Undoing some mods posting this... but my hackles are a bit raised...
And the games are better on a $200 console than either of those.
How so? Console games are lagging pretty far behind PC games these days thanks to running on ancient hardware. My middling video card (ATI 5770, bought for less than $100 a little under two years ago) blows the GPUs in the 360 and PS3 out of the water. I can play at a decent FOV, I can have weapon models that take up less than half the screen, I can play at a decent frame rate, and generally my games don't look like crap. Furthermore, I get the magic ability to mod my game, and tweak my controls to my liking, and I don't have to waste money on a single tasking bit of hardware that will end up sitting unused in a corner 90% of the time. Also, PC games actually go on sale... its amazing.
I actually can't think of any bonus that consoles have, for the computer literate, at least. I have the money to buy any console I want, and have been tempted from time to time, but I can never actually come up with a reason to do so. Every console game I've wanted to play has been ported to PC, with generally higher quality. My middle of the road PC can out perform every console out there. I haven't had any issues running games, and have never had a "red ring of death", or my computer maker (me) pull features out from under me, or artificially restrict my access to my property.
Sure, there are genres of games that generally work better on consoles, like racing games and fighting games; but I generally don't enjoy them enough to warrant $200+, plus the cost of games.
The video of the proof of concept looks actually awesome, and much better than how Google is doing it now. It's also much better for the user since it pulls the content from all social networks and other relevant sites. Interestingly, they're using Google's own search engine to do this:
Agreed... but for one thing, I hardly ever find Twitter relevant for anything, but thanks to its nature it will dominate every search. Twitter, thanks to its format, gets generally much higher "follower" counts, but each message has much less content than a Google+ or Facebook post (which isn't saying much), Twitter has a much higher single to noise ratio.
The best solution would be to return results from services that the user actually uses (and thus cares about). Sadly this would require a fair bit of intrusion on behalf of Google. A Google+ or Facebook hit is much more useful to me than a MySpace or Twitter hit, since I don't use, and don't want to use, either of those services. This also ignores my own subjective bias against social networking sites as suppliers of useful information, I know I, and many of my fellow/. nerds are fringe cases here. Most celebrity, or big, social accounts are also not real, they are basically marketing ploys, which limit their usefulness. So, why bother?
Also, this move does smell a bit fishy in-itself. I think Google's competition is just angry that they don't get to promote themselves via unrelated searches. Also, tangentially, I haven't actually noticed the social sidebar on many of my searches, but it did show up for "cooking", which is something I would never actually search for, it doesn't show up for "cooking with eggs", which is closer to something I might ever search for. What purpose is there in just looking up "cooking", outside of trying to get a Wikipedia link or Dictionary?
I agree that companies should look out for their employees but for issues as evenly split between left and right as this one, I wonder if they will deter as many potential employees as entice new ones. I think a more effective approach would be to improve remote locations so employees don't have to come to Washington to work for MS.
It isn't as split as one would think anymore, I'm pretty sure support for it has surpased the opposition some time ago, and in some age groups (young people) and demographics the support is much higher.
Also, who cares if people against gay marriage refuse to work for you? Let me rephrase that, who cares if the extremist camp, who can't tolerate views other than their own, refuse to work for you? I'm guessing that group would make rather shitty employees, especially at a tech firm. The sane opponents probably can respectfully disagree and get on with their lives. I manage to happily associate with many people who hold views that I completely (and sometimes vehemently) disagree with. Actually it is healthier to associate with people who hold diverse views, as long as they aren't insane about them.
Tangentially, I've never heard a convincing secular argument against gay marriage outside of the libertarian one (which I don't really hold an opinion on, either way)... If I ever heard a convincing secular argument against it, I might be able to take it at all seriously, but for the moment everyone I've ever heard opposed to it is generally (notice that word before flaming) nothing but a know-everything who wants to tell others how to live their lives, and thus utterly ignorance. Even the Libertarian stance is a bit nonsensical, since it is still about denying one group the same rights that others have, even if opposed to the general institution as it stands. It would be better to let everyone have their cake and equality until they day comes when you can reform it for everyone, instead of just excluding a group until your true wish can actually come true.
I'm on the same boat... But I think there are other factors involved beyond hipsterism and age, though... Games these days are like movies these days, you have the big AAA blockbuster titles which are massive, expensive, and epic, but ultimately safe and shallow, and then you have a thriving indie market which spawns tons of terrible crap but also manages to come up with some really good (better than the AAA titles) experiences. For some reason the indie scene has completely exploded of late, probably thanks to Steam and the various console marketplaces, and thus there is a constant stream of high quality indie games.
I personally think that this might be the golden age of gaming, not because of the big studios or AAA titles, but because of the huge glut of "must play" indie games. Back in the 90's there was one or two games you had to play a year, usually by one or two studios consistently (Interplay and Blizzard, for me), now I'm actually overwhelmed by the amount of games I want to play, and most of them are so cheap I have a hard time not getting them. I'm probably wasted more time in Minecraft, Dungeons of Dredmor, and the Binding of Issac (and the excellent but unknown Tales of Maj'Eyal) than I've wasted on any AAA title in the last couple of years, and together they cost less than half of buying Skyrim or Fallout New Vegas.
Sure, there still are some good AAA titles out there, both Skyrim and New Vegas were awesome, and epic enough to be worth $60. But they seem to be getting rarer, and tastes have changed with newer generations coming into gaming. I can't stand stealth or squad based shooters, they are all the same to me. I didn't even like the new Deus Ex since I had to spend half the game hiding behind cover, even if it said it could handle any play style (if any play style is stealth shooting). I find all the various MW games to be boring, slow, and ugly, and would trade them all in for something as much fun as UT2k3 or Quake 3 Arena was (the new Tribes game looks promising, though). But even a new UT2k3 would die quickly, since fragmentation has become a big issue. How many servers can you find for a game thats only been out for six months? Everyone moves on fast these days since there are more choices and more platforms.
It might be, but it was just an illustration of why I, personally, didn't choose an iPad. It does nothing to say that no one should choose an iPad, or only choose what I bought, since that would be stupid.
Its all about balancing your own individual needs and desires against the available products. If Apple fit my needs, then that is fine, if some other product does that is equally fine.
What if he doesn't want an iPad (which seems rather obvious from the question)?
I just bought a 16GB Transformer from B&H (cheap!), and I didn't even consider Apple since their philosophy doesn't really do it for me. The iPad might be the most awesome tablet in existence for some people, but this doesn't make it a universal. I WANTED an Android Tablet, and I find them superior to iOS devices. This isn't an attack on Apple or their customers, it is merely a matter of taste.
When someone states they want an Android tablet, why even bother stating "Get an iPad"? There are people in this world who don't like Apple for various reasons (just like there are people who can't stand Google or Microsoft), and this is fine. Their opinion is just as valid as yours. Some people don't want an iPad. Live with it. Telling people to buy something they already expressed no interest in considering isn't helpful, it is just obnoxious.
"I'm looking for a decent compact car, any suggestions?" "Buy an SUV!"
I don't want an iPad because I can't stand Apple's direction and marketing strategy. The fact they like to force $500 upgrades yearly in order to have support. They fact that they decided that they can patent basic shapes. The fact that their founder had a God complex, and is on the record stating he wants to Balmerize the competition. I don't like the closed App store idea, nor the fact that I'm not supposed to own my own hardware. I don't like having a designers tastes shoved down my throat since they "know better". I don't particularly like iOS, or its interface (Yes, it does some things better than Android, but it does some things worse). I don't really like the hardware lock in. I've also had some fairly nasty experiences with their PCs before switching back to Windows and Linux. I like open source software (Android frustrates me too, but it is the closest of all the mobile OSs that are common, or don't suck). I don't want to be locked into iTunes. i don't want to be associated with the "bad type" of Apple fans, who feel the need to constantly show people their devices and try to get them to buy Apple products instead (being loyal to an impersonal mega corporation is annoying in itself) and rant about how Apple is the greatest thing in the world without ever once trying or experiencing non-Apple alternatives. (for my choice: I want to be able to make my tablet a Netbook at whim. I like the the size better, as well.) All of these are valid reasons for not liking the iPad. Or at least these are the ones I'll drag out when my Apple fanboi friends start ranting about their iPads and how much better than must be (a priori) than anything else in existence (even when one of them returned his because he couldn't actually find any use for it to justify its insane price tag, with data).
Pretty soon, you should assume there will be no more high quality productions. No commercials, and most people completely unwilling to pay for anything because they're somehow entitled to it, and.. You'll have a lot of YouTube reality TV and some random indie projects of mixed quality from people who do it just for the love of it. But all other programming will go away.
