Personally I don't mind much. I'm hoping we see a resurgence of train travel. Easier, cheaper, and somehow a more romantic way to travel.
Well, I don't know where you're getting your numbers. Perhaps for short distances and certain areas (ie, up and down the Eastern Seaboard), but for cross country travel, trains aren't price competitive at all. I travel to Seattle once or twice a year from Boston, and I can still get ~$300 round trip tickets. I also get there in a few hours. I've priced out train travel, and it comes out to almost $600, and 6 solid days of travel time for the round trip. Even more if I want a guaranteed electrical socket so I can plug anything in and do work/other stuff during the 3 day journey each way (you've got to buy a room for the long distance trains, the special seats with plugs only seem to be on the trains that run along the Eastern Seaboard, that's something like $300 per CONNECTION).
Now, I don't imagine that the cost of air travel is going to stay that low, so in the near future train travel may very well become the only reasonable option left to me, but even with the nightmare that is air travel today, it's still a better option than the train.
"news.com" domain name sold for 1.8 billion, because that's what it really boils down to. Sure, they get a portfolio of websites that get a lot of eyes and I would imagine a fair amount of dollars, but everyone knows how fickle that can be in today's world. CBS's news divsion is at the bottom of the pack of major US news networks despite the Katie Couric hire, which was supposed to get them back on track. This sounds like a similar ploy, the bulk of C-Net being sweetener to the "screw the news division, it's not a profit center" investors.
Religion is inherently irrational, as it involves absolute certainity in something utterly unprovable, intangible, and usually contradictory.
Some religions, and some sects of some religions, yes. In the US, the religious landscape is dominated (for various reasons including money, cultivated political influence, and the history of the country) by sects and religious leaders that espouse various levels of literal interpretation of the Protestant version of the Bible (ie, the Protestant denomination I grew up in didn't teach me that Genesis was meant to be taken literally, but the Gospel books were generally taken more literally, despite their inconsistencies), and/or demand absolute unquestioned faith. That is by no means the case for all religions, or even all versions of Christianity, but the prevalence in the US, the near universal evangelistic bent of Protestant denominations, and the fact that a very large percentage of the people that call themselves Protestants haven't even read a quarter of the Bible they claim is literally true, makes a lot of Americans think that's what religion is all about.
Catholic dogma, believe it or not, does not espouse a literal interpretation of the Bible (not to mention that it has more books in it than what you'd find in the Bibles in American hotels), nor that you even have to be Catholic to go to heaven. My fiancee is Catholic, and I regularly get excoriated for being "too Protestant" (despite the fact that I'm not even Christian anymore) for quoting scripture at her when religion discussions happen. I'm not sure she even OWNS a Bible. To her, Catholicism is as much, if not more cultural than religious, much like Judaism is for a lot of Jews.
The blog post calls for feedback on what features of VBA and Windows interoperability are most important to people.
I should think all of them, since interoperability with Office for Windows is the only reason there is for spending a lot of money on Office for Mac instead of spending a lot less money on either a cheaper commercial alternative (Pages, Mariner Write, etc) or using an open source alternative (FINALLY Open Office is getting around to an Aqua version).
Will these Olympics lead to a more free China, or is it just corporate pandering?
Since when has any Olympic games, even the ancient ones, ever led to to resolution of any conflict? Did the 1936 Summer Olympics get Hitler to mend his ways? Did the 1980 Moscow Olympics get the Soviet Union to mend their ways? Did any of the Olympics held in the US do anything but promote self-importance and exceptionalism amongst Americans? Did the Tokyo Olympics, or the Nagano Olympics get Japan to mend fences with China and Korea over Japanese war crimes in WW2?
At the very best, it allows rival groups to fight each other in a less murderous way for a bit (and even that isn't a given, see Munich 1972, Atlanta bombing). That's a good thing, but expecting more than that is ignoring history. The people in the "Olympic movement" that see the games as a tool for peace and understanding are just deluding themselves. Even with the ancient games, wars were only put on hold, not ended, and that was only because it was a religious event.
The only people that ever make money on an Olympics are the ad agencies.
By professional skeptic, I mean people like the Skeptic Society and the various other people that go around actively trying to disprove stuff. And as for amateur skeptic, I'm not one of those either. Questioning everything, even things you personally think are correct isn't limited to the UFOs, magical powers, or the existence of a deity. Moral systems aren't defined by the physical world in the way that planetary systems are (the sun isn't good or bad, it is). I've got a huge pile of unfinished arguments on my computer (because I'm not a professional) against the philosophical and moral positions of the "skeptic community" that have nothing to do with the good, helpful, and necessary science work that they base those positions.
