Resident Evil made enough money that a sequel was made, so whoever greenlighted that probably shouldn't have been fired. People went to see it, it made money, ergo it was the right idea. Art isn't what the movies are about. Art movies generally don't make big bucks, it's just nice when they do.
Hell, when agriculture was first developed, there were probably hunter-gatherers who predicted nothing but gloom and doom, but we're still here.
Well, looking back, agriculture certainly was the beginning of the slippery slope that has led us to modern society. Hunter/gatherers have little to no negative impact on the general environment, since they're basically no different than bear families. Agriculture by definition radically alters the local environment with pretty grave consequences if you're a species that is a problem to that agriculture (wolves get hunted to near extinction as they threaten herds of livestock, "weed" species are ruthlessly torn up and driven out of the local area, regardless of what their part in the local ecology was). Once the first field was tilled, it was pretty much inevitable that we were going to end up where we are.
Not to say that what we are doing isn't natural. It's most certainly natural (termites raise aphids as livestock, build gigantic mounds, and otherwise alter the landscape around them, they're natural). It's not right or wrong, it's just change, which is the only real certainty. Death and taxes are just fronts.
given the smaller percentage of that who will play games
You mean the smaller perchentage of that who will bother to try and play a game that isn't:
1. Shareware/"Inexpensive-ware". Long tradition of reasonable quality/popular shareware games in the Mac community. Apple often gives people full versions of shareware or cheap for-pay games with their installs. From experience, they get a lot of play.
2. Produced by Blizzard. I've switched recently to raiding fulltime on my Mac. I have a lot of other games, but don't play many of the PC ones much anymore aside from WoW. That my copies of WoW and Diablo 2 run on it (as well as Starcraft 2 which will run on it out of the box) are nice bonuses.
...at least in its current form. Now, don't get me wrong, I still employ e-mail, but it's not exactly useful to me. When 90% of the e-mail I and my clients recieve is useless crap, the medium that allows that kind of pathetic signal-noise ratio is just plain not useful in my book.
I've got clients that get 10,000+ spam e-mails a day, and we're not even talking large businesses. I'm talking 1 person getting well over 10,000 pieces of useless junk per day, because they don't want to or can't change their e-mail address. The amount of money they've spent on me to try to reduce that is ludicrous, and I feel like some kind of Dick Cheney oil profiteer. They're all quite happy with every little bit of relief I can give them, but it's getting to the point where if something serious WAS done about spam e-mail (in an international/legal sense) I would lose a lot of business, and that concerns me.
Communication is important, but there are a lot less costly methods of communication out there than e-mail. E-mail damn well isn't free now, so I don't know what the "Oh no, don't charge me for e-mail!!" people are complaining about, honestly. Just ask the postmasters of AOL, Yahoo, Gmail, etc, how much they spend on spam filtering. Just ask the restaurant owner and the machinist I work for how much they've spent on my time to teach them how to use spam filtering, and finding a service provider that provides decent filtering options in their management consoles.
Actually, it seems to be a reasonably tidy bow, it's just not an easy package it's wrapped around.
The sudden stop is, visually, an extremely loud "Here ends The Story Of Tony Soprano"
That phrase is just as ambiguous as the few seconds of blank. It could easily means he dies, it could just as easily mean he lives and does nothing worth telling after this. Or that this is all I'm going to tell you about Tony for now, maybe later I'll tell you more about old Tony. How you interpret the ending says far more about you than about the writer, the characters, or the situation.
I've only seen a few episodes. It was certainly a good show, but I didn't think it was as amazing as most people seem to, by any stretch. I've got my own theories based on what I've read about the episode, and the series, but really, those theories don't matter. The story ended there, and that's all folks.
I use SpamSentry, and while Blizzard did hamstring the reporting function, the spam blocking parts still work fine. I get at least 4 spam messages each hour still, more if I'm in a city with a trade channel for any length of time. At least Blizzard has finally woken up and tried to do something, but it hasn't been effective by even the most generous stretch of the imagination.