Half in jest: Is that a bad thing? I'm not terribly invested in television though, if it completely disappeared tomorrow I probably wouldn't care too much. No, I'm not putting that forward as a serious suggestion, I just sometimes wonder why it seems so unthinkable to people. The future, in all seriousness, is probably pay-per-view. I would love to be able to just pay a small (sensible) yearly fee for access to a single show. Or even just a "roll your own" solution to cable.
As it stands I don't watch cable or broadcast television because of the ads. I'll be a year behind and just buy the season on DVD, or wait for it to hit Netflix. I'm sick of ads. I find a scorched earth policy towards them completely reasonable since they have completely corrupted the world. If my refusing to watch ads kills your favorite show, sport (I also gave up on those after the 2001 baseball playoffs, pausing the live, in person, game so the audience at home could watch commercials), or webpage dies because I'd rather not be brainwashed by corporate sponsors... I won't cry.
Hell, I'd rather not use the internet at all, than use a browser without adblock. Its worth the sacrifice.
And, for the per-season and roll-your-own solutions, piracy will happen. It's reality. Corporations will just have to live with it, since if they make consuming their content and giving them my money harder than me reading a book or going for a nice walk, they are screwed. Most people don't pirate, some people always will, tough shit. Live with it. I don't care if you get every cent you think your entitled to. So.. My media IS my media. I bought it. I will rent it (Netflix), or I will buy it. That is it. There is no middle ground, since my enjoyment and convenience trumps any corporate profit margin.
Reading through all the OPs comments I can't find him finding a single fault in Win 8. Sure, he never went out and said "Windows 8 is perfect", but by not listing a single fault, and trying to negate every single fault that others here have brought up sort of points towards that conclusion. Eventually a rational person is going to have to cede points to detractors, at least on subjective ground, the OP has consistently failed to do so. Further up the discusion some dismissed the Metro menu as being subjectively sub-par, the OP dismissed this. How does one dismiss a subjective judgment?
Me: "I don't like vanilla ice cream." OP: "You are wrong, vanilla ice cream is obviously the greatest thing in the world, you just have to get used to it." Me: "Purple carpeting doesn't match my sofa" OP: "Purple is currently a pre-beta, so every once of dissatisfaction you may find with it will be eliminated, beta, and release, purple will match every other color in existence." Me: "I don't like Elton John." OP: "But beneath the surface he has the organs of a shining God, so you are wrong" Me: "I see no reason to buy a new house, I just bought one and like it" OP: "Your house is vastly inferiour to the same model of house painted a new color, no windows, with a doorbell that plays the best of MC Hammer." Me: "..." OP: "pwned!"
Okay, I've read every single post of yours in this discussion up to this point, and have one question: Are you indeed a Microsoft employee, or an employee of a PR firm talking on behalf of Microsoft? Please be honest. I won't think less of you if you just come clean, I'd actually think more of you.
I ask this because there is no way in hell any person on this planet could fine absolutely no fault with a product, especially one that introduces completely new UX principles, and changes the long term functionality of an old system. Most OS X (or Windows, or iOS, or Android, or Linux flavor) fanboys can at least list one or two gripes about their pet platform. You, on the other hand (correct me if I'm wrong), think that Win 8 is the second coming of Christ, and Metro will wash away all of our sins.
You have to eventually (outside of not being paid to) realize that various UX schemes world for various people and various tasks better than other schemes. While Metro might be nice for some people, and some uses (information consumers), it somewhat fails in other areas, and for other users. I played with the dev preview, and will not be purchasing it. This isn't an objective judgement on its intrinsic merits, but rather an observation that it completely fails for my own personal way of doing things, and clashes with my subjective aesthetic considerations. Further, its functions would be redundant for its role on my desktop PC, since I already use my phone and tablet for the tasks that it seems to think that I find important. I find touch UIs to be great, on touch screens, and I might even try a W8 tablet someday (when my forthcoming Transformer dies) Again (to avoid trolling), this is purely subjective.
There are obvious failings in Win 8, or at least from a standard usability context. These failings might be mitigated by great implementation, or decent added functionality. But from this point of view I don't see this. I haven't seen anything in Win 8 (outside of under the hood stuff, which isn't really all that innovative or as much improvement to make me want to put up with the other changes) that really makes me want to switch from Win 7. I was genuinely excited by Win 7, and lived though all the hassle of the dev preview and beta just because it was that much better than Vista (or any other version of Windows). Windows 7 fits my workflow perfectly, and if something isn't broke I see no reason to fix it.
1. Is it a correct thing to allow interpretation of Constitution?
So who holds the "True" interpretation of the document? How do they prove, beyond a doubt that they hold the "true" truth, the one that was locked firmly in the founder's heads. Basically your saying "my interpretation is right and because your interpretation is different, it is wrong, since mine is right". Which is a pretty blatant fallacy.
3. Is it a correct thing to allow the government control money supply and cost?
I don't see why not. Government exists for "the people", corporations exist "for themselves", someone has to protect the former from the latter, which is why the former all got together and formed governments in the first place.
5. Is it a correct thing to give the government power to tax people's incomes?
How isn't it? Government's provide a service (notice the phrase "provide for the general welfare...), and these services have to be paid for. People tell their governments to do something, the government has to somehow procure funds to carry out the people's will.
6. Is it a correct thing to give government power to provide security against criminal activity by diminishing individual liberties?
Your reading of political philosophy must be shallow, or selective. Your liberties end where mine begin, this is one of the primary (THE primary) functions of government. Government, by nature, is the sacrifice of certain individual liberties for the protection of the liberties of the whole. This has been the function of societies long before formal governments ever existed. Go live somewhere without effective government, and tell me how your liberties fair.
7. Is it a correct thing to allow government regulate business?
See above.
The correct long term answer to items 1-7 is always a 'no', it cannot be a 'yes' under any circumstances, but that's the long term thinking.
Why's that? Because you say so?
But the fact remains that majority of people don't have ability to think long term,
Looking at the "long term" history of government, I'd say answering "yes" to most of those questions have fared better than answering "no" to them. I personally enjoy my rights, my girlfriend enjoys her vote and equal rights, my black friends enjoy not having to work your plantation, and I'm very happy that I wasn't mangled in some factory as a child. I'm also very happy that my tax dollars have went to keeping me from dying at 35, or being shot in the streets, or dying because my neighbors house caught fire. I'm also happy that my food is safe to eat, etc... The long term outlook is pretty good. I don't know what the future holds, obviously, but the past is a pretty good predictor.
Sure, the world isn't perfect. Nor will it ever be. Though I'm glad would be tyrants, such as yourself, are held in check by the evil government. Your "utopia' sounds like hell.
. If some people like it that's great but I'm tired of them calling me a old fart because I don't like DRM.
I didn't mean to imply that, if you got that impression I'm sorry. I do think a world without DRM would be a better one, if there suddenly was a platform as robust, and with the same selection as Steam, but unencumbered, I'd jump ship in a heartbeat.
DRM is about restricting your rights to resell, regift, or transfer your games that you purchased legitimately (pirates on the other hand have no such restrictions).
In some cases, yes. Though the used PC game market was dead or dying long before Steam, or digital distribution become widespread. There was one place by me that traded old PC games (Electronic Boutique), but Gamestop bought them and put an end to that. Part of the issue is just change in general. MP3's also pretty much killed the resale of music, but on the other hand it wasn't by design, they are just better. I like being able to just download a game and have it work, without having to go find a retail store (i.e. a Gamestop or Bestbuy, since they are the last men standing around here), deal with pimply high school drop outs, etc... Digital downloads are winning because they offer something to both customers and publishers. Yes, I think things are moving a bit too quickly, though, since our level of decent, affordable, and cheap internet access hasn't grown nearly fast enough to keep up. Part of this is that PC gaming has become a niche, we don't matter much.
Steam is not the least of all evils.
They are when you realize that DRM is inevitable. I never said I was happy with it, but I do feel it is true. We, customers, will lose.
I'm sure it'll be very convienient to have all your games linked to one unified store and DRM provider when Steam shuts down or decides you violated some obscure TOS and bans your account (and you from all the games on it).
Snarky irony italics aside, I did wrestle with this issue before switching over to buying most of my games through Steam. I am a DRM-skeptic, and was fully DRM opposed, as the good slashtard that I am. But I realized that universal DRM is inevitable, no matter how much we hate it, no matter how much we boycott, it will happen. A boycott might have worked ten years ago when gaming was still the domain of geeks, but now we are an almost completely inconsequential minority. And whinging forum posts have never done a damn thing. The only alternative was to give my money to the least evil of the various DRM schemes. Well, either that or just give up gaming completely, since a large, and growing percentage of games have DRM built into their core. Go buy a retail PC copy of Skyrim and tell me how to play it without Steam (yes, I can go the hack and crack route, or downright pirate it, but then is it really worth the time and risk? Why bother at all?)