I guess technically I would fall under the dictionary definition of skeptic, but that word has more political, social, and moral overtones than just what's in the dictionary, and I don't fall into that mold.
If you are "FOR" something you have to be willing to defend and justify it, repeatedly.
Yeah, we call that "the way things ought to work". Too often, however, things don't work like that. WAY too often, we have really great ideas that aren't defended or justified repeatedly, and therefore aren't thought through nearly as well. While I am not personally a "professional skeptic", if you take a position on ANYTHING you'd better be prepared to back it up with evidence if possible, and argument if there isn't any evidence yet (because no one's tried it, or it's impossible to test for one reason or another). Every assertion should be questioned repeatedly and mercilessly, especially ones that will end up transferring other people's resources into something that you think should be done. You know, such sterling examples of crappy ideas that didn't get argued against nearly enough, such as the Cultural Revolution, the second US invasion of Iraq, Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler, Alan Greenspan's dropping the cost of borrowing to nothing.
If you have the resources to do something yourself, without outside help, then you don't really need to worry about questions, but don't expect anyone else to care much. If someone wants to go to space, I'm all for letting them, as long as they pay for it.
Calling a politician is going to get you nowhere.
on
Dealing With Dialup
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The only thing most people living on the Cape and islands care about are eyesores. Just ask the Cape Wind people. Massive public support within the state, multiple environmental impact statements that conclude that nothing dire is going to happen as a result, and it's derailed for years because a bunch of very rich and very politically connected people think it'll look ugly.
1. Cost is too high. Around $100 would probably be the magic number for me. Over that I can't really justify.
2. Text files can be loaded onto it without having to hack it. I'm not interested in reading new books on it. My interest in an eBook reader is pretty much soley to read the classics I can obtain free of charge from places like Project Gutenburg. Reading them on a computer screen is a pain, and so is a Palm, I've tried both. I recently bought Crime & Punishment and the cheapest copy was $8. That kind of pricing for classics makes building a library really expensive, especially with no decent used bookstore anywhere near me (yeah, I can shop online, but half the fun is browsing). This would make it a lot easier for me to read all the classics I should've read in school but never got around to, and make it really REALLY easy to do so before I go to sleep, on the can, at my desk waiting for the phone to ring, or the few times I travel each year.
I agree with the general thrust of what you're saying, but you're being as simplistic as the previous poster in a lot of ways.
First off, US military power is at a seriously low ebb these days. We are locked into Iraq and Afganistan for the forseeable future. There's no way we could move equipment and material in a rapid manner from those theaters to a new one if another conflict came up, nor provide troops without a draft. It would have to be an EXTREMELY serious, direct threat to US or close allied soil (like Japan, NATO) for us to either drop the Middle Eastern ball, or draft enough troops to keep doing what we're doing now without sparking crippling dissent at home. Hard-liners in China are currently being kept well in check from forcing a confrontation over Taiwan, and their government seems much better able to continue holding them in check than we did on our hard-liners before we went into Iraq, but that isn't a given for any point past the present.
Secondly, China is already projecting global power, just not militarily. They have crushing economic power that they are not shy about using. They're not especially subtle about it (I've heard stories of Chinese businessmen going to US farms and offering farmers suitcases full of cash to break their contracts) but they don't need to be right now, and they're getting better at it. They have the power to destroy the American economy right now, and though it would take them down if they exercised that power at this point, they aren't sitting on that debt. Our current debt problems are a huge wakeup call to them that just being the lender doesn't make you immune to problems of the debtor. They're also fixing to fall into the same trap that America has fallen into, with anti-Chinese blowback from their rampant mercantilism. Right now there isn't a lot of it (China doesn't make political demands on governments it does deals with, the money flows extremely freely, the US is a bigger bogey-man, and the EU are ex-colonial powers and just about everyone harbors at least a small grudge) but if the trend of dangerous products coming out of China and Chinese-owned factories continues, they could be in for a serious problem. It may very well be poetic justice if the next Union Carbide-style disaster happens in the US, but that won't let the Chinese off any more than the US.
Have you actually played any other single player FPSes? Doom 3 had issues, sure. The flashlight was annoying, but bearable and one of the few spots of realism in the game. Yes, carrying around an entire arsenal isn't particularly realistic, but neither is affixing, removing, and re-affixing a flashlight to each weapon you carry with duct tape really really fast when you swap weapons, or carrying around 10 or so flashlights to duct tape to everything. Things spawning behind you wasn't surprising after very long, and was seriously overdone, but they learned that lesson in the expansion.