Those were implied in the "etc" but sure. Nigeria isn't exactly a shining beacon of wonderfulness. And Norway is pretty harmless, but I don't particularly like having to give them money so I can get to work/heat my home either.
Farmers have been unable to support themselves by farming because of the insane cheapness of food, and high fructose corn syrup being so cheap is one of the big parts of the obesity epidemic. Anything that raises the price of food means portions will need to be reduced, and farmers will be more likely to be able to support themselves by growing crops.
I frankly don't give a shit whether the emissions are "cleaner" with ethanol. If it means I'm not forced to shovel money into the pockets of Arab governments, Russia, Venezuela, etc, just to continue to make a living and survive, then I'm all for it.
I want that to work on all ignores, not just Report Spam-based ignores. If it's just on report spam, there's going to be way more reports than actual spam just to get the account-ignore feature.
...you wait for the song to stop. Imus has been dancing for awhile and he's always gotten to safety after the song stopped before. Even he realizes this, where apparently most people on slashdot don't.
I don't particularly care one way or the other about Don Imus getting fired. He's said a lot of offensive stuff in the past. Media Matters was just the spark on this, letting the rest of the world that doesn't care much about Imus know about it. The fire was the revolt within both the advertisers and the broadcasters that decided they didn't want to deal with Don Imus and the crap he generates any more. That's their perogative.
It's not censorship. Nothing stops Don Imus from finding another platform to continue saying whatever he wants, as long as people can be convinced to pay for it. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, respectfully, didn't get the kind of win they seem to think they did. No one but them got fed up with "the culture". This was consumer pressure, both from the consumers of ad time on the networks he broadcast on, and a threatened boycott by normal people. Frankly it's an example of how things ought to work when people want change. Market forces. The true meaning of voting with your wallet.
Claiming Media Matters directly had anything to do with this other than showing people who didn't see/hear the show the video is ludicrous. Media Matters has spent TONS of time complaining about all kinds of people and they've had zero effect, because not nearly enough real people cared until now.
Didn't the law firm that's running the case basically get handed the store as their legal fee? I'm not exactly sure of the details, and I can't do much checking right now since I'm about to run out, but that was my impression.
Well, I believe that technically drug tests for athletes ARE an invasion of privacy, and you're allowed to refuse to submit to one.
However, the athletic organization has the right to not allow anyone to compete in their events, and take away a medal should you refuse the test right after completion of the event.
Blizzard should be allowed to disallow people that won't let them check for cheating from playing their game. I don't think that includes suing the makers of software that allows you to cheat.
There's an argument to be made that Blizzard is being defrauded, since they specifically claim all rights to the virtual objects in their game, and say up front that account access merely grants a non-transferrable right to use the virtual objects they generate within the game space.
There's an argument that the customer who buys WoW gold is defrauded because the merchant is claiming a right they don't have by selling it to them, but the customer has more than likely agreed to the Terms of Service (since you don't see people without WoW accounts buying WoW gold to resell, since without agreeing to the Terms of Service and maintaining an account, you can't store that inventory anywhere) and would probably be considered as part of the fraud or some such. Like I said, IANAL, but I'm pretty sure you couldn't get away with claiming a seller defrauded you.
Basically it comes down, like the article the article originally referenced says, to a final word on the ownership of WoW gold being handed down, and that just hasn't happened yet. If Blizzard doesn't have the right to negate a transaction because there is some form of ownership by the player, then that's a much bigger foothold for the tax man. If Blizzard retains all ownership, then anyone defrauding Blizzard by "selling" WoW gold needs to pay the taxes on those ill gotten gains (I'm pretty sure that you're required to report all income, whether legal or illegal), but normal players can't reasonably be taxed, because they never had ownership of the Sword of Awesomeness that dropped for them, so they can't even barter for it. I can't be taxed for the value of a painball gun I am being allowed the use of by the arena owner if I hand it to my friend next to me. The owner may say I can't do that, but we're not talking a taxable transaction. However if I buy a gun there, and then sell it to someone within the arena, that's taxable even if it's within the game.