Steam is the best DRM system around right now. It is also the least evil.
DRM is the future. The only choices you have is to try to shape it by putting money on a contender, escape it by piracy (which to me isn't an option), or give up completely. I suppose you could give up PC gaming, if you ignore the fact that consoles themselves are nothing but a form of DRM. Yes, there are services like GOG, but sadly I own the disks (from the 90s) of many of the games they sell, so there is no point, and they rarely, if ever, get new, big, games (I think the Witcher 2 is the last new game they had, that I actually wanted to purchase).
I'm also beginning to think the anti-DRM crowd is getting a bit silly, dominated by the dogmatic fringe. Yes, services like Steam have some downfalls (what happens if Valve dies, what happens if I somehow manage to get a TOS issue, etc... In both cases I will ethically grab the games from more dubious sources, since I did, in fact, pay for them)... But, I don't notice the DRM in 90% of cases, very rarely have I been disturbed by it. And, on the whole, it has made my life a bit more convenient (notice the lack of italics). Having one place for all my games to reside, having unified updates, having a included community, having frequent sales, having a vast reservoir of at-hand cheap indie titles, etc... As a net whole Steam has improved my experience. This, in the end, is what matters. DRM should, at best be a "value added" feature for both consumers and developers, and at worse be completely transparent. If DRM doesn't negatively effect me, I have a hard time caring. But then again my crusading quixotic days are a bit behind me. Time is short, I'd rather be enjoying myself then chasing windmills.
Did we all forget the social contract? Your rights end where mine begin. If your right to parent your child however you want interferes with my ability to keep my kid safe, your rights are forfeit, especially when your argument for potentially harming my child has no credible authority (empirical, logical, or otherwise). You don't have the right to risk my children's health, or anyone else's. Rights are different than egotism, but many people in America have forgotten this. Rights has become a codeword for "I want this, screw everyone else, and screw the consequences".
This is one reason why I have a hard time taking 90% of (capital "L") Libertarians, and Republicans seriously anymore. They blather on about their rights, but completely forget about their responsibilities, and the rights of others. Well that and the fact that anyone who claims to know the the truth 100%, and is willing enough to force it on others is automatically suspect, especially when it manages to coincide with some proper-noun dogma. Yes, many of the left are guilty of this too, but it seems the right is much louder, and much more wanting to inflict their dogmas on others.
Don't take this as an attack, it isn't quite aimed at you. This whole conversation reminds me of this point.
Furthermore, according to TFA and TFS (summary), you can opt out, but you must also opt out of some benefits. This doesn't mean force, this just incentivizes making the correct decision, no problem with that. If you don't want to do it, fine. You also have the right to nor work, but don't expect a paycheck, is anyone bitching about this?
now we have origin. which sucks, but we can't play BF3 without it... Steam is losing customers at a slow trickle.
I doubt they are too worried. I generally won't use a game if it uses a different store than Steam anymore, it isn't worth the hassle or bloat. 90% of the games on my computer are on/through Steam, so convenience takes a large dip when I have to install another full store/distribution service just to play a single game. I'm guessing I'm not alone in this, there has to be a demographic separate from the "gotta have it now" crowd. I had a couple games through Impulse (pre-Gamestop, now I wouldn't touch it with a 10' pole), and I found myself ignoring them completely since they weren't as available as Steam.
I also stick with Steam for their insane and frequent sales, and their growing support for games in the various Humble Bundles. Its shocking the amount of cash I've split on random Steam impulse buys.
As for EA, I can live without them, though I find it sad what they've done to places like Bioware (used to be one of my favorite studios, but Dragon Age 2 pretty much killed that).
I know someone here is going to yell at me for supporting DRM... I can live with it. Gabe has a point, the value added bit that Steam has keeps me from caring too much. Steam actually manages to add value to my purchases, while keeping publishers happy with control. No, Steam isn't perfect, and yes, Steam annoys the hell out of me from time to time. But the future is DRM (love it or hate it) and digital distribution, and I'd rather have Steam leading the pack than EA, or Microsoft, Valve at least compromises between DRM and their users wants/needs/happiness, as opposed to the others who would love to eat your rights for dinner, with your enjoyment and experience as a nice after-dinner mint.
he popular opinion on a lot of sites (Reddit, 4chan, etc) is that Oblivion was boring trash ruined by a bad leveling system.
Yes, Oblivion didn't compare at all with Morrowind or Daggerfall, but it still was a damn fine game compared to most other western RPGs on the market at the time. I felt the same about (to move past TES) Fallout 3, it was somewhat lackluster to my expectations (Fallout 1 & 2, and even Tactics. Thankfully NV recovered most of my love for the franchise), but it still was a decent game, and much better than pretty much anything else out there. I didn't like Oblivion that much when finally purchased it (after the expansions, and GoTY editions), but I still logged around over 100 hours into it (as opposed to Morrowind's 300+). But playing Skyrim, I find myself looking back at some moments in Oblivion fondly.
The beautiful thing about the TES series (and Bethesda games in general) is the fact that you can fix pretty much everything you dislike. Not many other companies allow the level of modification Bethesda does, hell, they even embrace it. After the last Skyrim patch, encrypting the executable, which broke LAA patches (why not just allow it to be 64bit? Who knows), one of their folks tweeted the location of the LAA workaround which works on the new exe. I can't really think of my other companies that would do that.
Also, I don't value the collective opinion of Reddit or (especially) 4chan very highly. Both of them are fringe sites known more for "culture" and "memes" than actual insight or content. I doubt they are at all representative of gamers in general, much less anything approaching my opinions, which are the only ones that actually matter much to me. Oblivion did have a fair amount of hype, at least in my circle of friends. Yes, there was a ton of whinging on the auto-level crap, and the general Bethesda facial deformity problems, but on the whole people I know enjoyed them, enough for me to purchase the full package the second I had a computer that could actually play them (meaning I left Apple-land). That is successful advertising, to me.
Your ignoring the fact that the most powerful form of marketing is word of mouth from positive previous experiences. I bought and evangelized Skyrim because every single TES game was awesome, and every single Bethesda game has been well worth the money, despite of the Bethesda bugs. Bethesda is in the same pantheon as Blizzard, where you know you're going to get a damn good game (Blizzard might be passing away though, in a hail of pandas).
Both of these companies have earned the benefit of the doubt, thanks to their long history of not sucking, and as such I tell my gaming friends about their products.
Actually these might be the only two (large) studios who still have any of my respect. Blizzard may not, since my faith in them still hinges on Diablo 3 not being a soulless cash grab. But if Bethesda made a game about shrimp feces, I would probably recommend it to all my friends without ever reading a single blurb about it.
Yes, we obviously care a ton about the (non-American) human consequences of our global actions, which are generally only orchestrated for our own gain. Hence funding terrorists, despots, dictators, and attempting to overthrow popular regimes.
The size of our military, the size of our economy, the importance of the dollar as a global reserve currency, and the effectiveness of our intelligence services.
I notice you didn't cite anything that is actually important to real people, like health and education. Yes, our military is ridiculously massive, but sadly it eats resources that are better spent on real people. I'd rather have the best health and education systems in the world, and a merely average military.
Hindsight is 20/20. Iraq didn't work, Libya did, so you don't like the former and do like the latter.
Screw hindsight, Iraq served no purpose, and we were in Libya at the behest of Libyans and the international community. Many people knew Iraq was a stupid and dangerous venture before it started, but they were ignored.
Of course they weren't, because it's so much easier to let the US fight wars for Europe, take the moral high ground, and spend the money on benefits and infrastructure.
Mind your pronouns. I said "we", as in "Americans". Also the EU has an issue, since they aren't a single country but a collective trying to balance the collective good against each individual countries sovereignty. Each member country has a different idea of what the EU should be. So organizing a European military (a better Eurocorps) is a bit like herding autistic cats. Though the sad fact of the matter is that no one can be considered to be "carrying their own weight" with the US, since our military is obscenely large, and would be even if we were sane, since we are a rather large country compared to the EU much less any individual country within it.
The UN is a diplomatic organization where even the most evil regimes can talk to each other to avoid disaster. It is not a democratic body and it certainly should not control a military.
I don't see why not, then its resolutions would have teeth. If i was the dictator of the world for a day, one of the things I would do is give the UN an actual military force (or at least enhance its ability to use the forces of member countries), and take away all the permanent veto countries veto, and just have it rotate among nations like everything else in the UN.