I don't count a couple annoying issues that should've been looked at harder a serious misstep. You may not have liked the story, but it at least HAD a story. Doom 1&2 and Quake don't have stories, they have premises. There is a difference. In fact, I generally think of Quake 1 as the real "Doom 3", and Doom 3 as really the premise of Doom 1 reworked into a more modern game. It's fair to be disappointed that it wasn't another massed thoughtless enemies game like its direct predecessors, but I personally consider getting away from that kind of gameplay as a plus, not a minus. Painkiller and Serious Sam are fun to a point, but I never bothered to finish either (well, I finished Serious Sam 2, but it was a coop LAN party event that took several hours.)
And the competition? Painkiller was interesting, with impressive boss fights, but was empty calories. No story worth bothering with, and as I said before, endless streams of enemies are something I'm glad to do without. Far Cry has piss-poor storytelling, and fakes nonlinearity with huge mostly empty levels that you have to trudge through pathetically slowly. Halo multiplayer may have been the best thing since sliced bread (though I have no real opinion, since I never played it multiplayer), but after the introduction of the Flood, it was a totally brainless "kill the marauding hordes" experience I couldn't even bring myself to finish in single player. Half Life 2 is a cinematic masterpiece, and as a result is probably the most linear game since Rebel Assault. Not telling your story as well as Half Life 2 is no crime, and you've got a lot of company.
Don't get me wrong, I think this is insane, and I hope it goes the way of similar bills before it, but the tighter the so-called "content cartels" grip on their copyright, the more persuasive the arguments for Creative Commons, GPL (v2 or v3), and other similar copyright-related social movements become. The same laws that protect the iron grip of Disney on Mickey Mouse for as long as they can legislate it, also protect those who participate in the Creative Commons (like Nine Inch Nails to take a totally non-random example) from the Disneys, the Time Warners, and the Sonys of the world. They can only be the gatekeepers of "the culture" if YOU choose to pay the entry fee. There's plenty enough out there that they don't control, that they CAN'T control anymore. All this sound and fury is trying to make people focus on them instead of looking for alternatives. There's no such thing as bad publicity, and all that.
The onus is on those who claim that art should be for love and not money to put up or shut up. If you're an artist, go make some art under something like Creative Commons that both allows you to make money off it when someone else is making money off it (and sue the pants off them if they don't pay you for it), and allows people who aren't making money off it to spend as much money as they want spreading the word about how awesome you are. If you're not an artist, don't forget that artists need to eat as much as you do. Actually reach into that wallet and give money to artists that take a chance and produce work that you like under a Creative Commons license (or some other license with terms that aren't crazy) and be as generous as you can afford. Every Tom, Dick, and Sally that releases something under Creative Commons isn't worth supporting just because they're releasing as Creative Commons. There is a TON of freely distributable junk out there. However there ARE people out there that every one of us reading this story would feel comfortable supporting, and rather than shovel money on a monthly basis into Comcast's, or Sirius', or Time Warner's or whomever's bank account for content that isn't worth using as toilet paper, a small fraction of that money could make a world of difference for one of the people that IS taking a risk and releasing good content under terms that are reasonable.
Where the hell is the Creative Commons Foundation of the Arts, taking donations and patronizing quality artists that release work under the Creative Commons like the foundations supporting free software? Do you think this stuff grows on trees?
I'm glad that my state still uses paper ballots, but as long as it's legal to count a vote without any physical record in any state, no national election in this country should be considered "free and fair." What's good for Zimbabwe, Venezuela, the Russian Federation, and Iran, should be good for the United States of America too, and shame on those who claim otherwise.
Whether it's Hillary Clinton, Barak Obama, or John McCain elected this year, the rest of the world should bring as much pressure on them to reform our elections process as they have in those other countries. Stuff like this prove that people here are working more and more to push back against it, but if you care about what happens here yourself (and if you don't, I don't blame you) push your leaders to push our leaders harder on this.
Oh, I totally agree with the point. My response probably sounded harsher than I intended to, I just wanted to point out that it wasn't much of a prediction, since it's happened to some pretty high profile distros in the past. Red Hat and Ubuntu were just the biggest (Red Hat with its IPO) and most current (Ubuntu) incarnations of the phenomenon within the Linux community. You could make the same case for SuSE (with the Novell/Microsoft deal fiasco), Mandrake, Gentoo, but their ride on the top was comparitively very shortlived.