A bit rambling, but I think there's something worth thinking about in there.
I unchecked "Willing to Moderate" in my account preferences, because I know I'm an intensely biased, flawed person, and I would happily ostracize my enemies and laud my friends regardless of the quality, or lack thereof of their posts. I hate a lot of people. A lot of the people on here, come to mention it. Having mod points gives me the power to act on the desire to do something about it, and power (even the power to demote your post because I think you're an idiot, or meta-moderating with an agenda) corrupts. I, apparently, am quite easily corruptible. I couldn't enjoy reading this site, because I was looking to deal with people I thought should be pushed down. Now that I can't do anything about it, it's a lot less frustrating to read things here.
However, I've set my highlight threshold to +4, because experience has taught me that even a bunch of my fellow random idiots on the internet can't be wrong all the time. Approximately 90% of the stuff that gets modded that high, I can only assume as a result of some kind of emergent reasonableness from a sea of unreasonable stupidity. The other 10% is easily skipped, and doesn't enrage me like reading the vast sea of idiocy those posts have somehow risen above does.
It's a bit hypocritical of me, to take the product of the moderation system without contributing to it, but if that matters, you shouldn't allow people not to opt out. I don't contribute to any open source projects, either financially or by helping at all, and use the hell out of their software either, and that doesn't trouble me much either.
No, when Yahoo, Walmart, etc enter the DRM Free game they will be selling whatever format(s) customers demand
Who is this "the customer", and how the hell do companies actually find out what they demand?
If you believe Microsoft, every change they've ever made to their software is because the customer demanded it. I don't find too many actual customers demanding anything. The ones that make demands generally are the ones that are either, 1) not buying the product the demand is being made over, or 2) are such a high volume customer that your defection to another supplier means serious harm for the company. The latter just isn't the case in the digital music business, and the people infringing copyright with regard to music tend to make pretty unreasonable demands.
As long as Dell and company keep allowing you to choose WIndows XP, people will do so, and they currently still let you (as the computer I set up today is testament to).
There is no holy grail, that's why there are many other window managers out there in wide use. You might as well ask if Ubuntu is the "Holy Grail" of Linux.
I personally can't stand KDE. I have the libraries installed because of one application that just works easier than other alternative I've found (k3b) but that's it, and I don't run it all that often. I run Gnome (vanilla Ubuntu) but since I've got to wipe that computer for other reasons, I'm going to be installing Xubuntu, because Gnome, like KDE, has a bunch of bloat, both from a visual design and code perspective, I just have found Gnome less bad. XFCE is darn close to my Holy Grail as far as window managers go, but that doesn't work for my father, who will be running MacOS X until his dying day, because he loves it, or my girlfriend who still uses Enlightenment e17 and is EXTREMELY touchy when anyone suggests that she try something newer.
This kind of religious evangelism from the KDE community over a window manager turns off an awful lot of people. Yes, there are an awful lot of people that find that KDE is a wonderful desktop for them. Awesome. However, there are an awful lot of people that don't like it, too. Gnome didn't pay off Sun Microsystems, Canonical, or Red Hat so their window manager could be made the default. Acting like the Flying Spagetti Monster wants KDE to be on everyone's desktop just makes you look like jerks.
Slashdot Mirror
Resident Evil made enough money that a sequel was made, so whoever greenlighted that probably shouldn't have been fired. People went to see it, it made money, ergo it was the right idea. Art isn't what the movies are about. Art movies generally don't make big bucks, it's just nice when they do.
Well, looking back, agriculture certainly was the beginning of the slippery slope that has led us to modern society. Hunter/gatherers have little to no negative impact on the general environment, since they're basically no different than bear families. Agriculture by definition radically alters the local environment with pretty grave consequences if you're a species that is a problem to that agriculture (wolves get hunted to near extinction as they threaten herds of livestock, "weed" species are ruthlessly torn up and driven out of the local area, regardless of what their part in the local ecology was). Once the first field was tilled, it was pretty much inevitable that we were going to end up where we are.