I also see what you did there... Last I checked most of the worlds countries were in the UN, and most of them used it as a way of talking to each other from time to time. Thus by your logic most of the world is ran by an evil regime. Well, all of them but the US, who is too good for international opinion or law, who sometimes tries its hardest to act like an evil regime (if China does something it is evil, if the US does the same thing it is saintly).
Supporting conservative religious factions in Germany had managed to pacify the country after WWII, it had been a reasonable thing to try, but it obviously doesn't work well with Islam.
Or with South Americans, it seems. Actually it never really worked. Sure, short terms goals are very important, but that all becomes rather stupid when it blows up in your (literally) face a generation down the line. Our bullshit in South America was worse, since we subverted democratically elected governments to install tyrants, just so they'd play better with American corporations (oh, and we must stop those damn leftists, at any cost!). All of this blew up in our faces to, nicely.
I'm not saying that we should never intervene, isolationism is stupid. But, we should realize that our "the ends always justify the means, no matter how horrible they may be" ideology is dubious, being that the ends are rarely, if ever, how we want them, and the means are generally always self-defeating. It also ignores the fact the all of the people trampled by American means are human beings.
So you like theft on a global scale, genocide and slavery then?
Notice I said the word "ghost", this doesn't mean I support any present attempts at colonialism, but I'd rather have idiocy in the past than idiocy in the present. You forget that America also has theft on a global scale, genocide, and slavery in our past. Actually, probably every country that exists has at least one or two of these in their history. The fact is we're still acting like assholes. They acted like assholes. Tense is important.
"American Exceptionalism", on the other hand, is just a fact...
By what objective metric? Education? Health? Equality? Violence? Freedoms? All we have that is exceptional is a grotesquely large parasitical military, and an intelligence apparatus that would turn the KGB green with envy. On everything that matters we are about as far from exceptional as possible.
Europeans keep asking the US to fix their messes for them, and the US can't refuse, because not intervening is even worse than intervening.
There are some things we should intervene on. Libya is a good example, we did well, there is no ethical problem, and the world is a better place for our help. Iraq being the counter-example, and an example of the US. doing exactly what you decry Europe for doing, we dragged a NATO into a big stupid conflict that benefited nobody, not even the US. Our intervention in the Balkans were also a good thing, since, well... I can't argue against stopping a genocide. But then again I'm looking at all this from a philosophical, ethical, and humanist point of view, and not some strange, inhuman, political view.
I do agree, Europe needs a military. If I remember right, though, we weren't very keen on that idea a couple years ago. Hell, the UN needs a damn military wing.
Well, geez, who created the mess in Afghanistan in the first place?
Man, you're right, its not like the US funded the Taliban or Bin Laden or anything... Damn Europeans.
Yes, Europe was full of assholes. America is currently full of assholes, though.
I am an American, but some of the actions of my government, and some of the attitudes of our people bring me shame. I'd take the ghost of previous colonialism any day over American Exceptionalism.
So she should be allowed to blackmail him for the rest of his life?
Why not? If you act like a dick, you can't get mad for being called out on it. Also, there were other circumstances at play for her not releasing it. As in her mom was on her father's side, also she lived with him, and he had political power. Anyone of these generally preclude one from reporting abuse, all of them together means reporting means jack-all, and would probably make the situation worse for her.
The system generally fails in cases like this. And reporting things, without official consequence, always makes the situation worse for the abused.
But she's no saint either. People all too often fall into the trap of thinking that there must be exactly two sides to every issue: the good guys and the bad guys. Real life isn't so tidy.
Because everytime I buy a computer, I don't replace the monitor. Especially if I have a nice monitor. If I cough up a grand for a monitor, that thing is sticking around for a very long time. My monitor, obviously, isn't that nice, and it is sticking around for awhile (until I can justify the expense for a better one).
Yeh, but when was the last time you sold a 2 year old machine for 80% of it's original retain value? That's possible with a mac.
There is that. I just sold the first Intel MacMini for $300, I paid $500 for it five years ago. I did upgrade it something fierce, though (from a 1.5Ghz Core Solo to a 1.6Ghz Core 2 Duo, added 1Gb RAM, upped the HDD, all told around an extra $100 in parts). It took a painfully long time to sell, though, and most Mac people looked at the upgrades as a bad thing (oddly). Many models were more depreciated, even more recent ones. I don't understand the Apple second-hand market very well. Someone was even willing to pay $300 for a completely broken (fried logic board, thanks to spilled tasty beer), very outdated, MacBook, that also was lacking RAM and an HDD. Insanity.
With resale, I'd say upgrading a PC versus fully replacing a Mac might come closer, over certain time frames, again depending on monitors, and also depending on upgrades for the PC. If you upgrade for middle of the road (as I used to), a Mac might win, if you upgrade for high end, the PC might (I'm probably good on the costly bits like the CPU and GPU for another 3-4 years, even if they were $400 combined last year).
Your prices might be valid... But I have one complaint about this (rather common) argument; when was the last time anyone here upgraded without carrying over parts? Yes, I'm guessing the answer on/. will be "almost never", but even in the real world you'll find people dragging their monitors through multiple upgrades.
This computer is in its second "upgrade cycle" since I switched from using Apple products. It started as an Dell, and since then I've replaced basically everything but the RAM, an HDD, the DVD drive, and the monitor. So this new computer would be the cost of components, minus the cost of the carry over. I'm a nerd, so this is rather common. My old computer, before switching to a Mac, was being upgraded for around 10 years, piecemeal, and still had some of the older parts throughout most of that cycle (until a new PSU, and bad dorm wiring did me in). Hell, my old monitor managed to survive tens of upgrades, and now happily resides on my mom's frankencomputer.
Ignoring the monitor, your prices are off by a grand.
Mac's you throw away (or try to sell), since you can't really dig around in them and upgrade their components as they age. A Mac might cost $1700, but that is $1700 every upgrade. I might blow $100 a year on my computer. Hell this year I didn't spend a cent. Next year I'm planning on getting a new HDD (depending on current circumstances), and some extra RAM (no more than $100 worth, for sure). I might spend the cost of a new Mac (the one you listed) in 10 years, how often do you replace an iMac? This is the real question, does the cost of PC upgrades cost more or less than the cost of a new iMac over the replacement period?
You obviously haven't been to a local library outside a massive establishment in a large city. The reason few people use them is that they most certainly do not have lots of high quality books. Reference material is weak, limited and very dated, fiction is mostly womens' romance drivel, kids' sections are weird budget titles and even more dated that the other sections. DVDs and CDs are woefully dated and of little interest. The movies are so old, TV channels won't even show them.
I live in a large city, Phoenix, AZ. The local branch library where I lived sucked, badly. It was mostly DVDs (meaning 6000 children, meaning no reading in most of the library) and very popular fiction (it didn't have a single book by Hemingway...). Actually all of our libraries have pretty much turned into "free Blockbusters for the urban poor". This annoys me.
But... There is this thing called "Inter-library loan", which managed to keep me reading free books for most of my youth, and well into my adulthood. If my local branch didn't have a book I wanted to read, I just enter some stuff into an online form in the catalog, and within a couple days I get an email telling me my book is waiting for me at my local branch. Magic. If you want to get truly zesty, you can also borrow from other libraries, both public and academic, both local and national from a single branch. The wait time is a bit more extreme, and there are some conditions, but it generally works. I used that when doing research a fair bit, getting books from various universities throughout the U.S., even pretty rare and obscure ones.
I do hate where our library system is going. I would completely purge every single popular DVD from every single branch in the U.S., if I had the power. I would also probably remove most of the free access computers, as well. At the branch I used to frequent the top floor (reference and non-fiction) was completely taken over by computers, halving the floor space for books. You were lucky to hear yourself think, much less read, thanks to the "clackity-clack" of teenage Facebook use, and the leaky music from headphones. The bottom floor (fiction, multimedia, and childrens) was worse, thanks to the huge families gawking at DVDs, inevitably chatting loudly on their ever-ringing cellphones. This and the fact that our library started only acquiring "contemporary Chirstian fiction", instead of real books, is why I stopped going. As a child I loved libraries. Now, I could go to Walmart on a Saturday for the same experience I get for going to the Phoenix library.
Luckily the library next to my new house is much, much, better. Go suburbia!
Slashdot Mirror
Undoing some mods posting this... but my hackles are a bit raised...
And the games are better on a $200 console than either of those.