Mark my prophecy: Someday some company is going to produce a desktop Linux so good that it's going to catch on and become if not a major competitor in the OS market, then at least the major distro of Linux. And they will suffer the same fate, becoming the punching bag of the Linux community, while lesser distros have no fewer problems and gather fewer complaints. And of those complaining, many will have obtained the free version of the distro. They will be out nothing, but will feel somehow justified because of the stature of their target, and will do so with gusto despite the fact that equally good distros are available to which they could switch. This irrationality will escape them, as it does the author of TFA.
Post hoc predictions earn no points, at least if you're just looking at competition among Linux distributions. Remember Red Hat Linux? I was inside the E-Trade offices the day of the Red Hat IPO, and the people I was there with and I were just staring at the TVs watching it rocket up and up and up, and we were all exstatic that maybe now the time had come for "real" computing to get out there and put the smackdown on Microsoft. It was the darling for a bit, then the floodgates of criticism opened from all quarters in the Linux community about issues with RHL, both technical and political, and they were pulled down from that perch in short order thanks to a fractured community it had lost support from. I saw people going berserk over Red Hat's adoption of Gnome over KDE, even some people claiming that it was anti-Europe bias, as one example of how Red Hat, in short order, could do no right.
Fast forward to today, and Ubuntu is making huge strides in usability and popularity, introducing Linux into more homes and onto more desks than any other Linux distribution yet released. Coincident with that is a rising hue and cry against it from many corners, for being too simplistic and taking options away form the users, for cutting too many corners, for making it easier to install proprietary software like Nvidia's drivers, and other such complaints. It gets derided as candy-coated Linux that coddles stupid people.
The future is now, and was not too long ago as well, I guess.
Not merely because of their past actions, but because their music is awful now. Their older music was great, but in the words of Tenacious D, "no more rockin' for you". If Lars Ulrich was handing out copies on the street, Creative Commons licensed, I wouldn't bother expending the calories to carry it.
I do freelance support work for Macs primarily (though I deal with plenty of Windows machines as well), and I've helped switch several small companies partially from PCs to Macs. Generally, once the "how do I do this" calls stop, and the users get some familiarity, the new Mac people stop calling for months. The die hard Windows people I deal with also tend to be the least technically inclined, and generally I'll see them every few months to fix the results of their incompetence before they either run out of money in the budget to pay me to fix it, or decide that it's me who's incompetent and allowing all these viruses and spyware on their machine and go call the Computer Geeks at 2-3 times my rate.
There are a few people that have made the switch, and end up just not wanting to change the way they've always done things (despite the fact that they'd called me in to totally reformat and reinstall Windows 3 times in the last few months) and who pitch a fit about it, but there just isn't much you can do about them.
Plenty of the switchers I've dealt with run Parallels to run the one or two Windows apps that they just can't be without for whatever reason, but I haven't ever (depsite offering several times) had to install Boot Camp on anyone's machine to effectively switch them back. I have had a couple customers that who exchanged some quite old Macs for cheapass, low-end Windows machines, but that's was for cost reasons primarily, rather than preferring the Windows platform (and they're spending more money on my time as a result).
The Internet as it stands causes governments, regardless of party, left/right leaning, democratic, heriditary, authoritarian, fascist, or progressive, way more problems than it solves.
1. It makes many laws nearly impossible to enforce on people in your country (the various laws in France banning Holocaust denial, globalised P2P in less RIAA/MPAA friendly countries).
2. It makes it easier for corporations and other employers to provide services and product in your country while employing few if any of your citizens.
3. It creates a tax-gathering nightmare for revenue officials.
4. It provides free and open access for foreigners who are inclined to break your laws, and exploit and defraud your citizens. Commercially operated botnets and the total hijacking of e-mail for spam, protected with a wink and a nod by corrupt officials and organized crime sponsors are just the start.
5. Foreign militaries, paramilitaries, intelligence agencies, and terrorist groups have a direct, hard to trace, and nearly impossible to stop communications line into your country, on top of a map to attack your critical network infrastructure (and physical infrastructure too, if you're like the US and are stupid enough to connect power plant control systems directly to the Internet).
6. Critical Internet infrastructure, and new development is often at the whim of an unfriendly or hostile government. (though this government is generally the US in just about every case, with its control of ICANN)
Again, this is governments. The people don't like a lot of the negatives too, and that means that in general they are going to be pleased if action to cut off "bad actors" from flooding their inboxes with spam, or stopping the US government from controlling the DNS system, or the Chinese military from attacking their country, or Russian hackers taking their entire country offline if they do something that Russia doesn't particularly like. The fact that it gives governments nothing but nightmares is eventually going to create a lot of little internets, with countrycountry access governed by treaty. The Wile West was tamed a long time ago, and the Internet will be as well, just like every other frontier. You've just got to create a new one.