Not to say that what we are doing isn't natural. It's most certainly natural (termites raise aphids as livestock, build gigantic mounds, and otherwise alter the landscape around them, they're natural). It's not right or wrong, it's just change, which is the only real certainty. Death and taxes are just fronts.
given the smaller percentage of that who will play games
You mean the smaller perchentage of that who will bother to try and play a game that isn't:
1. Shareware/"Inexpensive-ware". Long tradition of reasonable quality/popular shareware games in the Mac community. Apple often gives people full versions of shareware or cheap for-pay games with their installs. From experience, they get a lot of play.
2. Produced by Blizzard. I've switched recently to raiding fulltime on my Mac. I have a lot of other games, but don't play many of the PC ones much anymore aside from WoW. That my copies of WoW and Diablo 2 run on it (as well as Starcraft 2 which will run on it out of the box) are nice bonuses.
...at least in its current form. Now, don't get me wrong, I still employ e-mail, but it's not exactly useful to me. When 90% of the e-mail I and my clients recieve is useless crap, the medium that allows that kind of pathetic signal-noise ratio is just plain not useful in my book.
I've got clients that get 10,000+ spam e-mails a day, and we're not even talking large businesses. I'm talking 1 person getting well over 10,000 pieces of useless junk per day, because they don't want to or can't change their e-mail address. The amount of money they've spent on me to try to reduce that is ludicrous, and I feel like some kind of Dick Cheney oil profiteer. They're all quite happy with every little bit of relief I can give them, but it's getting to the point where if something serious WAS done about spam e-mail (in an international/legal sense) I would lose a lot of business, and that concerns me.
Communication is important, but there are a lot less costly methods of communication out there than e-mail. E-mail damn well isn't free now, so I don't know what the "Oh no, don't charge me for e-mail!!" people are complaining about, honestly. Just ask the postmasters of AOL, Yahoo, Gmail, etc, how much they spend on spam filtering. Just ask the restaurant owner and the machinist I work for how much they've spent on my time to teach them how to use spam filtering, and finding a service provider that provides decent filtering options in their management consoles.
Actually, it seems to be a reasonably tidy bow, it's just not an easy package it's wrapped around.
The sudden stop is, visually, an extremely loud "Here ends The Story Of Tony Soprano"
That phrase is just as ambiguous as the few seconds of blank. It could easily means he dies, it could just as easily mean he lives and does nothing worth telling after this. Or that this is all I'm going to tell you about Tony for now, maybe later I'll tell you more about old Tony. How you interpret the ending says far more about you than about the writer, the characters, or the situation.
I've only seen a few episodes. It was certainly a good show, but I didn't think it was as amazing as most people seem to, by any stretch. I've got my own theories based on what I've read about the episode, and the series, but really, those theories don't matter. The story ended there, and that's all folks.
Well, the problem is that this administration believes it IS the United States of America, instead of just the current administration.
I use SpamSentry, and while Blizzard did hamstring the reporting function, the spam blocking parts still work fine. I get at least 4 spam messages each hour still, more if I'm in a city with a trade channel for any length of time. At least Blizzard has finally woken up and tried to do something, but it hasn't been effective by even the most generous stretch of the imagination.
These places also have signs saying "Open" or "Closed", often with hours of operation posted nearby.
Just because the door is unlocked, doesn't mean you're allowed to walk in if there's a big "Closed" sign on the front.
"Linksys" doesn't translate as "I allow anyone that wishes to to connect to this network, enjoy" in any language I'm familiar with.
Those were implied in the "etc" but sure. Nigeria isn't exactly a shining beacon of wonderfulness. And Norway is pretty harmless, but I don't particularly like having to give them money so I can get to work/heat my home either.