How so? Console games are lagging pretty far behind PC games these days thanks to running on ancient hardware. My middling video card (ATI 5770, bought for less than $100 a little under two years ago) blows the GPUs in the 360 and PS3 out of the water. I can play at a decent FOV, I can have weapon models that take up less than half the screen, I can play at a decent frame rate, and generally my games don't look like crap. Furthermore, I get the magic ability to mod my game, and tweak my controls to my liking, and I don't have to waste money on a single tasking bit of hardware that will end up sitting unused in a corner 90% of the time. Also, PC games actually go on sale... its amazing.
I actually can't think of any bonus that consoles have, for the computer literate, at least. I have the money to buy any console I want, and have been tempted from time to time, but I can never actually come up with a reason to do so. Every console game I've wanted to play has been ported to PC, with generally higher quality. My middle of the road PC can out perform every console out there. I haven't had any issues running games, and have never had a "red ring of death", or my computer maker (me) pull features out from under me, or artificially restrict my access to my property.
Sure, there are genres of games that generally work better on consoles, like racing games and fighting games; but I generally don't enjoy them enough to warrant $200+, plus the cost of games.
So, how are consoles better than PCs for gaming?
The video of the proof of concept looks actually awesome, and much better than how Google is doing it now. It's also much better for the user since it pulls the content from all social networks and other relevant sites. Interestingly, they're using Google's own search engine to do this:
Agreed... but for one thing, I hardly ever find Twitter relevant for anything, but thanks to its nature it will dominate every search. Twitter, thanks to its format, gets generally much higher "follower" counts, but each message has much less content than a Google+ or Facebook post (which isn't saying much), Twitter has a much higher single to noise ratio.
The best solution would be to return results from services that the user actually uses (and thus cares about). Sadly this would require a fair bit of intrusion on behalf of Google. A Google+ or Facebook hit is much more useful to me than a MySpace or Twitter hit, since I don't use, and don't want to use, either of those services. This also ignores my own subjective bias against social networking sites as suppliers of useful information, I know I, and many of my fellow /. nerds are fringe cases here. Most celebrity, or big, social accounts are also not real, they are basically marketing ploys, which limit their usefulness. So, why bother?
Also, this move does smell a bit fishy in-itself. I think Google's competition is just angry that they don't get to promote themselves via unrelated searches. Also, tangentially, I haven't actually noticed the social sidebar on many of my searches, but it did show up for "cooking", which is something I would never actually search for, it doesn't show up for "cooking with eggs", which is closer to something I might ever search for. What purpose is there in just looking up "cooking", outside of trying to get a Wikipedia link or Dictionary?
I agree that companies should look out for their employees but for issues as evenly split between left and right as this one, I wonder if they will deter as many potential employees as entice new ones. I think a more effective approach would be to improve remote locations so employees don't have to come to Washington to work for MS.
It isn't as split as one would think anymore, I'm pretty sure support for it has surpased the opposition some time ago, and in some age groups (young people) and demographics the support is much higher.
Also, who cares if people against gay marriage refuse to work for you? Let me rephrase that, who cares if the extremist camp, who can't tolerate views other than their own, refuse to work for you? I'm guessing that group would make rather shitty employees, especially at a tech firm. The sane opponents probably can respectfully disagree and get on with their lives. I manage to happily associate with many people who hold views that I completely (and sometimes vehemently) disagree with. Actually it is healthier to associate with people who hold diverse views, as long as they aren't insane about them.
Tangentially, I've never heard a convincing secular argument against gay marriage outside of the libertarian one (which I don't really hold an opinion on, either way)... If I ever heard a convincing secular argument against it, I might be able to take it at all seriously, but for the moment everyone I've ever heard opposed to it is generally (notice that word before flaming) nothing but a know-everything who wants to tell others how to live their lives, and thus utterly ignorance. Even the Libertarian stance is a bit nonsensical, since it is still about denying one group the same rights that others have, even if opposed to the general institution as it stands. It would be better to let everyone have their cake and equality until they day comes when you can reform it for everyone, instead of just excluding a group until your true wish can actually come true.
I'm on the same boat... But I think there are other factors involved beyond hipsterism and age, though... Games these days are like movies these days, you have the big AAA blockbuster titles which are massive, expensive, and epic, but ultimately safe and shallow, and then you have a thriving indie market which spawns tons of terrible crap but also manages to come up with some really good (better than the AAA titles) experiences. For some reason the indie scene has completely exploded of late, probably thanks to Steam and the various console marketplaces, and thus there is a constant stream of high quality indie games.
I personally think that this might be the golden age of gaming, not because of the big studios or AAA titles, but because of the huge glut of "must play" indie games. Back in the 90's there was one or two games you had to play a year, usually by one or two studios consistently (Interplay and Blizzard, for me), now I'm actually overwhelmed by the amount of games I want to play, and most of them are so cheap I have a hard time not getting them. I'm probably wasted more time in Minecraft, Dungeons of Dredmor, and the Binding of Issac (and the excellent but unknown Tales of Maj'Eyal) than I've wasted on any AAA title in the last couple of years, and together they cost less than half of buying Skyrim or Fallout New Vegas.
Sure, there still are some good AAA titles out there, both Skyrim and New Vegas were awesome, and epic enough to be worth $60. But they seem to be getting rarer, and tastes have changed with newer generations coming into gaming. I can't stand stealth or squad based shooters, they are all the same to me. I didn't even like the new Deus Ex since I had to spend half the game hiding behind cover, even if it said it could handle any play style (if any play style is stealth shooting). I find all the various MW games to be boring, slow, and ugly, and would trade them all in for something as much fun as UT2k3 or Quake 3 Arena was (the new Tribes game looks promising, though). But even a new UT2k3 would die quickly, since fragmentation has become a big issue. How many servers can you find for a game thats only been out for six months? Everyone moves on fast these days since there are more choices and more platforms.
Meh, I'm ranting...
Yes.
It might be, but it was just an illustration of why I, personally, didn't choose an iPad. It does nothing to say that no one should choose an iPad, or only choose what I bought, since that would be stupid.
Its all about balancing your own individual needs and desires against the available products. If Apple fit my needs, then that is fine, if some other product does that is equally fine.
What if he doesn't want an iPad (which seems rather obvious from the question)?
I just bought a 16GB Transformer from B&H (cheap!), and I didn't even consider Apple since their philosophy doesn't really do it for me. The iPad might be the most awesome tablet in existence for some people, but this doesn't make it a universal. I WANTED an Android Tablet, and I find them superior to iOS devices. This isn't an attack on Apple or their customers, it is merely a matter of taste.
When someone states they want an Android tablet, why even bother stating "Get an iPad"? There are people in this world who don't like Apple for various reasons (just like there are people who can't stand Google or Microsoft), and this is fine. Their opinion is just as valid as yours. Some people don't want an iPad. Live with it. Telling people to buy something they already expressed no interest in considering isn't helpful, it is just obnoxious.
"I'm looking for a decent compact car, any suggestions?"
"Buy an SUV!"
I don't want an iPad because I can't stand Apple's direction and marketing strategy. The fact they like to force $500 upgrades yearly in order to have support. They fact that they decided that they can patent basic shapes. The fact that their founder had a God complex, and is on the record stating he wants to Balmerize the competition. I don't like the closed App store idea, nor the fact that I'm not supposed to own my own hardware. I don't like having a designers tastes shoved down my throat since they "know better". I don't particularly like iOS, or its interface (Yes, it does some things better than Android, but it does some things worse). I don't really like the hardware lock in. I've also had some fairly nasty experiences with their PCs before switching back to Windows and Linux. I like open source software (Android frustrates me too, but it is the closest of all the mobile OSs that are common, or don't suck). I don't want to be locked into iTunes. i don't want to be associated with the "bad type" of Apple fans, who feel the need to constantly show people their devices and try to get them to buy Apple products instead (being loyal to an impersonal mega corporation is annoying in itself) and rant about how Apple is the greatest thing in the world without ever once trying or experiencing non-Apple alternatives. (for my choice: I want to be able to make my tablet a Netbook at whim. I like the the size better, as well.) All of these are valid reasons for not liking the iPad. Or at least these are the ones I'll drag out when my Apple fanboi friends start ranting about their iPads and how much better than must be (a priori) than anything else in existence (even when one of them returned his because he couldn't actually find any use for it to justify its insane price tag, with data).
Pretty soon, you should assume there will be no more high quality productions. No commercials, and most people completely unwilling to pay for anything because they're somehow entitled to it, and.. You'll have a lot of YouTube reality TV and some random indie projects of mixed quality from people who do it just for the love of it. But all other programming will go away.