Other great multiplayer action RPG choices for PS2 are Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance 1 & 2 (though 2 is in high demand and pricey as a result), Champions of Norrath and Champions: Return to Arms (basically two more Dark Alliance games set in the EQ world, but that doesn't make them too far different).
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Well, I don't know where you're getting your numbers. Perhaps for short distances and certain areas (ie, up and down the Eastern Seaboard), but for cross country travel, trains aren't price competitive at all. I travel to Seattle once or twice a year from Boston, and I can still get ~$300 round trip tickets. I also get there in a few hours. I've priced out train travel, and it comes out to almost $600, and 6 solid days of travel time for the round trip. Even more if I want a guaranteed electrical socket so I can plug anything in and do work/other stuff during the 3 day journey each way (you've got to buy a room for the long distance trains, the special seats with plugs only seem to be on the trains that run along the Eastern Seaboard, that's something like $300 per CONNECTION).
Now, I don't imagine that the cost of air travel is going to stay that low, so in the near future train travel may very well become the only reasonable option left to me, but even with the nightmare that is air travel today, it's still a better option than the train.
I dunno, have you ever seen two cats fighting? That's pretty dynamic right there. Productive, too. Fur flying all over the place.
"news.com" domain name sold for 1.8 billion, because that's what it really boils down to. Sure, they get a portfolio of websites that get a lot of eyes and I would imagine a fair amount of dollars, but everyone knows how fickle that can be in today's world. CBS's news divsion is at the bottom of the pack of major US news networks despite the Katie Couric hire, which was supposed to get them back on track. This sounds like a similar ploy, the bulk of C-Net being sweetener to the "screw the news division, it's not a profit center" investors.
Some religions, and some sects of some religions, yes. In the US, the religious landscape is dominated (for various reasons including money, cultivated political influence, and the history of the country) by sects and religious leaders that espouse various levels of literal interpretation of the Protestant version of the Bible (ie, the Protestant denomination I grew up in didn't teach me that Genesis was meant to be taken literally, but the Gospel books were generally taken more literally, despite their inconsistencies), and/or demand absolute unquestioned faith. That is by no means the case for all religions, or even all versions of Christianity, but the prevalence in the US, the near universal evangelistic bent of Protestant denominations, and the fact that a very large percentage of the people that call themselves Protestants haven't even read a quarter of the Bible they claim is literally true, makes a lot of Americans think that's what religion is all about.
Catholic dogma, believe it or not, does not espouse a literal interpretation of the Bible (not to mention that it has more books in it than what you'd find in the Bibles in American hotels), nor that you even have to be Catholic to go to heaven. My fiancee is Catholic, and I regularly get excoriated for being "too Protestant" (despite the fact that I'm not even Christian anymore) for quoting scripture at her when religion discussions happen. I'm not sure she even OWNS a Bible. To her, Catholicism is as much, if not more cultural than religious, much like Judaism is for a lot of Jews.
I should think all of them, since interoperability with Office for Windows is the only reason there is for spending a lot of money on Office for Mac instead of spending a lot less money on either a cheaper commercial alternative (Pages, Mariner Write, etc) or using an open source alternative (FINALLY Open Office is getting around to an Aqua version).
Already done, we call it a trebuchet. Reload time is a bit long though.
Since when has any Olympic games, even the ancient ones, ever led to to resolution of any conflict? Did the 1936 Summer Olympics get Hitler to mend his ways? Did the 1980 Moscow Olympics get the Soviet Union to mend their ways? Did any of the Olympics held in the US do anything but promote self-importance and exceptionalism amongst Americans? Did the Tokyo Olympics, or the Nagano Olympics get Japan to mend fences with China and Korea over Japanese war crimes in WW2?
At the very best, it allows rival groups to fight each other in a less murderous way for a bit (and even that isn't a given, see Munich 1972, Atlanta bombing). That's a good thing, but expecting more than that is ignoring history. The people in the "Olympic movement" that see the games as a tool for peace and understanding are just deluding themselves. Even with the ancient games, wars were only put on hold, not ended, and that was only because it was a religious event.
The only people that ever make money on an Olympics are the ad agencies.
By professional skeptic, I mean people like the Skeptic Society and the various other people that go around actively trying to disprove stuff. And as for amateur skeptic, I'm not one of those either. Questioning everything, even things you personally think are correct isn't limited to the UFOs, magical powers, or the existence of a deity. Moral systems aren't defined by the physical world in the way that planetary systems are (the sun isn't good or bad, it is). I've got a huge pile of unfinished arguments on my computer (because I'm not a professional) against the philosophical and moral positions of the "skeptic community" that have nothing to do with the good, helpful, and necessary science work that they base those positions.