Farmers have been unable to support themselves by farming because of the insane cheapness of food, and high fructose corn syrup being so cheap is one of the big parts of the obesity epidemic. Anything that raises the price of food means portions will need to be reduced, and farmers will be more likely to be able to support themselves by growing crops.
I frankly don't give a shit whether the emissions are "cleaner" with ethanol. If it means I'm not forced to shovel money into the pockets of Arab governments, Russia, Venezuela, etc, just to continue to make a living and survive, then I'm all for it.
I want that to work on all ignores, not just Report Spam-based ignores. If it's just on report spam, there's going to be way more reports than actual spam just to get the account-ignore feature.
There, fixed it for you.
Here you have two prime examples of "too much choice" in action.
You're assuming that everyone uses an apt-get based package distribution method, and you just can't do that.
You're also assuming KDE is there, and that's an even more flawed assumption.
Do it all the time - I don't actually remember the last time a business had someone out front asking me to come in.
They don't have someone, but they generally do have an "Open" sign, or hours of operation posted prominently, even if it's "Open 24 Hours".
If you feel it necessary to carry a lethal weapon in order to feel safe, something is very very wrong.
No shit, Dick Tracy.
What was your first clue?
Because "schadenfreude" doesn't quite roll off the tongue as well.
...you wait for the song to stop. Imus has been dancing for awhile and he's always gotten to safety after the song stopped before. Even he realizes this, where apparently most people on slashdot don't.
I don't particularly care one way or the other about Don Imus getting fired. He's said a lot of offensive stuff in the past. Media Matters was just the spark on this, letting the rest of the world that doesn't care much about Imus know about it. The fire was the revolt within both the advertisers and the broadcasters that decided they didn't want to deal with Don Imus and the crap he generates any more. That's their perogative.
It's not censorship. Nothing stops Don Imus from finding another platform to continue saying whatever he wants, as long as people can be convinced to pay for it. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, respectfully, didn't get the kind of win they seem to think they did. No one but them got fed up with "the culture". This was consumer pressure, both from the consumers of ad time on the networks he broadcast on, and a threatened boycott by normal people. Frankly it's an example of how things ought to work when people want change. Market forces. The true meaning of voting with your wallet.
Claiming Media Matters directly had anything to do with this other than showing people who didn't see/hear the show the video is ludicrous. Media Matters has spent TONS of time complaining about all kinds of people and they've had zero effect, because not nearly enough real people cared until now.
..so the business model is the lawsuit.
Didn't the law firm that's running the case basically get handed the store as their legal fee? I'm not exactly sure of the details, and I can't do much checking right now since I'm about to run out, but that was my impression.
Well, I believe that technically drug tests for athletes ARE an invasion of privacy, and you're allowed to refuse to submit to one.
However, the athletic organization has the right to not allow anyone to compete in their events, and take away a medal should you refuse the test right after completion of the event.
Blizzard should be allowed to disallow people that won't let them check for cheating from playing their game. I don't think that includes suing the makers of software that allows you to cheat.
IANAL, however, I have a brain...
There's an argument to be made that Blizzard is being defrauded, since they specifically claim all rights to the virtual objects in their game, and say up front that account access merely grants a non-transferrable right to use the virtual objects they generate within the game space.
There's an argument that the customer who buys WoW gold is defrauded because the merchant is claiming a right they don't have by selling it to them, but the customer has more than likely agreed to the Terms of Service (since you don't see people without WoW accounts buying WoW gold to resell, since without agreeing to the Terms of Service and maintaining an account, you can't store that inventory anywhere) and would probably be considered as part of the fraud or some such. Like I said, IANAL, but I'm pretty sure you couldn't get away with claiming a seller defrauded you.