Half in jest: Is that a bad thing? I'm not terribly invested in television though, if it completely disappeared tomorrow I probably wouldn't care too much. No, I'm not putting that forward as a serious suggestion, I just sometimes wonder why it seems so unthinkable to people. The future, in all seriousness, is probably pay-per-view. I would love to be able to just pay a small (sensible) yearly fee for access to a single show. Or even just a "roll your own" solution to cable.
As it stands I don't watch cable or broadcast television because of the ads. I'll be a year behind and just buy the season on DVD, or wait for it to hit Netflix. I'm sick of ads. I find a scorched earth policy towards them completely reasonable since they have completely corrupted the world. If my refusing to watch ads kills your favorite show, sport (I also gave up on those after the 2001 baseball playoffs, pausing the live, in person, game so the audience at home could watch commercials), or webpage dies because I'd rather not be brainwashed by corporate sponsors... I won't cry.
Hell, I'd rather not use the internet at all, than use a browser without adblock. Its worth the sacrifice.
And, for the per-season and roll-your-own solutions, piracy will happen. It's reality. Corporations will just have to live with it, since if they make consuming their content and giving them my money harder than me reading a book or going for a nice walk, they are screwed. Most people don't pirate, some people always will, tough shit. Live with it. I don't care if you get every cent you think your entitled to. So.. My media IS my media. I bought it. I will rent it (Netflix), or I will buy it. That is it. There is no middle ground, since my enjoyment and convenience trumps any corporate profit margin.
Reading through all the OPs comments I can't find him finding a single fault in Win 8. Sure, he never went out and said "Windows 8 is perfect", but by not listing a single fault, and trying to negate every single fault that others here have brought up sort of points towards that conclusion. Eventually a rational person is going to have to cede points to detractors, at least on subjective ground, the OP has consistently failed to do so. Further up the discusion some dismissed the Metro menu as being subjectively sub-par, the OP dismissed this. How does one dismiss a subjective judgment?
Me: "I don't like vanilla ice cream."
OP: "You are wrong, vanilla ice cream is obviously the greatest thing in the world, you just have to get used to it."
Me: "Purple carpeting doesn't match my sofa"
OP: "Purple is currently a pre-beta, so every once of dissatisfaction you may find with it will be eliminated, beta, and release, purple will match every other color in existence."
Me: "I don't like Elton John."
OP: "But beneath the surface he has the organs of a shining God, so you are wrong"
Me: "I see no reason to buy a new house, I just bought one and like it"
OP: "Your house is vastly inferiour to the same model of house painted a new color, no windows, with a doorbell that plays the best of MC Hammer."
Me: "..."
OP: "pwned!"
I really need more coffee. Sorry.
Okay, I've read every single post of yours in this discussion up to this point, and have one question: Are you indeed a Microsoft employee, or an employee of a PR firm talking on behalf of Microsoft? Please be honest. I won't think less of you if you just come clean, I'd actually think more of you.
I ask this because there is no way in hell any person on this planet could fine absolutely no fault with a product, especially one that introduces completely new UX principles, and changes the long term functionality of an old system. Most OS X (or Windows, or iOS, or Android, or Linux flavor) fanboys can at least list one or two gripes about their pet platform. You, on the other hand (correct me if I'm wrong), think that Win 8 is the second coming of Christ, and Metro will wash away all of our sins.
You have to eventually (outside of not being paid to) realize that various UX schemes world for various people and various tasks better than other schemes. While Metro might be nice for some people, and some uses (information consumers), it somewhat fails in other areas, and for other users. I played with the dev preview, and will not be purchasing it. This isn't an objective judgement on its intrinsic merits, but rather an observation that it completely fails for my own personal way of doing things, and clashes with my subjective aesthetic considerations. Further, its functions would be redundant for its role on my desktop PC, since I already use my phone and tablet for the tasks that it seems to think that I find important. I find touch UIs to be great, on touch screens, and I might even try a W8 tablet someday (when my forthcoming Transformer dies) Again (to avoid trolling), this is purely subjective.
There are obvious failings in Win 8, or at least from a standard usability context. These failings might be mitigated by great implementation, or decent added functionality. But from this point of view I don't see this. I haven't seen anything in Win 8 (outside of under the hood stuff, which isn't really all that innovative or as much improvement to make me want to put up with the other changes) that really makes me want to switch from Win 7. I was genuinely excited by Win 7, and lived though all the hassle of the dev preview and beta just because it was that much better than Vista (or any other version of Windows). Windows 7 fits my workflow perfectly, and if something isn't broke I see no reason to fix it.
1. Is it a correct thing to allow interpretation of Constitution?
So who holds the "True" interpretation of the document? How do they prove, beyond a doubt that they hold the "true" truth, the one that was locked firmly in the founder's heads. Basically your saying "my interpretation is right and because your interpretation is different, it is wrong, since mine is right". Which is a pretty blatant fallacy.
3. Is it a correct thing to allow the government control money supply and cost?
I don't see why not. Government exists for "the people", corporations exist "for themselves", someone has to protect the former from the latter, which is why the former all got together and formed governments in the first place.
5. Is it a correct thing to give the government power to tax people's incomes?
How isn't it? Government's provide a service (notice the phrase "provide for the general welfare...), and these services have to be paid for. People tell their governments to do something, the government has to somehow procure funds to carry out the people's will.
6. Is it a correct thing to give government power to provide security against criminal activity by diminishing individual liberties?
Your reading of political philosophy must be shallow, or selective. Your liberties end where mine begin, this is one of the primary (THE primary) functions of government. Government, by nature, is the sacrifice of certain individual liberties for the protection of the liberties of the whole. This has been the function of societies long before formal governments ever existed. Go live somewhere without effective government, and tell me how your liberties fair.
7. Is it a correct thing to allow government regulate business?
See above.
The correct long term answer to items 1-7 is always a 'no', it cannot be a 'yes' under any circumstances, but that's the long term thinking.
Why's that? Because you say so?
But the fact remains that majority of people don't have ability to think long term,
Looking at the "long term" history of government, I'd say answering "yes" to most of those questions have fared better than answering "no" to them. I personally enjoy my rights, my girlfriend enjoys her vote and equal rights, my black friends enjoy not having to work your plantation, and I'm very happy that I wasn't mangled in some factory as a child. I'm also very happy that my tax dollars have went to keeping me from dying at 35, or being shot in the streets, or dying because my neighbors house caught fire. I'm also happy that my food is safe to eat, etc... The long term outlook is pretty good. I don't know what the future holds, obviously, but the past is a pretty good predictor.
Sure, the world isn't perfect. Nor will it ever be. Though I'm glad would be tyrants, such as yourself, are held in check by the evil government. Your "utopia' sounds like hell.
. If some people like it that's great but I'm tired of them calling me a old fart because I don't like DRM.
I didn't mean to imply that, if you got that impression I'm sorry. I do think a world without DRM would be a better one, if there suddenly was a platform as robust, and with the same selection as Steam, but unencumbered, I'd jump ship in a heartbeat.
DRM is about restricting your rights to resell, regift, or transfer your games that you purchased legitimately (pirates on the other hand have no such restrictions).
In some cases, yes. Though the used PC game market was dead or dying long before Steam, or digital distribution become widespread. There was one place by me that traded old PC games (Electronic Boutique), but Gamestop bought them and put an end to that. Part of the issue is just change in general. MP3's also pretty much killed the resale of music, but on the other hand it wasn't by design, they are just better. I like being able to just download a game and have it work, without having to go find a retail store (i.e. a Gamestop or Bestbuy, since they are the last men standing around here), deal with pimply high school drop outs, etc... Digital downloads are winning because they offer something to both customers and publishers. Yes, I think things are moving a bit too quickly, though, since our level of decent, affordable, and cheap internet access hasn't grown nearly fast enough to keep up. Part of this is that PC gaming has become a niche, we don't matter much.
Steam is not the least of all evils.
They are when you realize that DRM is inevitable. I never said I was happy with it, but I do feel it is true. We, customers, will lose.
I'm sure it'll be very convienient to have all your games linked to one unified store and DRM provider when Steam shuts down or decides you violated some obscure TOS and bans your account (and you from all the games on it).
Snarky irony italics aside, I did wrestle with this issue before switching over to buying most of my games through Steam. I am a DRM-skeptic, and was fully DRM opposed, as the good slashtard that I am. But I realized that universal DRM is inevitable, no matter how much we hate it, no matter how much we boycott, it will happen. A boycott might have worked ten years ago when gaming was still the domain of geeks, but now we are an almost completely inconsequential minority. And whinging forum posts have never done a damn thing. The only alternative was to give my money to the least evil of the various DRM schemes. Well, either that or just give up gaming completely, since a large, and growing percentage of games have DRM built into their core. Go buy a retail PC copy of Skyrim and tell me how to play it without Steam (yes, I can go the hack and crack route, or downright pirate it, but then is it really worth the time and risk? Why bother at all?)