I guess technically I would fall under the dictionary definition of skeptic, but that word has more political, social, and moral overtones than just what's in the dictionary, and I don't fall into that mold.
Yeah, we call that "the way things ought to work". Too often, however, things don't work like that. WAY too often, we have really great ideas that aren't defended or justified repeatedly, and therefore aren't thought through nearly as well. While I am not personally a "professional skeptic", if you take a position on ANYTHING you'd better be prepared to back it up with evidence if possible, and argument if there isn't any evidence yet (because no one's tried it, or it's impossible to test for one reason or another). Every assertion should be questioned repeatedly and mercilessly, especially ones that will end up transferring other people's resources into something that you think should be done. You know, such sterling examples of crappy ideas that didn't get argued against nearly enough, such as the Cultural Revolution, the second US invasion of Iraq, Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler, Alan Greenspan's dropping the cost of borrowing to nothing.
If you have the resources to do something yourself, without outside help, then you don't really need to worry about questions, but don't expect anyone else to care much. If someone wants to go to space, I'm all for letting them, as long as they pay for it.
The only thing most people living on the Cape and islands care about are eyesores. Just ask the Cape Wind people. Massive public support within the state, multiple environmental impact statements that conclude that nothing dire is going to happen as a result, and it's derailed for years because a bunch of very rich and very politically connected people think it'll look ugly.
1. Cost is too high. Around $100 would probably be the magic number for me. Over that I can't really justify.
2. Text files can be loaded onto it without having to hack it. I'm not interested in reading new books on it. My interest in an eBook reader is pretty much soley to read the classics I can obtain free of charge from places like Project Gutenburg. Reading them on a computer screen is a pain, and so is a Palm, I've tried both. I recently bought Crime & Punishment and the cheapest copy was $8. That kind of pricing for classics makes building a library really expensive, especially with no decent used bookstore anywhere near me (yeah, I can shop online, but half the fun is browsing). This would make it a lot easier for me to read all the classics I should've read in school but never got around to, and make it really REALLY easy to do so before I go to sleep, on the can, at my desk waiting for the phone to ring, or the few times I travel each year.
I agree with the general thrust of what you're saying, but you're being as simplistic as the previous poster in a lot of ways.
First off, US military power is at a seriously low ebb these days. We are locked into Iraq and Afganistan for the forseeable future. There's no way we could move equipment and material in a rapid manner from those theaters to a new one if another conflict came up, nor provide troops without a draft. It would have to be an EXTREMELY serious, direct threat to US or close allied soil (like Japan, NATO) for us to either drop the Middle Eastern ball, or draft enough troops to keep doing what we're doing now without sparking crippling dissent at home. Hard-liners in China are currently being kept well in check from forcing a confrontation over Taiwan, and their government seems much better able to continue holding them in check than we did on our hard-liners before we went into Iraq, but that isn't a given for any point past the present.
Secondly, China is already projecting global power, just not militarily. They have crushing economic power that they are not shy about using. They're not especially subtle about it (I've heard stories of Chinese businessmen going to US farms and offering farmers suitcases full of cash to break their contracts) but they don't need to be right now, and they're getting better at it. They have the power to destroy the American economy right now, and though it would take them down if they exercised that power at this point, they aren't sitting on that debt. Our current debt problems are a huge wakeup call to them that just being the lender doesn't make you immune to problems of the debtor. They're also fixing to fall into the same trap that America has fallen into, with anti-Chinese blowback from their rampant mercantilism. Right now there isn't a lot of it (China doesn't make political demands on governments it does deals with, the money flows extremely freely, the US is a bigger bogey-man, and the EU are ex-colonial powers and just about everyone harbors at least a small grudge) but if the trend of dangerous products coming out of China and Chinese-owned factories continues, they could be in for a serious problem. It may very well be poetic justice if the next Union Carbide-style disaster happens in the US, but that won't let the Chinese off any more than the US.
Have you actually played any other single player FPSes? Doom 3 had issues, sure. The flashlight was annoying, but bearable and one of the few spots of realism in the game. Yes, carrying around an entire arsenal isn't particularly realistic, but neither is affixing, removing, and re-affixing a flashlight to each weapon you carry with duct tape really really fast when you swap weapons, or carrying around 10 or so flashlights to duct tape to everything. Things spawning behind you wasn't surprising after very long, and was seriously overdone, but they learned that lesson in the expansion.