Basically it comes down, like the article the article originally referenced says, to a final word on the ownership of WoW gold being handed down, and that just hasn't happened yet. If Blizzard doesn't have the right to negate a transaction because there is some form of ownership by the player, then that's a much bigger foothold for the tax man. If Blizzard retains all ownership, then anyone defrauding Blizzard by "selling" WoW gold needs to pay the taxes on those ill gotten gains (I'm pretty sure that you're required to report all income, whether legal or illegal), but normal players can't reasonably be taxed, because they never had ownership of the Sword of Awesomeness that dropped for them, so they can't even barter for it. I can't be taxed for the value of a painball gun I am being allowed the use of by the arena owner if I hand it to my friend next to me. The owner may say I can't do that, but we're not talking a taxable transaction. However if I buy a gun there, and then sell it to someone within the arena, that's taxable even if it's within the game.
A bit rambling, but I think there's something worth thinking about in there.
...and I have personally renounced it.
I unchecked "Willing to Moderate" in my account preferences, because I know I'm an intensely biased, flawed person, and I would happily ostracize my enemies and laud my friends regardless of the quality, or lack thereof of their posts. I hate a lot of people. A lot of the people on here, come to mention it. Having mod points gives me the power to act on the desire to do something about it, and power (even the power to demote your post because I think you're an idiot, or meta-moderating with an agenda) corrupts. I, apparently, am quite easily corruptible. I couldn't enjoy reading this site, because I was looking to deal with people I thought should be pushed down. Now that I can't do anything about it, it's a lot less frustrating to read things here.
However, I've set my highlight threshold to +4, because experience has taught me that even a bunch of my fellow random idiots on the internet can't be wrong all the time. Approximately 90% of the stuff that gets modded that high, I can only assume as a result of some kind of emergent reasonableness from a sea of unreasonable stupidity. The other 10% is easily skipped, and doesn't enrage me like reading the vast sea of idiocy those posts have somehow risen above does.
It's a bit hypocritical of me, to take the product of the moderation system without contributing to it, but if that matters, you shouldn't allow people not to opt out. I don't contribute to any open source projects, either financially or by helping at all, and use the hell out of their software either, and that doesn't trouble me much either.
No, when Yahoo, Walmart, etc enter the DRM Free game they will be selling whatever format(s) customers demand
Who is this "the customer", and how the hell do companies actually find out what they demand?
If you believe Microsoft, every change they've ever made to their software is because the customer demanded it. I don't find too many actual customers demanding anything. The ones that make demands generally are the ones that are either, 1) not buying the product the demand is being made over, or 2) are such a high volume customer that your defection to another supplier means serious harm for the company. The latter just isn't the case in the digital music business, and the people infringing copyright with regard to music tend to make pretty unreasonable demands.
As long as Dell and company keep allowing you to choose WIndows XP, people will do so, and they currently still let you (as the computer I set up today is testament to).
Won't someone PLEASE think of the ponies!!!1!!
There is no holy grail, that's why there are many other window managers out there in wide use. You might as well ask if Ubuntu is the "Holy Grail" of Linux.
I personally can't stand KDE. I have the libraries installed because of one application that just works easier than other alternative I've found (k3b) but that's it, and I don't run it all that often. I run Gnome (vanilla Ubuntu) but since I've got to wipe that computer for other reasons, I'm going to be installing Xubuntu, because Gnome, like KDE, has a bunch of bloat, both from a visual design and code perspective, I just have found Gnome less bad. XFCE is darn close to my Holy Grail as far as window managers go, but that doesn't work for my father, who will be running MacOS X until his dying day, because he loves it, or my girlfriend who still uses Enlightenment e17 and is EXTREMELY touchy when anyone suggests that she try something newer.
This kind of religious evangelism from the KDE community over a window manager turns off an awful lot of people. Yes, there are an awful lot of people that find that KDE is a wonderful desktop for them. Awesome. However, there are an awful lot of people that don't like it, too. Gnome didn't pay off Sun Microsystems, Canonical, or Red Hat so their window manager could be made the default. Acting like the Flying Spagetti Monster wants KDE to be on everyone's desktop just makes you look like jerks.