Steam is the best DRM system around right now. It is also the least evil.
DRM is the future. The only choices you have is to try to shape it by putting money on a contender, escape it by piracy (which to me isn't an option), or give up completely. I suppose you could give up PC gaming, if you ignore the fact that consoles themselves are nothing but a form of DRM. Yes, there are services like GOG, but sadly I own the disks (from the 90s) of many of the games they sell, so there is no point, and they rarely, if ever, get new, big, games (I think the Witcher 2 is the last new game they had, that I actually wanted to purchase).
I'm also beginning to think the anti-DRM crowd is getting a bit silly, dominated by the dogmatic fringe. Yes, services like Steam have some downfalls (what happens if Valve dies, what happens if I somehow manage to get a TOS issue, etc... In both cases I will ethically grab the games from more dubious sources, since I did, in fact, pay for them)... But, I don't notice the DRM in 90% of cases, very rarely have I been disturbed by it. And, on the whole, it has made my life a bit more convenient (notice the lack of italics). Having one place for all my games to reside, having unified updates, having a included community, having frequent sales, having a vast reservoir of at-hand cheap indie titles, etc... As a net whole Steam has improved my experience. This, in the end, is what matters. DRM should, at best be a "value added" feature for both consumers and developers, and at worse be completely transparent. If DRM doesn't negatively effect me, I have a hard time caring. But then again my crusading quixotic days are a bit behind me. Time is short, I'd rather be enjoying myself then chasing windmills.
This has been bugging me...
Did we all forget the social contract? Your rights end where mine begin. If your right to parent your child however you want interferes with my ability to keep my kid safe, your rights are forfeit, especially when your argument for potentially harming my child has no credible authority (empirical, logical, or otherwise). You don't have the right to risk my children's health, or anyone else's. Rights are different than egotism, but many people in America have forgotten this. Rights has become a codeword for "I want this, screw everyone else, and screw the consequences".
This is one reason why I have a hard time taking 90% of (capital "L") Libertarians, and Republicans seriously anymore. They blather on about their rights, but completely forget about their responsibilities, and the rights of others. Well that and the fact that anyone who claims to know the the truth 100%, and is willing enough to force it on others is automatically suspect, especially when it manages to coincide with some proper-noun dogma. Yes, many of the left are guilty of this too, but it seems the right is much louder, and much more wanting to inflict their dogmas on others.
Don't take this as an attack, it isn't quite aimed at you. This whole conversation reminds me of this point.
Furthermore, according to TFA and TFS (summary), you can opt out, but you must also opt out of some benefits. This doesn't mean force, this just incentivizes making the correct decision, no problem with that. If you don't want to do it, fine. You also have the right to nor work, but don't expect a paycheck, is anyone bitching about this?
now we have origin. which sucks, but we can't play BF3 without it... Steam is losing customers at a slow trickle.
I doubt they are too worried. I generally won't use a game if it uses a different store than Steam anymore, it isn't worth the hassle or bloat. 90% of the games on my computer are on/through Steam, so convenience takes a large dip when I have to install another full store/distribution service just to play a single game. I'm guessing I'm not alone in this, there has to be a demographic separate from the "gotta have it now" crowd. I had a couple games through Impulse (pre-Gamestop, now I wouldn't touch it with a 10' pole), and I found myself ignoring them completely since they weren't as available as Steam.
I also stick with Steam for their insane and frequent sales, and their growing support for games in the various Humble Bundles. Its shocking the amount of cash I've split on random Steam impulse buys.
As for EA, I can live without them, though I find it sad what they've done to places like Bioware (used to be one of my favorite studios, but Dragon Age 2 pretty much killed that).
I know someone here is going to yell at me for supporting DRM... I can live with it. Gabe has a point, the value added bit that Steam has keeps me from caring too much. Steam actually manages to add value to my purchases, while keeping publishers happy with control. No, Steam isn't perfect, and yes, Steam annoys the hell out of me from time to time. But the future is DRM (love it or hate it) and digital distribution, and I'd rather have Steam leading the pack than EA, or Microsoft, Valve at least compromises between DRM and their users wants/needs/happiness, as opposed to the others who would love to eat your rights for dinner, with your enjoyment and experience as a nice after-dinner mint.
he popular opinion on a lot of sites (Reddit, 4chan, etc) is that Oblivion was boring trash ruined by a bad leveling system.
Yes, Oblivion didn't compare at all with Morrowind or Daggerfall, but it still was a damn fine game compared to most other western RPGs on the market at the time. I felt the same about (to move past TES) Fallout 3, it was somewhat lackluster to my expectations (Fallout 1 & 2, and even Tactics. Thankfully NV recovered most of my love for the franchise), but it still was a decent game, and much better than pretty much anything else out there. I didn't like Oblivion that much when finally purchased it (after the expansions, and GoTY editions), but I still logged around over 100 hours into it (as opposed to Morrowind's 300+). But playing Skyrim, I find myself looking back at some moments in Oblivion fondly.
The beautiful thing about the TES series (and Bethesda games in general) is the fact that you can fix pretty much everything you dislike. Not many other companies allow the level of modification Bethesda does, hell, they even embrace it. After the last Skyrim patch, encrypting the executable, which broke LAA patches (why not just allow it to be 64bit? Who knows), one of their folks tweeted the location of the LAA workaround which works on the new exe. I can't really think of my other companies that would do that.
Also, I don't value the collective opinion of Reddit or (especially) 4chan very highly. Both of them are fringe sites known more for "culture" and "memes" than actual insight or content. I doubt they are at all representative of gamers in general, much less anything approaching my opinions, which are the only ones that actually matter much to me. Oblivion did have a fair amount of hype, at least in my circle of friends. Yes, there was a ton of whinging on the auto-level crap, and the general Bethesda facial deformity problems, but on the whole people I know enjoyed them, enough for me to purchase the full package the second I had a computer that could actually play them (meaning I left Apple-land). That is successful advertising, to me.
Your ignoring the fact that the most powerful form of marketing is word of mouth from positive previous experiences. I bought and evangelized Skyrim because every single TES game was awesome, and every single Bethesda game has been well worth the money, despite of the Bethesda bugs. Bethesda is in the same pantheon as Blizzard, where you know you're going to get a damn good game (Blizzard might be passing away though, in a hail of pandas).
Both of these companies have earned the benefit of the doubt, thanks to their long history of not sucking, and as such I tell my gaming friends about their products.
Actually these might be the only two (large) studios who still have any of my respect. Blizzard may not, since my faith in them still hinges on Diablo 3 not being a soulless cash grab. But if Bethesda made a game about shrimp feces, I would probably recommend it to all my friends without ever reading a single blurb about it.
Well, fortunately that is not US philosophy.
Yes, we obviously care a ton about the (non-American) human consequences of our global actions, which are generally only orchestrated for our own gain. Hence funding terrorists, despots, dictators, and attempting to overthrow popular regimes.
The size of our military, the size of our economy, the importance of the dollar as a global reserve currency, and the effectiveness of our intelligence services.
I notice you didn't cite anything that is actually important to real people, like health and education. Yes, our military is ridiculously massive, but sadly it eats resources that are better spent on real people. I'd rather have the best health and education systems in the world, and a merely average military.
Hindsight is 20/20. Iraq didn't work, Libya did, so you don't like the former and do like the latter.
Screw hindsight, Iraq served no purpose, and we were in Libya at the behest of Libyans and the international community. Many people knew Iraq was a stupid and dangerous venture before it started, but they were ignored.
Of course they weren't, because it's so much easier to let the US fight wars for Europe, take the moral high ground, and spend the money on benefits and infrastructure.
Mind your pronouns. I said "we", as in "Americans". Also the EU has an issue, since they aren't a single country but a collective trying to balance the collective good against each individual countries sovereignty. Each member country has a different idea of what the EU should be. So organizing a European military (a better Eurocorps) is a bit like herding autistic cats. Though the sad fact of the matter is that no one can be considered to be "carrying their own weight" with the US, since our military is obscenely large, and would be even if we were sane, since we are a rather large country compared to the EU much less any individual country within it.
The UN is a diplomatic organization where even the most evil regimes can talk to each other to avoid disaster. It is not a democratic body and it certainly should not control a military.