I don't count a couple annoying issues that should've been looked at harder a serious misstep. You may not have liked the story, but it at least HAD a story. Doom 1&2 and Quake don't have stories, they have premises. There is a difference. In fact, I generally think of Quake 1 as the real "Doom 3", and Doom 3 as really the premise of Doom 1 reworked into a more modern game. It's fair to be disappointed that it wasn't another massed thoughtless enemies game like its direct predecessors, but I personally consider getting away from that kind of gameplay as a plus, not a minus. Painkiller and Serious Sam are fun to a point, but I never bothered to finish either (well, I finished Serious Sam 2, but it was a coop LAN party event that took several hours.)
And the competition? Painkiller was interesting, with impressive boss fights, but was empty calories. No story worth bothering with, and as I said before, endless streams of enemies are something I'm glad to do without. Far Cry has piss-poor storytelling, and fakes nonlinearity with huge mostly empty levels that you have to trudge through pathetically slowly. Halo multiplayer may have been the best thing since sliced bread (though I have no real opinion, since I never played it multiplayer), but after the introduction of the Flood, it was a totally brainless "kill the marauding hordes" experience I couldn't even bring myself to finish in single player. Half Life 2 is a cinematic masterpiece, and as a result is probably the most linear game since Rebel Assault. Not telling your story as well as Half Life 2 is no crime, and you've got a lot of company.
...but nothing happened.
Not a penny, except the 20+ billion in losses to shareholders of Microsoft stock as of yesterday.
Don't get me wrong, I think this is insane, and I hope it goes the way of similar bills before it, but the tighter the so-called "content cartels" grip on their copyright, the more persuasive the arguments for Creative Commons, GPL (v2 or v3), and other similar copyright-related social movements become. The same laws that protect the iron grip of Disney on Mickey Mouse for as long as they can legislate it, also protect those who participate in the Creative Commons (like Nine Inch Nails to take a totally non-random example) from the Disneys, the Time Warners, and the Sonys of the world. They can only be the gatekeepers of "the culture" if YOU choose to pay the entry fee. There's plenty enough out there that they don't control, that they CAN'T control anymore. All this sound and fury is trying to make people focus on them instead of looking for alternatives. There's no such thing as bad publicity, and all that.
The onus is on those who claim that art should be for love and not money to put up or shut up. If you're an artist, go make some art under something like Creative Commons that both allows you to make money off it when someone else is making money off it (and sue the pants off them if they don't pay you for it), and allows people who aren't making money off it to spend as much money as they want spreading the word about how awesome you are. If you're not an artist, don't forget that artists need to eat as much as you do. Actually reach into that wallet and give money to artists that take a chance and produce work that you like under a Creative Commons license (or some other license with terms that aren't crazy) and be as generous as you can afford. Every Tom, Dick, and Sally that releases something under Creative Commons isn't worth supporting just because they're releasing as Creative Commons. There is a TON of freely distributable junk out there. However there ARE people out there that every one of us reading this story would feel comfortable supporting, and rather than shovel money on a monthly basis into Comcast's, or Sirius', or Time Warner's or whomever's bank account for content that isn't worth using as toilet paper, a small fraction of that money could make a world of difference for one of the people that IS taking a risk and releasing good content under terms that are reasonable.
Where the hell is the Creative Commons Foundation of the Arts, taking donations and patronizing quality artists that release work under the Creative Commons like the foundations supporting free software? Do you think this stuff grows on trees?
You've never seen "Death of a Salesman," have you...
How exactly does a paper ballot or a voter-checked printed ballot require a federally mandated ID?
Does not compute.
I'm glad that my state still uses paper ballots, but as long as it's legal to count a vote without any physical record in any state, no national election in this country should be considered "free and fair." What's good for Zimbabwe, Venezuela, the Russian Federation, and Iran, should be good for the United States of America too, and shame on those who claim otherwise.
Whether it's Hillary Clinton, Barak Obama, or John McCain elected this year, the rest of the world should bring as much pressure on them to reform our elections process as they have in those other countries. Stuff like this prove that people here are working more and more to push back against it, but if you care about what happens here yourself (and if you don't, I don't blame you) push your leaders to push our leaders harder on this.
Oh, I totally agree with the point. My response probably sounded harsher than I intended to, I just wanted to point out that it wasn't much of a prediction, since it's happened to some pretty high profile distros in the past. Red Hat and Ubuntu were just the biggest (Red Hat with its IPO) and most current (Ubuntu) incarnations of the phenomenon within the Linux community. You could make the same case for SuSE (with the Novell/Microsoft deal fiasco), Mandrake, Gentoo, but their ride on the top was comparitively very shortlived.
