standards, let alone new ones. After all, who wants to lower profitability in the name of infrastructure investment? Paying fines for being noncompliant is cheaper than making the plants compliant since your enviornmental laws are so toothless - and that's in comparaison to other first world nations, who for the most part also have extremely lax laws.
It's awful - not awe-full, which might mean something filled to the brim with awesome-ness.
Your friendly neighbourhood english nazi, reporting from the moon.
Once apon a time, in a far away land, there lived a boy who was once a Metallica fan.
This boy spent far too much time smoking herb and listening to Metallica.
Metallica released an album with quite a different feel, and the boy was not sure he would enjoy it.
He heard of this thing called Napster, and downloaded a song about Whisker in a Pail or somesuch. He thought it was crap, but remained a fan of Metallica.
Then one day he received a letter from some Mr. Fancypants in some other Place. It said 'Your account on Napster has been deactivated because you had Whiskey in a Pail on your system, bla bla bla..'
Coupled with what he read in the papers, the boy deduced that Metallica was very much against the sharing of music. What, thought the boy, is radio then, if not sharing? What about all the statements to 'bootleg' the music that Metallica has made in the past? How was his downloading of Whiskey in the Pail hurting Metallica? Because he had a chance to evaluate their crap before buying it?
Within an hour, the boy was again checking music out with Napster - if I recall, a simple registry key change - but Whiskey in the Pail was deleted from his computer, and he would never again purchase music from Lars Ulrichs Metallica. Was it the quality of their music or their insatiable greed?
We may never know.
Also, the next time a junior admin asks me a question, I'll respond with a petulant reply like 'Piss off, I worked hard to get where I am at. Figure it out yourself.' the 'creative' types who are forced to work for free (or low wages) to entertain the rest of society Actually most creative works simply never see the light of day, and that includes authors, musicians, amateur game designers, traditional artists and more I am sure I forget. The few successful acts often in fact rip off ideas (if not entire works) made by the classic 'starving artist' who sees not a penny, and whose meager resources make them typically unable to pursue a lawsuit. Noone forces artists to work 'for free', and it's pretty damn lazy of you to use this in relation to Metallica, one of the better-renumerated bands in the history of the human race.
Apple fanboy mods strike again, +1 insightful for random AC trash.
Apple will make even a beachhead in the enterprise when they stop marketing exclusively to a 'hip and cool' segment. You see, big corporations know they're not hip or cool. They are looking for a certain featureset to standardize on, with key features, that integrates well and is inexpensive to support. The iPhone is none of these things.
RIM has a fairly prominent position amongst big corporations, because that's who they have been marketing to - in Europe as well, regardless of what the naysayers think, blackberry adoption is pretty high. Now, your average joe schmoe wants a cool phone, well they may have an iPhone, or a generic WinCE platform from a mobile carrier. This article was about corporate adoption, however.
What I don't get is that if only 30% of Fortune 500 companies signed up for a 'Beta' iPhone program - where presumably they get to play with some hardware for a reduced cost at scale, how that could possible be considered 'good'? Over two thirds of the market said 'No, thanks.' unless we are to believe that Apple did not reach them. That's not good at all and does not bode well for the iPhone vis-a-vis the corporate market.
If Tolkien is, to you 'Second rate fantasy', what qualifies as 'First rate fantasy' in your mind? Or is the question rhetorical flamebait posted simply because you couldn't think of something intelligent to say quickly enough?
Perhaps you meant we should be reading Shakespeare (no thanks, had enough already) or Aristotle? If so, I salute your observation that just about every story has a greek tragedy at the heart - in other words, its already been done.
Somehow, though, I think you were more likely referring to modern authors. I'm sorry but the latest self-fellating pap by l'auture de jour tends to be pretentious as hell and without entertainment value. It's no wonder that most of my reading is either old books or non-fiction. Like modern 'art' (ahem) most modern fiction is trash.
Uh...I refuse to call behaviours that have no physical component - such as game playing, excessive masturbation, gambling, risk taking, overeating etc. - addictions. They are not addictions, they are behaviours which, for whatever reason, a certain individual cannot seemingly refrain from engaging in, despite negative consequences. The vast majority of individuals can enjoy the above referenced behaviours without negative consequences. These instances should be called compulsive behaviours.
On the other hand, no one can have can smoke crack, shoot heroin or snort synthetic opiates for several days without becoming physcially addicted - ie. there are physical symptoms of illness. These are accurately called addictions. Everyone will be susceptible, except for those prescient enough to take the Chem Resistant trait.