I don't see why not, then its resolutions would have teeth. If i was the dictator of the world for a day, one of the things I would do is give the UN an actual military force (or at least enhance its ability to use the forces of member countries), and take away all the permanent veto countries veto, and just have it rotate among nations like everything else in the UN.
I also see what you did there... Last I checked most of the worlds countries were in the UN, and most of them used it as a way of talking to each other from time to time. Thus by your logic most of the world is ran by an evil regime. Well, all of them but the US, who is too good for international opinion or law, who sometimes tries its hardest to act like an evil regime (if China does something it is evil, if the US does the same thing it is saintly).
Supporting conservative religious factions in Germany had managed to pacify the country after WWII, it had been a reasonable thing to try, but it obviously doesn't work well with Islam.
Or with South Americans, it seems. Actually it never really worked. Sure, short terms goals are very important, but that all becomes rather stupid when it blows up in your (literally) face a generation down the line. Our bullshit in South America was worse, since we subverted democratically elected governments to install tyrants, just so they'd play better with American corporations (oh, and we must stop those damn leftists, at any cost!). All of this blew up in our faces to, nicely.
I'm not saying that we should never intervene, isolationism is stupid. But, we should realize that our "the ends always justify the means, no matter how horrible they may be" ideology is dubious, being that the ends are rarely, if ever, how we want them, and the means are generally always self-defeating. It also ignores the fact the all of the people trampled by American means are human beings.
So you like theft on a global scale, genocide and slavery then?
Notice I said the word "ghost", this doesn't mean I support any present attempts at colonialism, but I'd rather have idiocy in the past than idiocy in the present. You forget that America also has theft on a global scale, genocide, and slavery in our past. Actually, probably every country that exists has at least one or two of these in their history. The fact is we're still acting like assholes. They acted like assholes. Tense is important.
"American Exceptionalism", on the other hand, is just a fact...
By what objective metric? Education? Health? Equality? Violence? Freedoms? All we have that is exceptional is a grotesquely large parasitical military, and an intelligence apparatus that would turn the KGB green with envy. On everything that matters we are about as far from exceptional as possible.
Europeans keep asking the US to fix their messes for them, and the US can't refuse, because not intervening is even worse than intervening.
There are some things we should intervene on. Libya is a good example, we did well, there is no ethical problem, and the world is a better place for our help. Iraq being the counter-example, and an example of the US. doing exactly what you decry Europe for doing, we dragged a NATO into a big stupid conflict that benefited nobody, not even the US. Our intervention in the Balkans were also a good thing, since, well... I can't argue against stopping a genocide. But then again I'm looking at all this from a philosophical, ethical, and humanist point of view, and not some strange, inhuman, political view.
I do agree, Europe needs a military. If I remember right, though, we weren't very keen on that idea a couple years ago. Hell, the UN needs a damn military wing.
Well, geez, who created the mess in Afghanistan in the first place?
Man, you're right, its not like the US funded the Taliban or Bin Laden or anything... Damn Europeans.
Yes, Europe was full of assholes. America is currently full of assholes, though.
I am an American, but some of the actions of my government, and some of the attitudes of our people bring me shame. I'd take the ghost of previous colonialism any day over American Exceptionalism.
I'm not refuting you, but... Have they? Do you have any proof of this?
In other words: "[citation needed]".
So she should be allowed to blackmail him for the rest of his life?
Why not? If you act like a dick, you can't get mad for being called out on it. Also, there were other circumstances at play for her not releasing it. As in her mom was on her father's side, also she lived with him, and he had political power. Anyone of these generally preclude one from reporting abuse, all of them together means reporting means jack-all, and would probably make the situation worse for her.
The system generally fails in cases like this. And reporting things, without official consequence, always makes the situation worse for the abused.
But she's no saint either. People all too often fall into the trap of thinking that there must be exactly two sides to every issue: the good guys and the bad guys. Real life isn't so tidy.
Everyone is an asshole. Except me.
Yes, but why would you ignore the monitor
Because everytime I buy a computer, I don't replace the monitor. Especially if I have a nice monitor. If I cough up a grand for a monitor, that thing is sticking around for a very long time. My monitor, obviously, isn't that nice, and it is sticking around for awhile (until I can justify the expense for a better one).
Yeh, but when was the last time you sold a 2 year old machine for 80% of it's original retain value? That's possible with a mac.
There is that. I just sold the first Intel MacMini for $300, I paid $500 for it five years ago. I did upgrade it something fierce, though (from a 1.5Ghz Core Solo to a 1.6Ghz Core 2 Duo, added 1Gb RAM, upped the HDD, all told around an extra $100 in parts). It took a painfully long time to sell, though, and most Mac people looked at the upgrades as a bad thing (oddly). Many models were more depreciated, even more recent ones. I don't understand the Apple second-hand market very well. Someone was even willing to pay $300 for a completely broken (fried logic board, thanks to spilled tasty beer), very outdated, MacBook, that also was lacking RAM and an HDD. Insanity.
With resale, I'd say upgrading a PC versus fully replacing a Mac might come closer, over certain time frames, again depending on monitors, and also depending on upgrades for the PC. If you upgrade for middle of the road (as I used to), a Mac might win, if you upgrade for high end, the PC might (I'm probably good on the costly bits like the CPU and GPU for another 3-4 years, even if they were $400 combined last year).
Your prices might be valid... But I have one complaint about this (rather common) argument; when was the last time anyone here upgraded without carrying over parts? Yes, I'm guessing the answer on /. will be "almost never", but even in the real world you'll find people dragging their monitors through multiple upgrades.
This computer is in its second "upgrade cycle" since I switched from using Apple products. It started as an Dell, and since then I've replaced basically everything but the RAM, an HDD, the DVD drive, and the monitor. So this new computer would be the cost of components, minus the cost of the carry over. I'm a nerd, so this is rather common. My old computer, before switching to a Mac, was being upgraded for around 10 years, piecemeal, and still had some of the older parts throughout most of that cycle (until a new PSU, and bad dorm wiring did me in). Hell, my old monitor managed to survive tens of upgrades, and now happily resides on my mom's frankencomputer.
Ignoring the monitor, your prices are off by a grand.
Mac's you throw away (or try to sell), since you can't really dig around in them and upgrade their components as they age. A Mac might cost $1700, but that is $1700 every upgrade. I might blow $100 a year on my computer. Hell this year I didn't spend a cent. Next year I'm planning on getting a new HDD (depending on current circumstances), and some extra RAM (no more than $100 worth, for sure). I might spend the cost of a new Mac (the one you listed) in 10 years, how often do you replace an iMac? This is the real question, does the cost of PC upgrades cost more or less than the cost of a new iMac over the replacement period?
I'm guessing not.
You obviously haven't been to a local library outside a massive establishment in a large city. The reason few people use them is that they most certainly do not have lots of high quality books. Reference material is weak, limited and very dated, fiction is mostly womens' romance drivel, kids' sections are weird budget titles and even more dated that the other sections. DVDs and CDs are woefully dated and of little interest. The movies are so old, TV channels won't even show them.
I live in a large city, Phoenix, AZ. The local branch library where I lived sucked, badly. It was mostly DVDs (meaning 6000 children, meaning no reading in most of the library) and very popular fiction (it didn't have a single book by Hemingway...). Actually all of our libraries have pretty much turned into "free Blockbusters for the urban poor". This annoys me.
But... There is this thing called "Inter-library loan", which managed to keep me reading free books for most of my youth, and well into my adulthood. If my local branch didn't have a book I wanted to read, I just enter some stuff into an online form in the catalog, and within a couple days I get an email telling me my book is waiting for me at my local branch. Magic. If you want to get truly zesty, you can also borrow from other libraries, both public and academic, both local and national from a single branch. The wait time is a bit more extreme, and there are some conditions, but it generally works. I used that when doing research a fair bit, getting books from various universities throughout the U.S., even pretty rare and obscure ones.
I do hate where our library system is going. I would completely purge every single popular DVD from every single branch in the U.S., if I had the power. I would also probably remove most of the free access computers, as well. At the branch I used to frequent the top floor (reference and non-fiction) was completely taken over by computers, halving the floor space for books. You were lucky to hear yourself think, much less read, thanks to the "clackity-clack" of teenage Facebook use, and the leaky music from headphones. The bottom floor (fiction, multimedia, and childrens) was worse, thanks to the huge families gawking at DVDs, inevitably chatting loudly on their ever-ringing cellphones. This and the fact that our library started only acquiring "contemporary Chirstian fiction", instead of real books, is why I stopped going. As a child I loved libraries. Now, I could go to Walmart on a Saturday for the same experience I get for going to the Phoenix library.
Luckily the library next to my new house is much, much, better. Go suburbia!