Post hoc predictions earn no points, at least if you're just looking at competition among Linux distributions. Remember Red Hat Linux? I was inside the E-Trade offices the day of the Red Hat IPO, and the people I was there with and I were just staring at the TVs watching it rocket up and up and up, and we were all exstatic that maybe now the time had come for "real" computing to get out there and put the smackdown on Microsoft. It was the darling for a bit, then the floodgates of criticism opened from all quarters in the Linux community about issues with RHL, both technical and political, and they were pulled down from that perch in short order thanks to a fractured community it had lost support from. I saw people going berserk over Red Hat's adoption of Gnome over KDE, even some people claiming that it was anti-Europe bias, as one example of how Red Hat, in short order, could do no right.
Fast forward to today, and Ubuntu is making huge strides in usability and popularity, introducing Linux into more homes and onto more desks than any other Linux distribution yet released. Coincident with that is a rising hue and cry against it from many corners, for being too simplistic and taking options away form the users, for cutting too many corners, for making it easier to install proprietary software like Nvidia's drivers, and other such complaints. It gets derided as candy-coated Linux that coddles stupid people.
The future is now, and was not too long ago as well, I guess.
Not merely because of their past actions, but because their music is awful now. Their older music was great, but in the words of Tenacious D, "no more rockin' for you". If Lars Ulrich was handing out copies on the street, Creative Commons licensed, I wouldn't bother expending the calories to carry it.
I do freelance support work for Macs primarily (though I deal with plenty of Windows machines as well), and I've helped switch several small companies partially from PCs to Macs. Generally, once the "how do I do this" calls stop, and the users get some familiarity, the new Mac people stop calling for months. The die hard Windows people I deal with also tend to be the least technically inclined, and generally I'll see them every few months to fix the results of their incompetence before they either run out of money in the budget to pay me to fix it, or decide that it's me who's incompetent and allowing all these viruses and spyware on their machine and go call the Computer Geeks at 2-3 times my rate.
There are a few people that have made the switch, and end up just not wanting to change the way they've always done things (despite the fact that they'd called me in to totally reformat and reinstall Windows 3 times in the last few months) and who pitch a fit about it, but there just isn't much you can do about them.
Plenty of the switchers I've dealt with run Parallels to run the one or two Windows apps that they just can't be without for whatever reason, but I haven't ever (depsite offering several times) had to install Boot Camp on anyone's machine to effectively switch them back. I have had a couple customers that who exchanged some quite old Macs for cheapass, low-end Windows machines, but that's was for cost reasons primarily, rather than preferring the Windows platform (and they're spending more money on my time as a result).
The Internet as it stands causes governments, regardless of party, left/right leaning, democratic, heriditary, authoritarian, fascist, or progressive, way more problems than it solves.
1. It makes many laws nearly impossible to enforce on people in your country (the various laws in France banning Holocaust denial, globalised P2P in less RIAA/MPAA friendly countries).
2. It makes it easier for corporations and other employers to provide services and product in your country while employing few if any of your citizens.
3. It creates a tax-gathering nightmare for revenue officials.
4. It provides free and open access for foreigners who are inclined to break your laws, and exploit and defraud your citizens. Commercially operated botnets and the total hijacking of e-mail for spam, protected with a wink and a nod by corrupt officials and organized crime sponsors are just the start.
5. Foreign militaries, paramilitaries, intelligence agencies, and terrorist groups have a direct, hard to trace, and nearly impossible to stop communications line into your country, on top of a map to attack your critical network infrastructure (and physical infrastructure too, if you're like the US and are stupid enough to connect power plant control systems directly to the Internet).
6. Critical Internet infrastructure, and new development is often at the whim of an unfriendly or hostile government. (though this government is generally the US in just about every case, with its control of ICANN)
Again, this is governments. The people don't like a lot of the negatives too, and that means that in general they are going to be pleased if action to cut off "bad actors" from flooding their inboxes with spam, or stopping the US government from controlling the DNS system, or the Chinese military from attacking their country, or Russian hackers taking their entire country offline if they do something that Russia doesn't particularly like. The fact that it gives governments nothing but nightmares is eventually going to create a lot of little internets, with countrycountry access governed by treaty. The Wile West was tamed a long time ago, and the Internet will be as well, just like every other frontier. You've just got to create a new one.
Other great multiplayer action RPG choices for PS2 are Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance 1 & 2 (though 2 is in high demand and pricey as a result), Champions of Norrath and Champions: Return to Arms (basically two more Dark Alliance games set in the EQ world, but that doesn't make them too far different).